Sorry, haven't started a ping list yet but maybe I will!
Here's something from "Timeswatch" a year ago that mentions that the "Bureau of Intelligence and Research" at State predicted before the war that Turkey might not cooperate - but did any current or former State or CIA officials help to make this a self-fulfilling prophecy?? I think it's highly likely that people LIKE Joe Wilson, if not Wilson himself, were giving their Turkish contacts at least a wink and a nudge, if not more overt encouragement, to try to block the movement toward war. They would have assumed that if Turkey did not at least allow the 4th ID movement to northern Iraq that the war would be considerably delayed if not blocked.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/19/politics/19INTE.html?ex=1122696000&en=2fb97f02477607fe&ei=5070&pagewanted=all&position&oref=login
http://www.timeswatch.org/articles/2004/0719.asp
"The misinformed reporting continues Monday. Douglas Jehl spreads the old line about Niger and uranium in a story about the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. One of the successes Jehl credits the tiny agency for is its dismissal of the "British contention" that Iraq was trying to get uranium from Niger: "It also predicted correctly that Turkey might not permit American troops to cross its territory en route to Iraq...."
It seems, too that he is a “Strategic Advisor” to the CPS :
Corporate and Public Strategy Advisory Group (CPS) is a consultancy company providing strategic advice in public affairs and business and investment development, to the public and private sectors.
CPS actually seems to be a Turkish consulting firm as a glance at its personnel shows.
Why is Wilson linked to them? Maybe he’s knows a lot about Turkey too. Or maybe they’re eager to have a former U.S. Ambassador on their masthead, and he’s willing to sell his name cheap.
Those are our facts.
What can we make of them? Well, here are my speculations. WASPy liberal Joseph Wilson IV graduated from Santa Barbara in 1972 and didn’t want to dirty his fingers with a job in business, so he went into the Foreign Service. He didn’t do terribly well there, and was eased out at age 48, two years before the earliest voluntary retirement age.
What was he to do? He kicked around in various political appointments in the Clinton Administration for a few years, he put up his shingle as a consultant, and he did odd jobs for CPS and anyone else he could get work from. In America, even if you’re rich, you’re supposed to have a job if you’re under age 65. If you can’t find a job or don’t want to, the conventional way out is to call yourself a consultant and change the subject if people rudely ask you exactly what being a consultant means.
But you know that some consultants actually make money, and that if you are a consultant on political matters, one way to earn money is by seeming to have important contacts in government.
Your wife is one such contact, but she’s pretty far down the totem pole. Nonetheless, she can help. She can get you a gig visiting a foreign capital– it’s only Niger, but you’re desperate– as a representative of the CIA, on a mission of the highest importance.
Your air fare is paid, as is the bill at the one decent hotel in Niger (only about 100 bucks a night, at the Hotel Sofitel Niamey Gaweye (I’m guessing).
That doesn’t matter much, though, and neither does the fact that you can’t get paid anything because that would violate the federal anti-nepotism law, 5 USC Sec. 3110.
What matters is that you come back to America and, since somehow you didn’t sign any nondisclosure agreement, when people ask what you did last year, you can say, “Oh, lots of stuff. For example, when the CIA needed to send someone to Africa to check on possible uranium sales to Iraq, they naturally thought of me, and after some thought I agreed to take the time to go, since I do like to serve my country even now that I’ve joined the private sector.”
Is this part of his motivation? I don’t know. You’ve got the same facts as I do now. I still think the “Get Bush” motivation– which, note, has also been a huge source of publicity and income for him– is the main thing. But 8 days in Africa would be worth it for the boasting value alone, whether that value came back in actual consulting contracts or just in preserving one’s self-respect as a man ashamed of involuntary early retirement.
This hypothesis could easily be disproved if it was false. What we would need is a copy of Wilson’s tax returns or some other measure of how he is spending his time. If he is making lots of money from consulting and seems to have more business than he can handle, the hypothesis is false. If, on the other hand, he isn’t doing much business at all, and is spending a lot of time at the golf course, then the hypothesis becomes more plausible.
If the hypothesis is true, a new question arises. It would certainly be unethical for his wife to have gotten him a CIA consulting gig just for their own private purposes when she knew he wouldn’t do the best job of it, but would it be illegal? It would be if he were paid cash, but he was not.
Suppose, though, that she plainly admitted that he was given the job for the purpose of helping him get private consulting contracts. Would that be illegal? I don’t know.
bttt