.... and yet we have seen some detailed accounts elsewhere (including from Joe "Blowhard" Wilson himself) about how he met with half a dozen CIA people to receive his assignment. Wilson described it later in the summer of 2003 when he was trying to refute allegations that his wife had any role in getting him the mission (she did) and he described how he didn't know any of the CIA people in the room, blah blah blah (of course, that said nothing to the question of what Valerie had done to cause him to be invited to that room at Langley in the first place).
Anyway, when you read all of his accounts and references to his mission across the many months there are many variations and inconsistencies. He definitely does not have a stable and rigorous mind, which is probably why even the other liberals at State tired of him and stalled his career in the mid-90s. I know I could not put up with his bloviating for very long.....
Yes, I think you're absolutely right in that what we know about the facts of the matter is that it WAS in fact a CIA assignment. I gather he went to Langley where he met with a group that included both CIA people (including his wife) and State people, where he was vetted for the assignment which was then approved.
I think what Lyin' Joe may be thinking at the time of this speech is that because (i) he is a former State person, (ii) there were State people in the room, and (iii) he was never asked to sign a confidentiality agreement and apparently was never informed his assignment was secret, therefore if he were later to be prosecuted for disclosing classified CIA information one of his possible defenses was that he didn't "knowingly" do so because he didn't subjectively believe it was a CIA assignment, but rather for a different agency.
Another possibility is that, being part of this anti-Bush cabal composed of former CIA people and then-current CIA people in Alan Foley's department, he simply wanted to distance himself from the CIA, but did it in the most clumsy way possible.
Who knows what he was doing after he left the government...as we found out he was only a phone call away from reasserting himself in the region.
I have always found it very interesting that Chomsky quotes Knut Royce (yes, that's the one who along with Timothy Phelps confirmed Plame's status in Newsday) as the one American journalist who told the truth about the first Gulf War. Royce wrote an article citing a US diplomat as his source wherein he said that Saddam had wanted a diplomatic solution but the White House ignored the proposal. In Wilson's book he refers to a call a received from Phelps about Novak's article...Wilson says he had met Phelps 12 years earlier in Iraq. I think it's quite possible that Wilson has been leaking information out of school for a long, long time.