Wilsongate: Motive, Means, and Opportunity
Four days after his Nightline appearance with Levin, Wilson made his first public statement on the Niger forgeries, prompted by CNN’s David Ensor, who was investigating the origin of the forgeries.181
Ensor’s prompting was intended to get Wilson to comment on a quote the March 8 The Washington Post writer Joby Warrick attributed to an anonymous “U.S. official”.
Knowledgeable sources familiar with the forgery investigation described the faked evidence as a series of letters between Iraqi agents and officials in the central African nation of Niger. The documents had been given to the U.N. inspectors by Britain and reviewed extensively by U.S. intelligence. The forgers had made relatively crude errors that eventually gave them away--including names and titles that did not match up with the individuals who held office at the time the letters were purportedly written, the officials said. “We fell for it,” said one U.S. official who reviewed the documents.182
Several things are striking about Warrick’s quote. For one thing, six weeks earlier on January 26, 2003, another Post writer, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, had quoted someone else saying something remarkably similar to the March 8 statement of the anonymous “U.S. official”:
The Iraqi government believes it has done enough to cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors and now regards a war with the United States as almost inevitable, a top adviser to President Saddam Hussein said today. Providing a rare glimpse into the strategic thinking of Hussein's secretive, authoritarian government, his chief adviser on weapons issues, Gen. Amir Saadi, suggested Iraq would not alter its policy toward the inspections and overall disarmament. Although U.N. and U.S. officials demand that the government work actively to resolve conflicts over the private questioning of scientists, the handover of documents and a host of other issues, Iraq believes that it is already "doing all the things we think can prevent war," he said. . .Administration officials also contend they have strong evidence that Iraq has active programs to manufacture chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. But Saadi dismissed those claims, noting that allegations advanced by the administration last year that Iraq was using imported aluminum tubes to enrich uranium have largely been dismissed by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
"It was a lie and they fell for it," he said.183
It is also interesting that although Warrick’s Post article does not name the anonymous official, Joseph Wilson is more specific. In his book he says it is a “State Department spokesman”:
. . .I was on the set of CNN, waiting to do an interview, when David Ensor, a CNN national security reporter, happened by. He was looking at the story with an eye out for the perpetrators of the forgeries and asked me what I knew about the Niger uranium business. I told him that as far as I knew, the State Department spokesman had not spoken accurately. . .As I sat there in the green room, I concluded that the U.S. government had to be held to account. It was unacceptable to lie about such an important issue.
I told Ensor that I would be helpful in his efforts to ferret out the truth, and offered to answer a question or two on the air and to provide leads to him. While I was not willing at that stage to disclose my own involvement, it was not a difficult decision to make, to point others in the right direction. The essential information--the forged documents--was already in the public domain; the State Department spokesman had purposely deceived the public in his response, or else he himself had been deceived. Whichever the case, in my mind it was essential that the record be corrected.
When I went on the air, the CNN newscaster, prompted by Ensor, asked me about the “We fell for it” line. . .184
Elsewhere Wilson names the State Department spokesman he has in mind:
Wilson says he let the matter drop until he saw State Department spokesman Richard Boucher say a few months later that the U.S. had been fooled by bad intelligence. It was then that Wilson says he realized that his report had been overlooked, ignored, or buried.185
Thus, Wilson’s first comments on the Niger forgeries represent a convergence of several curious items rolled into one:
1) Wilson’s fingering of Richard Boucher as the anonymous source for Warrick’s Washington Post quote;
2) Wilson’s prompting by CNN, a network which seems to have inherited its founder Ted Turner’s antiwar spin and anti-Israeli bias;186 and
3) Warrick’s attribution to an anonymous source of a phrase strikingly similar to that of an Iraqi spokesman quoted six weeks earlier by Chandrasekaran in the Post, a prime mover in the Watergate coup against Richard Nixon.187
If the public were not regularly assured that the Post and CNN like Joseph Wilson are non-partisan victims of a right-wing smear campaign, someone might begin to suspect the trio were up to something here--particularly in light of Walter Pincus’ revelation of the behind-the-scenes role of Bob Woodward, who coincidentally has recently released an insider account of the Bush administration along with his latest work of fiction about Deep Throat,188 in the wake of John Dean coming forward to declare that Plamegate is worse than Watergate.189
Was Wilson already playing “Deep Throat II” by the time of his March 8, 2003 CNN interview? If so, for information he purported to have about the Niger forgeries beyond his own personal knowledge of his February 2002 trip--made over half a year before Martino’s documents entered US intelligence files in October--he would have had to have had access to other sources of information about the Niger forgeries. By what means could Wilson have obtained such information?
SNIP
Wilson’s leaks did not occur in a vacuum. They were concurrent with the leaks to Britain’s BBC and Guardian that prompted Blair supporter John Reid to complain on June 3, 2003 that “rogue elements” in the intelligence community were out to smear Blair.201 Meanwhile on the other side of the Atlantic, Ensor followed up his March 8, 2003 interview with Wilson with a March 14 interview of VIPS’ Ray Close, who had been writing on the Niger forgeries since March 10.202
SNIP
"As I sat there in the green room, I concluded that the U.S. government had to be held to account. It was unacceptable to lie about such an important issue."
It's like he could see the actor playing him in the movie going through the dramatic realization of his mission. (in a bad book/screenplay) LOL.
It's all starting to seem so transparent and obvious .. the whole setup.
Such an evil, calculating cabal.