Is Everything We Know About Joe Wilson’s Trip to Niger Wrong?

National Review ^ | Byron York

[Iwo Jima]

Exactly, like an administration defending itself is unheard of (Clinton never did that, did he?)

What is so insidious is that if I am correct, Cheney's briefer went to him preplanned to present information that Cheney would naturally ask to be checked out. Then, the whole preplanned scenario was triggered.

If Cheney can't trust his briefer not to be setting him up for a fall, then just how can he work with the CIA? The fact is that he cannot, and the CIA likes it that way.

So my questions are: what was the CIA's primary objective? And why do they hate Cheney that much?

[melancholy]

Another thing that has always bothered me is what is the damn big deal about an administration defending itself from a pack of lies?

They certainly didn't defend themselves at all. The spineless Republican Congress didn't investigate William Jefferson non-Clintoon, Sandy Burglar (not even the required and agreed upon lie detector test!), Hitlery's campaign financing in CA, on and on and on!

Before hiring Tony Snow, Dave Gregory and his ilk were running the show.

When we win back the Congress and elect a Republican President, this has to start. Confronting the MSM and the RATs with all kinds of demands for their sources, their immediate apologies on page one when we expose their lies, their affiliation, etc. must be done.

It's the only way to expose the enemy within and the outright traitors to the American people.

.

[Iwo Jima]

The Gerald Ford gambit.

First, take out the vice president. Then replace him with a suitable candidate (i.e., someone who you really want to be president but who could never, ever be elected president). Next, take out the president (either by impeachment, forced resignation, or otherwise).

Silent coup. Replace an elected president with the CIA's hand-picked candidate who never received a single vote.

[Howlin]

Here is the New Republic's slant on a few things we're talking about:

http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:hrf09dqFCEsJ:www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml%3Fi%3D20030630%26s%3Dackermanjudis063003+Cheney+didn%27t+pressure+intelligence&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=8&gl=us


It's full of crap, but gives enough nuggets about how the intelligence agencies work to be worth muddling through. I'm guessing they get a lot of that inside information from the likes of Wilson and Ray McGovern, who I believe is a traitor.

[okie01]

It was Tenet who first said Iraqi WMD was a slam dunk but later allowed Wilson to spread his lies, and later demanded a DOJ criminal prosecution over the WH's rebuttal of Wilson's lies. The target of that referral was Cheney.

And it was Tenet who issued a mea culpa without revealing that Wilson's report had actually lent substance to the reports about Iraq trying to acquire yellowcake from Niger.

There can be only two reasons for this: 1.) ignorance of the activities of his own organization, or 2.) a malignant intent to undermine the President's position from the very outset.

[Howlin]

I think we have been looking too hard at this Wilson stuff and we should look at what ELSE was going on all around this story that was hogging the headlines.

Let's start with Rockefeller.

[ItsTheMediaStupid]

You obviously don't know what you're talking about.

And that statement proves it? Why don't you present some facts instead of flaming idiotic statements. No because you act like a liberal and emote, no facts required.

[Howlin]

Thanks for proving my very point.

[ItsTheMediaStupid]

I think you are on to something.

[Howlin]

or 2.) a malignant intent to undermine the President's position from the very outset.

Paging Ray McGovern!!!

Notice Ray McGovern's name on the placecard in the extreme right corner; he's been cropped out.

[pinz-n-needlez]

Great summation.

There were also the accusations that the VP was forcing CIA to shape intelligence to his liking before it was presented to the President. That never made sense to me -- until now.

It makes me think of the CIA like the old Mission: Impossible series... The agents would surround the (usually) 3rd World governments with an artificial reality, duping them into behaving against their own interests and then springing a trap.

Because Cheney operates by his own consistent intentions and procedures, he wasn't taken in. But that didn't stop Wilson and the Press (and Fitzgerald) from springing the trap.

Hence all of this current chaos and confusion....

[Iwo Jima]

I think that the CIA wanted the war in Iraq in order to achieve some major objectives of its own, but did not want Bush to get any credit for it. So, the plan was to have a war that would take Bush out. Now that's having your (yellow) cake, and eating it, too.

That would explain why the CIA so often said/did things both publicly and privately that justified the war, and then after the fact did a complete reversal.

The CIA is not inept. It just looks that way if you don't understand their agenda.

[ItsTheMediaStupid]

Thanks for proving my very point.

Since you have no facts you obviously don't know what you are talking about. Tell me how this will make the media notice. If it won't it is not significant. And don't get into stupid nuances about that Cheney did or did not ask the CIA to look into this matter. It is obvious he did, if only verbally or implied. In other words you were correct on what was written in the article, but most likely incorrect about what happened. Some facts and not the typical hissy spewing I have seen so far.

[Neverforget01]

Can I make a suggestion? If you don't feel this is newsworthy, perhaps another thread might interest you more?

[pinz-n-needlez]

Bingo! When was this plot hatched, and by whom?

Wilson went on a similar trip during the Clinton presidency, if I recall....

Are there plots being hatched in Federal Departments currently to bring down future presidencies???

[ItsTheMediaStupid]

Can I make a suggestion? If you don't feel this is newsworthy, perhaps another thread might interest you more?

Get a dictionary, I said it was not significant, not that it was not newsworthy! It will not change the media's story line, it is not significant.

[Della Street]

And it was Tenet who issued a mea culpa without revealing that Wilson's report had actually lent substance to the reports about Iraq trying to acquire yellowcake from Niger.

Actually Tenet did include Wilson's earlier trip in his statement.

I'm inclined to assign incompetency to Tenet rather than malevolent motive. The Wilson gang, on the other hand...

Tenet's Statement

The same former official also said that in June 1999 a businessman approached him and insisted that the former official meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations" between Iraq and Niger. The former official interpreted the overture as an attempt to discuss uranium sales.

[Howlin]

CAPITAL REPORT, Tuesday, July 8, 2003
GLORIA BORGER, co-host:

But first, NBC's chief foreign affairs correspondent, Andrea Mitchell, joins us with the latest.

Andrea, how much of a problem is this for this administration right now?

ANDREA MITCHELL (NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent): Well, it's becoming a political problem; at least the Democrats are putting out statements. And, in fact, Democrats on the Hill in the Intelligence Committee, Senator Rockefeller demanding investigations, the inspector general of the CIA is already investigating. And while the Republican leadership on the Hill is pushing back and trying to prevent full-scale investigations, they themselves are going along with inquiries into it.

ALAN MURRAY, co-host:

Andrea, are you getting any explanation for how this could have happened? I mean, we now know that Ambassador Joe Wilson had come back a year earlier telling the State Department that it looked like bad intelligence. It seems to have been a widespread notion this was bad intelligence, and yet somehow it got put in the State of the Union address. How did it happen?

MITCHELL: Well, that is a great question, because this is the bad information that just wouldn't go away. It would not die. People tried to put a stake through it. And the only conclusion that Joe Wilson comes to and that other critics of the administration is that this was bad information, but it reflected so negatively on Saddam Hussein, it was the scariest thing they had against him, so those who wanted war used it to make their case. It was repeated by the Brits on September 24th of 2002, months and months after Wilson had come back and debunked it. It was repeated in September on "Meet the Press" by Dick Cheney to Tim Russert.

Again, it popped up in the national intelligence estimate, which is the consensus document that goes to the Hill and the White House, and this was October 1st. It was briefed to the Senate Intelligence Committee or Foreign Relations Committee, rather, on October 4th. And even though there was a caveat from the State Department that this information was highly dubious, this was buried in a footnote. And again it cropped up in December in a white paper put out by the State Department, even though people in the State Department knew it wasn't true.

BORGER: Andrea, this being Washington, somebody's going to have to take the fall for this. The president giving faulty information in a State of the Union address is not something that makes the president very happy. So who is going to end up taking the fall?

MITCHELL: Well, people at the CIA say that it's not going to be George Tenet; and, in fact, that high-level people at the CIA did not really know that it was false, never even looked at Joe Wilson's verbal report or notes from that report, didn't even know that it was he who had made this report, because he was sent over by some of the covert operatives in the CIA at a very low level, not, in fact, tasked by the vice president.

So one of Wilson's assumptions, which is that Dick Cheney asked the CIA about this allegation from a foreign intelligence service and that he was sent as a result of that, may not, in fact, be true. It could very well be that the vice president is correct, that he never asked for Joe Wilson to be sent, that it was a much lower level. And Condi Rice may, in fact, have been accurate when she said very recently to Russert on "Meet the Press" that this was buried deep in the bowels of the CIA.

But the bottom line is, though, that it did get into the national intelligence estimate, which is a very important document, and this came from the CIA to all the policy-makers and someone should have warned them--I talked to someone at the CIA today and they said this was a throw-away line and it should have been thrown away and it should never have gotten into the State of the Union, and we do need to find out how that happened.

[ItsTheMediaStupid]

From disclosure that the CIA was running an active disinformation op and "silent coup" against the WH and Cheney in particular. Wilson was sent out with the mission of first inducing reliance upon and then discrediting the African uranium reports. Like the forgeries themselves, he was intended to suck people into relying on his actual substantiation of Iraqi uranium scouting in Afrida, and to then repudiate it and pull the rug out from under them and discredit them. The CIA sent him. The CIA let him lie in the NYT. The CIA very reluctantly on a Friday evening issued a statement contradicting Wilson. The CIA first supported the 16 words, but then withdrew the support when it was completely unnecessary to do so, severely discrediting the President. The CIA resisted decassifying NIE portions that discredited Wilson, but was obviated by the President's declassification decision - a decision that was kept from the CIA at first. It was Tenet who first said Iraqi WMD was a slam dunk but later allowed Wilson to spread his lies, and later demanded a DOJ criminal prosecution over the WH's rebuttal of Wilson's lies. The target of that referral was Cheney.

The MSM has been quoting officials of the CIA from the beginning. That is why they stick to the story. They don't want to believe otherwise and will not bother to dig the information. There will have to be something to discredit the very people leaking the info, or proof identifying the actual leaker of this bogus story.

[Eva]

The significance is that Wilson claimed that the Whitehouse had manipulated the intelligence report as an excuse to war.
Cheney said that he never saw Wilson's intelligence report, which is probably true because the CIA says that there was no written report. This doesn't exactly ring true with anyone because the CIA always has written reports. It may be that Wilson didn't write a report, but someone else, possibly Plame, did and they are playihng games with investigators.

My guess on this whole case was that, perhaps the administration knew that Wilson was lying about everything, but the documents involved were too sensitive to release and needed to discredit Wilson, rather than discredit the lies, because they had no proof to show the people

The big question is, why did Wilson lie about the whole thing? Was Wilson working for anti-US interests inside our own government, or just anti-Bush interests? We know that he had worked as a national security advisor for Al Gore in the 2000 election.