I'm sure that this information will be featured on page one of the NYT, above the fold!
< /sarc >
And exactly how did Wilson 'investigate' the report? Sipping tea with the leaders of the country and asking them "pretty please - tell me if you are selling uranium to Iraq- c'mon, I won't tell- with sugar on it?"
And, of course, they'll get away with it...again.
I go from seething rage to abject depression these days.
fyi
Byron York engages in too much ass-covering in this article for me to take it seriously. Come back when you've got some confidence in your assertions, Mr. York.
Is that the reason why Matthews let an F bomb slip on Imus this AM?
The CIA gave the SSCI enough to prove that Wilson was lying in several particulars, so why did they hold back on these documents showing that the Wilson trip pre-dated the VP's request for more info?
I'll indulge in some rank speculation.
To protect themselves - the bureaucratic prime directive.
But from what?
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 President might want to ask Tenet to give back that Medal of Freedom.
My head hurts.
Ping
Any news I hear or read today in Big Media still has "Joe Wilson DISCREDITING!!! the Bush admin on uranium in Niger". I barely kept myself from screaming at the radio at work a few weeks ago when the lib radio station news stooge broadcast the "Wilson discredits Bush" lie. And that's still what Americans still hear. They don't read or hear that Joe Wilson has been proven to be a stinking liar and the Bush admin was right about Hussein and Niger uranium. They still dutifully repeat the lie that is fed to them by the Donkey Party operatives.
bttt
Sounds like some sort of offbeat Firesign Theatre album.
BTTT
Another dribble of truth coming from Washingtoon,CYA.
"The document doesn’t seem particularly newsworthy until it is viewed alongside a memo first revealed by the Senate Intelligence Committee in its report on the African uranium matter, released in July 2004. That report cited an e-mail written by Valerie Plame Wilson to her boss, the deputy chief of the CIA’s Counterproliferation Division, in which she suggested her husband for the fact-finding mission to Niger. A CIA official told the committee that Mrs. Wilson “offered up [Joseph Wilson’s] name” for the job, and the Senate report quoted the e-mail written by Mrs. Wilson saying, “my husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.”
"According to the Senate report, Valerie Plame Wilson sent her e-mail on February 12, 2002 — the day before the vice president was briefed on the African uranium matter. The discrepancy between the two dates seems glaring, but was not included in the Senate report. That is because, according to a source familiar with the committee’s investigation, the CIA did not include the document in the materials it turned over to the committee. Senate investigators apparently never knew the exact date of the vice president’s request, so they never knew it came after Plame’s e-mail."
"What does the new information mean? On February 12, 2002, the Defense Intelligence Agency released — inside the government, not publicly — a report covering the Africa uranium issue; its title said that Niger had “signed an agreement to sell 500 tons of uranium a year to Baghdad.” CIA officials told Senate investigators the report spurred requests for information from both the State Department and the Department of Defense. Knowledgeable sources speculate — and they stress, they are speculating — that those inquiries from State and Defense were made on the 12th, the day the Defense Intelligence Agency report was sent around, and that Valerie Plame Wilson, in suggesting her husband be sent to investigate, was reacting to those requests, and not to the vice president’s question, which came the next day. In this new version of events, Dick Cheney was the last guy to request more information, not the first; the notion that his request started the whole affair seems wrong."
Plames boss at this time, made a quick retirement shortly after the Plame/Wilson lies became national pseudo news.
Isn't this amazing? And why did the CIA not give the memo to the SSCI and why did the SSCI not demand that it do so?
I think York is making too much of this. We already knew that Wilson wasn't directly sent by Cheney, but by CIA intermediaries. If others at the CIA also had the idea - a day or two before Cheney - of checking out the Niger story, and were already thinking of sending Wilson, I don't that that is particularly significant.
Plame ping.
The Dems dropped this sleazy pair like a hot potato last fall. NOBODY believes their story. The Washington Post ripped them to shreds last year, in an editorial that rivalled anything I've seen in a conservative publication for nose-pinching disdain.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/31/AR2006083101460.html
And Proskauer Rose attorney (and Plame-Wilson next door neighbor) Christopher Wolf withdrew from working on their civil suit less than a month after filing it, apparently after beginning to dig into the facts a little.