Joseph Wilson interview with Paula Zahn, April 29, 2002

CNN Transcript | April 29, 2002 Monday | Paula Zahn

[nunoste]

So here is Joseph Wilson not only criticizing the administration, but inferring already that the administration is "hell bent" on going to war against Saddam without justification. And this was APRIL 2002! Wilson falls off the face of the earth (presumably because he is sent to Africa), comes back and then (clandestinely at first through journalists like Pincus) criticizes the administration once again. Then he starts coming out of the woodwork saying that he was the one that was sent to Africa, drawing attention to himself and his family. The obvious question to any insider is, "what the hell was the administration thinking by sending this yokel to Africa to find a justification for going to war when he is already clearly on record criticzing the 'hell bent' nature of the administration for war"? If it was common knowledge that his wife worked for the CIA, and people must have known she accompanied him to Africa, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that he is her cover. Its not the first time the CIA uses some schleppy husband ambassador as a front for a female operative. If he was really worried about her safety, he would have never stuck his mug all over the talk shows and he certainly wouldn't have criticized the Bush administration therby forcing the obvious contemplation by busy body jourbalists of why this anti-war and anti-Bush guy was sent on such an important mission.

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[piasa]

Wilson hangs out with the EPIC crowd...

APRIL 2003 early : (EPIC aka "EDUCATION FOR PEACE IN IRAQ CENTER: LAUNCHES PETITION DRIVE TO TRY TO KEEP FUNDING FOR IRAQ HUMANITARIAN AID AND RECONSTRUCTION OUT OF THE HANDS OF THE US MILITARY - AND INTO THE HANDS OF THE STATE DEPARTMENT ) Another group, the Education for Peace in Iraq Center (EPIC) this week launched the latest of numerous online petition drives, calling on their supporters to flood Congress with e-mails calling on legislators keep funding for Iraq humanitarian and reconstruction out of the hands the US military. "The State Department, in partnership with the UN and our allies, is the appropriate authority for US funds related to post-war Iraq," EPIC said in an action email sent to supporters.

[swilhelm73]

And he seems to be drawing a pay check from the Saudis too...

[MEG33]

I think the real scandal is who approved Wilson as our fact finder in Niger.His views were known.He had tea and inquired.Outrageous!

[piasa]

I suspect he's also been drawing from Iraq, much like Scott Ritter & the UK's Galloway, given his associations.

[swilhelm73]

When will the supposed "nonpartisan" press mention the Saudi ties? He and *his wife's name* are listed on the Saudi front organization he is a member of.

Further, whether it be, as I think seems likely, Plame, or whoever else it was that chose him to go needs to be fired, at the least for rank incompetence.

[piasa]

From what I've seen, it was probably lower level officials since this administration is not into Clinton-Gore style micromanaging. Hillary might have hand-picked even the janitors and told them how to clean, whereas Bush is more inclined to demand and expect professionalism and trust those folks in charge of their own departments, who in turn have to trust the people who work for them.

One article backs that up; Wilson's "mission" was always WAAAAY overblown and of little importance- he wasn't doing an investigation after all, just making daylight housecalls to see if there were any info volunteers. So there wasn't much importance placed on who went, since no doubt they assumed there could be no way to screw up.

(They underestimated the ability of Green bureaucrats to screw up.)

The "delegate, hands off" style of leadership works best when there is team loyalty, but unfortunately it is vulnerable when there is no team loyalty. In this case we have a Democrat party which wants to see the US defeated.

I suspect that there haven't been too many clearanvce reviews over the last decade.

Some lower level person was either stupid, misinformed, or maybe compromised as a leftist and his decision went unnoticed because there was a wee bit too much faith in our fellow American.

[MEG33]

I would say someone had to be incredibly stupid to send him.My bet is on a person not happy with this administration.

[JCG]

I think the real scandal is who approved Wilson as our fact finder in Niger.His views were known.He had tea and inquired.Outrageous!

How true. You don't send a Clintonoid, translate Muslim-lover, to get one Muslim country to rat out another Muslim country -- unless you're up to something.

The real operatives in this deal are the political ones who sought to derail the administration's plans with regard to Saddam.

[JCG]

From what I've seen, it was probably lower level officials since this administration is not into Clinton-Gore style micromanaging. Hillary might have hand-picked even the janitors and told them how to clean....

A lot of Hillary's cockroaches are still in the house.

George Tenet?

 

 

 

[Grampa Dave]

Here is the Andrew Sullivan article on David Kay's report to Congress on WMD data and $oddomit.

This whole yellowcake charade is out there to detract attention from the dangerous realities re $oddomite.

Andrew Sullivan: READ THE (WMD) REPORT
andrewsullivan.com ^ | 10/03/03 | Andrew Sullivan


Posted on 10/02/2003 9:33 PM PDT by Pokey78


If you think that David Kay's report on Iraqi WMDs can be adequately summarized by idiotic headlines such as: "No Illicit Arms Found in Iraq," then you need to read this report. If you believe the following "news analysis" by David Sanger in today's New York Times summarizes the findings of David Kay, then you need to read this report. Sanger's piece is, in fact, political propaganda disguised as analysis, designed to obscure and distort the evidence that you can read with your own eyes. His opening paragraph culminates in a simple, knowing, well-crafted lie:

The preliminary report delivered on Thursday by the chief arms inspector in Iraq forces the Bush administration to come face to face with this reality: that Saddam Hussein's armory appears to have been stuffed with precursors, potential weapons and bluffs, but that nothing found so far backs up administration claims that Mr. Hussein posed an imminent threat to the world.
That is not what the administration claimed. (The Times has even had to run a correction recently correcting their attempt, retroactively, to distort and misrepresent the administration's position.) The administration claimed that Saddam had used WMDs in the past, had hidden materials from the United Nations, was hiding a continued program for weapons of mass destruction, and that we should act before the threat was imminent. The argument was that it was impossible to restrain Saddam Hussein unless he were removed from power and disarmed. The war was based on the premise that Saddam had clearly violated U.N. resolutions, was in open breach of such resolutions and was continuing to conceal his programs with the intent of restarting them in earnest once sanctions were lifted. Having read the report carefully, I'd say that the administration is vindicated in every single respect of that argument. This war wasn't just moral; it wasn't just prudent; it was justified on the very terms the administration laid out. And we don't know the half of it yet.

THE MONEY QUOTES: If you don't have time, here are my highlights. First off:

We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002. The discovery of these deliberate concealment efforts have come about both through the admissions of Iraqi scientists and officials concerning information they deliberately withheld and through physical evidence of equipment and activities that ISG has discovered that should have been declared to the UN.
Translation: Saddam was lying to the U.N. as late as 2002. He was required by the U.N. to fully cooperate. He didn't. The war was justified on those grounds alone. Case closed. Some of the physical evidence still remains, despite what was clearly a deliberate, coordinated and thorough attempt to destroy evidence before during and after the war. Among the discoveries:
* A clandestine network of laboratories and safehouses within the Iraqi Intelligence Service that contained equipment subject to UN monitoring and suitable for continuing CBW research.

* A prison laboratory complex, possibly used in human testing of BW agents, that Iraqi officials working to prepare for UN inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the UN.

* Reference strains of biological organisms concealed in a scientist's home, one of which can be used to produce biological weapons.

* New research on BW-applicable agents, Brucella and Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF), and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin were not declared to the UN.

* Documents and equipment, hidden in scientists' homes, that would have been useful in resuming uranium enrichment by centrifuge and electromagnetic isotope separation (EMIS).

* A line of UAVs not fully declared at an undeclared production facility and an admission that they had tested one of their declared UAVs out to a range of 500 km, 350 km beyond the permissible limit.

* Continuing covert capability to manufacture fuel propellant useful only for prohibited SCUD variant missiles, a capability that was maintained at least until the end of 2001 and that cooperating Iraqi scientists have said they were told to conceal from the UN.

* Plans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1000 km - well beyond the 150 km range limit imposed by the UN. Missiles of a 1000 km range would have allowed Iraq to threaten targets through out the Middle East, including Ankara, Cairo, and Abu Dhabi.

* Clandestine attempts between late-1999 and 2002 to obtain from North Korea technology related to 1,300 km range ballistic missiles --probably the No Dong -- 300 km range anti-ship cruise missiles, and other prohibited military equipment.
Would you be happy, after 9/11, if the president had allowed such capabilities to remain at large, and be reinvigorated, with French and Russian help, after sanctions were removed? I wouldn't. But the New York Times and Dominique de Villepin would have happily looked the other way rather than do anything real to enforce the very resolutions they claimed to support.

THERE'S MORE: One of the crazy premises of the "Where Are They?" crowd is that we would walk into that huge country and find large piles of Acme bombs with anthrax in them. That's not what a WMD program is about; and never was. Saddam was careful. He had to hide from the U.N. and he had to find ways, over more than a decade, to maintain a WMD program as best he could, ready to reactivate whenever the climate altered in his favor. Everything points to such a strategy and to such weapons being maintained. The bio-warfare stuff is particularly worrying:

With regard to biological warfare activities, which has been one of our two initial areas of focus, ISG teams are uncovering significant information - including research and development of BW-applicable organisms, the involvement of Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) in possible BW activities, and deliberate concealment activities. All of this suggests Iraq after 1996 further compartmentalized its program and focused on maintaining smaller, covert capabilities that could be activated quickly to surge the production of BW agents.
Mustard gas in a matter of months. And concealment all the time:
A very large body of information has been developed through debriefings, site visits, and exploitation of captured Iraqi documents that confirms that Iraq concealed equipment and materials from UN inspectors when they returned in 2002. One noteworthy example is a collection of reference strains that ought to have been declared to the UN. Among them was a vial of live C. botulinum Okra B. from which a biological agent can be produced. This discovery - hidden in the home of a BW scientist - illustrates the point I made earlier about the difficulty of locating small stocks of material that can be used to covertly surge production of deadly weapons. The scientist who concealed the vials containing this agent has identified a large cache of agents that he was asked, but refused, to conceal. ISG is actively searching for this second cache.
When you read this kind of information, you can see why the president has ordered more money to go to this effort. We need every cent. We have to show to the world - and to the appeasers at home - the extent of the threat that this monstrous regime potentially represented.

FOR THE FUTURE: But Kay makes a more important point at the end. He notes that our ability to examine this entire edifice in a liberated Iraq, to see where our intelligence failed and where it succeeded, is a hugely helpful task in the broader war on terror. Over to Kay:

[W]hatever we find will probably differ from pre-war intelligence. Empirical reality on the ground is, and has always been, different from intelligence judgments that must be made under serious constraints of time, distance and information. It is, however, only by understanding precisely what those differences are that the quality of future intelligence and investment decisions concerning future intelligence systems can be improved. Proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is such a continuing threat to global society that learning those lessons has a high imperative.
Of course it has. I've waited a long time for this report, and kept my peace until it came out and we had some empirical data to measure. What we now see may not impress those who are looking for any way to discredit this administration and this war. But it shows to my mind the real danger that Saddam posed - and would still pose today, if one president and one prime minister hadn't had the fortitude to face him down. We live in a dangerous but still safer world because of it. Now is the time for the administration to stop the internal quibbling, the silence and passivity, and go back on the offensive. Show the dangers that the opposition was happy for us to tolerate; show the threat - real and potential - that this war averted; defend the record with pride and vigor; and fund the reconstruction in ways that will make it work now not just for our sake but for the sake of those once killed in large numbers by the weapons some are so eager not to find.

[isthisnickcool]

This guy is after his last 15 minutes of fame and a Playboy spread for his wife. He will be gone soon. In fact, I see Wilson is already melting, slowly, into a small pool of fecal matter that not only smells bad nobody wants to get too close to it.

[PGalt]

Great post, comments bump.

[gaspar]

Nunoste: You might also want to check the video of Wilson's speech at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Jan 22, 2003. The audio/video feed can be found at:

http://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/video/index.shtml

[gaspar]

At a colloquium held by the Council on Foreign Relations, March 25, 2003, Wilson stated: "Just for the record, it's my full expectatin that, based on what they have told me, they [the Iraqis] will use every weapon in their arsenal and that would include chemical weapons and biological weapons, if they can."

http://www.cfr.org/php?id=5763

[Triple]

IMO - Wilson is part of a coordinated campaign to discredit the Bush administration.

Moveon.org - a communist linked group may be the nexus of the campaign - IMO.

[Triple]

BTW - I wonder where Wilson turned in his expense report for his Africa trip. (It sure would show who sent him.)

Are these expense reports public records? If so, who approved the expenses, and paid reimbursements?

[kimoajax]

Is it just me or does this whole episode smell like CIA orchestrted theater? Was this a snare spawned inside the agency? Is there some simmering grudge or issue between certain career leadership people at the CIA and someone in the Bush Administration?

[cyncooper]

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