Plame's Input Is Cited on Niger Mission (Joe Wilson lied about EVERYTHING)

Washington Compost ^ | 7/10/04 | Susan Schmidt

[thoughtomator]

Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, dispatched by the CIA in February 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq sought to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program with uranium from Africa, was specifically recommended for the mission by his wife, a CIA employee, contrary to what he has said publicly.

-------- snip! ----------

Wilson's assertions -- both about what he found in Niger and what the Bush administration did with the information -- were undermined yesterday in a bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report.

...

[piasa]

I appreciate the links and will eventually add them to the timelines data, if events don't keep burying me with so much data to format. (I haven't been able to follow the bulk of the Kelly threads and left it to ya'all.) At the risk of going even further off-topic from this Wilson/Plame thread, I'll just add this and post anything further to a Kelly thread so as to avoid muddling it up:

AUGUST 13, 2003 : (DR KELLY INVESTIGATION/ BBC MEDIA SCANDAL : WATTS ) During the inquiry ... into the suicide of Dr. Kelly, Ms. Watts blew Mr. Gilligan's tendentious report out of the water. Ms. Watts released a tape of her last conversation with Dr. Kelly, who makes clear that he is not in a position to assert that Mr. Campbell inserted anything into the intelligence report. Ms. Watts said of her conversations with Dr. Kelly, "He didn't say to me that the dossier was transformed in the last week and he certainly didn't say that the 45-minute claim was inserted either by Alastair Campbell or by anyone else in government. In fact, he denied specifically that Alastair Campbell was involved in the conversation on May 30 . . . he was very clear to me that the claim was in the original intelligence." Ms. Watts testified ... that the BBC seemed primarily interested in corroborating Mr. Gilligan's account rather than in the merits of her own reports: "I felt under some considerable pressure to reveal my source. I also felt the purpose of that was to help corroborate the Andrew Gilligan allegations and not for any proper news purpose." And, "I was most concerned that there was an attempt to mold [her reports] so that they were corroborative which I felt was misguided and false."

...

Earlier, the inquiry heard a tape recording of a telephone conversation that Miss Watts had with Dr Kelly the day after Mr Gilligan's report was broadcast, during which she sought to clarify comments made by Dr Kelly about Mr Campbell in an earlier conversation. Asked whether "Alastair Campbell himself" had ordered the dossier to be allegedly altered, Dr Kelly replied: "No, I can't. All I can say is the No 10 press office. I've never met Alastair Campbell so I can't..." He added: "I think Alastair Campbell is synonymous with that press office because he's responsible for it."
Miss Watts told the inquiry that she believed Dr Kelly was making clear that Mr Campbell was not personally involved. "I think he was clarifying what he was saying in the earlier conversation on May 7. He was talking about the No 10 press office generically as a tribe rather than Alastair Campbell as an individual," she said. "To my mind he specifically denies that Alastair Campbell was involved personally by saying: 'No, I can't'." -- "BBC reporter refused to name Kelly" (Bad News for BBC)

[piasa]

It's not that I doubt he killed himself so much as I doubt he did it for the reasons attributed to him by reporters claiming to be his friends.

[McGavin999]

Watch closely folks. The media is being warned to back off, they've been allowed to run with their innuendos and poor reporting, but they are being warned that they've gone too far. The truth is about to come out in a HUGE dump and they are being given a heads up in order to get themselves on the right side of the issue. Those who are too dumb to survive will ignore it.

[Stallone]

I would like to destroy the Democratic Party.

Who's in?

[Ann Archy]

You said........This makes me wonder if the Wilson group at the CIA were deliberately putting forth forged documents to see if the administration would bite at false evidence and use it to justify the war.

YIKES! I think you got it!!

[PhilDragoo]

[Wolfstar]

I will again place into consideration that the Wilsons were involved in the forgeries for a nefarious purpose.

Cyncooper, you may very well be right. I hope the grand jury's scope is wider than just that Plame-name leak question. Otherwise we'll probably never get to the truth.

[Republic]

Petitfour: This makes me wonder if the Wilson group at the CIA were deliberately putting forth forged documents to see if the administration would bite at false evidence and use it to justify the war.

This is beyond horrific to consider, which is why it is so plausible when attaching such a plot to democrats.

This truly should explode over the weekend airwaves tomorrow.

Our President described a present, clear and gathering danger when speaking of Iraq pre-the Iraq War to congress---if proof of this attempted purchase in Nigeria is NOT brought forth by our press, to correct an extremely wrongful series of attacks on our President and his administration, then we can rest assured that we no longer have a real press corp.

[nopardons]

Oh,I love this graqphic! Too funny for words. LOL

[Ann Archy]

Sadly, this too, shall die a ver quick death because the MEDIA won't cover it!

[Smartass]

FOR THE PING.

Is this dope still hanging around. He got caught in a lie.
There will be more catches.

[Gothmog]

Great article, thanks for posting. Funny how if anyone wanted to know the truth about Wilson they could have found out months ago reading about him on FR, but that did not fit with the lib media's agenda.

I doubt it wil happen, but I'd love to see Wilson and his wife both frog-marched out of the DNC.

[piasa]

I neglected to add one more thing about the French Father Flyboy: His name was on the list of people and entities Saddam Hussein had bribed with oil vouchers.

Was he bribed just to write songs and make documentaries or was he paid for something/someone delivered by air in the summer of 2000 or something else?

JANUARY 29, 2004 : (FATHER JEAN-MARIE BENJAMIN DENIES HE TOOK IRAQI OIL-FOR-FOOD BRIBES) "...The list even included a priest who heads the nonprofit Committee for Iraq. Father Benjamin, in Assisi, Italy, ejected allegations he took 4.5 million barrels of oil. "After having dedicated a number of years to dangerous and tiring work to support the Iraqi people, ... to be denigrated in such a fashion, with such vulgar slanders, shows once more how infinite is the wickedness of those who in truth are now interested in Iraqi oil," Father Benjamin said.http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040129/ap_on_re_mi_ea/saddam_bribes_5

[Cindy]

Quite an info summary, Piasa.

Thank you.

[SAMWolf]

LOL Bump!

[piasa]

Gets worse. Look what I just found [more in here besides what I'm snipping, too]:

--"Al Qaeda seeking funds in Italy," By John Phillips THE WASHINGTON TIMES, June 12, 2004

(snip)ROME — Al Qaeda has built a thriving support network among Italians and is busily collecting funds from left-wing militants to buy arms used to kill Americans and other allied troops in Iraq, news reports and a high-level intelligence official say.

    Details of the fund raising for Osama bin Laden's foot soldiers were disclosed in the Italian press as the government put final touches on extraordinary security for the recent visit to Rome by President Bush.

"Al Qaeda's front no longer consists exclusively of Arabs or Muslims," said a recent front-page article in the Libero newspaper. "Italian extremists are enrolled in al Qaeda."

 Details of this and other reports were confirmed by a senior Italian intelligence official, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified.

    Italian extremists' involvement with the terrorists is thought to be so deep that, according to press reports, at least one Italian accomplice was present when an Italian contractor was killed in April in Iraq.

Much of the fund raising for al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents has been done by two groups — the Iraqi Patriotic Alliance (IPA), made up of Iraqi exiles, and the Anti-Imperialist Alliance, made up mainly of European leftists.

Their leader, Abdul Jabbar Kubaisy, reconciled with Saddam Hussein in Baghdad in February 2003 and committed the group "to confront American imperialist aggression."

Mr. Kubaisy returned to Baghdad when the United States invaded Iraq, leaving his deputy, Awni al Kalemji, to organize anti-American propaganda, according a senior official of the Italian military intelligence organization SISMI.

   Mr. Kalemji took part last summer in the "Anti-Imperialist Camp," a weeklong gathering of communists and other leftists including revolutionaries from Iraq, the Philippines, Nepal, the Palestinian territories and Venezuela. The camp was held in the Umbrian hill town of Assisi, home of St. Francis of Assisi (1181-1226), patron saint of animals and the environment and founder of the Franciscan Order of monks.

    Also present were radical intellectuals such as Franco Cardini, a leading expert on medieval history who says that recent videos of Osama bin Laden are fakes distributed by the CIA to foster anti-Islamic sentiment.    

 Another participant was the Rev. Jean-Marie Benjamin, a French Roman Catholic priest who in February 2003 organized a visit to the Vatican by then Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz.  

   Father Benjamin's name appeared on a list of 270 persons and organizations that received suspect vouchers under the U.N.-run Iraqi oil-for-food program, the subject of several investigations.... ...

(/snip)

[piasa]

From the above article on Italy, this bud's for you- any insights on this group? :

One of the most vociferous leaders of the Anti-Imperialist Camp is Moreno Pasquinelli, an activist arrested April 1 in the Umbrian city of Perugia as part of an international crackdown on sympathizers with the Revolutionary People's Liberation Party/Front (DHKP/C), a Turkish Marxist terror gang. He subsequently was released. -- "Al Qaeda seeking funds in Italy," By John Phillips, THE WASHINGTON TIMES, June 12, 2004

[Fedora]

Very interesting. It raises a number of questions in my mind, some of which would be:

Does Fr. Benjamin have any ties to the PLO, Al Qaeda, etc.?

Is Benjamin linked to left-wing Catholic antiwar groups in the US like Ramsey Clark's friend Thomas Gumbleton's Pax Christi?

Does this scandal involve any of the same names that came up in the Roberto "God's Banker" Calvi case?

[VOA]

bump