Followup:
Joe Wilson has claimed that his wife’s career was ruined by the Bush administration. But Wilson has made a lot of claims that weren’t true.
There's a 511-page report from the bipartisan Senate Select Intelligence Committee that looked into the intelligence used by the Bush administration. The committee looked at all the intelligence and all the documents and interviewed all the figures involved. The report has a 48-page section on Wilson. The report was signed by all committee members of both parties. The report reveals some interesting things.
Before Wilson went to Niger for the CIA, the CIA had received two reports from “foreign sources” that Iraq was negotiating with Niger to obtain uranium. Cheney asked the CIA for more information. Later, when the CIA’s Conterproliferation Division discussed how to get that information, Plame recommended sending her husband, Wilson, because he had once been a U.S. ambassador to Gabon and had good relations with the former Prime Minister of Niger, Ibrahim Mayaki.
Wilson would later claim that his wife had nothing to do with his trip to Niger. That was false.
Before Wilson arrived in Niger in late February 2002, the U.S. embassy in Niger sent a cable that recommended a closer investigation of the situation. So before he ever got there, strong suspicions about Iraq’s activities had developed.
Wilson spoke with Mayaki, who told him that in 1999, the Iraqis had visited Niger to explore "expanding commercial relations" between Iraq and Niger. Mayaki had met with them and concluded that what they really wanted was to purchase uranium, which Mayaki claimed he didn’t do because U.N. sanctions prohibited it.
When Wilson returned, he never filed a written report with the CIA. Though in his debrief he voiced doubts as to whether the Iraqis had sought uranium from Niger, Mayaki’s comments regarding the Iraqi visit in 1999 raised further suspicions. If Mayaki had negotiated with the Iraqis, he certainly wouldn’t admit it to Wilson. And the CIA had reports of similar Iraqi visits seeking uranium from Congo and Somalia in 1999.
Between the time Wilson returned and October 9, 2002, the CIA cleared various speeches and reports that carried the claim of Iraq seeking uranium. On September 24, 2002, the British government made public in a white paper the claim that “There is intelligence that Iraq has sought the supply of significant quantities of uranium from Africa." On October 9, 2002, an Italian journalist delivered to the U.S. embassy in Rome documents claiming that Iraq had purchased uranium from Niger. These documents turned out to be forgeries.
Wilson would later claim, through articles in the New York Times (Kristof) and Washington Post (Pincus) in 2003 that he had advised the CIA that the information was wrong and forged. He did so again through an article in The New Republic (Judis and Ackerman). However, Wilson’s visit to Niger was in February 2002. Our embassy in Rome received the forgeries in October 2002.
He could not have known they were forgeries. He lied. He admitted as much on July 6, 2003, in his article in the New York Times: “As for the actual memorandum, I never saw it.” And also on Meet The Press: “I had not, of course, seen the documents.”
If Plame’s career is ruined, she may want to point the first finger at her husband, who lied in very public forums. She might also reserve a finger for herself for her newspaper and magazine interviews, and for her “Spy vs. Spy” cover photo with her decked out in dark glasses and a head scarf. For a covert agent concerned about her career and keeping her security clearance, she’s hardly doing herself any favors.
Plus, without any of this, she wouldn’t have her second career as an author with Simon and Schuster. Somehow, I think a lucrative book deal just may ease her financial pain. Cha-ching. Throw me into that briar patch.
BRILLIANT!