nobody here really knows...that's what the cat fight is about.

Everyone know how they did it. I don't think anyone knows why they did it.

Remember, Joe Wilson was not even required to sign a confidentiality agreement before going to Niger and he didn't submit a written report afterwards. That by itself sounds pretty hokey to me. That the CIA let him write an op-ed in the NYT, which they should have known to be erroneous and politically motivated, is further proof of the CIA's ineptness. Tenet was no Bush'ist. He was one of the very few Clinton appointees who was a holdover. I can't understand how the CIA let themselves get pulled into this drama, but I doubt it was intentional. Wilson should have never gotten that trip to Niger in the first place and he should have been prosecuted for lying to the Senate Intel. Comm.

Orwell was right:

Wilson is a bad guy because he told the truth.

We're supposed to hate the French because they didn't see Saddam as a threat. (And ignore the fact they were first to volunteer to aid us in Afghanistan.)

We're supposed to be okay with the president breaking laws that came from the heart of the Constitution, but condemn Mexicans for walking across the border to work.

Outing a CIA operative for purely political vengeance is supposed to be okay, but a government employee reporting on a probable violation of the constitution is supposedly a traitor?

Do things seem a bit 1984-ish?

But wasn't she just a deskjockey? Surely, she didn't have the authority to hide his lies from case officers and analysts? I thought someone above her had to approve the trip.


OK. But why didn't the good guys in the CIA shut him up, or warn the administration, after he made his verbal report - if they already knew what he reported were lies?

Tech, Wilson did NOT tell the truth. The Senate Intel. Committee wrote in their report that his testimony (under oath) WAS NOT TRUTHFUL. Why can't you grasp that? Why can't you stop trying to confuse the issue? Wilson lied. That's all there is to it.

Wilson's key claim was that the Niger "yellowcake" documents were false. They were. That is the key issue in the Bush administration's attack on his family.

Wrong again. It's not the key issue. Though you refuse to admit it, Wilson claimed Cheney sent him to Niger. How else could Bush or Cheney have refuted that, other than to find out how Wilson was selected for the trip and who ordered it? Wilson (as far as is publicly known now) is THE only person who ever claimed Cheney ordered the Niger trip. Seems to me, there nothing wrong with refuting a lie, especially one made for political purposes, as Wilson's was.

I think you're listening to RNC propaganda, again.

This has been repeated endlessly by your pundits. If you can give me a legal cite, that'd be great.

All I've seen is that the RNC has long claimed Plame 'sent' Wilson to Niger, but of course, she did not have that power. Wilson has stated that "Cheney's office" was in on the decision to send him to Niger, and the RNC has spun that into the claim Cheney personally sent him to Niger, which is not what Wilson said.

I was just reading the "U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq," and it did not, from what I could see, attack the truthfuness of Joe Wilson or bad mouth his wife's role in this. Yet the Chairman, Repub. Sen. Pat Roberts, lashed out at Wilson in the media. If I was cynical, I would think that was staged for political effect. But, I'm not cynical. :cool:

If you want to see how Faux News and the Repubs are spinning this, nearly 3 years later:

http://mediamatters.org/items/200604140005

Ok Tech, until I can find a Comm. trans., the right wing Wash. Post will have to suffice.

Plame's Input Is Cited on Niger Mission
Report Disputes Wilson's Claims on Trip, Wife's Role
By Susan Schmidt
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 10, 2004; Page A09


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.

Wilson last year launched a public firestorm with his accusations that the administration had manipulated intelligence to build a case for war. He has said that his trip to Niger should have laid to rest any notion that Iraq sought uranium there and has said his findings were ignored by the White House.

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.

The panel found that Wilson's report, rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, bolstered the case for most intelligence analysts. And contrary to Wilson's assertions and even the government's previous statements, the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence that made its way into 16 fateful words in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address.

Yesterday's report said that whether Iraq sought to buy lightly enriched "yellowcake" uranium from Niger is one of the few bits of prewar intelligence that remains an open question. Much of the rest of the intelligence suggesting a buildup of weapons of mass destruction was unfounded, the report said.

The report turns a harsh spotlight on what Wilson has said about his role in gathering prewar intelligence, most pointedly by asserting that his wife, CIA employee Valerie Plame, recommended him.

Plame's role could be significant in an ongoing investigation into whether a crime was committed when her name and employment were disclosed to reporters last summer.

Administration officials told columnist Robert D. Novak then that Wilson, a partisan critic of Bush's foreign policy, was sent to Niger at the suggestion of Plame, who worked in the nonproliferation unit at CIA. The disclosure of Plame's identity, which was classified, led to an investigation into who leaked her name.

The report may bolster the rationale that administration officials provided the information not to intentionally expose an undercover CIA employee, but to call into question Wilson's bona fides as an investigator into trafficking of weapons of mass destruction. To charge anyone with a crime, prosecutors need evidence that exposure of a covert officer was intentional.

The report states that a CIA official told the Senate committee that Plame "offered up" Wilson's name for the Niger trip, then on Feb. 12, 2002, sent a memo to a deputy chief in the CIA's Directorate of Operations saying her 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." The next day, the operations official cabled an overseas officer seeking concurrence with the idea of sending Wilson, the report said.

Wilson has asserted that his wife was not involved in the decision to send him to Niger.

"Valerie had nothing to do with the matter," Wilson wrote in a memoir published this year. "She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip."

Wilson stood by his assertion in an interview yesterday, saying Plame was not the person who made the decision to send him. Of her memo, he said: "I don't see it as a recommendation to send me."

The report said Plame told committee staffers that she relayed the CIA's request to her husband, saying, "there's this crazy report" about a purported deal for Niger to sell uranium to Iraq. The committee found Wilson had made an earlier trip to Niger in 1999 for the CIA, also at his wife's suggestion.

The report also said Wilson provided misleading information to The Washington Post last June. He said then that he concluded the Niger intelligence was based on documents that had clearly been forged because "the dates were wrong and the names were wrong."

"Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the 'dates were wrong and the names were wrong' when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports," the Senate panel said. Wilson told the panel he may have been confused and may have "misspoken" to reporters. The documents -- purported sales agreements between Niger and Iraq -- were not in U.S. hands until eight months after Wilson made his trip to Niger.

Wilson's reports to the CIA added to the evidence that Iraq may have tried to buy uranium in Niger, although officials at the State Department remained highly skeptical, the report said.

Wilson said that a former prime minister of Niger, Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, was unaware of any sales contract with Iraq, but said that in June 1999 a businessman approached him, insisting that he meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations" between Niger and Iraq -- which Mayaki interpreted to mean they wanted to discuss yellowcake sales. A report CIA officials drafted after debriefing Wilson said that "although the meeting took place, Mayaki let the matter drop due to UN sanctions on Iraq."

According to the former Niger mining minister, Wilson told his CIA contacts, Iraq tried to buy 400 tons of uranium in 1998.

Still, it was the CIA that bore the brunt of the criticism of the Niger intelligence. The panel found that the CIA has not fully investigated possible efforts by Iraq to buy uranium in Niger to this day, citing reports from a foreign service and the U.S. Navy about uranium from Niger destined for Iraq and stored in a warehouse in Benin.

The agency did not examine forged documents that have been widely cited as a reason to dismiss the purported effort by Iraq until months after it obtained them. The panel said it still has "not published an assessment to clarify or correct its position on whether or not Iraq was trying to purchase uranium from Africa."

Rick, I read the actual US Senate report, not a Washington Post story. Gawd, I'm floored that you'd quote the Post. :p

Yeah, I had the report on my computer somewhere, but the Post is easier to search than my email archives. Once in a while, those right-wing nuts at the Post have to report the truth.

Oh here's the part from Wikipedia. I've never searched that site before. They must be wing nuts too.

"Senators Roberts, Hatch, and Bond
In the first "additional view" attached to the report, Chairmain Pat Roberts (R-KS), joined by Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Christopher Bond (R-MO), presents two conclusions that Democratic members of the Committee were unwilling to include in the report, even though, according to Roberts, "there was no dispute with the underlying facts." Those two conclusions related to the actions of Joseph Wilson, the former ambassador who was sent to Niger in 2002 to investigate allegations that the Iraqi government was attempting to purchase "yellowcake" uranium, presumably as part of an attempt to revive Iraq's nuclear weapons program. The two conclusions were that the plan to send Wilson to investigate the Niger allegation was suggested by Wilson's wife, a CIA employee, and that in his later public statements criticizing the Bush administration, Wilson included information he had learned from press accounts, misrepresenting it as firsthand knowledge."

:D :D :D

Hilarious.

So it comes down to Wilson talking about a meeting he was not in, saying his wife did not propose sending him to Niger, when she may have suggested the CIA 'talk to him because of his connections there?'

Wow. That's a felony!

You're splitting the is/is infinitive. She apparently suggested her husband had connections... which he did. Wow. What a plot.

As for the "yellocake letters" not being in CIA hands, I believe that is unprovable. Those documents had circulated the intelligence community for quite a while after coming out of Italy. That the British saw the documents and pronounced them fake before Wilson said (correctly) that they were fake is not in dispute.

So, as I said, you're condemning Wilson for saying his wife didn't 'send him' to Niger, which is likely true, and for saying Cheney's office was aware of him going to Niger (probably true, since Cheney or his people were at the CIA every day at that time), and for saying the Niger yellowcake letters were obviously false... when they were obviously false.

And all this because Wilson may have been motivated to keep us out of an unnecessary war. What a traitor!

in all fairness to the yellowcake issue, the Senate report said that Wilson's trip really didn't change the opinions of the CIA analysts who believed it was true, but did firm up the State Dept's analysts' beliefs that it was phony. Interesting read.

Actually Tech, it is a felony when you do it before a Senate committee.

BTW, I stood in line next to Matt Cooper from Time Mag. yesterday while waiting for my Five Guys burger in my bldg. food court. Wish I could have asked him about all this, but I wasn't even thinking about it.

Well, how come the senate committee didn't state that he wa 'not truthful,' then?

It's only a Repub. felony. Dem's have no values. ;)