I am surprised this editorial has not seen wider attention. Probably because it has this about Wilson:
But much is still unknown, and Democratic demands that Mr. Rove be fired immediately seem premature given the murky state of the evidence. While we await more facts, it’s worth remembering some from the previous episodes of this strange story — including a few that have been mangled or forgotten.
Mr. Wilson made his trip in 2002 to look into reports that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from Niger. A year later, he publicly surfaced and loudly proclaimed that the Bush administration should have known that its conclusion that Iraq had sought such supplies, included in the president’s 2003 State of the Union address, was wrong. He said he had debunked that theory and that his report had circulated at the highest levels of government.
One year after that, reports by two official investigations — Britain’s Butler Commission and the Senate intelligence committee — demonstrated that Mr. Wilson’s portrayal of himself as a whistle-blower was unwarranted. It turned out his report to the CIA had not altered, and may even have strengthened, the agency’s conclusion that Iraq had explored uranium purchases from Niger. Moreover, his account had not reached Vice President Cheney or any other senior official. According to the Butler Commission, led by an independent jurist, the assertion about African uranium included in Mr. Bush’s State of the Union speech was “well-founded.”
And then for a jab at Rove:
This gives the lie to White House denials that Mr. Rove was involved in the leak. Mr. Rove and White House spokesman Scott McClellan can fairly be accused, at the very least, of responding to questions about the affair with the sort of misleading legalisms and evasions that Republicans once rightly condemned President Bill Clinton for employing. “I didn’t know her name. I didn’t leak her name,” Mr. Rove told CNN last year. Technically true, perhaps, but hardly a model of straightforwardness and probity. Asked about the leak, Mr. McClellan waxed indignant: “That is not the way this White House operates,” he said. Or is it?
At the same time, Mr. Rove and other administration officials had a legitimate interest in rebutting Mr. Wilson’s inflated claims — including the notion that he had been dispatched to Niger at Mr. Cheney’s behest. It’s in that context, judging from Mr. Cooper’s e-mail, that Mr. Rove appears to have brought up Ms. Plame’s role. Whether Mr. Rove or others behaved in a way that amounted to criminal, malicious or even merely sleazy behavior will turn on what they knew about Ms. Plame’s employment. Were they aware she was a covert agent? Did they recklessly fail to consider that before revealing her involvement? How they learned about Ms. Plame also will matter: Did the information come from government sources or outside parties?
It may be that Mr. Rove, or someone else, will turn out to be guilty of deliberately leaking Ms. Plame’s identity, knowing that it would blow her cover. Or officials may have conspired to cover up a leak or lied about it under oath. For now, however, it remains to be established that such misconduct occurred.
A more straightforward depiction of events could not be found, IMHO.
Jon H
“Moreover, his account had not reached Vice President Cheney or any other senior official.”
But this doesn’t make sense. We know Cheney was after the CIA to dig up supporting evidence. If Wilson’s report actually supported the war effort, it would certainly have been sent to Cheney.
The whole stovepiped intelligence issue was that intel that didn’t support the White House position on Iraq was ignored, and the White House only wanted to hear about intel that helped them.
If Cheney didn’t get the memo, it strongly suggests that Wilson’s report contradicted the claims and was not useful for supporting the war.
Further, the WaPo editorial seems to take the Senate GOP addendum to the Intelligence Report as if it was as valid as the rest.
The WaPo’s editorial page has been about as pro-war as one could imagine.
ppGaz
John, I strongly disagree that this is a straighforward account.
The real story has been left out. The real story is that people in the White House set out to trash at least one, and probably two, public servants because one of them dared to tell what turned out to be the truth about a reason for war, a truth that was embarassing to the government’s version of reality.
Every inch of column space in WAPO, or anywhere else including the blogosphere, that does not address that issue, is just bullshit.
Your government made a decision that it, not the people, had the right to judge the facts and draw the decisive conclusions, and then acted in a tawdry manner to carry out that decision. It’s the worst case of ends justifies means I’ve ever seen in my 58 years. I’ve seen some bad government before, but this takes the cake.
That is about as bad as it gets in this country, John. Nothing else in these pages in the few months I’ve been around here even comes close to the gravity of that real story. Stirring the nabobs to chatter over which email preceded which phone call in this story is just irresponsible behavior on the part of WAPO.
Furthermore, the cloud of churn around this story ignores another set of facts. Since when are intelligence activities supposed to look out for interests of a president’s policies? Aren’t they supposed to look out for the interests of the country? Presidents come and go, they’re disposable. So when intelligence turns up that is a threat to policy, the approved response is to sweep it under the rug, or discredit the whistleblower?
If that’s the case, then we’re fucked. We’re doubly fucked when the press sits by and scratches its crotch while these things are going on.
CaseyL
One year after that, reports by two official investigations — Britain’s Butler Commission and the Senate intelligence committee — demonstrated that Mr. Wilson’s portrayal of himself as a whistle-blower was unwarranted. “
The Butler report depended on documents later found to be forgeries. Although the Butler report referenced “other sources,” it’s never been disclosed what those other sources were.
The Senate Intelligence Committee report WaPo refers to did not refute Wilson. There was a rebuttal – but it was in an addendum to the report, inserted over the objections of the rest of the Committee by three pro-Bush, pro-war Senators. The rebuttal included no new facts, and no rebuttal or refutation of known facts.
The only really relevant attempt to buy yellowcake that has any source verification at all was in 1999, and even that one is iffy: an Iraqi official or businessman wanted to discuss trade issues with Niger, and the assumption is that meant uranium, since Niger doesn’t have anything else Saddam would be interested in buying. There was a meeting, but so far as anyone knows uranium wasn’t discussed (just the talk about trade issues), and the Niger government official never followed up as Iraq was under embargo.
In any case, when you’re talking about an urgent/grave/etc. threat to the US, as Bush did, and you talk about “recent” attempts to buy uranium in order to buttress claims of an urgent threat to the US as Bush did, “recent” doesn’t mean “3 years ago.” Particularly since it was clear that Saddam had not, in fact, purchased uranium from Niger.
Wilson was a whistle-blower. The Bush Admin did keep making the yellowcake claim. The yellowcake claim was unfounded.
Also: If Wilson had been wrong about yellowcake, why didn’t the Bush Admin simply produce the evidence that he was wrong? Why, instead, did the Bush Admin out Valerie Plame?
John Cole
Bullshit. Wilson’s account of his report has been viewed differently by legitimate intelligence sources from day one. To state his account is the Capital T Truth is absurd, and his own report was, in the eyes of many non-hacks in intelligence, used to bolster the claim that Hussein was looking around for yellowcake.
And Wilson himself has created so many different accounts of his trip that his credibility is suspect:
Pudentilla
“including the notion that he had been dispatched to Niger at Mr. Cheney’s behest.”
Did Wilson ever say he had been dispatched at Cheney’s behest? I know he said that Cheney had been asking questions and that the cia sent him – but did Wilson ever say that Cheney directed that Wilson (or anyone) be sent? I don’t think so. I think that’s a Republican straw man. Which, as the White House lies begin to unravel, no doubt will consume a lot more air space. Because the alternative is for republicans to start contemplating the possibility that the administration knew there were no wmd and didn’t care. And that would be a rather risky conversation. Much safer to trash Wilson.
John Cole
And I might add, while this Mark Steyn quote is pretty hacktacular and one-sided in its presentation, there is some subtext to it that I agree with:
Why is our nation’s premiere intelligence gathering service relying on reports from former ambassador, and why do we not have better intelligence assets? That, in and of itself, is a larger cause for long-term concern than the Plame thing to me- why our we so woefully inadequate in our intelligence gathering?
CaseyL
Before Wilson went to Niger, what did his professional record look like?
Was he being a “shrill poseur” when he got those hostages out of Iraq?
John Cole
While Wilson’s career is admirable and I would argue, at its zenith in the Iraq War, heroic, that doesn’t mean we don’t get to look at his behavior in this specific case. Just as Rush Limbaugh is a blowhard and a pompous ass, it doesn’t mean that his fundraisers for leukemia aren’t worthy of independent praise.
Next.
hadenoughofthisyet
One year after that, reports by two official investigations — Britain’s Butler Commission and the Senate intelligence committee — demonstrated that Mr. Wilson’s portrayal of himself as a whistle-blower was unwarranted. It turned out his report to the CIA had not altered, and may even have strengthened, the agency’s conclusion that Iraq had explored uranium purchases from Niger
Seems like Fred Hiatt’s assertions here are at odds with the final report from Charles Duelfer of the Iraq Survey Group. This is the final report’s conclusion on the uranium issue:
Bob
So Wilson’s later caterwawling was lying, and instead of using what was on the record to sink him in the public eye the Bush Admin decided to destroy a CIA operation on loose nukes and energy bad things by outing Plame.
Makes all the sense in the world to me.
scs
Kudos John for trying to fairly examine the original issue that so many assume is a done deal. We still don’t know all the facts about the Niger issue.
SamAm
I haven’t followed the ins-and-outs of the Niger-Iraq uranium story, but it seems to me that a great deal of the criticisms leveled at Wilson have been spin, moreso than Wilson had been throwing at the White House (not to say he hadn’t engaged in truth stretching, perhaps even lies, not to say his credibility and the Niger issues aren’t serious). I see a great many claims repeated as cant across the right wing blogosphere about Wilson that don’t pan out (the Andrea Mitchell “everyone knew” quote, or the suggestion he made it even seem like Cheney dispatched him, or even recently the mis-reading of his “blew my wife’s cover” quote). And the White House’s story about its involvement has more or less collapsed over the past two weeks.
I don’t like liars, especially those I think are taking my party for a ride (I cringed when I saw he appeared at the Conyers DSM hearing). To me, they’re nothing but trouble. And there are absolutely legitimate complaints about the job Wilson has done. But in the realm of pure heuristics, his dishonesty is neither as important to American national defense as a whole, nor as relevent to the specifics of the case as the nearly unbroken string of fiction and half-truths that come from the White House.
Call me a partisan, fine. I’m going to read Belgravia’s thoughts on the subject, cause I think GD is a pretty fair guy. But Wilson’s credibility, inasmuch as its relevent to the case, looks a lot better when compared to what his critics are offering as a response.
SamAm
Also, WRT Wilson as a whistle-blower, I don’t think the way Fitzgerald put it to the court is irrelevent.
“This case,” he said, “is not about a whistle-blower. It’s about a potential retaliation against a whistle-blower.”
John Cole
But Wilson’s credibility, inasmuch as its relevent to the case, looks a lot better when compared to what his critics are offering as a response.
Wilson;s credibility has nothing to do with whether or not the WH outed an agent, IMHO.
What is driving me crazy is that the right seems to think hius credibility is reason enough to make excuses for outing an agent (if it happened- waiting for Fitzgerald’s saY), while those on the left are peddling the notion that it is wrong to even question Wilson’s credibility on the mission and report he himself filed.
Cliff
John, I would be curious to see any cites that back up the list of supposed inconsistencies in Wilson’s claims about this 1999 meeting.
What you link to is a comment on another blog with no documentation of any sort. I’m pretty confident that if this claim had any sort of half plausible support it would have been shouted all over already, as have claims of Wilson “lying” about his wife’s involvement.
The larger picture is of course that…wait for it…Wilson was Right.
That is the bottom line. No matter how one attempts to spin his report as supportive of uranium-from-Niger claims, or to insist that the Butler or Senate reports (whitewashes both) found the uranium from niger story well-founded, no such attempts to purchase uranium were made.
There are three main defense lines of spin here.
1) Wilson’s report actually supported the Niger hypothesis. This obvious piece of nonsense has been abandoned by most spinners already. Although some still quote the misprint in the WaPo Schmidt piece.
2) Wilson was a partisan sent by his wife. Single-sourced to an INR analyst who wasn’t even at the meeting. CIA sources dispute.
3) The CIA, or part of the CIA, was obstructing the True WMD Evidence, and Valerie Plame was a part of this effort.
It is this last line of defense, number 3, that will ultimately be the only one the supporters of this White House can retreat behind. Its subtext is that Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson had it coming to them (“fair game”).
Its obvious refutation is that the CIA “obstructionists” were to quote a certain journalist, “proved f*cking right.”
Jon H
“While Wilson’s career is admirable and I would argue, at its zenith in the Iraq War, heroic, that doesn’t mean we don’t get to look at his behavior in this specific case”
John, what, specifically, did he actually do in 2002 which you find questionable?
He didn’t raise any problems until after the war was already a “mission accomplished”.
Any complaints about his behavior can only be applied to things he did after Rove went after his wife.
He’s an entirely reasonable candidate for the job. He had Africa experience. He had defense experience, after working with NATO.
One big mistake you’re making is in assuming the CIA didn’t get a report from an agent in Niger, and that they only sent Wilson.
I don’t think there’s any reason to assume that to be the case. They certainly aren’t going to talk openly about having covert spies in Niger!
I think what happened is that the CIA already had intelligence from Niger from their own official-cover agents, but it did not support Cheney’s specious lead about Iraq. Cheney demanded that they take another look. Since their existing agents’ intel hadn’t been sufficient, there’s no reason to think they’d be able to produce satisfactory intel through their channels.
So the CIA had to go a different way. And they sent Wilson, an excellent choice for the job. He didn’t find anything to support Cheney, and that’s why the report never made it to Cheney. He didn’t want to see anything that didn’t confirm his theory.
Jon H
John writes:
“Why is our nation’s premiere intelligence gathering service relying on reports from former ambassador, and why do we not have better intelligence assets?”
What makes you think they didn’t have intel from CIA operatives in Niger?
Cliff
My understanding is that Cheney’s office received the intel on Niger outside normal channels (this is what one of the recent articles related, Newsweek or WaPo I think), then asked to have it looked into.
My hypothesis is that the people asked to look into this figured it was pretty lame to start with, not for partisan or CIA fifth column reasons, but because on the face of it it seemed ridiculous. Yellowcake wouldn’t be that useful, certainly in the short term, Iraq had plenty of its own, and Niger’s was sewn up tightly. The people asked to look into the claim would have known all these things.
It was looked into by three parties, who all reported it was suspect (General Fulford, ambassador Fitzpatrick, Wilson).
So why wasn’t this investigated more closely? Why didn’t we send teams of undercover CIA people to infiltrate the Niger government? Why didn’t we send 007 down into the Nigerian mines on a parachute?
Because you choose how to allocate your resources. If Cheney had asked the CIA to look into the Giant Firebreathing Lizard Army that Saddam was assembling along the Iran border, I’m pretty sure they would have said they’d look into that, as well. And have a few satellite overflies of the Iraq Iran border, and report back that there were no lizards to be found, and that oh btw there’s no such thing as giant firebreathing lizards.
John Cole
From Phil Smith on another thread:
“The problem with Wilson’s editorial isn’t what he says, it’s what he leaves out. He is correct in asserting that he was able to establish that no uranium purchase was likely — not at all likely, in fact — to have occurred. But that is most emphatically not what the administration claimed. The administration stated that Saddam attempted to buy uranium in Africa. There are, upon reading the SSCI report, several quite good reasons to believe that Saddam tried in Niger and elsewhere. And Saddam’s attempt to buy uranium in Niger is what Wilson knew quite well did, in fact, happen. Wilson appears to be the sole source for the knowledge that Iraq approached the PM of Niger (Mayaki) in 1999.
Is Wilson a liar? The SSCI was unwilling to put it bluntly, but they chided him for his inconsistency. The following are from pp. 44-45 (the full report, not the addenda):
Translation: somebody lied to us. . .
As we have seen, that is unsupported, and Wilson knew better. Perhaps his memory failed him. To wit:
Which is what Wilson failed to mention.
Translation: we call bullshit.
There weren’t any documents for him to see or even discuss.
The committee goes on to say that
Okay, now I call bullshit. He “thought he had seen the names himself”? He knew damn good and well he hadn’t seen them. Unless, of course, the documents were leaked to him. I refuse to speculate that that occurred. My take is that he overplayed his hand from the start, and he’s been covering his ass with bluff and bluster ever since. None of which, I reiterate, excuses outing his wife and burning a CIA front company.
All emphases in the above blockquotes are mine.”
SamAm
I’m on the left, so to speak, and I think there’s certainly room to question Wilson’s credibility and his report.
But that doesn’t happen in a vaccum. When I say Wilson’s account of what happened looks better when compared to the White House’s, and that of its friends in the internets and media, I’m not just talking about the events surrounding his wife. It is, however, very important to remember that an administration that conducted itself in a generally irresponsible way (at least) with respect the outing and original push-back, and then for two years with the cover-up is maybe not very credible.
Add to that specific detail the specific details of the Africa thing (remember they got taken out of the Cincinatti speech, Tenant apologized for their inclusion in the SOTU because they hadn’t been investigated enough, the claim was based at least in part on forgeries, the conclusion of the Duelfer report quoted upthread, which I hadn’t seen before, the Butler commission’s reliance on secret evidence not even the IAEA has seen, and the fact that the SSCI even said, from Wikipedia, the Committee’s report concluded that this view was not supported by the underlying intelligence, and the report agreed with the opinion of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, expressed as an “alternative view” in the NIE, that the available intelligence did not make “a compelling case for reconstitution” of the Iraqi nuclear program.) and the general fact that the entire pre-war effort to inspire fear about Iraqi weapons was almost completely without reasonable fact, and it’s not clear to me why it’s Wilson who’s on the spot in this regard.
I agree that lies and misleading information about WMD are awful things. And it is for that reason that I still believe Wilson’s emphasis (if not all his conclusions) are better than the administration’s, that a greater percentage of his factual conclusion were borne out, but if they were not it was not due to the malice and recklessness with which the administration conducted itself with, and that the administration’s shot to hell track record of truth-telling on issues like Iraq, WMD, national security and its critics make attempts to discredit Wilson something to be extremely wary of.
Jon H
Fax from Dick Cheney: “I have intel saying that there was a visit from the Great Pumpkin last night. I want to know if you can confirm it.”
CIA guy1: “Well, I think our operative in the pumpkin patch would have let us know if something that important had happened. Pass on to Cheney that there was no Great Pumpkin visit.”
CIA guy2: “I called the OVP. They want us to double-check.”
CIA guy1: “Okay, why don’t we get Valerie’s husband to take a look. He’s done some gardening, he knows gourds, is friendly with the locals.”
[Wilson takes a walk to the pumpkin patch. Asks around. Returns and reports.]
CIA guy1: Thanks, Wilson. We’ll include that in our report to the OVP. (dials phone) OVP? Yeah, we got that pumpkin report you wanted. No visits from the Great Pumpkin. Shall I send it over?”
OVP: Thanks, but you can hold onto it. We won’t be needing it.
gswift
Why is our nation’s premiere intelligence gathering service relying on reports from former ambassador
In this case, I imagine people who’ve served both in several African countries, and Iraq are probably in short supply. Very few people’s contacts are going to have that kind of overlap.
Iraq bought yellowcake, Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda, Hussein has WMD… All this shit came out of Office of Special Plans. Rumsfeld and his band of merry men thought the CIA and the actual antiterrorism people were “out of touch” and downplaying the links because, gasp, they weren’t telling Rummy and crew what they wanted to hear. So they formed a team that fed them Chalabi’s song and dance. Machiavelli’s warnings about the trustworthiness of exiles went unheeded.
The Administration cherry picked intel, and when someone publicly called bullshit, they retaliated by outing his wife who was a covert op.
gswift
outing an agent (if it happened-
Well, as has been noted other places, the fact that the investigation is still going pretty much confirms it occurred. Your first witness to even establish she was covert is going to be the CIA. Basically if they get up on the stand and answer “no” to the question of whether Plame was a covert op, the investigation dies right there. No covert op, no crime. No witness after that even needs to be called. That it’s still going on tells us the anser to that question was yes. Now trying to ammass enough evidence to bring someone to trial is another matter. But the fact that Fitzgerald is still pursuring this pretty much establishes that the CIA has confirmed that at the time her name was published, she was in fact a covert op.
John Cole
Just like the length of the Starr investigation shows that Clinton pretty much… Oh yeah.
The CIA, and Tenet in particular, werre under statutory obligatin to refer all possible crimes to the DOJ. Trying to conclude that the length of the investigation proves a crim has been coimmitted is a fools endeavor, at this point.
If a crime has been committed, we will find out.
Cliff
I do speculate, and have speculated, that either the forged documents were leaked to Wilson, or a trusted contact of his described them to him. The names and dates were indeed wrong. (For the tin-hatters on the right, he may have known about the docs from the internal anti-Bush CIA group that created the easily-found-out forgeries to discredit the admin.)
Leaving that aside.
Some Niger government official said he was contacted by an intermediary, who asked if the official would meet with an Iraqi about sales, and declined.
That is the sum total of “evidence” Wilson was able to find that Iraq sought uranium from Niger. That an official said some guy asked him about meeting with an Iraqi, and he said no.
That Wilson did not mention this second-hand story about nothing in his Op-Ed proves exactly zilch.
Jon H
Heh, I wonder if that Iraqi contact in 1999 was not an attempt to *buy* uranium, but actually they wanted to get Niger to broker a *sale* of Iraq’s 500 tons of unneeded yellowcake, hoping to conceal the transaction in Niger’s normal export business.
SamAm
Couple more things. What’s missing from the Niger-Iraq uranium debate is any sense of proportion with respect to the threat faced by the United States by Saddam. He may have had the desire for nuclear weapons or other WMD, hell, I’m sure he did, but it was either a very weak desire or something he had almost no capability to enact (and the fact that we found, ah, zero WMD in Iraq suggests a capability that was totally degraded). When the president got up there and said those words, it wasn’t as part of some damn academic debate. It wasn’t in the same realm as the level of minutia we’re going through on this thread. It just wasn’t. It was a claim to the clear and imminent danger posed by Iraq, a danger that only, they believed, one policy outcome could resolve, a danger whose price would be a mushroom cloud 45 minutes later, because Saddam had in fact reconstituted his nuclear weapons program. It was a false premise, presented to the American public in a totally false light, not supported by any real and few academic pieces of substance that have come to light since the invasion.
It is only in fighting battles like the one over Niger that the administration can rescue the Known Facts they ran screaming with for over 2 years. And because they got the big picture so totally wrong, and in such a willfully ignorant way (at best) I find it difficult to give them square one in the Wilson debate, much less the debate itself. These guys were almost exclusively wrong about everything to do with the invasion, and they lied and misled in the process. The ground under debates like these have been so fundamentally shaken that I think excercises like this, trying to sort all these facts, are impossible with a White House that has behaved the way it has. So Wilson has gotten too much benefit of the doubt, and I don’t think he has, that’s not unrelated to the actions of the people he would have pissed off under any circumstances.
The White House cannot be trusted to a fair debate with its critics.
Also, the SSCI and Butler Reports are tainted by politics, and the SSCI in particular was gunning for Wilson the whole way (in the main text and in the addendum). These are complicated issues that a little change in meaning or language can greatly affect. Plus, the entire SSCI report seems suspect to me in the sense that Roberts, um, didn’t allow half of it to even be started.
Jon H
“The CIA, and Tenet in particular, werre under statutory obligatin to refer all possible crimes to the DOJ. Trying to conclude that the length of the investigation proves a crim has been coimmitted is a fools endeavor, at this point.”
This is very different from the Clinton investigations. Whether Plame was covered is an objective measure. And it’s not like there’s a defensive process, where the prosecutor has to indict her for being covert.
It’s not a grey issue. There’s no interpretations or motives at issue in her cover status. If she’s not covert, that should be easy to prove.
Fitzgerald didn’t even take the case until about six months after it happened. The Ashcroft DOJ had an awful lot of time to check the CIA’s records for Plame’s status.
Clearly, Bush and his appointees are feckless and incompetent, but even I don’t think they’re *that* incompetent.
Cliff
Well put, SamAm.
I would like to chime in on something you mention early in your post: Saddam may have had a desire for WMD, but that was pretty much all he had, as he had no way of getting them.
When Bush said he had “sought” uranium, the clear implication was that this was a credible sort of seeking, rather than “I want a pony”.
Some Niger official said some guy said some Iraqi wanted to meet him. If that’s evidence of seeking, so is Saddam asking for a-bombs in his letter to Santa.
Jon H
Fact is Saddam put less effort into obtaining uranium than he put into achieving literary stardom.
Andrei
I guess you might have a point if any evidence whatsoever was produced by this administration to show that Saddam really did have WMD and we really did have justifiable, concrete evidence that taking out Saddam had direct ties to fighting terrorism and securing our people from future terrorism. Otherwise, who cares really?
From what I can tell… it’s seems very clear there is a serious fight going on with folks inside the CIA and the White House. I caught Uncovered: The whole Truth about the Iraq War on the Sundance Channel the other night. I have no idea how much of it is true, accurate or what, but it’s seems quite clear from that documentary that there is a massive fight going on with folks from the CIA and this administration over what the right thing to do was with regard to waging pre-emptive in Iraq. It seems clear to me that Wilson is on one side of that fight and allowed himself to get involved, whatever the cost. (And consider he did so AFTER being the guy who confronted Saddam himself and dared the dictator to execute him and the people he looked after in the embassy in around the time of Gulf War I.)
Check out the documentary, because you’ll get an earful not only from Wilson, but many others in the CIA. Are they all collectively lying to us John? Can they really be trusted, these internal government officials who tried to stop a pre-emptive war from happening?
Given that we have not had what the administration predicted with regards to Iraq, both in terms of how the war would go and finding what we have yet to find with regard to an imminent threat — and further — given the lengths the Bush administration has gone to sidestep these issues, either lying or misrepresenating their involvement in the Plame incident…. who should we more likely believe?
Ok… so Maybe Wilson hasn’t been entirely consistent? In the end, is that the real issue for you?
Vladi G
Just like the length of the Starr investigation shows that Clinton pretty much… Oh yeah.
John, respectfully, snark only works when you actually respond to the point being made. There is a difference between saying that Plame was outed (a virtual certainty) and that a crime was committed (a tougher question due to the vagaries of the statute).
An agent was most certainly outed. Whether doing so broke any laws is what is (presumably) being investigated.
Bernard Yomtov
he left keeps wanting to cherry-pick only the aspects of Wilson’s story that frames the WH in the most negative light, and all criticism of Wilson is somehow beyond the pale.
As someone who has complained about your criticism of Wilson, let me tell you that you have misunderstood. Criticism of Wilson’s report is legitimate, if there is evidence that it is inaccurate. Criticism of other statements by Wilson is legitimate, if there is evidence they are inaccurate.
What maddens me is that whatever wrongdoing Wilson is or is not guilty of is utterly and totally irrelevant to the question of Rove’s behavior. Yet lots of people on the right, virtually all, are relying on criticism of Wilson as a defense of Rove. That’s bullshit.
In other words, speaking for myself at least, those who are outraged by the attacks on Wilson are outraged because of the context in which they are occurring. They are a blatant attempt to divert attention from the genuine issue, and, I might add, the vast bulk of right-wing pundits and bloggers have bought right into this fraudulent defense. They might just as well be yelling about steroids in baseball for all the relevance it has.
So yes, criticism of Wilson is beyond the pale, in the context of evaluating the behavior of Rove and others because Wilson is not relevant to that behavior. If his report on Niger was wrong then the Administration ought to have just said so, and explained why. What they did was scummy. And the fact that they chose that sort of response instead of the straightforward one suggests to me that perhaps the report was not so inaccurate after all.
ppgaz
For the record, referring back to an earlier post from John, I’ve never said that “questioning Wilson’s credibility” was not appropriate. The credibility of all intelligence should always be held up to question, in direct proportion to the stakes.
But this government did not take that tack. First of all, Wilson was a man who had been praised for his service by Bush’s father. He was not exactly some whackjob kook out there.
Second, Wilson’s Niger information does not seem to have received scrutiny in the way that a citzen out here might expect and have a right to expect.
Instead, it seems pretty clear to me that there was no effort to explore Wilson’s information …. instead, there was an effort to pigeonhole it, and then attack Wilson when he started speaking out.
To come back now and characterize that effort as just an honest examination of his credibility is …. Mehlman-Rovesque.
In other words, it’s bullshit.
The telltale tracks in the dirt here are these: If they leaders weren’t sure about the uranium deal, why didn’t they explore that? If they had information about Saddam’s nuclear initiatives which trumped Wilson’s points, why didn’t they advance those and argue the case?
You know why: They weren’t interested in the truth. They were interested in stories that supported conclusions already drawn. They were more afraid of losing their momentum on their manipulation of public opinion than they were of making a rather collossal mistake: Attacking a country supposedly riddled with WMDs and harboring a nuclear weapons program, only to find out that …. oops … there were no WMDs or viable nuclear program.
Why else would a thuggish political operative like Karl Rove get involved? What kind of leadership calls on Karl Rove to sling mud at a public servant who is raising legitimate questions about policy? The kind that doesn’t trust the people to see all of the facts and make their own judgement. The kind that thinks that their version of reality is more important than what the people might think if they were given the chance to see all the relevant information in at atmosphere of calm, rational deliberation.
Calm, rational deliberation. Sounds corny, doesn’t it?
Just the sort of thing that a Rove or a Coulter would laugh at. After they are done browbeating the opposition, we are left to wonder how we ever got to this sorry state of affairs.
Jon H
Another problem with criticism of Wilson is the way people try to treat his behavior post-burn is the same as his behavior pre-burn.
They try to blur the lines. Yes, he became an anti-Bush activist after Bush lashed out at his wife. That’s entirely justifiable. Anyone subjected to that kind of cowardly attack by the most powerful people in the world would. If he didn’t, I’m sure the GOP would be using that as evidence of his lack of character.
But they take his post-burn behavior and use that to claim that he was an anti-Bush activist in 2002 when he went to Africa, but there isn’t any evidence for that.
It’s all just an effort to tear down Wilson and Plame, in a pointless attempt to rebuild Bush and Rove’s reputations.
Jon H
If you want to see a real case of an utterly incompetent, unqualifed person hired, on the sly, to do a political smear job, you can take a look at the guy hired by the head of Corporation for Public Broadcasting to monitor PBS and NPR.
That would be the winger moron who said Chuck Hagel was liberal, among other marks of genius.
And he didn’t even work for free. He got to sit at home in Indiana, on his fat ass, drinking mint tea, watching TV – for $14,000 of taxpayer money.
Jon H
I also get annoyed when people talk about Wilson as if he had tried to stop the war. He didn’t. He didn’t start making a fuss until after we were up to our ass in it.
I’ve heard journalists and talking heads make this mistake a few times. Hello? War started in March 03. Kristof’s article showed up in May 03. Wilson’s op/ed showed up in July 03. By then, we were well into Rummy’s postwar blundering.
Kimmitt
Bwuh? Wilson’s report to the CIA could not possibly have strengthened the agency’s conclusion, since he very specifically found no corroboration for these conclusions.
Seriously, wtf?
Phil Smith
P. 73 of the SSCI report.
I’ve spent far too much time reading the report and highlighting the relevant portions. Look upthread.
SamAm
Given the fact that INR got more Iraq intelligence right than any other entity, I’d say that’s an exculpatory detail.
ppGaz
And so we are left with an obvious question — but not so obvious that a cowed, flaccid press couldn’t miss it — which is this:
Why the scramble to attack a messenger, rather than advance an argument that countered his message?
For two years, the Plame-Rove story has centered around Who Struck John issues. The world will little note, nor long remember, who struck John. Even if Fitzgerald gets a trophy out of this. What the world will remember is how a government martialed its thug forces to squelch dissent instead.
That’s the government you have now. The messages don’t matter any more. Only the politics and the personalities matter.
That’s the way Karl Rove likes it.
Unfortunately, that’s not the way I like it, and I don’t think Rove’s way is the right way for America.
I can’t sign off from this thread without my customary torpedo at blogdom: Not much of the blog population has kept its eye on the ball here. The constant churn over irrlevant bullshit just plays into the hands of people who have no respect for the public’s expectations as a people who are both equipped, and allowed, to govern themselves.
(Apologies, of course, to Abe Lincoln.)
Cliff
Phil, good for you that you’ve spent so much time with the Senate report. Except that the Senate report itself is looking a lot less solid on any number of points than, just to name some random example, Wilson’s report.
I fail to understand how people can simultaneously believe that a) Wilson was a partisan hack dispatched by his Saddam-loving wife to distort The TRUTH About Niger, and b) that Wilson’s report supported the uranium from Niger story.
“Most analysts”? “Most analysts who didn’t want to lose their jobs and/or get their cover blown for contradicting the OVP”, perhaps…The only way in which Wilson’s report “supported” the preferred story is that some guy told him that some guy told *him* that some Iraqi wanted to meet him.
Use your ability to think critically here, Phil.
If the majority of CIA analysts felt that this Niger story was so solid, why did the CIA want it out of the SOTU and other speeches?
If the story itself *was* so solid, how come all the evidence points the other way — that there was no nuclear program, that Saddam hadn’t sought uranium from Niger, etc.?
Go on, quote the Butler report. You know you want to.
gswift
Just like the length of the Starr investigation shows that Clinton pretty much… Oh yeah.
Oh come on now, the extent of the crime, if any statutes were violated, the evidence as to who was involved, etc. is still unkown.
But it’s getting absurd at this point to argue that she was not covert. Does anyone here really think a Republican appointed DOJ lawyer was told by the CIA that Plame was not covert, and he just decided to keep going for kicks?
eileen from OH
Why is our nation’s premiere intelligence gathering service relying on reports from former ambassador, and why do we not have better intelligence assets? That, in and of itself, is a larger cause for long-term concern than the Plame thing to me- why our we so woefully inadequate in our intelligence gathering?
If we want to improve our intelligence gathering the first thing we need are good people – many of whom will risk their lives. I would venture that the outing of a CIA agent – covert or not – for purely political reasons, will not help much in recruitment efforts.
eileen from OH
Bruce Moomaw
“A more straightforward depiction of events could not be found”? The Post editorial swallows whole the Senate Intelligence Committee report — which, lest we forget, insists that the bad old extremist-hawk CIA sold the relatively reulctant-to-fight White House a bill of goods about Saddam’s aggressive tendencies. This, after the Bush neocons had spent YEARS screaming that the stupid peaceniks of the CIA were downplaying the evidence of Saddam’s aggressive intentions. (Laurie Mylroie, in a spectacular piece of bad timing, published an entire book on that theme just when the news of Saddam’s nonexistent WMDs was breaking.)
In connection with Wilson himself, note the glaring contradiction pointed out immediately above by Cliff: Wilson’s peacenik wife supposedly got him the job in order to falsely discredit the Niger Yellowcake Deal, but at the same time the Senate report cites the CIA as saying that his report actually strengthened the evidence of the deal. What’s wrong with this picture?
The reason for this Lewis Carrollian tone in the Senate report is that Chairman Roberts solemnly promised Sen. Rockefeller that the Committee would do a companion report AFTER the election about the extent to which the White House might have distorted the intelligence it WAS given — and then, of course, reneged on the deal. (See the New Republic’s account.) I hope no one ever offers Jay Rockefeller the Brooklyn Bridge.
As for the Butler Report, Josh Marshall did a convincing demolition job last year:
and
(That report was clearly designed as a pre-election fig leaf for Tony Blair.)
The overlying story remains exactly the one which Frank Rich devotes his entire lengthy column to, exceptfor the single paragraph that Cole quotes: the Bush Neocons were so absolutely convinced that the Iraq War would be “a cakewalk” (to quote Kenneth Adelman) that they decided to cook the evidence of Saddam’s WMDs in order to get the US into it, despite the fact that Iran was clearly a lot closer to actually getting the Bomb. After all, the War would unquestionably be over in a cheap jiffy — and we could then use the new pro-American Iraq as a base from which to launch similar quick overthrows of the regimes in Iran and Syria. (To quote one frequent pre-war line from the Neocons: “Men go to Baghdad; real men go to Teheran and Damascus.”) Stupid misjudgment, followed by frantic attempts to cover it up — it’s the oldest of all political stories.
And the Post editorial provides further evidence that its editorials have been slowly degenerating since Katherine Graham died and was succeeded by her Republican husband Richard.
Bruce Moomaw
Goddamn it, I STILL cannot get the URL link here to work right. Let’s try again. First
Bruce Moomaw
Second
Bruce Moomaw
What is wrong with this bloody thing, John?
Jess
Good point, Eileen.
And the next thing we need to do is to listen to them when they have important information to report, such as “OBL determined to strike within US.”
rilkefan
Bruce, you sure you have an http:// in your link?
Andrei
For some reason Bruce, you are forgetting to put content into the link tags. (Or they are getting stripped on posting. not sure which.)
Here are Bruce’s links for everyone:
First
Second
p.lukasiak
you have to feel sorry for John, endlessly repeating GOP talking points — and then referencing those talking points when they show up in the mainstream media.
Here is a clue — Wilson’s primary point was that intelligence that was counter to the push for war was ignored. Wilson had excellent reason to assume that Cheney would have been told about his trip — it was standard procedure for officials who ask questions to get answers, and we know that Cheney asked questions.
Whether or not Cheney did get a response based on Wilson’s report is irrelevant — What Wilson “did not find in Africa” should have been disseminated to those charged with making the decisions, because it provided a clear rebuttal of some “raw intelligence” that the White House had been given.
Now, the White House wants to blame the CIA for faulty intelligence, and it does seem possible that there was someone in the CIA who was tasked with making sure that the “wrong intelligence” did not reach the White House (the whole “aluminum tubes” fiasco makes this much clear.)
But we also know that the CIA had insisted on leaving out references to “efforts to buy uranium from Africa” in at least one speech, and tried to keep it out of the SOTU — but that Steven Hadley insisted upon putting it back in and the CIA didn’t put up a fight. We also know that Powell thought the story was so dubious he refused to include it in his presentation to the United Nations.
And this is what Wilson was writing about — the fact that the intelligence and facts had been fixed around the policy.
But Cole (and the Post) really drank the Kool-Aid by thinking that outing Plame was in any way necessary to rebut Wilson’s column. It simply wasn’t. Wilson himself made it clear that Cheney did not “directly appoint” Wilson to go on the trip — and all Rove had to do was point that out to reporters. Wilson also made it clear that his trip was about actual arrangements for a sale of yellowcake — and all Rove had to do was cite Wilson’s piece to point out that Bush claimed that Iraq “sought” uranium, not that arrangements had been made.
John Cole needs to take a good long look in the mirror, and ask himself “Why the fuck am I holding Joseph Wilson to a much higher standard of absolute accuracy and truth than I do George Bush, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, Steven Hadley, Donald Rumsfeld, and the rest of the people who engaged in a deliberate campaign of lies, distortions, deceptions, and disinformation designed to get us into a war that has killed 1763 Americans?”
John Cole
Lukasiak- I have refrained from calling you an asshole for long enough. No longer. I am sick and tired of people like you who DO recite the DNC talking points at every opportunity impugning my motives anbd questioning my ability to think for myself.
I am not just reciting GOP talking points. Wilson was shopping his story around to numerous reporters. Wilson’s story, every time it is re-told, is embellished in a certain way. There are inconsistencies in his story. The administration did have a valid reason to refute his story, as they felt he was providing a one-sided narrative. There was a false image that Cheney himself sent Wilson. His wife did have a lot to do why Wilson was sent. There are numerous reports that refute Wilson’s report, and there are many analysts, who are not party hacks, who disagreed with Wilson;s analysis
None of that makes it acceptable or appropriate to burn CIA agents (spomething I have repeatedly said, so I don;t know where you get your kool-aid reference). None of that makes it appropriate to smear his wife. And none of that changes Wilson’s past heroic deeds in the first Gulf war.
Whether you can accept all that is up to you, but you are a big boy, so rather than feel sorry for you, I am just going to let you run back to TPMCafe, where you can get your fill of independent thinking in the form of DNC talking points.
But for the love of God, quit posting shitty, snide, condescending little posts where yuo feign to be sorry for me because I am just repeating ‘talking points.’ I am trying to come at this honestly- you won’t, as nothing that deviates from your “BUSH EVIL-ROVE EVIL” knuckle-dragging narrative is allowed.
I have been polite enough to all of yuo impugning my motives, my intentions, and my character. Not longer. Piss off, you condescending shit.
Cliff
That image, to the extent it existed, was not due to Wilson.
There is a single INR source, not at the meeting, who claims she put him forward. All CIA sources agree that she was asked about him (“say, didn’t your husband…”), responded, and others in the CIA made the decision.
As in intelligence reports? As in people who looked into the Niger uranium claims? No there aren’t. All there is, the only thing, is the forged docs, and with very generous interpretation, a secondhand rumor about an intermediary asking for a meeting.
The only reports that allegedly refute Wilson’s are the Senate and Butler reports, which are politically tainted.
Phil Smith
You’ve been entirely too polite, John. Some people are pretty clearly not interest in an honest discussion.
pleasewakeupy'all
While I agree with the notion that the length of the investigation is not proof that the event occurred–it merely proves that Fitzgerald will be thorough before reaching a conclusion. What I’m struck by is the contast of this investigation to Starr’s. That serpentine affair started at Whitewater and ended…..well you know where, while Fitzgerald’s is focussed on a possible violation of the Agee law, and other associated criminal activities–and has not strayed from that. In other words, Fitzgerald appears to be a serious prosecutor while Starr proved to be a partisan hack.
The prevailing end-justifies-the-means political operations has led us to the most institutional un-American behavior since the McCarthy era. Silence the critics. Silence the media. Distort and obfuscate. How can anyone be OK with this administration’s nauseating brand of politics?
CaseyL
“There are numerous reports that refute Wilson’s report.”
What, exactly, do you mean by this statement?
Which reports “refute” which aspects of Wilson’s report?
And which of Wilson’s reports are you referring to? His debriefing by the Administration, his testimony to the SSIC, his NYT Op-Ed, or…?
First: Don’t lose sight of what Wilson’s mission was: to determine if and when Iraq had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger.
Second: Don’t mix up the timeline. Wilson went to Niger in Feb 2002; gave his account of his Niger trip in a debriefing upon his return; wrote his Op-Ed in July 2003; and appeared before the SSCI in 2004.
Bear in mind that WIlson did not mention forged documents in his initial reports and debriefing because their existance had not yet been revealed. He did mention them in his Op-Ed because they had been discovered by then. And he notes that; he notes that he found it out via news reports.
Phil Smith provided very good links and quotes, and the only thing Wilson “lied” about is whether he actually saw the forged documents, or the memo about the forged documents, and how he knew which names had been appeared on them.
That’s hardly an indictment of Wilson’s report.
And it does not in any way undermine the meat of WIlson’s report: Other than a 1999 meeting which went nowhere, and in which yellowcake wasn’t even mentioned, Iraq had not attempted to buy yellowcake from Niger at any “recent” time.
Vladi G
There was a false image that Cheney himself sent Wilson.
So if I go around telling everyone that John Cole kicks puppies, after the story gets out, can I malign your credibility by saying “but there an false image of you kicking puppies!”? Can I cite that image as an inconsistency in your claim of not being a puppy-kicker?
Phil Smith
That’s true insofar as it goes, but Wilson’s brief was restricted to speaking to only past officials. He did not talk to anyone that was currently in the Nigerien government. Since there was a coup in 1999, I’m assuming that means that he spoke to nobody with first-hand knowledge more recent than then.
ppGaz
Well, what is the Capital T Truth about Saddam’s nuclear capability? Unless I missed something, it was vaporware.
The best lipstick the White House can put on that whole issue (the actual threat posed by Iraq in Feb 2003) is that the signals were “mixed.”
Great. So, without any proximate and unambiguous threat to the immediate safety and lives of Americans, we went to war on the basis of mixed signals.
Excuse me if I don’t vote to start building the George W. Bush Iraq War Memorial, just yet.
And my central point stands:
These assholes attacked the messenger. They did not attack “mixed signals” and try to un-mix them. The latter is what they are hired to do, not the former. If this was a reality tv show, Donald Trump would fire these incompetant fucks in the first episode.
Andrei
In the business world, when one gets back information from a consultant or researcher that one doesn’t want to hear or that doesn’t back up their marketing plans, either the marketing plans change to fit the new reality or more research is done to find more information.
So? Did this administration do either? Not that I’m aware of. If they did, why didn’t they just promote that new research? Why did Rove and Libby bother with Wilson in the public arena in the first place?
It all stinks of a very big cover-up John. And if there is no cover-up, then it reeks of incompetence and pettiness on the part of the Administration. Given their handling of the aftermath of shock and awe, it doesn’t seem far fetched quite frankly.
What does that have to do with the underlying matter of this story? The one you seem to be doing a good job avoiding these days, John? The one that has more to do with the things ppGaz keeps commenting about? The one about how a majority of the American were convinced to fight this war in Iraq?
When are we going to have a discussion on that aspect of this story? Or are you going to continue to feed the fire over Wilson’s inconsistencies with his embellishments on what happened as a way to damn the left for frothing at the mouth and basically offer nothing new to this thing?
John Cole
What the hell does any of that have to do with whether or not Rove outed an agent or not?
What would you like to ‘discuss?’ Or should I just go read the latest shocking update on the DSM at the Raw Story and we can consider the discussion over?
Hunh?
Andrei
Ok… why do you think Rove and Libby even bothered with discussing Wilson’s wife openly with reporters? What could they possibly gain by trying to discredit one man’s opinion? Especially a man whom 99.99% of this country doesn’t even know! that op-ed peice would have blown over in a week’s time, to be forgotten forever or made into simply a footnote if proven correct.
Was it pure spite on the part of Rove/Libby? Pure hatred of democrats that even one op-ed piece had to be attacked and discredited? Was it that Rove couldn’t let his opponent gain one single inch in the public debate on the lead up to the war? Was the admnistration covering something up? Did they know Wilson’s report was accurate? Were they playing pure partisan hackery up for all its worth not realizing that in that moment they were openly discussing employees from the CIA who happened to be married to a guy Bush I called a “Hero?”
IOW…. why the heck did Rove/Libby bother at all with discussing Wilson’s wife with reporters?
What I’d like to see discussed is what is underneath all of this. I could give a rat’s ass about the he said/he said potential perjury case that seems to be building up here. Although if Rove or Libby got their due on trumped up perjury charges, I have to admit I wouldn’t cry for them.
I want to know if this administration misled this country into war knowingly or not. Maybe they were just blinded by hubris? Could be. But as a tax-paying American citizen, I think I have the right to know what my elected leaders and their chosen appointess are doing in my country’s name.
Kimmitt
This part is true. So what you have to ask yourself is whether these inconsistencies are consistent with a guy trying to promote a true story who gets carried away sometimes, or if they actually do a lot of damage to his credibility.
To put it another way, if we held any random Bush Administration offical — including the President — to the standard to which you are holding Joseph Wilson, we would find that person non-credible. So any attacks on Wilson from those sources are also non-credible, and we’re back where we started.
SamAm
Kimmitt, that’s exactly right.