DesertFox
07-20-2005, 09:04 AM
Mark Goldblatt
The American Spectator
20 July 05
There's a more scandalous question hovering in the background of Valerie Plame affair than whether presidential adviser Karl Rove intentionally or inadvertently blew the cover of a CIA agent -- namely, the question of how Plame's husband Joe Wilson wound up as point man to investigate whether Saddam Hussein had tried to acquire uranium from Africa.
It was Wilson, recall, who claimed in July 2003 op-ed for the New York Times that the agency had dispatched him to Niger -- at the personal request, he insinuated, of Vice President Cheney -- to look into the Iraq-Africa connection. Wilson insisted that he'd found no link and accused President Bush of lying in his 2003 State of the Union when he said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Wilson's conclusion that Iraq had never sought to buy uranium from Niger, we now know, wasn't borne out by his own sketchy, hearsay-filled report; indeed, the British government still stands by the intelligence Bush cited. Wilson, in short, misrepresented his own findings in order to undermine the re-election of the president. In the words of Pat Roberts (R. Kansas), chairman of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee which looked into the matter, "[Wilson] seems to have included information he learned from press accounts and from his beliefs about how the intelligence community would have or should have handled the information he provided...Time and again Joe Wilson told anyone who would listen that the president had lied to the American people...and that he had 'debunked' the claim that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa....Not only did he NOT 'debunk' the claim, he actually gave some intelligence analysts even more reason to believe [the British report was] true."
More (http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=8465)
The American Spectator
20 July 05
There's a more scandalous question hovering in the background of Valerie Plame affair than whether presidential adviser Karl Rove intentionally or inadvertently blew the cover of a CIA agent -- namely, the question of how Plame's husband Joe Wilson wound up as point man to investigate whether Saddam Hussein had tried to acquire uranium from Africa.
It was Wilson, recall, who claimed in July 2003 op-ed for the New York Times that the agency had dispatched him to Niger -- at the personal request, he insinuated, of Vice President Cheney -- to look into the Iraq-Africa connection. Wilson insisted that he'd found no link and accused President Bush of lying in his 2003 State of the Union when he said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Wilson's conclusion that Iraq had never sought to buy uranium from Niger, we now know, wasn't borne out by his own sketchy, hearsay-filled report; indeed, the British government still stands by the intelligence Bush cited. Wilson, in short, misrepresented his own findings in order to undermine the re-election of the president. In the words of Pat Roberts (R. Kansas), chairman of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee which looked into the matter, "[Wilson] seems to have included information he learned from press accounts and from his beliefs about how the intelligence community would have or should have handled the information he provided...Time and again Joe Wilson told anyone who would listen that the president had lied to the American people...and that he had 'debunked' the claim that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa....Not only did he NOT 'debunk' the claim, he actually gave some intelligence analysts even more reason to believe [the British report was] true."
More (http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=8465)