Winds of Change.NET: The Senate Intelligence Committee Report

Ross Ross

Dan Darling writes a few brief conclusions on the Senate Report. I decided to pull apart his comments on Joe Wilson, and this is what I found.

Dan, on the Wilson matter: You call the man a "liar and not a particularly good one at that". Then you've got a few paragraphs from which we're supposed to infer exactly that, I suppose. I don't get there from what you've written and the publicly available documents.

After some pointless characterization of Wilson's public image, you state: "Even more so, I would argue, if only for the fact that he was making claims about a number of issues, for example the forged documents referring to Niger, of which he had no actual knowledge - a very polite way of saying that the man was blowing smoke out his ass."

The Senate report is available at http://intelligence.senate.gov. It is a little awkward to deal with, as it does not contain a text layer (it's image only). I refer to page numbers in the document, not in the PDF file.

According to the Senate report, page 36, the first CIA report on the Iraq-Niger deal was written on Oct. 18, 2001. The first CIA report referred to a report from a foreign government's intelligence service. Per the Senate report, page 37, the second CIA report was issued on February 5, 2002. This second report "provided what was said to be the 'verbatim text' of the accord". In other words, the second report contained the alleged contract between Iraq and Niger.

On page 40 of the Senate report, we learn that Wilson participated in a February 19, 2002 meeting "to discuss the merits of the former ambassador travelling to Niger". On page 41, of the SR:

"The INR analyst's notes also indicate that specific details of the classified report on the Iraq-Niger uranium deal were discussed at the meeting, as well as whether analysts believed it was plausible that Niger would be capable of delivering such a large quantity of uranium to Iraq. The CIA has told committee staff that the former ambassador did not have a 'formal' security clearance but had been given an 'operation clearance' up to the Secret level for the purpose of his potential visit to Niger."

In other words, Wilson was present at a meeting during which specific details of the CIA's reports on the alleged Iraq-Niger deal were discussed, and he had clearance to be there. We know that the second report contained the "verbatim text" of the agreement, which presumably would mean it contained the names of those who signed it. It is entirely possible that the names were discussed or seen at that meeting.

Page 45 of the SR notes:

"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 former ambassador said that he may have 'misspoken' to the reporter when he said he concluded the documents were 'forged'. He also said he may have become confused about his own recollection after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported in March 2003 that the names and dates on the documents were not correct and may have thought he had seen the names himself."

Note the remarkably minimal text that is directly attributable to Wilson himself. The 'dates were wrong and the names were wrong' is in fact the entire extent of the quote, in the June 13, 2003 Post story (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A46957-2003Jun11&notFound=true). We are then told only TWO WORDS of Wilson's testimony: 'misspoken' and 'forged'. What did Wilson actually say? This is summary of summary of summary, and isn't evidence of a damn thing.

The Washington Post article says this:

"After returning to the United States, the envoy reported to the CIA that the uranium-purchase story was false, the sources said. Among the envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because the 'dates were wrong and the names were wrong,' the former U.S. government official said."

Note that Wilson is not QUOTED as saying that the documents were forged; he is quoted as saying 'dates were wrong and the names were wrong'. The March 2003 IAEA report concluding that the documents were forged and that they had the wrong names on them had already been published at that point, and Wilson had likely already seen it. Note that the SR indicates that the word 'forged' is a quote from wilson, in the context of the Post article. It is not; that is the reporter's verbage. So all we have here is that in June 2003, Wilson told a reporter that the 'dates were wrong and the names were wrong', which was both true and public knowledge. That the documents were forged was ALSO public knowledge.

I encourage you to be more specific about "making claims about a number of issues, for example the forged documents referring to Niger, of which he had no actual knowledge". Back it up with a specific claim that Wilson has made, quoted in his OWN words if you please, rather than a multiple levels of indirection.

Next, you state "the name of Wilson's wife was leaked to the press in order to punish him for having "debunked" the administration's claims with respect to Iraq attempting to purchase uranium from Africa. As the report very clearly indicates, this was simply not the case". Where do you see this in the Senate report? By "simply not the case", do you mean that Wilson's wife's name was leaked, or do you mean that his report did NOT in fact "debunk" the Iraq-Niger deal? On the first, there's no text in the SR concluding anything about whether the administration leaked her name; we're therefore talking about whether Wilson's report "debunked" anything. Why, then, do you lead your sentence mentioning the leak of Plame's name? Perhaps you have inadvertently connected the SR and this conclusion.

On the SR, page 43, we learn that Wilson was debriefed after his trip on March 5, 2002. Pages 43 and 44 contain summarizations of the report that resulted from that debriefing. It is quite clear that Wilson came to the conclusion, during his trip and his meetings with Nigerien officials who would have had to have been involved at the time, that the Iraq-Niger deal was bogus. But did this "debunk" the theory? On page 73:

"Conclusion 13. The report on the former ambassador's trip to Niger, disseminated in March 2002, did not change any analysts' assessments of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal. For most analysts, the information in the report lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal, but State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) analysts believed that the report supported their assessment that Niger was unlikely to be willing or able to unranium to Iraq."

Some analysts believed him, and some did not. In Wilson's mind, the Iraq-Niger deal was a done deal. In the minds of at least some analysts (INR), his report further affirmed what they thought. I find nothing in the SR contradicting wilson's claim that his report "debunked" the Iraq-Niger deal; please point out where you see it. I don't mean to be combative, here -- with over 500 pages of image-only data you may have seen something that I didn't. My point is that nothing in the SR makes it inconsistent for Wilson to have claimed to have debunked the Iraq-Niger story.

You conclude that "Wilson's trip to Africa did not 'debunk' the administration position that Iraq was attempting to purchase uranium from Niger - in fact it strengthened this position on the basis of Wilson's claim that an Iraqi delegation had traveled to Niger in 1999". The only fact in Wilson's report that bolstered any part of the original claim was that it placed an Iraqi delegation in Niger in June of 1999. Everything else went against it. As noted in Conclusion 13 above, the information "did not change" assessments.

Wilson clearly believed he had shown the Iraq-Niger deal was false. We know now that he was correct. The Senate report shows us that wilson's report may have had less effect on analysts' opinions than he thought. Does that make him "a liar and not a particularly good one"?

You link to Instapundit, who claims that Joe Wilson lied in that linked article. Specfically, Instapundit is referring to the recent Susan Schmidt article that stirred this particular pot. Schmidt's article is available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39834-2004Jul9.html?referrer=emailarticle. Instapundit tells us to "read the whole thing", but he presumably means for us to read Schmidt's article instead of the Senate report upon which it is based. When we go to the Senate report Schmidt has professed to "summarize" for us, we find something rather different.

I've discussed the one of the differences above -- the difference on the document forgery and names. The Senate report discusses this on page 45. I struggle to see how this difference impugns Wilson in any way; the information is accurate, it was public when he said it, and it was a sentence fragment embedded into a much more general paragraph. The contested implications are generated by the reporter.

On page 44 of the SR, there is a brief discussion of the other differences. The first concerns whether Wilson's report discounted BOTH an actual sale of uranium to Iraq AND that Iraq had approached Niger to buy uranium; the intelligence report generated from wilson's debriefing "did not refute the possibility that Iraq had approached Niger to purchase uranium". That's a pretty microscopic difference; Wilson's report indicated that a meeting with the Iraqi delegation had taken place but that only "commercial interests" had been discussed. The Nigerien representative inferred that uranium could have been what the Iraqis were interested in, but that discussion did not happen. So, in the context of Wilson's report, an approach to buy uranium did not happen. The analyst writing the report may have wanted to include the possibility that the meeting concerned more than Wilson was told, or that there were other meetings.

Continuing on page 44, the committee found that "the former ambassador said that he discussed with his CIA contacts which names and signatures should have appeared on any documentation of such a deal". The Senate committee noted that the intelligence report "made no mention of the alleged Iraq-Niger uranium deal or signatures that should have appeared on any documentation of such a deal". I don't think we can draw too much of a conclusion from this particular statement. Wilson was sent to Niger to examine whether an Iraq-Niger uranium deal had taken place. The resulting debriefing report (not transcript) doesn't contain any mention of the deal he was sent to investigate? Seems to me that a debriefing report about a trip to examine a uranium deal would mention that deal. I think we're seeing fragments here, and far too many conclusions are being drawn.

The third "difference" on page 44 is this:

"Third, the former ambassador noted that his CIA contacts told him there were documents pertaining to the alleged Iraq-Niger uranium transaction and that the source of the information was the --redacted-- intelligence service. The DO reports officer told Committee staff that he did not provide the former ambassador with any information about the source or details of the original reporting as it would have required sharing classified information and, noted that there were no 'documents' circulating in the IC at the time of the former ambassador's trip, only intelligence reports from --redacted-- intelligence regarding an alleged Iraq-Niger uranium deal."

What we have here is a debriefing officer saying that he didn't tell Wilson any details about the originating report. He probably didn't; as the Senate report itself says on page 41 (and discussed above),

"The INR analyst's notes also indicate that specific details of the classified report on the Iraq-Niger uranium deal were discussed at the meeting, as well as whether analysts believed it was plausible that Niger would be capable of delivering such a large quantity of uranium to Iraq. The CIA has told committee staff that the former ambassador did not have a 'formal' security clearance but had been given an 'operation clearance' up to the Secret level for the purpose of his potential visit to Niger."

so we have Wilson, participating in a CIA meeting, where "specific details of the classified report" ... "were discussed". So if Joe Wilson says that CIA contacts told him that information, how exactly is that a lie? It's not. This particular officer was simply indicating that he had not told Wilson. Wilson had already learned that information through the February 19, 2002 meeting.

Instapundit also raises the issue of Joe Wilson's statements about his wife. Apparently it is brand new news that there was a memo from Plame, February 12, recommending Wilson for the trip. The clear implication is that Wilson lied about his wife's involvement in his selection. The public quote, from Wilson's book, is given almost everywhere as:

"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."

So what did he actually write? Here's where you can see a fuller excerpt from his book: http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36%257E27%257E2163873,00.html.

"Apart from being the conduit of a message from a colleague in her office asking if I would be willing to have a conversation about Niger's uranium industry, Valerie had had nothing to do with the matter. Though she worked on weapons of mass destruction issues, she was not at the meeting I attended where the subject of Niger's uranium was discussed, when the possibility of my actually traveling to the country was broached. She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip."

Wilson's clearly referring to the meeting where the decision got made. Note that according to the Senate report, page 39, Wilson had made at least two other trips to Niger on behalf of the CIA; his name was not unknown to that organization. Still, "definitely had not proposed" doesn't seem to square entirely. Looking a little further, we can see an interview that Wilson gave, October 28, 2003, to Talon news (http://www.gopusa.com/news/2003/october/1028_wilson_interview.shtml). Quoting from that interview:

"Wilson: Those were the premises under which I argued that we ought not to rush into an invasion, conquest, occupation, war. That said, that all took place well after my trip. I was selected to go to Niger because there was maybe one other person in the U.S. government who knew those who had been in office at the time this purported agreement memorandum was signed, and his credibility was somewhat damaged not by anything he did, but by the fact that he had been an ambassador out there and as a consequence, he had to be the daily point of friction with the military junta during the time he was out there. I was senior director for African affairs at the time. I started my career in Niger and had a whole series of relationships and a great credibility with that group of people who had been in power at the time.

I also happen to know a fair amount about the uranium business, having served in 3 of the 4 countries in Africa that produce uranium, including having been ambassador to the Gabonese Republic which is also a uranium exporter.

TN: Did your wife suggest you for the mission?

Wilson: No. The decision to ask me to go out to Niger was taken in a meeting at which there were about a dozen analysts from both the CIA and the State Department. A couple of them came up and said to me when we're going through the introductory phase, "We have met at previous briefings that you have done on other subjects, Africa-related."

Not one of those at that meeting could I have told you what they look like, would I recognize on the street, or remember their name today. And as old as I am, I can still recognize my wife, and I still do remember her name. That was the meeting at which the decision was made to ask me if I would clear my schedule to go.

TN: An internal government memo prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel details a meeting in early 2002 where your wife, a member of the agency for clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested that you could be sent to investigate the reports. Do you dispute that?

Wilson: I don't know anything about a meeting, I can only tell you about the meeting I was at where I was asked if I would prepare to go, and there was nobody at that meeting that I know. Now that fact that my wife knows that I know a lot about the uranium business and that I know a lot about Niger and that she happens to be involved in weapons of mass destruction, it should come as no surprise to anyone that we know of each others activities."

This reporter talks about a meeting where Plame may have suggested Wilson's name; the Senate report speaks of a memo. The bottom line is that this is old news; in this interview Wilson clearly indicates that his wife was not part of the decision-making process. He also clearly acknowledgehat s that his wife knows what he does and about his background, that that they know of each other's activities.

Wilson is publicly acknowledging here that his wife may have contributed to his selection; he also is clearly indicating that she had nothing to do with the decision. Criticism of Wilson on this point is, to my mind, requiring of unfair precision on his part.

The lesson in all of this is that quotes matter. By choosing parts, by displaying words without context or by supplying context and attributing it to the target, you can bend things around quite a bit.

Do I think that Joe Wilson stretched things a little? Probably; it seems to me that he felt his report was more dispositive of the Iraq-Niger deal than it actually was, to the analysts involved. But that is not a lie.

Criticize, by all means. Call a spade a spade. But recognize that your third-degree source on a matter may be inaccurate or be a mischaracterization.

Posted by Ross Ross on   |   § 18

§ 18 Comments

1

"Wilson clearly believed he had shown the Iraq-Niger deal was false. We know now that he was correct."

By all accounts the Iraq-Niger deal has been shown to be 100% accurate. Blair has stood by this all along and has had noting but vindication since.

Where are you getting your double secret intel?

fnyser fnyser

2

Nothing secret about it, friend. Follow the link to the Senate report, and have a look around page 69.

It is very generally accepted that the documents were forged and the deal never happened. You'll find hundreds of references to the deal in the report. Find me an account that shows the existence of the deal to be 100% accurate!

In the mean time, using the Senate Report as a primary source seems to be a good bet.

Ross Ross

3

Ross,

isn't there a difference between

a. whether the deal "happened"

and

b. whether Saddam sought uranium from Niger?

It would seem that all evidence indicates that the Hussein regime did indeed attempt to get uranium from Niger, but that as far as we know a transaction (such as the forgery would try to indicate) did not actually occur. so "you're both right"... and Bush was right too... right?

Blixa Blixa

4

The only evidence presented by Wilson's trip that supported Iraqi desires to obtain uranium was the Nigerien President's feeling that the Iraqi delegation was interested in more than trade.

The other piece of evidence was the documents, which were subsequently found to be forgeries.

Let's keep in mind here that George Tenet publicly stated that the Iraq-Niger information should not have been in the state of the union.

Hmm. No responses on the Wilson credibility issue?

Ross Ross

5

Hi, I have followed you home from Pejmanesque.

First, props for the hard work - you have clearly given this a lot of thought.

Secondly, hmm, are you kidding? Just to focus a bit, I am going to dwell on the question of his wife's involvement. We can come back to the forgeries, if you like.

If I am reading this correctly, you are presenting the Talon news interview as Wilson *confirming* that his wife was involved?

So when I read this:

TN: Did your wife suggest you for the mission?

Wilson: No.

What part of "No" do I not understand?

I guess your position is that when he says "Now that fact that my wife knows that I know a lot about the uranium business and that I know a lot about Niger and that she happens to be involved in weapons of mass destruction, it should come as no surprise to anyone that we know of each others activities.", that is a clear statement trumping his earlier denial as well as what he wrote in the book.

As you were looking through the Senate report, you may have missed this, regarding the fateful meeting his wife emphatically did not attend (p. 40):

U) On February 19, 2002, CPD hosted a meeting with the former ambassador, intelligence analysts from both the CIA and INR, and several individuals from DO's Africa and CPD divisions. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the merits of the former ambassador traveling to Niger. An INR analyst's notes indicate that the meeting was "apparently convened by [the former ambassador's wife] who had the idea to dispatch [him] to use his contacts to sort out the Iraq-Niger uranium issue." The former ambassador's wife told Committee staff that she only attended the meeting to introduce her husband and left after about three minutes."

So she was there, but he didn't recognize her? Deep-cover disguise, maybe? She left early to avoid embarrassment? She deliberately left early so later he could say "she wasn't in the room". Whatever.

And let's not gloss over this:

Some CPD officials could not recall how the office decided to contact the former ambassador, however, interviews and documents provided to the Committee indicate that his wife, a CPD employee, suggested his name for the trip. The CPD reports officer told Committee staff that the former ambassador's wife "offered up his name" and a memorandum to the Deputy Chief of the CPD on February 12, 2002, from the former ambassador's wife says, "my 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."

This was just one day before CPD sent a cable ^ ^ H ^ H ^ ^ ^ m ^ H requesting concurrence with CPD's idea to send the former ambassador to Niger and requesting any additional information from the foreign government service on their uranium reports. The former ambassador's wife told Committee staff that when CPD decided it would like to send the former ambassador to Niger, she approached her husband on behalf of the CIA and told him "there's this crazy report" on a purported deal for Niger to sell uranium to Iraq.

She writes a memo, a day later it is happening, she calls the meeting and opens it, but she is not involved? I guess it depends on what the meaning of "involved" is. She couldn't be much more involved if she was sleeping with him. Oops.

What he said in the book is a lie. What he said in the interview you cite is either a lie or deliberately misleading.

For fun, let's reprint the book excerpt:

Apart from being the conduit of a message from a colleague in her office asking if I would be willing to have a conversation about Niger's uranium industry, Valerie had had nothing to do with the matter. Though she worked on weapons of mass destruction issues, she was not at the meeting I attended where the subject of Niger's uranium was discussed, when the possibility of my actually traveling to the country was broached. She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip."

How much was he paid for that?

Tom Maguire Tom Maguire

6

1. What do you mean "more than trade"? This is not merely a false dichotomy you've set up, it's an identity. Obtaining uranium from Niger in exchange for something else, IS trade. That's what "trade" means!

And *trying* to do so is an attempt to do such a trade. Thus one who has made such an attempt has - one might say - "sought" uranium.

That aside, trying to parse your statement in an understandable way, you seem to speak as if there is a huge amount of trade with Niger in which Iraq would naturally have been interested, OTHER THAN uranium. Kindly explain what? By far the bulk of Niger's exports are... uranium. In second place are livestock, animal skins, and suchlike.

2. The forged documents are not the "other" piece of evidence showing Saddam's desire to seek uranium from Africa. They are one other piece, but as you say everyone says they are forged, so let's toss them out. But we are still left with the British intelligence finding, which they still stand by. I'm still a little confused however as to why Joe Wilson's actual report - that his source states Saddam's envoy attempted to procure uranium - does not count as evidence that Saddam sought uranium from Niger. At the very worst it's not a DEBUNKING as Wilson has been pretending.

3. People who toss "but Tenet publicly said it shouldn't have been in the SOTU" back in my face, as (I guess?) a rebuttal to uranium-Africa, just seem to me not to understand politics. This was a silly scandal spending too much time on the front pages, there was no real up-side in taking up the argument, and so the Bush admin sent someone out to fall on his sword to spike it. Big deal.

Although I believe it's almost certainly the case that Saddam sought uranium from Africa, I frankly AGREE with the statement "it shouldn't have been in the SOTU", if only because (1) saying this was a form of overreach and not very important to anything (Bush already had War Powers authorized! he should've quit while he's ahead!), and (2) it resulted in this idiotic scandal. That's enough of a reason to regret putting it in there. Thus, again, I parse "it shouldn't have been in there" from Tenet to mean something like, "we want this dumb thing off the front pages, it's not worth arguing about, so here's your quote", and anyone who doesn't, just doesn't understand politics IMO.

4. I don't know exactly what you mean by "responses on the Wilson credibility issue" except to say that I generally find him absolutely incredible and nothing you've written here has changed my mind about that *shrug* Best,

Blixa Blixa

7

Tom, I didn't forget about the "three minutes and left" quote. If someone drops me off at a meeting, says hello to the people in the room, then leaves, should I then testify under oath that the person attended the meeting?

Uh, no.

Are you disagreeing about the length of time she spent in the room? Do you believe that the entire meeting took place in three minutes, implying that she was present for it?

Let's say we don't know what happened. But, for the sake of argument, suppose she met him at the entrance of the building, walked with him to the meeting, made small talk, and departed. Let's say the meeting door was closed at that point, and the meeting began.

If that was the case, did Wilson lie about his wife's involvement in this meeting?

I quote the Talon News interview because Wilson is clearly, publicly indicating that when he says his wife is not involved, he means that she was not involved in the decision to send him.

I think it's imprecise of him to say that she didn't suggest his name. Perhaps his name didn't need raising; he had done similar missions for the CIA on at least two previous occasions. Was his name the only name in Plame's memo? We don't know.

Ross Ross

8

Blixa - when the decision to send Wilson was taken, intelligence indicated (the second CIA report) that an _actual deal_ had been signed by Iraq and Niger, to supply uranium. He was sent to figure out if a deal had been signed.

Iraqi representatives may or may not have visted every uranium producing country in the world; they probably did, asking. Nobody really gives a crap about that.

What we would care about is a signed agreement to sell them uranium, or finding out that uranium had actually been sold. That would place their nuclear program on a certain timetable, and also open up other bad possibilities for the material.

From Wilson's perspective, he was sent to find out about a signed agreement. There wasn't one; it turned out to be a forgery, we learned later. He then hears (paraphrasing) "sought uranium from niger", and thinks to himself that the report was disproven, and shouldn't have been in the state of the union.

You must admit that a nuclear-powered Iraq was one of the scariest claims made prior to the war. It's the one that had the most impact. It's an incredibly serious accusation, and something that any administration would take seriously. You don't run around crying wolf when it comes to nuclear technology.

To its credit, the administration indicated that the nuclear reference should not have been in the state of the union. The SR shows us roughly how it came to be there.

Ross Ross

9

We are stuck, probably hopelessly, on the three minutes of the meeting. She didn't meet him in the hallway and duck in for a doughnut - she called the meeting! It was her meeting, which is a big deal in bureaucratic circles.

She called it, she introduced him, and she left. I am not really able to grasp this:

If someone drops me off at a meeting, says hello to the people in the room, then leaves, should I then testify under oath that the person attended the meeting?

Uh, no. .

Uhh, yes, actually, if you are interested in being forthcoming; no, if you want to later debate with some lawyers what the meaning of "attend" is.

Put another way, if she didn't attend the meeting, how did the other staffers remember her being there - are they lying, or confused? And why does the report use the word "attend"?

Anyway, when was Wilson under oath, while giving the Talon interview or while writing the book? The Senate report doesn't seem to address this with him.

From the (intentionally misleading?) book:

"...she was not at the meeting I attended" except when she was at the meeting; is that really your idea of "not lying"? Would you settle for "deliberately evasive"?

Bonus - more evidence of her "non-involvement" from an old">http://www.cryptome.org/plame-memo.htm]old WSJ article:

The memo, prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel, details a meeting in early 2002 where CIA officer Valerie Plame and other intelligence officials gathered to brainstorm about how to verify reports that Iraq had sought uranium yellowcake from Niger.

Ms. Plame, a member of the agency's clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested at the meeting that her husband, Africa expert and former U.S. diplomat Joseph Wilson, could be sent to Niger to investigate the reports, according to current and former government officials familiar with the meeting at the CIA's Virginia headquarters. Soon after, midlevel CIA officials decided to send him, say intelligence officials.

Moving on a bit:

Wilson is clearly, publicly indicating that when he says his wife is not involved, he means that she was not involved in the decision to send him.

I think it's imprecise of him to say that she didn't suggest his name.

We are now stuck on the meaning of "involved". She writes a memo, a day later she gets action, she opens the meeting to introduce him, and we are wondering whether she was involved in the process that selected him?

From the (imprecise but lucrative) book:

She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip." except when she wrote a memo and appeared in a meeting proposing exactly that.

Words have lost meaning here.

As I said, I suspect we are stuck. I won't waste your time chatting about the forgeries.

Tom Maguire Tom Maguire

10

"He was sent to figure out if a deal had been signed."

Although I have suspicions, I'll not attempt to presume to know why the CIA sent Joe Wilson to Niger, exactly. Suffice it so say that by all accounts the CIA made this move in response to the request of Cheney who wanted to follow-up on a report of an *attempt* to get uranium. Yes clearly reporting on whether or not the deal occurred would have been part of Wilson's assignment. Yes Wilson came back and reported (with good reason or not) that the deal did not occur (which no one's disputing). Yet his report also included evidence of an *attempt* (which is what Bush had actually claimed).

So why then when this scandal broke did Joe Wilson go around acting as if he'd somehow debunked Bush's claim?

"Iraqi representatives may or may not have visted every uranium producing country in the world; they probably did, asking. Nobody really gives a crap about that."

Speak for yourself please. I do, evidently Bush does. (Can give my reasons if you want but I don't see the point; hint: has to do w/whether Saddam was "deterred".)

The fact is that this was Bush's claim. Your thinking that claim is uninteresting does not make the claim untrue.

"What we would care about is a signed agreement to sell them uranium, or finding out that uranium had actually been sold."

Again, speak for yourself. You're telling me what *you* would "care about", which is fine, fascinating, etc. But that's an autobiographical statement; I'm still not sure how this is germane to the veracity or lack thereof of Bush's "16 words".

If this is really what the "Bush lied" case boils down to here, it's a pretty transparent straw man: Bush says X ("sought"). You "don't care about" X, don't think it's interesting, casus belli, whatever. So you just go ahead and replace X with Y ("got"), because that's more interesting to you. But Joe Wilson disproved Y, therefore Bush is a Liar!

That all does indeed seem to have been Wilson's reasoning. It's precisely what makes him a partisan fraud.

"He then hears (paraphrasing) "sought uranium from niger", and thinks to himself that the report was disproven, and shouldn't have been in the state of the union."

But if that was really his reasoning it was entirely fallacious, and he either did not recognize this (making him a bit dense) or pretended not to recognize it (making him a fraud). What is so difficult to understand about the distinction between "sought" and "got"? about there being more than one country in Africa? about the fact that *British intelligence* (not the Niger document) was the source?

"You must admit that a nuclear-powered Iraq was one of the scariest claims made prior to the war. It's the one that had the most impact."

I most certainly need not admit that. The "16 words" had precisely 0 "impact" on the War Powers vote (arrow of time and all) which is the only thing Bush actually needed to commence war. (This is part of the reason I find the whole idiotic scandal so irritating; he *didn't need* to say this stuff.)

"You don't run around crying wolf when it comes to nuclear technology."

And evidently, Bush didn't, since his statement was correct.

"To its credit, the administration indicated that the nuclear reference should not have been in the state of the union."

Like I said I agree it "should not have been in there", because it was superfluous, unnecessary, and left them open to idiotic scandals cooked up by partisan hucksters like Joe Wilson. Where you and I would part company is the notion that saying "the statement should not have been in there" is the same thing as saying "the statement was untrue".

There's really very little doubt that Saddam Hussein sought uranium from Africa.

Best,

Blixa Blixa

11

It was her meeting, which is a big deal in bureaucratic circles.

Whoa, what was the evidence for that again? Oh, yes:

An INR analyst's notes indicate that the meeting was "apparently convened by [the former ambassador's wife] who had the idea to dispatch [him] to use his contacts to sort out the Iraq-Niger uranium issue."

Now, let's think about this. The word "apparently" means that the person writing the note did not know if Wilson's wife had "convened" the meeting or not. And yet that's the strongest evidence the Senate report -- which, as noted by others, was actively striving to denigrate Wilson's integrity -- offers to say that she had.

And, of course, it's good enough for Tom M. to convert into a flat-out fact.

Tsk, tsk. And far be it for me to question Tom's mastery of what goes on "in bureaucratic circles," but it seems to me that when one is involved enough to have a meeting referred to as "her meeting" (as Tom puts it), one normally stays for a decent portion of it -- say, longer than three minutes, does one not?

Swopa Swopa

12

So why then when this scandal broke did Joe Wilson go around acting as if he'd somehow debunked Bush's claim?

I don't know ... maybe it was the fact that two days after he went public with his criticism of the Niger claim, the White House admitted it shouldn't have been in the State of the Union address -- one of the few times they've ever admitted being wrong about anything.

Has that fact disappeared down the memory hole in your world, Blixa?

Swopa Swopa

13

It seems quite clear that at least some of the evidence which sent Wilson to Niger was based on the forged documents. This information might have been floating around 2nd hand from the actual forgeries. I think the reason Wilson was confused (if he was indeed confused, and this is not just flack from the GOP members of the committee) is that the information contained in the forgeries was what he was investigating, even though may have only seen one of the forgeries.
About the British intelligence: the brits are totally vague on the nature of what they know. I recall seeing Tony Blair be quite evasive about the time frame of that information.
The "recent" attempt that the British describe may have been recent in the same way the defeat of Bush Sr. was recent. There's no reason to believe the British reports---the CIA didn't believe them, after all.

Tom Maguire is completely nuts, btw---it's going to take a lot longer than 3 minutes to fix his problems, with or without Valerie PLame in the room.

marky marky

14

Swopa,

As I've already explained, "should not have been in speech" and "is false" are not the same thing. One can think a statement should not be in a speech for any number of reasons (political, etc), without thinking that statement is false.

For example, that's my publicly stated position here. I think the statement is 100% correct AND that it should not have been in the State of the Union address. The way a couple here are talking, that should make your heads explode, since evidently you don't think that's within the realm of possibility.

It's really disingenuous to attempt to argue that the 16 words are false/lies using only the fact of Tenet's statement. You have to ignore (a) what those 16 words actually say and (b) the fact that by all accounts you or I have access to, the content of those 16 words is completely accurate.

But yeah, just keep on telling yourself that because Tenet made that "should not have been in the speech" fall-on-sword gesture, IT THEREFORE FOLLOWS THAT SADDAM HUSSEIN DIDN'T SEEK URANIUM FROM ANYWHERE IN AFRICA. That's some good lawdjik.

Marky:

Read Wilson's original NYT op-ed. He had not seen the forgeri(es?) at all at the time of his little "investigation". That is, unless he lied about that, too?

That the Brits are "vague" on the nature of what they know, is a fair point. Another way of putting it is that they are not sharing our sources with us. C'est la vie. That's presumably why Bush attributed the finding to 'British intelligence' in the SOTU in the first placed.

Blixa Blixa

15

Blixa,
Apparently you didn't read what I said.
You're welcome to try again---I can't make anything out of your post above.

As to your first point, you seem to be imagining that there is some other reason for retracting the 16 words than a lack of confidence in their correctness. Quite a stretch, I'd say.

Incidentally, it's simply unsupportable
at this point in time to say that the 16 words are perfectly accurate: In order for that them to be accurate, the British intelligence must be correct. The sentences parses out to say that Saddam sought Uranium, not that the British believed he did.

marky marky

16

Ok but British intelligence was correct, because Saddam did seek uranium, so in this case the two interpretations coincide. *shrug*

I think they retracted the "16 words" because it was a stupid issue spending too much time on the front pages and they wanted to spike it, yes. It was really not an important argument to be taking up. If you replace "lack of confidence in correctness" with "lack of confidence in ability to prove their correctness to an extent that would be accepted by the media" then in the end you & I are probably not that far apart. Yes, I reckon they decided they wouldn't be able to Prove The 16 Words Correct Media-wise and have a media victory, so they cut their losses.

That still doesn't mean the 16 words were incorrect. Indeed, we now know that they were correct. The intrepid investigator Joe Wilson proved it!

Sorry you had trouble w/rest of what I wrote...

Blixa Blixa

17

Ahh, Marky and Swpoa, old times.
A simple suggestion. (NO, not Dick Cheney's simple suggestion). Imagine we learn that Fitzgerald, having completed his investigation, reports that:

(a) there is a memo from Karl Rove alerting various staffers that there is a PR problem being caused by Joe Wilson;

(b) one staffer remembers that Karl Rove convened a meeting to discuss Joe Wilson, introduced the subject, and then left to attend to other business.

With only this in hand, the prosecutor announces that he has found no evidence of Rove's involvement in the outing of Valerie Plame.

Everyone will be OK with that, right?

Glad to hear it.

Tom Maguire Tom Maguire

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