Betsy's Page
Lorie Byrd is so very right.
The Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame story has been one of the worst stories reported by the MSM. They never point out that Wilson was proven a liar by a bipartisan Senate report. Red State reminds us of this Washington Post article from a year ago.
<<<
The panel found that Wilson's report, rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, bolstered the case for most intelligence analysts. And contrary to Wilson's assertions and even the government's previous statements, the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence that made its way into 16 fateful words in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address.
>>>
So he lied about what he found in Niger in order to discredit the President as we prepared for war. Nice.
And he lied about his wife's role in getting him the mission to Niger.
<<< The report may bolster the rationale that administration
officials provided the information not to intentionally
expose an undercover CIA employee, but to call into
question Wilson's bona fides as an investigator into
trafficking of weapons of mass destruction. To charge
anyone with a crime, prosecutors need evidence that
exposure of a covert officer was intentional.
The report states that a CIA official told the Senate committee that Plame "offered up" Wilson's name for the Niger trip, then on Feb. 12, 2002, sent a memo to a deputy chief in the CIA's Directorate of Operations saying her husband "has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity." The next day, the operations official cabled an overseas officer seeking concurrence with the idea of sending Wilson, the report said.
Wilson has asserted that his wife was not involved in the decision to send him to Niger.
"Valerie had nothing to do with the matter," Wilson wrote in a memoir published this year. "She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip."
>>>
And sin of sins, he lied to the Washington Post.
The report also said Wilson provided misleading
information to The Washington Post last June. He said
then that he concluded the Niger intelligence was based
on documents that had clearly been forged because "the
dates were wrong and the names were wrong."
"Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could
have come to the conclusion that the 'dates were wrong
and the names were wrong' when he had never seen the CIA
reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were
in the reports," the Senate panel said. Wilson told the
panel he may have been confused and may have "misspoken"
to reporters. The documents -- purported sales agreements
between Niger and Iraq -- were not in U.S. hands until
eight months after Wilson made his trip to Niger.
Wilson's reports to the CIA added to the evidence that
Iraq may have tried to buy uranium in Niger, although
officials at the State Department remained highly
skeptical, the report said.
Wilson said that a former prime minister of Niger,
Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, was unaware of any sales contract
with Iraq, but said that in June 1999 a businessman
approached him, insisting that he meet with an Iraqi
delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations"
between Niger and Iraq -- which Mayaki interpreted to
mean they wanted to discuss yellowcake sales. A report
CIA officials drafted after debriefing Wilson said
that "although the meeting took place, Mayaki let the
matter drop due to UN sanctions on Iraq."
According to the former Niger mining minister, Wilson
told his CIA contacts, Iraq tried to buy 400 tons of
uranium in 1998.
It would be nice if the Washington Post reminded us of these facts some more and if the cable talking heads would remember this while they're preparing to barbecue Karl Rove.
However, the Washington Post today has a story about Rove's role and talks about the Niger yellowcake story and doesn't mention anything from its story last year saying that there were indications that Iraq was trying to buy yellowcake from Niger and Wilson himself had reported that to the CIA. Far be it from Washington Post reporters to do any research in their own newspaper.
UPDATE: Tom Maguire has a terrific summary of all the lies, questions, and myths about this story.
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