<font size=4>The Yellowcake Con
The Wilson-Plame "scandal" was political pulp fiction.
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REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Thursday, July 15, 2004 12:01 a.m.
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So now the British government has published its own inquiry into the intelligence behind the invasion of Iraq, with equally devastating implications for the credibility of the Bush-Blair <font color=blue>"lied"<font color=black> crowd. Like last week's 511-page document from the Senate Intelligence Committee, the exhaustive British study found some flawed intelligence but no evidence of <font color=blue>"deliberate distortion."<font color=black> Inquiry leader Lord Butler told reporters that Prime Minister Tony Blair had <font color=blue>"acted in good faith."<font color=black>
What's more, Lord Butler was not ready to dismiss Saddam Hussein as a threat merely because no large <font color=blue>"stockpiles"<font color=black> of weapons of mass destruction have been found.
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The report concludes that Saddam probably intended to
pursue his banned programs, including the nuclear one, if
and when U.N. sanctions were lifted; that research,
development and procurement continued so WMD capabilities
could be sustained; and that he was pursuing the
development of WMD delivery systems--missiles--of longer
range than the U.N. permitted.
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But the part that may prove most salient in the U.S. is that, like the Senate Intelligence findings, the Butler report vindicates President Bush on the allegedly misleading <font color=blue>"16 words"<font color=black> regarding uranium from Africa: <font color=blue>"We conclude also that the statement in President Bush's State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003 that 'The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa' was well-founded."<font color=black> (Click here for more excerpts.)
We're awaiting apologies from former Ambassador Joe Wilson, and all those who championed him, after his July 2003 New York Times op-ed alleging that Mr. Bush had <font color=blue>"twisted"<font color=black> intelligence <font color=blue>"to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."<font color=black> The news is also relevant to the question of whether any crime was committed when a still unknown Administration official told columnist Robert Novak that Mr. Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA employee and that's why he had been recommended for a sensitive mission to Niger. A Justice Department special prosecutor is investigating the case, with especially paralyzing effect on the office of the Vice President.
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In that New York Times piece, readers will recall, Mr. Wilson outed himself as the person who had been sent to Niger by the CIA in February 2002 to investigate claims that Iraq might have been seeking yellowcake ore for its weapons program. Vice President Dick Cheney had asked for the CIA's opinion on the issue after reading a Defense intelligence report.
Mr. Wilson wrote that <font color=blue>"It did not take long to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place."<font color=black> He claimed he informed the CIA of his findings upon his return, was certain reports of his debrief had circulated through appropriate channels, and that the Administration had chosen to ignore his debunking of the story.
After the Novak column appeared, Mr. Wilson charged that his wife was outed solely as punishment for his daring dissent from White House policy. To that end, he has repeatedly denied that his wife played a role in his selection for the mission. <font color=blue>"Valerie had nothing to do with the matter,"<font color=black> he wrote in his book <font color=blue>"The Politics of Truth." "She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip."<font color=black> A huge political uproar ensued.
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But very little of what Mr. Wilson has said has turned out to be true. For starters, his wife did recommend him for that trip. The Senate report quotes from a February 12, 2002, memo from Ms. Plame: <font color=blue>"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."<font color=black>
This matters a lot. There's a big difference both legally and ethically between revealing an agent's identity for the revenge purpose of ruining her career, and citing nepotism (truthfully!) to explain to a puzzled reporter why an undistinguished and obviously partisan former ambassador had been sent to investigate this <font color=blue>"crazy report"<font color=black> (his wife's words to the Senate). We'd argue that once her husband broke his own cover to become a partisan actor, Ms. Plame's own motives in recommending her husband deserved to become part of the public debate. She had herself become political.
Mr. Wilson also seems to have dissembled about how he concluded that there was nothing to the Iraq-Niger uranium story, serving for example as the anonymous source for a June 12, 2003, Washington Post story saying <font color=blue>"among the Envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because 'the dates were wrong and the names were wrong.' "<font color=black> There were some forged documents related to an Iraq-Niger uranium deal. Trouble was, such documents had not even come to the intelligence community (never mind to Mr. Wilson's attention) by the time of his trip, and obviously hadn't been the basis of the report he'd been sent to investigate. He told the Senate he may have <font color=blue>"mispoken"<font color=black>--at some length we guess--on this issue.
The Senate Intelligence Committee found, finally, that far from debunking the Iraq-Niger story, Mr. Wilson's debrief was interpreted as providing <font color=blue>"some confirmation of foreign government service reporting"<font color=black> that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger. Why? Because he'd reported that former Nigerien Prime Minister Ibrahim Mayaki had told him of a 1999 visit by the Iraqis to discuss <font color=blue>"commercial relations,"<font color=black> which the leader of the one-industry country logically interpreted as interest in uranium.
Remember that Messrs. Bush and Blair only said that Iraq had <font color=blue>"sought"<font color=black> or was <font color=blue>"trying to buy"<font color=black> uranium, not that it had succeeded. It now appears that both leaders have been far more scrupulous in discussing this and related issues than much of the media in either of their countries, which would embarrass the journalistic profession, if that were possible.
All of this matters because Mr. Wilson's disinformation
became the vanguard of a year-long assault on Mr. Bush's
credibility. The political goal was to portray the
President as a <font color=blue>"liar,"<font color=black> regardless of the facts. Now that
we know those facts, Americans can decide who the real
liars are.
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