Joe Wilson: Lying Liar who Tells Lies
A Reminder
By: Leon H ·RED STATE
In the wake of the recent furor over the revelation that Karl Rove is very likely at least one of the sources who leaked the fact that Joe Wilson's wife was a CIA operative, it is important to remember who we are discussing when we talk about Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame.
In case anyone was still under the illusion that Joe Wilson was an innocent State Department official who is being persecuted for "being honest", and Valerie Plame was a noble CIA field agent whose career - nay, personal safety is now in jeopardy, it is worth our while to remember that subsequent revelations, accepted by a bipartisan Senate committee, have put those Known Facts clearly to rest.
The WaPo explains below the fold that Joe Wilson lied about virtually everything he said in connection with Niger, and that his wife was also complicit in the falsity:
Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, dispatched by the CIA in February 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq sought to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program with uranium from Africa, was specifically recommended for the mission by his wife, a CIA employee, contrary to what he has said publicly.
In other words, he lied about how he came to be in Niger in the first place, and his wife was further complicit in the lie.
Wilson's assertions -- both about what he found in Niger and what the Bush administration did with the information -- were undermined yesterday in a bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report.
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.
In other words, he lied about the conclusions of his own report, and further lied about the information that was given to President Bush on the matter.
The report said Plame told committee staffers that she relayed the CIA's request to her husband, saying, "there's this crazy report" about a purported deal for Niger to sell uranium to Iraq. The committee found Wilson had made an earlier trip to Niger in 1999 for the CIA, also at his wife's suggestion.
In other words, Plame had already made up her mind about the truthfulness of the report, and dispatched her husband to Niger not to investigate, but specifically to come back with debunking evidence. From the committee's report, the information Wilson returned with actually strengthened the administration's case, so he just lied about what its conclusions were to the press.
In the most stunning lie of all, the committee caught Wilson in a lie of "Christmas in Cambodia Under Nixon in '68" proportions:
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.
Whooops.
Indeed, Wilson's mendacity was so stunning that even the "Vast Right Wing Conspirators" at the Washington Post ultimately concluded that whoever leaked Plame's name was ultimately doing so to shed light on the fact that Wilson had no business being in Niger in the first place, and that a political agenda drove him there - rather than out of a vindictive desire to exact retribution on Wilson for exposing the truth:
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.
So let's review - Wilson lied about how he got to Niger, he lied about seeing a report that didn't even exist at the time, he lied about the conclusions of his own report(!), he lied about what the administration had been told, and his wife, Valerie Plame, specifically sent him on a mission to intentionally debunk a claim, not to find facts or perform inspections. I'd say the WaPo's conclusion is pretty sound on this one.
Also, it certainly gives life to the question of why the heck these two lied so darn much in absence of a clear and compelling political agenda driving their every move. Let's not rush to make these partisan hacks into saints - they attempted to cook the books against the administration and got busted for being the compulsive liars that they are. In the course of attempting to discredit the ludicrously false claims, someone in the White House (presumably Rove) told the press that Wilson was sent to Niger on dubious premises in the first place (the recommendation of his wife), without giving the name of Wilson's wife, which Rove apparently did not know.
When this story first broke on the scene, I thought that Rove should properly be banished from the administration team, despite the fact that even at that time it was pretty clear that no crime took place. However, given the serial and politically motivated lies of Wilson and Plame, it's clear that the fairy tale the liberals have constructed in which Plame was the heroic CIA agent unjustly outed by Arch-Demon Karl Rove is totally and completely false - and I won't be shedding any more tears about either of their fates.
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