Wilson's Iraq Assertions Hold Up Under Fire From Rove Backers
July 14 (Bloomberg) -- Two-year old assertions by former ambassador Joseph Wilson regarding Iraq and uranium, which lie at the heart of the controversy over who at the White House identified a covert U.S. operative, have held up in the face of attacks by supporters of presidential adviser Karl Rove.
Rove is a subject of a special prosecutor's investigation into how the name of the agent, who is Wilson's wife, was leaked to journalists. There has been no evidence made public that Rove identified the agent to reporters. Rove's allies are arguing that he was in fact trying to steer journalists away from taking too seriously Wilson's criticism of President George W. Bush's reasons for going to war in Iraq in 2003.
The agent, Valerie Plame, was publicly identified July 14, 2003, a week after Wilson wrote an article for the New York Times about an investigative trip he took in 2002 at the behest of the Central Intelligence Agency. Wilson wrote that the administration's claim that Saddam Hussein's regime tried to buy uranium in Africa for nuclear weapons was wrong.
The main points of Wilson's article have largely been substantiated by a Senate committee as well as U.S. and United Nations weapons inspectors. A day after Wilson's piece was published, the White House acknowledged that a claim Bush made in his January 2003 state of the union address that Iraq tried to buy ``significant quantities of uranium from Africa'' could not be verified and shouldn't have been included in the speech.
While the administration was justified at the time in being concerned that Hussein was trying to build nuclear weapons, ``on the specifics of this I think Joe Wilson was right,'' said Michael O'Hanlon, a scholar of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
Criticism of Wilson
Republicans are attempting to defend Rove by discrediting Wilson, saying the former ambassador misled the public about why he was sent to Niger and what he found there.
Bush supporters such as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich contend that Wilson lied in claiming that Vice President Dick Cheney dispatched him on the mission to Niger. That echoes a Republican National Committee talking-points memo sent to party officials.
Wilson never said that Cheney sent him, only that the vice president's office had questions about an intelligence report that referred to the sale of uranium yellowcake to Iraq from Niger. Wilson, in his New York Times article, said CIA officials were informed of Cheney's questions.
``The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office,'' Wilson wrote.
Senate Report
The ``Wilson/Rove Research & Talking Points'' memo distributed by RNC Director of Television Carolyn Weyforth contends, ``Both the Senate Committee on Intelligence and the CIA found assessments Wilson made in his report were wrong.''
Yet the Senate panel conclusions didn't discredit Wilson. The committee concluded that the Niger intelligence information wasn't solid enough to be included in the State of the Union speech. It added that Wilson's report didn't change the minds of analysts on either side of the issue, while also concluding that an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate ``overstated what the Intelligence Community knew about Iraq's possible procurement attempts.''
continued..........
bloomberg.com |
