Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

pg 443 — The details of the Committee's findings and
conclusions on this issue can be found in the Niger
section of the report. What cannot be found, however, are
two conclusions upon which the Committee's Democrats
would not agree. While there was no dispute with the
underlying facts, my Democrat colleagues refused to allow
the following conclusions to appear in the report:

The former ambassador's wife suggested her husband for
the trip to Niger in February 2002. The former ambassador
had traveled previously to Niger on behalf of the CIA,
also at the suggestion of his wife, to look into another
matter not related to Iraq. On February 12, 2002, the
former ambassador's wife sent a memorandum to a Deputy
Chief of a division in the CIA's Directorate of
Operations which said, "[m]y 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 the same
Directorate of Operations division sent a cable to one of
its overseas stations requesting concurrence with the
division's idea to send the former ambassador to Niger.

Conclusion: Rather than speaking publicly about his actual
experiences during his inquiry of the Niger issue, the
former ambassador seems to have included information he
learned from press accounts and from his beliefs about
how the Intelligence Community would have or should have
handled the information he provided.

At the time the former ambassador traveled to Niger, the
Intelligence Community did not have in its possession any
actual documents on the alleged Niger-Iraq uranium deal,
only second hand reporting of the deal. The former
ambassador's comments to reporters that the Niger-Iraq
uranium documents "may have been forged because 'the
dates were wrong and the names were wrong,'" could not
have been based on the former ambassador's actual
experiences because the Intelligence Community did not
have the documents at the time of the ambassador's trip.

In addition, nothing in the report from the former
ambassador's trip said anything about documents having
been forged or the names or dates in the reports having
been incorrect. The former ambassador told Committee
staff that he, in fact, did not have access to any of the
names and dates in the CIA's reports and 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. Of note, the names and dates in the
documents that the IAEA found to be incorrect were not
names or dates included in the CIA reports.

Following the Vice President's review of an intelligence
report regarding a possible uranium deal, he asked his
briefer for the CIA's analysis of the issue. It was this
request which generated Mr. Wilson's trip to Niger. The
former ambassador's public comments suggesting that the
Vice President had been briefed on the information
gathered during his trip is not correct, however. While
the CIA responded to the Vice President's request for the
Agency's analysis, they never provided the information
gathered by the former Ambassador. The former ambassador,
in an NBC Meet the Press interview on July 6, 2003, said,
"The office of the Vice President, I am absolutely
convinced, received a very specific response to the
question it asked and that response was based upon my trip
out there." The former ambassador was speaking on the
basis of what he believed should have happened based on
his former government experience, but he had no knowledge
that this did happen.

These and other public comments from the former ambassador,
such as comments that his report "debunked" the Niger-
Iraq uranium story, were incorrect and have led to a
distortion in the press and in the public's understanding
of the facts surrounding the Niger-Iraq uranium story.
The Committee found that, for most analysts, the former
ambassador's report lent more credibility, not less, to
the reported Niger-Iraq uranium deal.

During Mr. Wilson's media blitz, he appeared on more than
thirty television shows including entertainment venues.
Time and again, Joe Wilson told anyone who would listen
that the President had lied to the American people, that
the Vice President had lied, and that he had "debunked"
the claim that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa. As
discussed in the Niger section of the report, not only
did he NOT "debunk" the claim, he actually gave some
intelligence analysts even more reason to believe that it
may be true. I believed very strongly that it was important
for the Committee to conclude publicly that many of the
statements made by Ambassador Wilson were not only
incorrect, but had no basis in fact.

In an interview with Committee staff, Mr. Wilson was
asked how he knew some of the things he was stating
publicly with such confidence. On at least two occasions
he admitted that he had no direct knowledge to support
some of his claims and that he was drawing on either
unrelated past experiences or no information at all. For
example, when asked how he "knew" that the Intelligence
Community had rejected the possibility of a Niger-Iraq
uranium deal, as he wrote in his book, he told Committee
staff that his assertion may have involved "a little
literary flair."

The former Ambassador, either by design or through
ignorance, gave the American people and, for that matter,
the world a version of events that was inaccurate,
unsubstantiated, and misleading. Surely, the Senate
Intelligence Committee, which has unique access to all of
the facts, should have been able to agree on a conclusion
that would correct the public record. Unfortunately, we
were unable to do so.