A War on Wilson?
Has the Bush Administration declared war on a former ambassador who conducted a
fact-finding mission to probe possible Iraqi interest in African uranium? Perhaps.
Former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson raised the Administration’s ire with
an op-ed piece in The New York Times on July 6 saying that the
Administration had “twisted” intelligence to “exaggerate” the Iraqi
threat. Since then Administration officials have taken public and
private whacks at Wilson, charging that his 2002 report, made at the
behest of U.S.
intelligence, was faulty and that his mission was a scheme cooked up by
mid-level
operatives. George Tenet, the director of the Central Intelligence
Agency, took a shot at Wilson last week as did ex-White House Press
Secretary Ari Fleischer. Both contended that Wilson’s report on an
alleged Iraqi effort to purchase uranium from Niger, far from
undermining the president’s claim in his State of the Union address
that Iraq sought uranium in Africa, as Wilson had said, actually
strengthened it. And some government officials have noted to TIME in
interviews, (as well as to syndicated columnist Robert Novak) that
Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, is
a CIA official who monitors the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction. These officials have suggested that she was involved in
her husband’s being dispatched Niger to investigate reports that Saddam
Hussein’s government had sought to purchase large quantities of uranium
ore, sometimes referred to as yellow cake, which is used to build
nuclear devices.
In an interview with TIME, Wilson, who served as an ambassador
to Gabon and as a senior American diplomat in Baghdad under the current
president’s father, angrily said that his wife had nothing to do with
his trip to Africa. “That is bulls__t. That is absolutely not the
case,” Wilson told TIME. “I met with between six and eight analysts and
operators from CIA and elsewhere [before the Feb 2002 trip]. None of
the people in that meeting did I know, and they took the decision to
send me. This is a smear job.”
Government officials are not only privately disputing the
genesis of Wilson’s trip, but publicly contesting what he found. Last
week Bush Administration officials said that Wilson’s report reinforced
the president’s claim that Iraq had sought uranium from Africa. They
say that when Wilson returned from Africa in Feb. 2002, he included in
his report to the CIA an encounter with a former Nigerien government
official who told him that Iraq had approached him in June 1999,
expressing interest in expanding commercial relations between Iraq and
Niger. The Administration claims Wilson reported that the former
Nigerien official interpreted the overture as an attempt to discuss
uranium sales.
“This is in Wilson’s report back to the CIA,” White House Press
Secretary Ari Fleischer told reporters last week, a few days before he
left his post to join the private sector. “Wilson’s own report, the
very man who was on television saying Niger denies it…reports himself
that officials in Niger said that Iraq was seeking to contact officials
in Niger about sales.”
Wilson tells the story differently and in a crucial respect.
He says the official in question was contacted by an Algerian-Nigerien
intermediary who inquired if the official would meet with an Iraqi
about “commercial” sales — an offer he declined. Wilson dismisses
CIA Director George Tenet’s suggestion in his own mea culpa last week
that the meeting validates the President’s State of the Union claim:
“That then translates into an Iraqi effort to import a significant
quantity of uranium as the president alleged? These guys really need to
get serious.”
Government officials also chide Wilson for not delving into the
details of the now infamous forged papers that pointed to a sale of
uranium to Iraq. When Tenet issued his I-take-the-blame statement on
the alleged Iraq-Niger uranium connection last week, he took a
none-too-subtle jab at Wilson’s report. “There was no mention in the
report of forged documents — or any suggestion of the existence
of documents at all,” Tenet wrote. For his part Wilson says he did not
deal with the forgeries explicitly in his report because he never saw
them. However, Wilson says he refuted the forgeries’ central allegation
that Niger had been negotiating a sale of uranium to Iraq. Wilson says
he explained in the report that several Nigerien government signatures
would be required to permit such a sale — signatures that were
either absent or clearly botched in the forged documents.
Administration officials also claim that Wilson took at face
value the claims of Nigerien officials that they had not sold uranium
ore to Saddam Hussein. (Such sales would have been forbidden under
then-existing United Nations sanctions on Iraq.) “He spent eight days
in Niger and he concluded that Niger denied the allegation.” Fleischer
told reporters last week. “Well, typically nations don’t admit to going
around nuclear nonproliferation,”
For his part, Wilson says that the Administration conflated the prior
report of the American ambassador to Niger with his own. Wilson says a
report by Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick, the American ambassador to Niger,
addresses the issue of Nigerien government officials disputing the
allegation. Wilson says that he never made the na�ve argument that if
Nigerien officials denied the sales, then their claims must be
believed.
A source close to the matter says that Wilson was dispatched to
Niger because Vice President Dick Cheney had questions about an
intelligence report about Iraq seeking uranium and that he asked that
the CIA get back to him with answers. Cheney’s staff has adamantly
denied and Tenet has reinforced the claim that the Vice President had
anything to do with initiating the Wilson mission. They say the Vice
President merely asked routine questions at an intelligence briefing
and that mid-level CIA officials, on their own, chose to dispatch
Wilson.
In an exclusive interview Lewis Libby, the Vice
President’s Chief of Staff, told TIME: “The Vice President heard about
the possibility of Iraq trying to acquire uranium from Niger in
February 2002. As part of his regular intelligence briefing, the Vice
President asked a question about the implication of the report. During
the course of a year, the Vice President asked many such questions and
the agency responded within a day or two saying that they had reporting
suggesting the possibility of such a transaction. But the agency noted
that the reporting lacked detail. The agency pointed out that Iraq
already had 500 tons of uranium, portions of which came from Niger,
according to the International Atomic Energy Administration (IAEA). The
Vice President was unaware of the trip by Ambassador Wilson and didn’t
know about it until this year when it became public in the last month
or so. ” Other senior Administration officials, including National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, have also claimed that they had not
heard of Wilson’s report until recently.
After he submitted his report in March 2002, Wilson says, his
interest in the topic lay dormant until the State of the Union address
in January 2003. In his speech, the President cited a British report
claiming that Hussein’s government had sought uranium in Africa.
Afterward, Wilson says, he called a friend at the Africa bureau of the
State Department and asked if the reference had been to Niger. The
friend said that he didn’t know but, says Wilson, allowed the
possibility that Bush was referring to some other country on the
continent. Wilson says he let the matter drop until he saw State
Department spokesman Richard Boucher say a few months later that the
U.S. had been fooled by bad intelligence. It was then that Wilson says
he realized that his report had been overlooked, ignored, or buried.
Wilson told TIME that he considers the matter settled now that the
White House has admitted the Bush reference to Iraq and African uranium
should not have been in the State of the Union address.
::Tullycast:: 