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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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July 17th,
2003 - A War on Wilson? |
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Inside the Bush Administration's feud with the diplomat who poured
cold water on the Iraq-uranium connection By Matthew Cooper, Massimo Calabresi & John F. Dickerson Time Magazine July 17, 2003 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 naïve
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. External link: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,465270,00.html |