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07/17/2004: "Stewing in his own juices"
Joe Wilson writes to the Washington Post:
For the second time in a year, your paper has published an article [news story, July 10] falsely suggesting that my wife, Valerie Plame, was responsible for the trip I took to Niger on behalf of the U.S. government to look into allegations that Iraq had sought to purchase several hundred tons of yellowcake uranium from that West African country. Last July 14, Robert Novak, claiming two senior sources, exposed Valerie as an 'agency operative [who] suggested sending him to Niger.'
Whenever a known liar manipulates a quotation as much as Wilson has above--constructing the first part of it, inserting a pronoun in the middle, and then reproducing only a few words of it--a critical reader should refer to the original as a precaution. Doing so reveals that Wilson has taken even more liberties than the corruption above implies. Here's Novak's original:
In truth, Novak did use the phrase "an Agency operative" in the sentence previous to the one in which Wilson inserts it, but it doesn't appear in the sentence Wilson is quoting. And Wilson leaves out the full description: "an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction."
The original two sentences together indicate why this quibble is important. Wilson is arguing about dust in the southwest corner to obscure more important matters and try to shore up his tattered credibility. No one has made the argument that Plame ordered, decided, mandated, promulgated, decreed, or otherwise dictated Wilson go to Niger. The only significance of Plame's involvement in suggesting Wilson as the person to go is first that it explains why Novak might have put her name in the article sans nefarious intent. That is, her job is the explanation for why a non-CIA op would be doing CIA business. And second, Wilson's later denial that this wife had anything to do with his selection is proved false.
Wilson, to state the obvious, is lying and to obfuscate his lie he's trying to change what the point of contention was. Novak said Plame suggested Wilson, Wilson denied that she did, the facts prove Wilson lied, Wilson now claims his wife never gave the order for him to go. No one ever said she did.
Novak went ahead with his column despite the fact that the CIA had urged him not to disclose her identity. That leak to Novak may well have been a federal crime and is under investigation.
Another nice try by Wilson. Novak was under no obligation at all to keep Plame out of it. The law in question doesn't apply to someone in Novak's position as an investigative journalist. Yes, there may be a crime here somewhere, but for someone who enjoys writing about his clandestine CIA missions in the New York Times, Wilson is not the most able stone thrower.
In the year since the betrayal of Valerie's covert status, it has been widely understood that she is irrelevant to the unpaid mission I undertook or the conclusions I reached.
I'm not sure that it's been widely understood at all. I think an attempted lie has been widely disseminated, mostly by Wilson.
But your paper's recent article acted as a funnel for this scurrilous and extraneous charge, uncritically citing the Republican-written Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report.
"Scurrilous" means abusive, obscene, scornful, insulting. Why would printing that Plame suggested her husband for this mission be any of those things? The only reason it might is because of what it implies about Wilson's honesty. If it does not contradict him and prove him the liar, then why should he react as he does? Was it so extraneous when he went around telling the opposite story? That is, why did Wilson insist for months his wife had nothing at all to do with his being sent? Could he not have said, "Well, she mentioned by name and my qualifications, but that's beside the point"?
The decision to send me to Niger was not made, and could not be made, by Valerie.
I assume that's right. No one anywhere to my knowledge is contradicting him. It's also extraneous to the point. See, when a fact is truly extraneous, it doesn't hurt to concede that fact. Only when a fact hurts one's case does making white black and black white become a necessity.
At the conclusion of a meeting that she did not attend, I was asked by CIA officials whether I would be willing to travel to Niger.
"A meeting?" What meeting? Did this meeting have anything to do with anything? More distraction on Wilson's part.
While a CIA reports officer and a State Department analyst, both cited in the report, speculate about what happened, neither of them was in the chain of command that made the decision to send me.
Neither, obviously, was Wilson.
Reams of documents were given over to the Senate committee, but the only quotation attributed to my wife on this subject was the anodyne "my 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."
I'm not sure how Wilson is using "anodyne" here, but I'm sure he personally finds that quotation anything but an anodyne--more likely a dyspepsia. You're a liar, Joe.
In fact, with 2-year-old twins at home, Valerie did not relish my absence for a two-week period. But she acquiesced because, in the zeal to be responsive to the legitimate concerns raised by the vice president, officials of her agency turned to a known functionary who had previously checked out uranium-related questions for them.
Yes, yes, the babies Wilson. They always make their appearance when Wilson wants to obscure the fact that his wife trained at the CIA's "Farm," where she showed considerable aptitude with an AK-47. This sort of thing reminds me of presidential candidate Martin Sheen holding the infant up in front of him in The Dead Zone to protect himself from an assassin's bullet. A gallant man does not hide behind his wife and his children as often as Wilson does when he's the main source of their trouble. Think about it: His wife works for the CIA, he's so concerned about her being outed, yet he exposes himself in the NY Times as an agent for her secretive employer.
I do like his description of himself, however: "known functionary"--although the resulting reasoning in that sentence is convoluted: When the CIA gets "zealous" and has to address the "legitimate concerns" of the Vice President of the United States, who does it turn to? Known functionary Joe Wilson, who previously "checked out uranium-related questions for them." I'd like to know specifics about that last because it sounds likely Wilson is once again fudging. When his own wife listed his qualifications for the assignment, she mentioned his contacts but failed to describe his previous experience as a ready-reference for "uranium-related questions." In other words, Wilson once again plays slight of hand: his wife, whose specialty as a CIA agent is WMD, mentions he has good contacts, but Wilson doesn't want that to be the reason he was sent because then it appears his wife played a significant role in his selection. Yet if Wilson actually knew his yellow cake, it seems highly unlikely his wife, the specialist, would have failed to mention that in her remark. In his original NY Times piece, Wilson lists his "experience in Africa" as his qualification. Hmm...sounds a lot more like what his wife told her bosses than what Wilson is claiming now.
Speaking of those twins, I would not be surprised at all to find out that the CIA wanted Plame (the WMD expert and CIA agent, after all) and she said, "Despite my inability to do without my husband's affections and attentions for two weeks, I have a couple of two-year-olds. Could you send the functionary instead?" And Wilson opted for a vacation in Africa rather than being left solo with Joseph C. Wilson V and Joseph C. Wilson VI.
But that is not the only inaccurate assertion or conclusion in the Senate report uncritically parroted in the article.
Good to know, because Wilson's letter so far has only dug himself a deeper hole. And the above remark about "parroting" is ludicrous anyway. Is Wilson suggesting that the WP should not report Senate conclusions because he, Wilson, disagrees with them?
The facts surrounding my trip remain the same.
Yes, past facts can't really change. Over time, however, we can often separate actual facts from false statements.
I traveled to Niger and found it unlikely that Iraq had attempted to purchase several hundred tons of yellowcake uranium.
Now we're getting to what's important. It's not, after all, totally about Wilson his wife, and their twins.
Yes, he went there and drew that conclusion, largely from sitting around drinking mint tea and asking some Nigerians if they'd heard about such sales. Highly effective methods of getting at the truth, I'm sure.
In his 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush referred to Iraqi attempts to purchase uranium "from Africa."
True. What the President said, however, was "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Apparently Wilson was hurt that the President didn't also mention that "known functionary Joe Wilson, however, has sipped some tea in Niger and put that rumor to bed." Hence, Wilson's need to pursue such a qualifying statement from the administration in the next few months via talking about his CIA mission first anonymously and then on the record to the press.
Between March 2003 and July 2003, the administration refused to acknowledge that it had known for more than a year that the claim on uranium sales from Niger had been discredited, until the day after my article in the New York Times.
This is another lie that serves no other purpose but for Wilson to try to raise his own importance as one who "speaks truth to power." It is true that on the day after Wilson's article in the NY Times appeared, White House Spokesman Michael Anton made the statement he quotes. Wilson conveniently ignores, however, that the White House had indeed been acknowledging problems with the assertion for months. (See the actions by Powell and statements by Rice and an unspecified spokesman in the linked timeline. Rice's statement is obviously more significant than Anton's as a line of demarcation, except to narcissist Wilson.)
Also, Wilson is again trying to conflate two things and hoping no one notices. All those acknowledgements have absolutely nothing to do with him; they are about the realization that the infamous Nigerian documents were likely forged. In other words, Wilson wanted the White House purely on the basis of his tea-sipping trip to come to the conclusion that Saddam was not trying to buy weapons anywhere in Africa--and then Wilson obfuscates that ludicrous agenda by linking his trip to the discovery that the documents were forged. Wilson had nothing to do with the latter, so his assertion that the claim had been discredited "for more than a year" is akin to Scott Ritter saying, "I told them a long time ago Iraq had no WMDs, but they pretended their shabby contradictory evidence still had value even so." Perhaps Val takes everything touristing Wilson says as infallible gospel, but that doesn't mean the White House or CIA does.
Wilson, in fact, has backpeddled entirely about the forged documents in response to the Report's statement: "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." Wilson now says he may have misspoken. Otherwise, the only plausible explanation would be that his wife showed those classified documents to him.
More importantly--with Wilson, what he says and does is always most important--his trip ''did not refute the possibility that Iraq had approached Niger to purchase uranium" (per the Senate report). So, despite his assertion to the contrary, the Nigerian claim had not been discredited. The British, in fact, stand by it to this day: "It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999."
Give it up, Joe. Your 15 minutes ran out several days ago.