Evening Public Lecture: A State of the Movement Address
EVENING KEYNOTE LECTURE
Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years and is on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. He is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an outreach ministry in inner city Washington D.C.
Hear Ray McGovern now.Or download and listen.Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, IV served as a member of the U.S. Diplomatic Service from 1976 until 1998. From 1988 to 1991, Ambassador Wilson served in Baghdad as Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy. As acting Ambassador during "Desert Shield," he was responsible for the negotiations that resulted in the release of several hundred American hostages. He was the last official American to meet with Saddam Hussein before the launching of "Desert Storm." Ambassador Wilson graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1972. He has been decorated as a Commander in the Order of the Equatorial Star by the Government of Gabon and as an Admiral in the El Paso Navy by the El Paso County Commissioners. Hear Ambassador Joe Wilson now.Or download and listen.
Valerie was also in attendance.
Here are some excerpts from the speech transcribed by FR's Fedora and reposted at the American Thinker by Clarice Feldman:
Let me just start out by saying, as a preface to what I really want to talk about, to those of you who are going out and lobbying tomorrow, I just want to assure you that that American ambassador who has been cited in reports in the New York Times and in the Washington Post, and now in the Guardian over in London, who actually went over to Niger on behalf of the government——not of the CIA but of the government——and came back in February of 2002 and told the government that there was nothing to this story, later called the government after the British white paper was published and said you all need to do some fact—checking and make sure the Brits aren't using bad information in the publication of the white paper, and who called both the CIA and the State Department after the President's State of the Union and said to them you need to worry about the political manipulation of intelligence if, in fact, the President is talking about Niger when he mentions Africa.
That person was told by the State Department that, well, you know, there's four countries that export uranium. That person had served in three of those countries, so he knew a little bit about what he was talking about when he said you really need to worry about this.
But I can assure you that that retired American ambassador to Africa, as Nick Kristof called him in his article, is also pissed off, and has every intention of ensuring that this story has legs. And I think it does have legs. It may not have legs over the next two or three months, but when you see American casualties moving from one to five or to ten per day, and you see Tony Blair's government fall because in the U.K. it is a big story, there will be some ramifications, I think, here in the United States, so I hope that you will do everything you can to keep the pressure on. Because it is absolutely bogus for us to have gone to war the way we did...
Of course Wilson was speaking of himself as a thinly disguised third person. He promised the audience that he would see to it that his "mission to Niger" story would have legs.
(Ironically, in his further remarks Wilson still continues to contend that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. But insisted that was only right, since he was so close to Israel, who also have WMD.)
Mind you, this was still weeks before he finally wrote his NYT op-ed. And it is exactly one month before Bob Novak wrote his column about Wilson and Plame.