DFU presents Joe Wilson's diary of his excellent adventure in Niger

Monday, Feb. 17
my biggest worry - when was I last immunized for yellow fever?...hectic cab ride to the airport...grabbed a latte on the way at the Starbucks where Caity Mahoney was murdered...awwww, she didn't get her chance to talk to Ken Starr...damn Republicans...caught United flight to Paris.....caught Al Algerie and landed in Niamey...20 hours and a lot of smelly people....man, I better find a way to get a book deal out of this

Tues, Feb. 18
fourth floor suite at the Gawaeye is okay...jet lag hitting hard...sat by the pool sipping sweet mint tea most of the day...asked a bellhop if he knew anything about Iraq buying yellow cake...he didn't

Wed., Feb. 19
spent about three hours sipping sweet ming tea...watched some CNN...I don't know whether to thank or blame Valerie for getting me this gig...if she ever finds out about the student who came in on my flight from Paris, she will hang me by my nads...asked Bridgette if she knew anything about Iraq buying yellow cake...she didn't

Thurs, Feb. 20
had a traditional Niger breakfast and stomach felt queasy most of the day...met with a few government officials...we sipped sweet mint tea...can't remember their names...asked if they knew about Iraq buying yellow cake...they didn't

Fri, Feb. 21
went to the Niamey Grand Market to do some shopping...asked the cabbie on the way if he knew anything about Iraq and yellow cake...he didn't...had a leisurely lunch and sipped sweet mint tea for about an hour and a half...asked 10 shop keepers if they knew about Iraq buying yellow cake...nine of them knew nothing...one guy heard some kind of a rumor from his brother-in-law in Chad but didn't trust him, particulary after his honor killing of their niece ...bought Valerie an authentic Djenne-Djeno copper alloy bead necklace...got one for Bridgette, along with a copy of Leaves of Grass in French...put it all on expense account...thank you, taxpaying suckers...watched a little CNN and a porno tape I brought with me

Saturday, Feb. 22
it was a tough week, so I thought I deserved some R&R...went to see camel races...asked three camel jockeys if they knew whether Iraq had bought yellow cake...they didn't...the races were fun, but the sweet mint tea had me jumping up to go to the bathroom too often...ha, ha, kind of like Al Gore was not in the room because he drank too much iced tea and had to go pee...took Bridgette out for some dinner and entertainment...we had a fairly decent meal of rice and sauce, couscous, kebabs, grilled fish and chicken...then went to the Jet-7 and drank a few too many beers

Sunday, Feb. 23
slept in late...this stinking place has no decent Sunday brunch in the whole damned country...had a continental breakfast -- orange juice, coconut milk, stale pastry of some kind...sat by the pool most of the day drinking sweet mint tea...in the evening, I went by a mosque and asked some kids outside if they knew anything about yellow cake...then ran away...I think they were scared and thought I might have been out gay cruising...maybe I'm lucky I didn't get beaten up like Kevin Spacey when he was out cruising in Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park in London

Monday, Feb. 24
last day here...in good faith, I really wanted to do my job and find out about this yellow cake stuff...a police officer knew nothing, a librarian knew nothing, three tribal leaders knew nothing, a high-ranking military officer knew nothing, a peddler knew nothing, a guy I met in a public restroom knew nothing...spent another few hours by the pool to get in my last several cups of sweet mint tea

Tuesday, Feb. 25
another 20 stinking hours from Niamey to Paris to D.C....if this religious warrior and cowboy thinks he is going to get away with claiming Iraq was a threat, I have all the info I need to nail him...hell, he was never elected in the first place...I wonder if it will be Howard Dean or Hillary who gets the nomination...if I were Howard, I would worry that Hillary might whack me...whoever gets the nod, if they win, I had better get a good job...but I'm not going back to Niger...give me Paris

British report undermines Wilson on prewar data

By Bill Sammon
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

The British government yesterday bolstered President Bush's assertion that Iraq sought uranium from Niger, casting further doubt on former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV's claims to the contrary.
The conclusion was reached by Robin Butler, who once was Britain's top civil servant, in a major report on prewar intelligence that came five days after the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reached a similar conclusion in its report.

Taken together, the British and U.S. reports appear to undermine Mr. Wilson's criticism of Mr. Bush, which led to a criminal investigation of the White House and made the retired diplomat a media darling.
"It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999," the British report said. "The British government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium.
"Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger's exports, the intelligence was credible," the report added.
That buttressed an assertion by Mr. Bush in his 2003 State of the Union speech: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Yesterday, the British report called that assertion "well founded." The report was cited by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who told Parliament: "It expressly supports the intelligence on Iraq's attempts to procure uranium from Niger in respect of Iraq's nuclear ambitions."
The State of the Union assertion rankled Mr. Wilson, who said he found no evidence of such an attempted purchase during a CIA-sponsored trip to Niger. Mr. Wilson arrived in the African nation in late February 2002.
"I spent the next eight days drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people," he wrote in the New York Times 18 months later. "Niger formally denied the charges."
Mr. Wilson, who opposed Operation Iraqi Freedom and works as an adviser to Democratic Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign, accused Mr. Bush of twisting the facts "to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."
The accusation set off a feeding frenzy in the media that intensified after conservative columnist Robert Novak mentioned in a July 2003 column that Mr. Wilson's Niger trip had been suggested by his wife, Valerie Plame, a CIA employee.
That prompted Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, to ask the Justice Department to begin a criminal investigation into whether the White House had leaked Mrs. Plame's name to Mr. Novak. The president himself was interviewed recently by an investigator on the case.
Mr. Wilson, who did not return phone calls yesterday, has publicly accused White House political strategist Karl Rove of leaking the name, although he has provided no evidence to back up that accusation.
"It's of keen interest to me to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs," he told an audience on Aug. 21, 2003.
Earlier this year, Mr. Wilson parlayed the controversy into a book, "The Politics of Truth," in which he insisted that his wife was not the one who had suggested that the CIA send him to Niger.
"Valerie had nothing to do with the matter," Mr. Wilson wrote. "She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip."
But that assertion was disputed by the Senate intelligence committee report last week.
"Interviews and documents provided to the committee indicate that his wife ... suggested his name for the trip," the report stated.
According to the Senate report, Mrs. Plame boasted to her CIA superiors about Mr. Wilson's contacts with Niger.
"My husband has good relations with both the [prime minister of Niger] 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," she wrote in a Feb. 12, 2002, memo to her superiors, cited in the Senate report.
When the CIA gave her the green light to enlist her husband for the mission, she told Mr. Wilson that "there's this crazy report" on a purported deal for Iraq to buy uranium from Niger, according to the report.
Like the British report, the United States did not back away from Mr. Bush's State of the Union assertion. The U.S. report said Mr. Wilson did little to change the CIA's belief that Iraq had tried to buy uranium.
"The report on the former ambassador's trip to Niger, disseminated in March 2002, did not change any analysts' assessment of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal," the U.S. report said. "For most analysts, the information in the report lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal."
Mr. Wilson has defended his position by pointing out that some documents linking Iraq with Niger were forgeries. U.S. and British officials said the forgeries may have been a red herring to cloud the issue and, in any event, did not surface until after the link had been established.
"The forged documents were not available to the British government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine it," concluded the report by Mr. Butler.
White House deputy spokesman Trent Duffy said the Butler report "speaks for itself" and declined further comment, citing the Justice Department's ongoing leak probe.

Joe Wilson Lied and Owes George W. Bush and America (and Me) an Apology

The Senate Intelligence Committee let some air – a lot of air - out of Joe Wilson’s overly inflated ego last Friday when it issued its first report on prewar intelligence. While the committee heaped most of its criticism on the Central Intelligence Agency for getting almost everything wrong about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction it pointedly rebuked the former ambassador and his infamous mission to Niger.

Wilson spent 8 days in the African nation in February 2002 investigating reports that Iraq had attempted to buy “yellowcake” uranium. He told the CIA that he found no evidence to substantiate that claim. So when President Bush said the “16 words” in his 2003 State of the Union address that Wilson wrongly assumed contradicted his report, he was apoplectic. The phrase used as part of the overall case for justifying the invasion of Iraq was, “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

In July 2003, Wilson wrote and op-ed piece for the New York Times titled, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa” where he said the administration was lying about an Iraq-Niger uranium connection. This catapulted the anti-Bush, anti-war media a full frenzy and the White House clumsily tried to defend its use of the phrase. Reasoned discussion was tossed aside as the media besieged the Bush administration with accusations of deception and manipulation. The White House meekly backed off the claim and tried to portray it as something of a clerical error.

A week later, Robert Novak was wrote a column during which he said that a member of the administration told him that Wilson got the Niger assignment because his wife, an “operative” for the CIA promoted him for it. Probably compelled to prove that he was still the consummate insider, Novak published the name of Wilson’s spouse, Valerie Plame. That’s when the real trouble began. Wilson loudly cried foul, saying that Plame was an undercover agent and that the White House had blown her cover. Following Novak’s column, Wilson said White House political advisor Karl Rove began to shop the story around to several journalists, supposedly saying that his wife was “fair game.” Except for the fact that intentionally exposing a covert agent is a crime, it first appeared that this was another inning in the endless game of political hardball. But Wilson quickly became aware that the spotlight that he intended for himself had shone on someone standing very close to him; someone that he knew lived in the shadows.

Wilson worked all of the talk shows hard, becoming an instant media darling. His call for Rove to be “frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs,” will long be remembered. Opponents of the President now had the scandal they had long sought. None of their previous attempts had gotten much traction, but now they could dust off the Watergate playbook and focus on regime change.

The media’s zeal to parrot Wilson’s increasingly vitriolic accusations obscured what Novak had really discovered, something that was equally important. It wasn’t until last Friday that the other shoe dropped.

No matter what someone somewhere told the Chicago Sun-Times columnist, the Senate Intelligence Committee published information that showed Joe Wilson had lied about how he came to be sent to Niger. He denied that his wife had any role in it whatsoever. But a memo Plame wrote on February 12, 2002 proves otherwise. She actively promoted him for the mission, just as she had done in 1999.

The Committee also chastised the former ambassador for using press reports to make declarative statements about the authenticity of documents he had never seen. It also said that his work was inconclusive and gave more credibility to the claims of an Iraq-Niger deal instead of debunking them.

Now Wilson is silent. The verbose windbag is nowhere to be seen or heard. And it gets worse for him. On Wednesday, an inquiry into British intelligence conducted by Lord Butler said that while most of its prewar information was wrong, the assertions about Niger and uranium were “well founded.” This is a complete exoneration of the White House on the “16 words.” What George Bush said in the State of the Union address was absolutely true. I doubt if there will be much press about that, based on the yawn Friday’s report drew from the media elites.

But there still is that sticky matter of Ms. Plame. The federal grand jury in the matter is close to concluding its work. Insiders say that there is an even chance that no indictments will be forthcoming since leaks are very difficult to trace. I have heard speculation that some underling may be designated to fall on a sword. Either way, the conclusion will be flawed.

Valerie Plame brought attention to herself when she went outside the agency to bring in her husband for the Niger mission. One has to wonder how the United States commits billions of tax dollars to the CIA yet not a single person within the agency was qualified to sail off to Africa to “sip sweet mint tea” with the locals. Still more puzzling is how a retired second-tier diplomat is supposed to convince anyone to admit to providing uranium to one of the most dangerous men in the world.

A memo written by an INR (Intelligence and Research) analyst who made notes of the meeting at which Wilson was asked to go to Niger sensed that something fishy was going on. That report made it to the outside world courtesy of some patriotic whistleblower that realized that a bag job was underway. Novak’s column 15 months later only confirmed what some already knew: Valerie Plame, a CIA employee had actively promoted him for the task.

I believe Plame was exposed at this point – far sooner than the timeline Wilson suggests. The classified document that slipped out sometime after the meeting put her name before the public, albeit a small group of inside-the-beltway types, but effectively ended the notion that she was still covert.

There is even some question as to whether she was covert at all. Nicholas Kristoff wrote in the New York Times that some at the CIA believe Plame had been betrayed to the Russians by Aldrich Ames in the early 1990s. He suggests that she was relegated to a desk at Langley as a result. I raised all of these questions with Wilson in October 2003 in an interview for Talon News. Since I was aware of the INR report, I confronted him about it.

TN: Did your wife suggest you for the mission?

Wilson: No. The decision to ask me to go out to Niger was taken in a meeting at which there were about a dozen analysts from both the CIA and the State Department. A couple of them came up and said to me when we're going through the introductory phase, "We have met at previous briefings that you have done on other subjects, Africa-related."

Not one of those at that meeting could I have told you what they look like, would I recognize on the street, or remember their name today. And as old as I am, I can still recognize my wife, and I still do remember her name. That was the meeting at which the decision was made to ask me if I would clear my schedule to go.

TN: An internal government memo prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel details a meeting in early 2002 where your wife, a member of the agency for clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested that you could be sent to investigate the reports. Do you dispute that?

Wilson: I don't know anything about a meeting, I can only tell you about the meeting I was at where I was asked if I would prepare to go, and there was nobody at that meeting that I know. Now that fact that my wife knows that I know a lot about the uranium business and that I know a lot about Niger and that she happens to be involved in weapons of mass destruction, it should come as no surprise to anyone that we know of each others activities.

Despite his deception, I was pleased with the interview until I read a front page article in the Washington Post on December 26, 2003 that said the CIA was angry that an INR report was circulating, mentioning Talon News as having written about it. The source said that the document was false said that whoever wrote it could not have possibly been at any such meeting. The Senate Intelligence Committee also blew that nugget of disinformation out of the water. The INR report was right on target.

What is difficult to understand is the reason that the CIA would want to discredit this report. The first clue came when the agents from the FBI came to my home in March 2003 to question me in connection to the leak probe. I was flattered to think that I was important enough to be included among the luminaries like Andrea Mitchell, Tim Russert and Chris Matthews who were also named in a Justice Department subpoena of records from the White House. But most of the questions were about the INR report. They wanted to know where I got it and what I knew about it. Of course, as a journalist there wasn’t much I could say without revealing my sources. I’m sure they were not satisfied, but it made me wonder why they were so interested in a document the CIA said was false.

Now we know. It was true – very true – and it blew a huge hole in the Niger story and the Plame story. She played a critical role in the Niger trip. Rush Limbaugh suggested that Plame pushing her husband for the job was the only way it would happen since someone in the administration would have never chosen him. I have been saying that very same thing for quite some time. If we are to believe that Vice President Cheney was over at Langley breathing down the necks of analysts in order to shape intelligence, how did he not know that Wilson would be sent on a mission he himself requested?

Joe Wilson once worked for Democrats Tom Foley and Al Gore. He also was a member of the Clinton administration. More importantly, he was a known opponent of plan to invade Iraq. That would have disqualified him on that basis alone.

I’m not a member of the black helicopter crowd, but I do read books by Tom Clancy and Vince Flynn. The Left wants us to believe that a fanatical group has hijacked foreign policy. They’ve even been given a name: Neo-cons. They are described as hawkish, pro-Israel conservatives purportedly with a desire to use America’s military arsenal to change the political landscape of the Middle East. If we are to buy into that, how difficult is it to grasp that there might be a small group at the CIA who were working to undermine the administration?

In his book “See No Evil”, former CIA agent Robert Baer blames the Clinton administration for decimating the CIA and politicizing the agency. Is it possible those that remained after the purges have political leanings that were inconsistent with the Bush administration?

No matter what kind of conspiracies one might was to fantasize about, one thing is certain: Joe Wilson lied. Lying to me is just bad manners, but lying to the nation is something he should be called to account for. More than anything, Joe Wilson owes George W. Bush an apology.

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