Posted on 07/14/2005 1:18:10 PM PDT by The Old Hoosier
WASHINGTON -- Like Sherlock Holmes's dog that did not bark, the most remarkable aspect of last week's Senate Intelligence Committee report is what its Democratic members did not say. They did not dissent from the committee's findings that Iraq apparently asked about buying yellowcake uranium from Niger. They neither agreed to a conclusion that former diplomat Joseph Wilson was suggested for a mission to Niger by his CIA employee wife nor defended his statements to the contrary.
Wilson's activities constituted the only aspects of the yearlong investigation for which the committee's Republican chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts, was unable to win unanimous agreement. Peculiarly, the Democrats accepted the evidence building up to the Wilson conclusions but not the conclusions themselves. According to committee sources, Roberts felt Wilson had been such a "cause celebre" for Democrats that they could not face the facts about him.
For a year, Democrats have been belaboring President Bush about 16 words in his 2003 State of the Union address in which he reported Saddam Hussein's attempt to buy uranium from Africa, based on official British information. Wilson has been lionized in liberal circles for allegedly contradicting this information on a CIA mission and then being punished as a truth-teller. Now, for Intelligence Committee Democrats, it is as though the Niger question and Joe Wilson have vanished from the earth.
Because a U.S. Justice Department special prosecutor is investigating whether any crime was committed when my column first identified Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA employee, on advice of counsel I have not written on the subject since last October. However, I feel constrained to describe how the Intelligence Committee report treats the Niger-Wilson affair because it has received scant coverage except in The Washington Post, Knight-Ridder newspapers, briefly and belatedly in The New York Times and few other media outlets.
The unanimously approved report said, "interviews and documents provided to the Committee indicate that his wife, a CPD (CIA counterproliferation division) employee, suggested his name for the trip." That's what I reported, and what Wilson flatly denied and still does.
Plame sent out an internal CIA memo saying that "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." A State Department analyst told the committee about an inter-agency meeting in 2002 that was "apparently convened by [Wilson's] wife who had the idea to dispatch [him] to use his contacts to sort out the Iraq-Niger uranium issue."
The unanimous Intelligence Committee found that the CIA report, based on Wilson's mission, differed considerably from the former ambassador's description to the committee of his findings. That report "did not refute the possibility that Iraq had approached Niger to purchase uranium." As far as his statement to The Washington Post about "forged documents" involved in the alleged Iraqi attempt to buy uranium, Wilson told the committee he may have "misspoken." In fact, the intelligence community agreed that "Iraq was attempting to procure uranium from Africa."
"While there was no dispute with the underlying facts," Chairman Roberts wrote separately, "my Democrat colleagues refused to allow" two conclusions in the report. The first conclusion merely said that Wilson was sent to Niger at his wife's suggestion. The second conclusion is devastating:
"Rather than speaking publicly about his actual experiences during his inquiry of the Niger issue, the former ambassador seems to have included information he learned from press accounts and from his beliefs about how the Intelligence Community would have or should have handled the information he provided."
The normally mild Pat Roberts is harsh in his condemnation: "Time and again, Joe Wilson told anyone who would listen that the President had lied to the American people, that the Vice President had lied, and that he had 'debunked' the claim that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa . . . [N]ot only did he NOT 'debunk' the claim, he actually gave some intelligence analysts even more reason to believe that it may be true." Roberts called it "important" for the Intelligence Committee to declare much of what Wilson said "had no basis in fact." In response, Democrats were silent.
©2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Inquiring minds want to know.
Why aren't Republicans holding press conferences to get that information out there? Every other day, we're seeing DemocRATs on TV, in the front pages of newspapers, posting on internet blogs flaming away at Bush/Rove. Telling lie after lie without being called on them by Republicans. It's getting very tiresome.
Whoa! That sure wraps that story up in a nice neat package. But will anybody ever read it?
If you believe that the MSM will give the Republican response the same amount of time and discussion, I have some desert acreage I'd like to sell you. :-)
This is a MSM dog and pony show for the Democrats.
All the AP reports I read neglect all the Wilson dissembling and Dem complicity in their Get-Rove! scam. Wilson is obviously a liar and a Dem operative. Typically the major lib rags and news services refuse to print anything negative about a Dem stooge.
A Kerry campaign adviser used his wife's position in the CIA to circumvent George Tenet and secure himself a CIA information gathering mission on Iraq nuclear development.
Upon returning to the US, Wilson lied about the intel and covered up the facts in order to damage Bush's Presidential campaign. His lies were exposed by British Intelligence and a Congressional investigation.
They just held one, and part of it was shown on CNN.
Novak is hedging his words here. The Niger story is true, and there was never any doubt that it was true. Iraq's trade mission to Niger is and was public knowledge.
Why Bush buttressed his argument by referring to British intelligence is a mystery to me, because it was unnecessary. The Iraqi mission to Niger is in the public domain.
What wasn't then in the public domain, which we now know, is that France and Niger were selling uranium to Libya. Iraq "sought" uranium, just as Bush said, but Niger and the French actually delivered on sales to Khadaffi. Keep this in mind when you remember back to Wilson's hysterical attacks on Bush, and similarly hysterical attacks by the Democrats, and similarly hysterical attacks by the DNC's operatives in the press.
Remember the "forged" documents that the French passed to the CIA and then exposed, to make Bush look like a liar; we now know that French intel commissioned the documents and the Niger embassy produced them. Everyone who has been involved in covering up Niger's uranium contraband operation has been exposed as a liar.
Do you suppose that this will make the news on CNN/ABC/CBS/NBC?
This is a sore spot for me. The Repubs basically own DC right now. Why do they continue to act as if they're in the minority???
I would say that it is their job to do in the "Two-Party Cartel". Anything to keep the conservative agenda from getting in the way of the elites that run the whole show.
What is happening right now is alot of Democrat operatives are making alot of money from their base. This is nothing more than the Democrats playbook of the Vietnam/Watergate template as Rush would say.
Nothing will come of this then they will try something else. We have 3 more years of this folks.
good one!
the other missing part is that the forged documents were planted there to discredit what was otherwise a true story - iraq did try to buy yellowcake from Niger. but unfortunately, the white house backed off too quickly on it, and that part of the story evaporated.
And another Kerry advisor shoved classified documents down his pants.
How do we know the French were the authors? Do you have a cite, svp?
indeed, that is also what I have heard - that is was the French who planted the forged documents to cover up the story that would have shown them as the middleman between iraq and niger.
of course it won't make the MSM - but the sad part is that the administration also seems to have given up on this part of the story.
when it was happening, John Loftus on the Batchelor radio show was saying it almost immediately - that it was the French who planted the forged documents as a poison pill to discredit the Niger claim. that is where I heard it.
Sorry I asked. Here's a link to the Telegraph.
http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/09/19/wniger19.xml
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