Posted on 10/02/2003 7:47:17 AM PDT by Wolfstar
Two notes that might help in searching for this:
1. I'm finding references to Wilson meeting Kristof at a meeting of the Senate Democratic Policy Committee. From the big Vanity Fair article:
In early May, Wilson and Plame attended a conference sponsored by the Senate Democratic Policy Committee, at which Wilson spoke about Iraq; one of the other panelists was the New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof. Over breakfast the next morning with Kristof and his wife, Wilson told about his trip to Niger and said Kristof could write about it, but not name him.
2. However, the meeting where the Democrats plotted how to undermine confidence in Bush may have been a meeting of the Democratic National Committee:
Dems plan to undermine America to beat Bush
Capitol Hill Blue obtained a copy of the talking points when the Democratic National Committee sent them to a news outlet recently acquired by CHB’s parent company.
Being the suspicious type, I might suspect that :-)
That's exactly what I found interesting about it.
The Iraqi WMD shell game. Now Hussein has them. Now he doesn't. For the better part of 20 years we were told he had them. We know he did in the '80's, because he used them. Then, he up and decides to invade Kuwait. Golden opportunity to use WMD against the Kuwaitis, the Israelis, and the vastly superior coalition forces. But he doesn't. Why? Might it be that contrary to conventional wisdom, he wasn't afraid of retaliation, but that he didn't have much of a stockpile left?
Enter the UN weapons inspectors after the Gulf War. Again, throughout the '90's, we're told that Hussein is a menace. He has WMD. He's not cooperating. Gotta keep those inspectors rummaging around in Iraq. Yada, yada, yada. Our Congress even passes the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act, making the ouster of Hussein national policy. Bill Clinton signed it and most of the Dems now caterwauling about how "Bush lied" issued hair-raising warnings about Iraq on the Senate floor and voted for it.
In the meantime, a little gravy train called the Oil-for-Food program was enriching a whole bunch of people. None of the players (including Hussein) in the weapons inspection scam wanted to go home and declare Iraq free of WMD, because that would mean the gravy train would come to a screeching halt. So Hussein continued to play the intransigent dictator, Kofi Annan's minions kept rummaging around Iraq, and all the players kept getting rich.
Enter George W. Bush, the "accidental" president who, from the Left's point of view, was dumber than a box of Texas rocks. The unthinkable happens -- a massive terrorist attack on American soil that catapults GWB into the ranks of our most significant presidents ever. GWB takes us into a real shooting war.
Worse, he begins lecturing the UN about its responsibilities, and begins making plans to invade Iraq. Oh, no! That would slam the door on the gravy train for sure. And it would also threaten the exposure of a lot of Euro and UN Leftists who made millions off the suffering of the Iraqi people. Can't have that, now, can we?
So it wouldn't surprise me at all that various schemes were cooked up here and in Europe to (1) provide cover for the crooks, and (2) set GWB up to take the fall for years of corruption about Iraq, its here-today, gone-tomorrow WMD, and the Oil for Food Program.
Now what Patrick Fitzgerald is up to, who knows. I doubt seriously that he's doing anything significant. Like most special prosecutors, once they get started, it's almost impossible to get them to wrap up and come to a conclusion. The history of such SP's is that their investigations take on a life of their own and run for years, often with little or no results to show for the effort and cost.
But the whole Wilson-Plame saga has provided excellent cover for the vastly more serious crimes that were committed re Oil-for-Food and its rationale, the continued UN search for Iraqi WMD.
Your post REALLY needs ( desperately ) to be posted to Pukin Dog's thread. You know that I am HTML deprived, so would you please post a link or the whole thing, if I ping you to it? PLLLLLLLLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASE? :-)
Obviously, I conflated the two. However, this May meeting apparently afforded the Democrats an opportunity to further the program they agreed to undertake in January.
Consequently, we have a nexus for the plot. Wilson, Kristof, a bunch of Democrat pols (is Schumer on this committee, I wonder). And, within days, things begin to happen...
...Kristof "leaks" Wilson's report (anonymously)
...Somebody identified as "a CIA agent" leaks to the BBC.
...Pincus and the WaPo gets on the scent.
...Wilson gets an op-ed in the NYT.
...and they're off and running at Pimlico...
I think I found the title and date and a summary, at least:
On July 8th, Capitol Hill Blue published a story titled "White House Admits Bush Lied About Iraqi Nukes". The bold headline was backed by an equally assertive lead-in, which stated "After weeks of denial, the White House Monday finally admitted President Bush lied in his January State of the Union Address when he claimed Iraq had sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa." This assertion went far beyond what other news organizations were reporting, which was that the Bush administration had admitted that the claim made in the State of the Union Address was based on information the President later found to be unreliable. There were other eye-raising details in the story, however.
The article quoted a "CIA advisor" named Terrance J. Wilkinson, claiming he had been present at two White House briefings attended by the President. "The report had already been discredited," the story quoted Wilkinson as stating. "This point was clearly made when the president was in the room during at least two of the briefings" said Wilkinson, who claimed Bush responded in anger. "He said that if the current operatives working for the CIA couldn't prove the story was true, then the agency had better find some who could," the Capitol Hill Blue story continued Wilkinson's quote. "He said he knew the story was true and so would the world after American troops secured the country." Wilkinson claimed to have written "numerous memos" questioning the use of "intelligence information that we knew to be from dubious sources." While American troops continue to search Iraq for a smoking gun regarding weapons of mass destruction, these allegations, if true, would be the smoking gun the left wing of American politics has been searching for in their quest to discredit the Bush administration.
On Free Republic, a website where conservatives dissect and debate the news, some people (including this author) started to question the story. The White House admitted Bush lied? Where could such an admission be found? And who is Terrance J. Wilkinson? Searches using various Internet tools such as Google were coming up empty. Doug Thompson joined in the discussion to defend his work and his publication. "The use of the word 'lied' has also sparked some controversy on the Capitol Hill Blue forum as well. It was my decision to use the word. Wilkinson did not accuse the President of lying. I did, based on information from other sources (who would not go on the record) that Bush was told outright that the information had been discredited before the State of the Union address but that he chose to use it anyway. To me that was a lie and I chose to use it in the headline and the lead of the story." Thompson admitted that he chose such a strong accusation because "I'm mad. Bush didn't have to use a discredited claim to justify the war with Iraq." However, Thompson admitted, "The headline is technically incorrect because the White House made no such admission. I have edited the headline and the lead of the story to reflect that." Thompson republished the article with the word 'lied' changed to 'wrong' in the headline, and the lead-in changed similarly. But what about Terrance J. Wilkinson? Thompson stood by his man. "I've known Terry Wilkinson for 20+ years and his decision to go public was a painful one that I'm sure will bring recriminations."
The same article is apparently referenced with a different, less inflammatory title here:
Over a month ago I wrote an entry here called "The Bush psyche." Well, today Steve Gilliard at the Daily KOS wrote "Time to admit the obvious: there are no WMD," in which he quotes a story from Capitol Hill Blue, "White House admits Bush wrong about Iraqi nukes."
"The [Niger] report had already been discredited," said Terrance J. Wilkinson, a CIA advisor present at two White House briefings. "This point was clearly made when the President was in the room during at least two of the briefings."
Bush's response was anger, Wilkinson said.
"He said that if the current operatives working for the CIA couldn't prove the story was true, then the agency had better find some who could," Wilkinson said. "He said he knew the story was true and so would the world after American troops secured the country."
This link given seems to redirect to a sanitized archive version of the article where references to Wilkinson have been removed, along with Thompson's name:
"White House admits Bush wrong about Iraqi nukes", July 8, 2003
After weeks of denial, the White House Monday finally admitted President Bush was wrong in his January State of the Union Address when he claimed Iraq had sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa.
The acknowledgment came as a British parliamentary commission questioned the reliability of British intelligence about Saddam Hussein's efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the war in Iraq.
Bush said in his State of the Union address that the British government had learned that Saddam recently sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa.
The president's statement was incorrect because it was based on forged documents from the African nation of Niger, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer acknowledged.
A British parliamentary committee has also concluded that Prime Minister Tony Blair's government mishandled intelligence material on Iraqi weapons.
John Stanley, a Conservative member of the committee, said so far no evidence has been found in Iraq to substantiate four key claims, including that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa as part of an effort to restart a nuclear weapons program.
The International Atomic Energy Agency told the United Nations in March that the information about uranium was based on forged documents.
I also tried searching Google for the link that redirects to the archived version, and they've pulled the original out of their cache as well:
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_2518.shtml
I'd go with a version of your larger affair scenario. My main difference in detail would be that I think Saddam's Oil-for-Food coconspirators were helping arm him with WMD as well as profiting from Oil-for-Food corruption. But apart from that I agree with your gist, and your bottom line that Oil-for-Food-related crimes (and profits) were most likely the heart of the motive.
I wonder. Does Terrance J. Wilkinson sound like Joseph C. Wilson to you? The claims and the manner of speaking? The tone is different than the one that Wilson adopted in his writing, but when he's worked himself into high dudgeon on the air, it sure sounds a lot like Terrance J. Wilkinson.
Joe Wilson? Or a close co-conspirator? It sounds like a test run for the op-ed, doesn't it? How much can I get away with, how far can I go?
Funny, too, how this ended up down the memory hole. It got swamped by the op-ed, sure. But nobody ever seemed to pick up on the association.
Has to be the heart of it. And I have no confidence Fitzgerald's investigation is going to do anything postive to shine light on the truth.
In 1982, while I was working for Congressman Manuel Lujan of New Mexico, a man came up to a me during a gathering in Albuquerque and introduced himself as Terrance J. Wilkinson. He said he was a security consultant and gave me a business card with his name and just a Los Angeles phone number.
A few weeks later, he called my Washington office and asked to meet for lunch. He seemed to know a lot about the nuclear labs in New Mexico and said he had conducted "security profiles" for both Los Alamos and Sandia National Labs.
This sounds like Wilkinson was active in New Mexico in 1982 and thereabouts. Wilson would've been in Africa at that time. I haven't heard anything about him being familiar with nuclear labs, either, so I tend to think it's someone else.
However this does suggest to me that "Wilkinson" might be someone tied to a spy ring at Los Alamos in the early 80s, which might be a clue.
This whole thing stinks. It's as if the CIA is using the Democrats to undermine the President of the United State in the same way they do in third world countries. I don’t understand how a CIA agent (Plame) can get away with caring out a "mission" without any approvals, and then have her husband use the mission to try and undermine the United States which was planning the next war front on terror.
She should be in jail for treason - along with her husband. Instead the CIA allows her to become some twisted sort of American hating hero to the left, and we have to sit on our hands while the network news (gossip) re-packages it as the sandal of a lifetime. I hope that the “moms” and “pops” are smart enough to see the whole story.
Holtz
JeffersonRepublic.com
Yes; and I think that this nexus was coordinating with a group of Clintonistas from CIA and State who had worked on Clinton's Iraq policy; and that this domestic nexus linked to foreign counterparts in Britain and France and elsewhere. The forged Niger documents initially came to British and US intelligence through Italy.
bump
Of course, this was based on the assumption that Thompson had made up the whole story and, having been caught, covered his tracks.
In hindsight, we now know that somebody was trying to peddle this story, though. So, Thompson would've had no apparent need to make it all up.
The possibility remains, though, that he might've been covering for somebody whose real identity he couldn't reveal for some reason. William McKinley, as I recall, tripped him up by convincingly establishing the fact that there was no such person as "Terrance J. Wilkinson".
If we take Thompson at his word, though, Terrance is "a CIA advisor". If he's not Wilson, that's still plausible -- Plame probably wasn't the only CIA-associated person in on this stunt.
Wonder whatever happened to Thompson. Wonder if he'd talk about this now...
I fear he has to find a way past Miller's stonewall to get much farther with his investigation. Part of the problem, too, is that some of the witnesses probably aren't under US jurisdiction. The British apparently know more than they can tell without violating intelligence-sharing agreements with France.
bump
FORMER DIPLOMAT TO GIVE VIEWS ON POSSIBLE WAR WITH IRAQ AT UCSB, January 14, 2003
"Our message to Saddam can be simple," he said. "You are going to lose your weapons-of-mass-destruction capability either through inspections or through a sustained cruise-missile assault. If you rebuild them, we will attack again. And if you use weapons of mass destruction or attack another country, we will destroy you and your regime. The decision to live or die then becomes his to make."
"The ultimate lesson of the gulf war may be that when offered the choice, Saddam will sacrifice almost everything before sacrificing his own life or grip on power," Wilson said.
It's quite possible Thompson made up a legend. In that case I'm at a loss for any leads, though, LOL. At this point my best suggestion is to check if there's any other information on counterintelligence agents who were approaching journalists and politicians in New Mexico around 1982. If that doesn't turn up anything I'm not sure where to look.
That's really interesting :-)
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