If Wilson’s motive was to help the perpetrators of Operation Nigergate and the Rockefeller Plan unseat Bush and his allies, the next question to be tackled is, by what means did Wilson and his accomplices attempt to carry out their coup? In the realm of public relations at least the assassination weapon of choice is the poison pen, which is mightier than the sword, so the selected means of attack was a propaganda campaign against Bush, targeting his case for war. For purposes of analysis and discussion, this propaganda campaign can be broken down into four phases:
1. Developing antiwar talking points.
2. Planting the forgery.
3. Publicizing the forgery.
4. Mop-up: Publicizing the alibi.
The first two phases began prior to Wilson’s activation in Phase 3, where he came to center stage.
Phase 1: Developing antiwar talking points.
In the first phase of the campaign, anti-Bush propagandists developed their talking points. These echoed talking points that had been developed by the antiwar movement over the course of late 2002 and early 2003.
Just as the proponents of any war seek to rally public support by providing a list of moral justifications for the war, a casus belli, opponents of any war seek to counter arguments for that war with a list of corresponding antiwar talking points. Over the course of two World Wars and the Cold War, the powers that sit on the UN Security Council have developed antiwar propaganda into an art. During the Cold War the former Soviet Union’s international antiwar umbrella, the World Peace Council (WPC), effectively distributed talking points through means such as international antiwar conferences. After the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein began hosting a similar semi-annual conference, the Baghdad Peace Conference. In September 2002 as the Iraq War approached, Hussein convened a scheduled Baghdad Peace Conference two months early in order to hold an emergency session on strategies for deterring military action against Iraq.131
It was this emergency conference that Congressman Rahall and Senator Abourezk’s Mission to Baghdad delegation attended on September 16, 2002. As previously mentioned, joining Rahall and Abourezk on their trip to Baghdad was Saul Landau, cofounder of the Institute for Policy Studies. IPS had been one of the WPC’s major US allies during the Cold War, working in cooperation with its European sister the Transnational Institute (TNI). Following historical precedent, IPS and TNI took a leading role in developing the talking points that would be used by the Iraq antiwar movement.
IPS and TNI’s most visible media spokesperson during the buildup to the Iraq War was Phyllis Bennis, who had been part of the Iraq antiwar movement since the Gulf War. Bennis and TNI worked closely with the antiwar coalition United for Peace and Justice (UPJ), a descendant of the Vietnam-era Communist Party front the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice (PCPJ), affiliated with John Kerry’s Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW).132 A year before Joseph Wilson gave the keynote address to the annual Iraq Forum of the Education for Peace in Iraq Center (EPIC), Bennis lectured at the same event on June 15-16, 2002, speaking on “The Iraq Debate Inside the Beltway” and citing UNSCOM weapons inspectors Scott Ritter and Richard Butler to support the statement that “there is no longer any nuclear or long-range missile capacity in Iraq”. Bennis’ lecture preceded a pair of presentations by Ritter himself, who gave a special screening of the film In Shifting Sands, financed by Iraqi agent Shakir Al-Khafaji with Oil-for-Food vouchers.133 The next month, Bennis debated war advocate Richard Perle on the July 1 episode of NewsHour with Jim Lehrer134 and wrote a five-point antiwar argument that was read into the record of a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Iraq by longtime Iraq antiwar ally Senator Paul Wellstone on July 31, 2002. Bennis’s antiwar argument included a supplementary point about weapons inspections which addressed both nuclear and biochemical weapons, stating with regards to nuclear weapons,
There has been no solid information regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction since UNSCOM and IAEA arms inspectors left Iraq in December 1998 in advance of the U.S. Desert Fox bombing operation. . .The IAEA report was unequivocal that Iraq no longer had a viable nuclear program. The UNSCOM report was less definitive, but months earlier, in March 1998, UNSCOM chief Richard Butler said that his team was satisfied there was no longer any nuclear or long-range missile capability in Iraq. . . Since that time, there have been no verifiable reports regarding Iraq's WMD programs. It is important to get inspectors back into Iraq, but U.S. threats have made that virtually impossible by setting a "negative incentive" in place. If Baghdad believes that a U.S. military strike as well as the maintaining of crippling economic sanctions, will take place regardless of their compliance with UN resolutions regarding inspections, they have no reason to implement their own obligations. If the United States refuses to abide by the rule of international law, why are we surprised when an embattled and tyrannical government does so?135
Armed with this word-twisting, issue-dodging argument from ignorance, Bennis launched into a campaign of media appearances on behalf of the antiwar cause, with her far-left affiliations typically going unmentioned by such hosts as CBS and CNN.136 Meanwhile a list of counterarguments similar to Bennis’ was packaged into a talking-points format in an August 2002 report of the IPS-affiliated think tank Foreign Policy in Focus written by Stephen Zunes and titled “Seven Reasons to Oppose a U.S. Invasion of Iraq”. Zunes’ argument included a full point titled “There Is No Firm Proof that Iraq Is Developing Weapons of Mass Destruction”, echoing Bennis’ point on weapons inspections and elaborating,
In its most recent report, the International Atomic Energy Agency categorically declared that Iraq no longer has a nuclear program. . . Although Iraq’s potential for developing weapons of mass destruction should not be totally discounted, Saddam Hussein’s refusal to allow UN inspectors to return and his lack of full cooperation prior to their departure do not necessarily mean he is hiding something, as President Bush alleges. More likely, the Iraqi opposition to the inspections program is based on Washington’s abuse of UNSCOM for intelligence gathering operations and represents a desperate effort by Saddam Hussein to increase his standing with Arab nationalists by defying Western efforts to intrude on Iraqi sovereignty. Indeed, the Iraqi defiance of the inspections regime may be designed to provoke a reaction by the United States in order to capitalize on widespread Arab resentment over Washington’s double standard of objecting to an Arab country procuring weapons of mass destruction while tolerating Israel’s nuclear arsenal. . .U.S. officials have admitted that there is no evidence that Iraq has resumed its nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons programs. Scott Ritter, a former U.S. Marine officer who served as chief weapons inspector for UNSCOM, responded to a query on a television talk show in 2001 about Iraq’s potential threat to the U.S. by saying: “In terms of military threat, absolutely nothing. His military was devastated in 1991 in Operation Desert Storm and hasn’t had the ability to reconstitute itself. . .In terms of weapons of mass destruction, we just don’t know. . .We should be trying to get weapons inspectors back into Iraq, so that we can ascertain exactly what’s transpiring in Iraq today instead of guessing about it.137
One may well wonder how Ritter was able to confidently declare Iraq a military non-threat while simultaneously confessing ignorance of the state of Iraq’s WMD arsenal. Perhaps enough money from Saddam Hussein can make UN weapons inspectors turn a blind eye to self-contradiction as well as WMD. In any case, in addition to disputing allegations of Iraq’s possession of nuclear and biochemical Weapons of Mass Destruction, Zunes’ point on WMD also warned that forcibly disarming Saddam Hussein “would dramatically increase the likelihood of his ordering the use of any weapons of mass destruction he may have retained”--a point logically in tension with the point that our lack of knowledge of Iraq’s WMD program constituted a lack of a threat, illustrating how these points were essentially pretexts for countering any possible case for war rather than genuine arguments addressing factual situations and realistic risks. Zunes’ other talking points included among other items a critique of arguments alleging Iraq’s sponsorship of terrorism.
Bennis’ and Zunes’ talking points received wide distribution from antiwar media in late 2002 and early 2003. A modified version of Zunes’ August 2002 Foreign Policy in Focus report was published in the September 30, 2002 issue of The Nation,138 which had previously published Bennis’ views on Iraq sanctions.139 The November 11 and December 2, 2002 issues of The Nation included articles by Bennis.140
The December 2, 2002 issue also featured an article by regular Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn that was posted on November 14 to that magazine’s website and was simultaneously published on Cockburn’s own website Counterpunch.com,141 soon to become the host of VIPS in February 2003.142 On December 4, 2002 the website of The Nation posted a debate between Cockburn and David Corn, whom Cockburn had attacked for mentioning the role of the World Workers Party in the antiwar movement.143 Despite such Stalinist-Trotskyite family feuding, in the March 3, 2003 issue of The Nation Cockburn’s regular column--again crossposted to Counterpunch.org, now hosting VIPS--shared space with a new writer Corn had invited to contribute, Joseph Wilson.144
By this time, Wilson says, he had known Corn through their mutual appearances on FOX News for some time and had “by and large. . .come to share” the editorial perspective of The Nation.145 Reflecting this, Wilson’s antiwar speeches had come to echo the talking points of Bennis and Zunes and their comrades, with modifications specifically arguing with Bush’s pro-war speeches and eventually incorporating Wilson’s own unique talking points about his Niger trip For instance, Wilson’s article “How Saddam Thinks”, published in the San Jose Mercury News October 13, 2002 and reprinted by CommonDreams.org a day after that website had featured an article by Zunes,146 regurgitated Zunes’ paradoxical WMD logic by arguing that “One of the strongest arguments for a militarily supported inspection plan is that it doesn’t threaten Saddam with extinction, a threat that could push him to fight back with the very weapons we’re seeking to destroy.”147 Wilson’s article “Republic or Empire?”, posted online on the website of the The Nation on February 13, 2003 in anticipation of that magazine’s March 3 printed edition, echoed Zunes’ points on WMD and terrorism and added a third point to counter Bush’s more recent talking point emphasizing how the war would liberate the Iraqi people from tyranny.148 Wilson’s June 14 lecture to the 2003 EPIC Iraq Forum, in which Zunes participated, developed the same three points and added a fourth based on combining the WMD and terrorism points into an additional point dismissing concerns posed by the threat of Iraq exporting WMD to terrorists. In the process of making these points Wilson elaborated an anti-neoconservative/anti-Zionist conspiracy theory sprinkled through the subtext of Bennis and Zunes’ talking points, as previously quoted.149
The empirically-demonstrable convergence between IPS’ talking points and Wilson’s potentially throws some light on an intriguing albeit unsubstantiated allegation Senator Trent Lott made to Sean Hannity on March 20, 2003. Lott stated he had received some information that the Democrats had tested various antiwar talking points on focus groups:
They'd been doing some focus groups or they'd been doing some polling that indicated maybe, don't attack the men and women (in uniform) but you can attack the diplomatic effort by Bush.150
Although Lott’s allegation is again unsubstantiated, it fits the pattern of data detailed above indicating a continuity between the talking points of IPS and those of Democratic foreign policy consultants like Joseph Wilson.
Against the Phase 1 background of the antiwar movement’s talking points, it is possible to place the Phase 2 planting of the Niger forgeries in a broader context. The antiwar movement’s talking points were broader in scope than just WMD or the Niger forgeries. For instance, on a non-WMD-related talking point, in late 2002 Vince Cannistraro was quoted disputing the link between Iraq and Al Qaeda.151 With respect to WMD-related talking points, Glen Rangwala--a UK scientist associated with the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq (CASI), which worked with Voices in the Wilderness and George Galloway’s Emergency Committee on Iraq (ECI)--accused a new Iraq dossier Britain released on February 3, 2003 (the so-called “Dodgy Dossier”) of plagiarizing a graduate student’s thesis.152 Meanwhile in the process of publicizing the forgeries IAEA chief ElBaradei disputed US allegations about Iraq intending aluminum tubes for nuclear purposes.153 It appears possible that there were several simultaneous propaganda operations of which Operation Nigergate was only one, and indeed, there was some contact between figures active in several different controversies. For example, Rangwala since November 2002 had been listed as an IPA spokesman in IPA press releases, alongside IPS’ Phyllis Bennis and VIPS’ David MacMichael; he was quoted in a VIPS memo published on May 1, 2003; he was quoted by Nicholas Kristof in the May 6, 2003 New York Times article which featured the first anonymous leaks from Wilson; he, Wilson, and Zunes all spoke at the June 14, 2003 EPIC Iraq Forum; and he and Dan Plesch of the Guardian coauthored a book accusing the British government of manufacturing WMD evidence.154 Against this background, the planting of the Niger forgeries may be viewed as one prong of a multi-pronged progpanda operation to discredit the various arguments underpinning the case for war. Operation Nigergate aimed specifically to discredit one argument underpinning the case for Iraq’s nuclear threat: namely, to discredit the allegation made by Britain’s September 24, 2002 dossier that “there is intelligence that Iraq has sought the supply of significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”155
Phase 2: Planting the forgery.
Within two weeks of the release of the September Dossier, attempts to plant the Niger forgeries in British and US intelligence files began. Around October 8, 2002, Rocco Martino began peddling his forgeries, first to the French DGSE he says (confirming information from other sources), and then to Italian Panorama journalist Elisabetta Burba.156
According to Burba she was skeptical of the documents’ authenticity. Her editor-in-chief Carlo Rossella requested verification of the documents from the US embassy in Italy, headed by Melvin Sembler. Thus the forgeries entered US State Department files.157
From here the forgeries spread through the US intelligence community via several routes. According to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s review, within the State Department, the documents passed from the Italian embassy via the Bureau of Nonproliferation (NP) to the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), headed by Carl Ford (who has also worked for Cassidy & Associates, a firm that lobbies for Gabon and was purchased by Shandwick Public Affairs in 2000), who was assisted on WMD-related issues until September 2002 by Greg Thielmann (later to join VIPS158). The INR was immediately suspicious, with one analyst commenting in an email to other intelligence community colleagues, “you’ll note that it bears a funky Emb. of Niger stamp (to make it look official, I guess).” On October 16, 2002 INR made copies of the documents available at meeting of the Nuclear Interdiction Action Group (NIAG) attended by representatives of a number of agencies including CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Department of Energy (DOE). Analysts from the DIA, NSA, and DOE picked up copies at the meeting. None of the four CIA representatives who attended the meeting recall picking up copies, but a later internal inspection found copies in the vault of the CIA’s Counterproliferation Division (CPD),159 where Valerie Plame worked under Alan Foley of the CIA’s Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center (WINPAC).160 CIA spokesman Bill Harlow told Seymour Hersh in March 2003 that the CIA did not obtain an actual copy of the forgeries until after the President’s January 2003 State of the Union address.161 Contradicting this, Vince Cannistraro later told Hersh that the State Department’s Italian embassy had passed the forgeries to the CIA’s Italian station, headed by Jeffrey Castelli, and that the CIA’s Italian station had passed them on to CIA headquarters.162 Whether the CPD got the documents through this alleged route, from the meeting where the INR made copies available, or through another channel is unclear.
On November 22, 2002 (a date that in retrospect takes on symbolic significance), the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs Director for Nonproliferation told State Department officials that France had information on an Iraqi attempt to buy uranium from Niger. France then waited until March 4, 2003 to inform the US that this information was based on Martino’s forgeries.163
Meanwhile on December 17, 2002, analysts from the CIA’s WINPAC produced a paper, U.S. Analysis of Niger’s Declaration, 7 December 2002, which critically reviewed a disclosure Iraq had just made to the UN. The paper included statements that Iraq’s declaration failed to explain its procurement of aluminum tubes and “does not acknowledge efforts to procure uranium from Niger, one of the points addressed in the U.K. dossier.” The day after this paper was produced WINPAC, the State Department’s NP, and the NSC began helping prepare a fact sheet to be released following a speech by UN ambassador John Negroponte and a press conference by Secretary of State Colin Powell. Despite a suggestion by the WINPAC Director to change the “Niger” reference to “Africa”, despite a suggestion by an INR analyst to change the phrase “efforts” to “reported efforts”, and despite a check by the State Department’s Office of United Nations Political Affairs with NP to make sure WINPAC had reviewed some last-minute changes to the final draft of the fact sheet, the fact sheet was posted to the State Department’s website with the same language used in WINPAC’s December 17 paper: “efforts to procure uranium from Niger.”
After seeing the WINPAC paper, an INR analyst sent an email to a DOE analyst on December 23, 2002 expressing surprise that WINPAC’s paper had not mentioned that the INR took a skeptical view on the aluminum tube and Niger uranium issues. The DOE analyst mentioned in reply, “it is most disturbing that WINPAC is essentially directing foreign policy in this matter. There are some very strong points to be made in respect to Iraq’s arrogant non-compliance with UN sanctions. However, when individuals attempt to convert those ‘strong statements’ into the ‘knock out’ punch, the Administration will ultimately look foolish--i.e. the tubes and Niger!”164
Along similar lines, Seymour Hersh reported in March 2003, after ElBaradei had publicized the forgeries:
The chance for American intelligence to challenge the documents came as the Administration debated whether to pass them on to ElBaradei. The former high-level intelligence official told me that some senior C.I.A. officials were aware that the documents weren’t trustworthy. “It’s not a question as to whether they were marginal. They can’t be ‘sort of’ bad, or ‘sort of’ ambiguous. They knew it was a fraud--it was useless. Everybody bit their tongue and said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if the Secretary of State said this?’ The Secretary of State never saw the documents.”. . .A former intelligence officer told me that some questions about the authenticity of the Niger documents were raised inside the government by analysts at the Department of Energy and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. However, these warnings were not heeded.“Somebody deliberately let something false get in there,” the former high-level intelligence official added. “It could not have gotten into the system without the agency being involved. Therefore it was an internal intention. Someone set someone up.”165
Hersh later added,
a former senior C.I.A. officer. . .had begun talking to me about the Niger papers in March, when I first wrote about the forgery, and said, "Somebody deliberately let something false get in there." He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves."The agency guys were so pissed at Cheney," the former officer said. "They said, 'O.K, we're going to put the bite on these guys.'" My source said that he was first told of the fabrication late last year, at one of the many holiday gatherings in the Washington area of past and present C.I.A. officials. "Everyone was bragging about it-'Here's what we did. It was cool, cool, cool.'" These retirees, he said, had superb contacts among current officers in the agency and were informed in detail of the sismi intelligence.
"They thought that, with this crowd, it was the only way to go-to nail these guys who were not practicing good tradecraft and vetting intelligence," my source said. "They thought it'd be bought at lower levels-a big bluff." The thinking, he said, was that the documents would be endorsed by Iraq hawks at the top of the Bush Administration, who would be unable to resist flaunting them at a press conference or an interagency government meeting. They would then look foolish when intelligence officials pointed out that they were obvious fakes. But the tactic backfired, he said, when the papers won widespread acceptance within the Administration. "It got out of control."166
Whether or not the allegation of Hersh’s source is accurate, what may be stated as established fact is that between October and December 2002, copies of the Niger forgeries and references to the forgeries had been widely distributed through the US intelligence community, and a specific reference to Niger had been posted to the US State Department website. From here information would begin to leak outside the US intelligence community, initiating Phase 3 of Operation Nigergate.
Phase 3: Publicizing the forgery.
Neither the September Dossier nor Bush’s State of the Union address actually referred to Niger, and both British and US intelligence would later insist they had evidence of Iraq’s attempts to acquire uranium from Africa independent of the Niger forgeries.167 But for Operation Nigergate’s propaganda purposes, the mere presence of the forgeries in British and US files was sufficient to cast doubt on the case for war. The next step was to publicize that doubt by leaking it to sympathetic politicians and reporters.
The posting of the Niger reference to the State Department’s website got the ball rolling. This prompted a public denial from Niger on December 24, 2002 and a request for substantiating informtation from the director of the IAEA’s Iraq Nuclear Verification Offfice, Jacques Baute, on January 6, 2003.168 Iraqi scientist Jafar Dhia Jafar would later publish a book which mentioned that on January 20, 2003 while being questioned by Baute, he was informed that Baute was in possession of information about Iraqi attempts to acquire uranium from Niger which had been“recieved from a certain country on the condition that it wasn’t shown to Iraq”.169
Baute’s request for more information was echoed throughout January by Senator Carl Levin, who had been pushing for the US to share more information with the UN since December 2002.170 Levin also sent a request the day after President Bush’s January 28, 2003 State of the Union address asking the CIA to provide him with details on what the US intelligence community knew about Iraqi attempts to acquire uranium from Africa.171 Then on January 31 in anticipation of Powell’s speech to the UN, Levin, along with Senators Jay Rockefeller and Joseph Biden, signed a letter from Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle asking President Bush to have Powell brief Congress on newly-acquired intelligence before going to the UN with that information.172 The next day Levin travelled to New York to meet with UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix.173
On February 4, the day before Powell’s UN speech, someone briefed Baute on the Niger forgeries and provided him with copies. Who provided the briefing and forgeries to him and where they did so have been reportedly differently by different sources. According to Baute’s account as reported by Seymour Hersh, he was briefed by the US mission in Austria while aboard a plane en route from IAEA headquarters in Vienna to UN headquarters in New York, and upon reaching New York he was provided with copies of the documents by the US.174 What the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s report says regarding this is censored at a key point, reading, “On February 4, 2003, the U.S. Government passed electronic copies of the Iraq-Niger documents to [3/4 line deleted] the IAEA. Because the Director of the IAEA’s INVO [Iraq Nuclear Verification Office] was in New York at the time, the U.S. Government also provided the documents to him in New York.”175 So far this seems consistent enough. But slightly at variance with these accounts is a July 18, 2003 article by Walter Pincus and Dana Priest which depicts the briefing occurring in Vienna rather than on the plane from Vienna: “On Feb. 4, the U.N. inspectors' Iraq team was called to the U.S. mission in Vienna and verbally briefed on the contents of the documents. A day later, they received copies, according to officials familiar with the inspectors' work.” A couple weeks earlier, Pincus and Richard Leiby had reported that the copies of the forgeries the inspectors received came from the CIA: “In early February, the CIA received a translation of the Niger documents and in early March, copies of the documents, which it turned over to the International Atomic Energy Agency.”176 A seemingly different account is found in a March 8, 2003 article by Ian Traynor, stating that Britain provided the documents to the IAEA in Vienna: “British officials named the state of Niger as the source of the uranium and passed their evidence to the UN nuclear watchdog, the international atomic energy agency, in Vienna.” Hans Blix curiously stated as reported in an April 22, 2003 article by Sally Bolton, “The CIA say they got a copy of the document from the UK.”177 This is contradicted by a September 2003 British Parliamentary investigation which states, “In February 2003 the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) received from a third party (not the UK) documents that the party had acquired in the autumn of 2002 and which purported to be evidence of Iraq’s attempts to obtain uranium from Niger. In March 2003 the IAEA identified some of the documents it had received as forgeries and called into question the authenticity of the others.” Britain’s July 2004 Butler Report similarly though somewhat more vaguely states: “it was not until early 2003 that the British Government became aware that the US (and other states) had received from a journalistic source a number of documents alleged to cover the Iraqi procurement of uranium from Niger. Those documents were passed to the IAEA. . .”178
On February 15, 2003, Levin, Rockefeller, and their Intelligence Committee colleagues left for their secret fact-finding mission abroad, returning February 27.179 Less than a week later, Levin and Joseph Wilson appeared together with the French ambassador Jean-David Levitte present on ABC’s Nightline on March 4, 2003180--the same day the US was first informed that the information French intelligence had provided on November 22 had been based on the Niger forgeries. Four days after his Nightline appearance with Levin, Wilson made his first public statement on the Niger forgeries, prompted by CNN’s David Ensor, who was investigating the origin of the forgeries.181
Ensor’s prompting was intended to get Wilson to comment on a quote the March 8 The Washington Post writer Joby Warrick attributed to an anonymous “U.S. official”.
Knowledgeable sources familiar with the forgery investigation described the faked evidence as a series of letters between Iraqi agents and officials in the central African nation of Niger. The documents had been given to the U.N. inspectors by Britain and reviewed extensively by U.S. intelligence. The forgers had made relatively crude errors that eventually gave them away--including names and titles that did not match up with the individuals who held office at the time the letters were purportedly written, the officials said. “We fell for it,” said one U.S. official who reviewed the documents.182
Several things are striking about Warrick’s quote. For one thing, six weeks earlier on January 26, 2003, another Post writer, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, had quoted someone else saying something remarkably similar to the March 8 statement of the anonymous “U.S. official”:
The Iraqi government believes it has done enough to cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors and now regards a war with the United States as almost inevitable, a top adviser to President Saddam Hussein said today. Providing a rare glimpse into the strategic thinking of Hussein's secretive, authoritarian government, his chief adviser on weapons issues, Gen. Amir Saadi, suggested Iraq would not alter its policy toward the inspections and overall disarmament. Although U.N. and U.S. officials demand that the government work actively to resolve conflicts over the private questioning of scientists, the handover of documents and a host of other issues, Iraq believes that it is already "doing all the things we think can prevent war," he said. . .Administration officials also contend they have strong evidence that Iraq has active programs to manufacture chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. But Saadi dismissed those claims, noting that allegations advanced by the administration last year that Iraq was using imported aluminum tubes to enrich uranium have largely been dismissed by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
"It was a lie and they fell for it," he said.183
It is also interesting that although Warrick’s Post article does not name the anonymous official, Joseph Wilson is more specific. In his book he says it is a “State Department spokesman”:
. . .I was on the set of CNN, waiting to do an interview, when David Ensor, a CNN national security reporter, happened by. He was looking at the story with an eye out for the perpetrators of the forgeries and asked me what I knew about the Niger uranium business. I told him that as far as I knew, the State Department spokesman had not spoken accurately. . .As I sat there in the green room, I concluded that the U.S. government had to be held to account. It was unacceptable to lie about such an important issue.
I told Ensor that I would be helpful in his efforts to ferret out the truth, and offered to answer a question or two on the air and to provide leads to him. While I was not willing at that stage to disclose my own involvement, it was not a difficult decision to make, to point others in the right direction. The essential information--the forged documents--was already in the public domain; the State Department spokesman had purposely deceived the public in his response, or else he himself had been deceived. Whichever the case, in my mind it was essential that the record be corrected.
When I went on the air, the CNN newscaster, prompted by Ensor, asked me about the “We fell for it” line. . .184
Elsewhere Wilson names the State Department spokesman he has in mind:
Wilson says he let the matter drop until he saw State Department spokesman Richard Boucher say a few months later that the U.S. had been fooled by bad intelligence. It was then that Wilson says he realized that his report had been overlooked, ignored, or buried.185
Thus, Wilson’s first comments on the Niger forgeries represent a convergence of several curious items rolled into one:
1) Wilson’s fingering of Richard Boucher as the anonymous source for Warrick’s Washington Post quote;
2) Wilson’s prompting by CNN, a network which seems to have inherited its founder Ted Turner’s antiwar spin and anti-Israeli bias;186 and
3) Warrick’s attribution to an anonymous source of a phrase strikingly similar to that of an Iraqi spokesman quoted six weeks earlier by Chandrasekaran in the Post, a prime mover in the Watergate coup against Richard Nixon.187
If the public were not regularly assured that the Post and CNN like Joseph Wilson are non-partisan victims of a right-wing smear campaign, someone might begin to suspect the trio were up to something here--particularly in light of Walter Pincus’ revelation of the behind-the-scenes role of Bob Woodward, who coincidentally has recently released an insider account of the Bush administration along with his latest work of fiction about Deep Throat,188 in the wake of John Dean coming forward to declare that Plamegate is worse than Watergate.189
Was Wilson already playing “Deep Throat II” by the time of his March 8, 2003 CNN interview? If so, for information he purported to have about the Niger forgeries beyond his own personal knowledge of his February 2002 trip--made over half a year before Martino’s documents entered US intelligence files in October--he would have had to have had access to other sources of information about the Niger forgeries. By what means could Wilson have obtained such information?
The most direct potential channel would have been his wife, CIA CPD agent Valerie Plame. Questions about CPD’s role in the Niger forgery saga are raised by several unresolved issues, such as the enigma of how and when CPD first obtained the copies of the forgeries found in its vault. Another issue is the discrepancy between the the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence testimony of Plame’s supervisor Alan Foley and that of his NSC counterpart Robert Joseph. Foley initially testified to the Senate that he told Joseph not to include the African uranium reference in Bush’s State of the Union speech on Iraq. After this and other elements of Foley’s testimony were disputed by Joseph, Foley located a draft of Bush’s speech, which proved to be more consistent with Joseph’s testimony, and Foley conceded that he may have mixed up his recollection of two different speeches he and Joseph had worked on together.190
Plame’s intelligence community colleagues may also have been a potential source of information for Wilson on the Niger forgeries. Seymour Hersh reported that Vince Cannistraro had learned about the forgeries a few months after October 2002 through an inside source at CIA: “Vincent Cannistraro. . .told me that copies of the Burba documents were given to the American Embassy, which passed them on to the C.I.A.'s chief of station in Rome, who forwarded them to Washington. Months later, he said, he telephoned a contact at C.I.A. headquarters and was told that ‘the jury was still out on this’--that is, on the authenticity of the documents.”191 VIPS founder Ray McGovern claimed he knew Foley from working with him.192 Wilson’s “longtime colleague” Pat Lang professed inside knowledge of conflicts between DIA Middle East officer Bruce Hardcastle and the Bush administration over Iraq-related intelligence.193 One email Lang circulated online in September 2003 was sent to a distribution list which included both McGovern and Cannistraro as well as associates of Lyndon LaRouche’s Executive Intelligence Review.194
Wilson also had inside contacts in the State Department. He mentions that after Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address he discussed the Africa uranium reference privately with State Department personnel, including Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Walter Kansteiner.195 Kansteiner had been involved in the organization of Wilson’s Niger trip196 and like Wilson was also associated with the Corporate Council on Africa and Brent Scowcroft.197
Finally, Wilson had contacts in Congress who could have been potential sources of information. As mentioned previously, Wilson says he “also shared what I knew with . . .several Democratic Senators and. . .met with the staffs of the House and Senate Intelligence committees”,198 and among the Democratic Senators and Senate Intelligence Committee members he is known to have been in contact with from at least March 4, 2003 was Carl Levin, whose colleague Jay Rockefeller requested an FBI investigtion of the Niger forgeries on March 14. Congressman Henry Waxman was also active in the Niger forgery investigation by March 17, 2003.199
Finally, between ElBaradei’s March 7,2003 announcement on the forgeries and Kristof’s May 6, 2003 article quoting Wilson anonymously some information about the forgeries was publicized in newspapers, so by the time Wilson talked to Kristof he could have obtained some information from articles on the forgeries or from contact with reporters known to be working on the story, who included David Ensor, Walter Pincus’ Washington Post colleagues Dana Priest and Susan Schmidt, Seymour Hersh, and Kristof himself.200
Through Wilson, a mixture of information and disinformation about the Niger forgeries leaked to various media outlets from March 8 through July 6, 2003, beginning with his comment for CNN’s David Ensor on the “We fell for it” quote reported by Washington Post writer Joby Warrick. In this Wilson was wittingly or unwittingly assisted by various media contacts, including CNN’s Ensor; New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof; Washington Post reporters Walter Pincus, Richard Leiby, and Dana Priest; The New Republic writers John Judis and Spencer Ackerman; British Independent journalists Andrew Buncombe and Raymond Whitaker; and NBC Meet the Press guest host Andrea Mitchell.
Wilson’s leaks did not occur in a vacuum. They were concurrent with the leaks to Britain’s BBC and Guardian that prompted Blair supporter John Reid to complain on June 3, 2003 that “rogue elements” in the intelligence community were out to smear Blair.201 Meanwhile on the other side of the Atlantic, Ensor followed up his March 8, 2003 interview with Wilson with a March 14 interview of VIPS’ Ray Close, who had been writing on the Niger forgeries since March 10.202 In the following months VIPS and similar sources continued to feed stories to both fringe and mainstream media, using channels such as Cockburn’s CounterPunch, LaRouche’s Executive Intelligence Review, Seymour Hersh, Nicholas Kristof, the June 14, 2003 EPIC Iraq Forum where McGovern spoke with Wilson, and McGovern’s July 15, 2003 press conference with Dennis Kucinich. By July 11 Senator Pat Roberts was voicing sentiments similar to that John Reid had expressed on the other side of the Atlantic:
What now concerns me most, however, is what appears to be a campaign of press leaks by the CIA in an effort to discredit the President. Unnamed ‘intelligence officials’ are now claiming that they told the White House that attempts by Iraq to acquire uranium from countries in Africa were unfounded. I understand, however, that as late as mid-January, 2003, approximately ten days before the State of the Union speech, the CIA was still asserting that Iraq was seeking to acquire uranium from Africa and that those attempts were further evidence of Saddam’s efforts to reconstitute his nuclear program. I have seen no documentation that indicates that the CIA had reversed itself after January 17th and prior to the State of the Union.203]
Phase 4: Mop-up: Publicizing the alibi.
With the publication of Wilson’s New York Times editorial on July 6, 2003, Phase 3 of Operation Nigergate was complete and the main task of smearing Bush’s war effort was done. However after any crime there remains the problem of an alibi. What if the Republicans or investigative journalists discovered Wilson’s wife’s CIA connection and uncovered the propaganda campaign? Wilson naturally does not say this in so many words, but he does recall his awareness that his anonymity was bound to be short-lived:
In late June, the story began to spin out of control as journalists started to report speculation as fact. At this point I was warned by a reporter that I was about to be named in an article as the U.S. official in question. . .. . . with my name now openly circulating among the press, it was clear that sooner or later my anonymity was going to be sacrificed on the altar of the story.
I learned that on June 22, the London newspaper The Independent blared a headline across the top of the front page. . .that read “Retired American diplomat accuses British Ministers of being liars.” I knew then that the story was spinning out of control and that I now had no choice but to write it myself.204
Once again Wilson’s story cannot be taken at face value, for the fact is that a week before June 22 he had already publicly revealed himself to his EPIC Iraq Forum audience: “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. . .I can assure you that that retired American ambassador to Africa, as Nick Kristof called him in his article. . .has every intention of ensuring that this story has legs.”205 But even if Wilson was not being as careful to protect his anonymity as he pretends, his comments do reflect his awareness of the obvious eventuality that sooner or later the targets of his attacks were going to fight back. One way to counter this eventuality would be that in the event anyone began to dig too deeply into his background, it could be attributed to White House “retaliation” against a “whistleblower”.
Based on what is currently known, it is possible that Wilson’s “whistleblower” defense was not originally part of Operation Nigergate and was only conceived after Novak’s article. But is also possible that it was designed ahead of time as a contingency plan, to be activated after word of Valerie Plame’s CIA association predictably passed through the Washington grapevine to the White House and media. Additional investigation would be required to settle this matter.
In either case, the chain of events that triggered Wilson’s whistleblower defense has been well-documented as a result of Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation of Plamegate.206 The paper trail that would eventually leave the White House open to charges of retaliation began to be laid in early June 2003 when Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus, who had a long history of association with both the CIA and IPS,207 asked the CIA about Wilson’s as background for an article he was then writing which quoted Wilson anonymously. Pincus’ Post colleague Bob Woodward claims he told Pincus about Plame’s CIA background in mid-June, which Pincus denies. Whatever the truth there, the process of responding to Pincus’ question predictably prompted an exchange of paperwork between the CIA and the State Department. The publication of Pincus’ article on June 12 naturally drew increased attention to his anonymous source and was, again predictably, followed up in the coming weeks by further inquiries from various reporters to both Vice President Cheney’s aide Lewis Libby and President Bush’s aide Karl Rove, as well as other administration sources and the CIA. Among the reporters who went to Rove for confirmation of information he had heard elsewhere was Robert Novak, on July 8, 2003. On the same day Novak talked to Rove--whether earlier in the day or later is unclear--he was approached on the street by an as-yet unidentified friend of Wilson, who according to Wilson did not mention that he knew him, struck up a conversation about Wilson, and then reported back to Wilson that Novak was saying, “Wilson’s an [expletive deleted]. The CIA sent him. His wife, Valerie, works for the CIA. She’s a weapons of mass destruction specialist. She sent him.” Three days after Novak’s encounter with Wilson’s anonymous friend, his July 14 article was pre-distributed by AP’s wire service on July 11, 2003. By July 16, David Corn, who had solicited Wilson to write his article “Republic or Empire?” for The Nation back in February, was accusing the White House of targeting Wilson through Plame. The day after that Matthew Cooper of TIME began echoing Corn’s accusations.
The rest is history.
The evidence considered so far verifies that:
1) With respect to motive, Wilson explicitly expressed an intent, motivated by disagreement over Middle Eastern and Iraq policy, to use the Niger forgery controversy to bring about Bush’s impeachment as well as Tony Blair’s downfall; and
2) With respect to means, Wilson had potential access to information from inside sources about the Niger forgeries, as well as actual access to media outlets to publicize this information.
Did Wilson also have actual opportunity to channel inside information? Data which help answer this question has already been assembled in the course of prior discussion, but it remains to address the question directly, and to address Wilson’s alibi.
1. Wilson’s original story before July 6, 2003
A review of Wilson’s statements prior to his July 6, 2003 New York Times article reveals no less than six occasions where Wilson or someone quoting him stated or implied he had inside knowledge of the Niger forgeries:
1) In his interview comments prompted by CNN’s David Ensor on March 8, 2003 (six days before Ensor interviewed VIPS’ Ray Close):
. . .I think it's safe to say that the U.S. government should have or did know that this report was a fake before Dr. ElBaradei mentioned it in his report at the U.N. yesterday.208
Wilson’s later recollection of these comments and their context is also worth repeating:
David Ensor, a CNN national security reporter, happened by. He was looking at the story with an eye out for the perpetrators of the forgeries and asked me what I knew about the Niger uranium business. . .I told Ensor that I would be helpful in his efforts to ferret out the truth, and offered to answer a question or two on the air and to provide leads to him. While I was not willing at that stage to disclose my own involvement, it was not a difficult decision to make, to point others in the right direction. The essential information--the forged documents--was already in the public domain; the State Department spokesman had purposely deceived the public in his response, or else he himself had been deceived. Whichever the case, in my mind it was essential that the record be corrected.
When I went on the air, the CNN newscaster, prompted by Ensor, asked me about the “We fell for it” line. I replied that if the U.S. government checked its files, it would, I believed, discover that it knew more about the case than the spokesman was letting on.209
2) In comments quoted by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times on May 6, 2003 (an article also referencing Seymour Hersh’s “Who Lied to Whom?” and quoting VIPS’ Patrick Lang):
I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged.The envoy reported, for example, that a Niger minister whose signature was on one of the documents had in fact been out of office for more than a decade. In addition, the Niger mining program was structured so that the uranium diversion had been impossible. The envoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted--except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway.210
3) In comments quoted by Walter Pincus in the Washington Post on June 12, 2003 and echoed in articles by Pincus on June 13 and June 22. Pincus reported on June 12:
Armed with information purportedly showing that Iraqi officials had been seeking to buy uranium in Niger one or two years earlier, the CIA in early February 2002 dispatched a retired U.S. ambassador to the country to investigate the claims, according to the senior U.S. officials and the former government official, who is familiar with the event. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity and on condition that the name of the former ambassador not be disclosed.211During his trip, the CIA's envoy spoke with the president of Niger and other Niger officials mentioned as being involved in the Iraqi effort, some of whose signatures purportedly appeared on the documents.
After returning to the United States, the envoy reported to the CIA that the uranium-purchase story was false, the sources said. Among the envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong," the former U.S. government official said.
However, the CIA did not include details of the former ambassador's report and his identity as the source, which would have added to the credibility of his findings, in its intelligence reports that were shared with other government agencies. Instead, the CIA only said that Niger government officials had denied the attempted deal had taken place, a senior administration said.
"This gent made a visit to the region and chatted up his friends," a senior intelligence official said, describing the agency's view of the mission. "He relayed back to us that they said it was not true and that he believed them."
On June 22 Pincus said similarly:
Similar questions have been raised about Bush's statement in his State of the Union address last January that the British had reported Iraq was attempting to buy uranium in Africa, which the president used to back up his assertion that Iraq had a reconstituted nuclear weapons program. In that case, senior U.S. officials said, the CIA 10 months earlier sent a former senior American diplomat to visit Niger who reported that country's officials said they had not made any agreement to aid the sale of uranium to Iraq and indicated documents alleging that were forged.212
4) In his lecture to the EPIC Iraq Forum on June 14, 2003:
. . .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. . . [T]he administration was very careful about only talking, on the forgery, only talking at the Presidential level about uranium sales from Africa, until such time as it came out that they were talking about Niger, and then that was subsequently denied by the State Department, it was difficult to sort of make the case, although I think some of the people inside could have probably talked about it a little bit more openly ahead of time.213
5) In comments quoted by John Judis and Spencer Ackerman in a New Republic article posted online June 19, 2003 and dated June 30, 2003:
One year earlier, Cheney's office had received from the British, via the Italians, documents purporting to show Iraq's purchase of uranium from Niger. Cheney had given the information to the CIA, which in turn asked a prominent diplomat, who had served as ambassador to three African countries, to investigate. He returned after a visit to Niger in February 2002 and reported to the State Department and the CIA that the documents were forgeries. The CIA circulated the ambassador's report to the vice president's office, the ambassador confirms to TNR. But, after a British dossier was released in September detailing the purported uranium purchase, administration officials began citing it anyway, culminating in its inclusion in the State of the Union. "They knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie," the former ambassador tells TNR. "They were unpersuasive about aluminum tubes and added this to make their case more persuasive.". . .After a few weeks of traveling back and forth between Baghdad and Vienna, Baute sat down with the dozen or so pages of U.S. intelligence on Saddam's supposed nuclear procurements--the aluminum tubes, the Niger uranium, and the magnets. In the course of a day, Baute determined, like the ambassador before him, that the Niger document was fraudulent.214
6) In comments quoted by Andrew Buncombe and Raymond Whitaker in the Independent on June 29, 2003:
The retired US ambassador said it was all but impossible that British intelligence had not received his report--drawn up by the CIA--which revealed that documents, purporting to show a deal between Iraq and the west African state of Niger, were forgeries. . .215. . . in his first interview on the issue, the former US diplomat told The Independent on Sunday: "It is hard for me to fathom, that as close as we are and [while] preparing for a war based on [claims about] weapons of mass destruction, that we did not share intelligence of this nature."
Asked if he felt his findings had been ignored for political reasons, he added: "It's an easy conclusion to draw." Though the official's identity is well-known in Washington--he was on the National Security Council under President Clinton--he asked that his name be withheld at this stage. . .
In February 2002, the former diplomat--who had served as an ambassador in Africa--was approached by the CIA to carry out a "discreet" task: to investigate if it was possible that Iraq was buying uranium from Niger. He said the CIA had been asked to find out in a direct request from the office of the Vice-President, Dick Cheney.
During eight days in Niger he discovered it was impossible for Iraq to have been buying the quantities of uranium alleged. "My report was very unequivocal," he said. He also learnt that the signatures of officials vital to any transaction were missing from the documents.
On his return he was debriefed by the CIA. One senior CIA official has told reporters the agency's findings were distributed to the Defence Intelligence Agency, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Justice Department, the FBI and the office of the Vice President on the same day in early March.
Up through the June 29 Independent article, Wilson’s story consistently depicted him exposing the Niger documents as forgeries upon his return from his February 2002 trip, and Wilson consistently gave the impression he had inside knowledge that the government knew the documents were forgeries from that time. This impression was conveyed not only by inferences but also by direction quotations, such as Pincus’ quotation of Wilson saying that the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong", as reported in an article Wilson referenced in his June 14, 2003 EPIC lecture by alluding to “that American ambassador who has been cited in reports in the New York Times and in the Washington Post”.
2. How Wilson’s (and Pincus’) story changed after July 6, 2003
However, starting July 6, 2003, Wilson changed his story, now emphasizing that he never saw the Niger forgeries at the time of his February 2002 trip. His own New York Times article published that day mentioned:
In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake--a form of lightly processed ore--by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990's. . .216(As for the actual memorandum, I never saw it. But news accounts have pointed out that the documents had glaring errors--they were signed, for example, by officials who were no longer in government--and were probably forged. And then there's the fact that Niger formally denied the charges.)
Walter Pincus and his coauthor Richard Leiby kept step with Wilson’s about-face in a Washington Post article published the same day:
217A senior administration official said yesterday that Wilson's mission originated within the CIA's clandestine service after Cheney aides raised questions during a briefing. "It was not orchestrated by the vice president," the official said. He added that it was reported in a routine way, did not mention Wilson's name and did not say anything about forgeries.
Wilson has been interviewed recently by the House and Senate intelligence committees, which are expected to focus on who in the National Security Council and the vice president's office had access to a CIA cable, sent March 9, 2002, that did not name Wilson but said Niger officials had denied the allegations.
Wilson said he went to Niger skeptical, knowing that the structure of the uranium industry--controlled by a consortium of French, Spanish, German and Japanese firms--made it highly unlikely that anyone would officially deal with Iraq because of U.N. sanctions. Wilson never saw the disputed documents but talked with officials whose signatures would have been required and concluded the allegations were almost certainly false.
Wilson likewise told Andrea Mitchell that day:
When I came back from Niger, and debriefed, I had not, of course, seen the documents, but one of the points that I made was if these documents did not contain certain signatures--specifically, the signature of the Minister of Energy and mine and the prime minister--then they could not be authentic.218
Wilson later added in a letter to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee that he forwarded to a website for posting:
The first time I actually saw what were represented as the documents was when Andrea Mitchell, the NBC correspondent, handed them to me in an interview on July 21. I was not wearing my glasses and could not read them. I have to this day not read them. I would have absolutely no reason to claim to have done so. My mission was to look into whether such a transaction took place or could take place. It had not and could not. By definition that makes the documents bogus.219
3. Wilson’s dilemma
Why did Wilson change his story after July 6, 2003 to emphasize that he never saw the forgeries at the time of his Niger trip? As Pincus and Leiby mention, by July 6 Wilson had testified to the House and Senate intelligence committees, which had opened hearings the week of June 15 that Pincus had been following.220 When the Senate committee later reviewed prewar intelligence on Iraq, they asked Wilson about a discrepancy they had found between his public statements and their own investigation of government witnesses and documents, which indicated that not only did Wilson’s original report on his February 2002 Niger trip not mention anything about forgeries, but the US government did not even have the forgeries at that time, since Rocco Martino would not pass them on until October 2002. The body of the Senate’s report summarized Wilson’s response to this when questioned:
The former ambassador also told Committee staff that he was the source of a Washington Post article ("CIA Did Not Share Doubt on Iraq Data; Bush Used Report of Uranium Bid," June 12,2003) which said, "among the Envoy’s conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because ‘the dates were wrong and the names were wrong.'" 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. The former ambassador said that he may have "misspoken" to the reporter when he said he concluded the documents were "forged." He also said he may have become confused about his own recollection after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported in March 2003 that the names and dates on the documents were not correct and may have thought he had seen the names himself. The former ambassador reiterated that he had been able to collect the names of the government officials which should have been on the documents.221
Additional comments attached to the Senate report by its Republican members because the Democrats on the Intelligence Committee would not allow them in the body of the report elaborated:
Conclusion: 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.At the time the former ambassador traveled to Niger, the intelligence community did not have in its possession any actual documents on the alleged Niger-Iraq uranium deal, only second hand reporting of the deal. The former ambassador’s comments to reporters that the Niger-Iraq uranium documents “may have been forged because ‘the dates were wrong and the names were wrong,’” could not have been based on the former ambassador’s actual experiences because the Intelligence Community did not have the documents at the time of the ambassador’s trip. In addition, nothing in the report from the former ambassador’s trip said anything about documents having been forged or the names or dates in the reports having been incorrect. . .Of note, the names and dates in the documents that the IAEA found to be incorrect were not names or dates included in the CIA reports. . .
These and other public comments from the former ambassador, such as his comments that his report “debunked” the Niger-Iraq uranium story, were incorrect and have led to a distortion in the press and in the public’s understanding of the facts surrounding the Niger-Iraq uranium story.222
4. Wilson’s alibi(s)
Wilson and his defenders have used several strategies to try to deflect criticisms raised by the Senate committee’s findings. Their counterarguments will now be considered.
Wilson’s supporter Joshua Marshall has tried to defend him by challenging the Senate committee’s findings, as well as the similar findings of Britain’s Butler Report.223 Marshall argues that British and US intelligence had received a summary of Martino’s forgeries from Italian intelligence by early 2002. To support this argument Marshall cites an article by Dana Priest and Karen DeYoung mentioning a “written summary” of the Niger forgeries.224 He equates this “written summary” with the first of a pair of reports British intelligence received in June 2002 and September 2002, mentioned in Parliamentary inquiry published before the Butler Report.225 He asserts that this “written summary” was “the same summary the Italians had earlier provided to the Americans, which the CIA used to brief Joe Wilson before they sent him off to Niger”.
Marshall seems to be assuming that the forgeries Martino passed on to Elisabetta Burba in October 2002 are identical to documents he had passed on to various intelligence agencies earlier, which is not clear, since it is known that he passed on more than one set of documents at different times to different parties, and likewise, that US intelligence received several different reports about alleged Iraq-Niger interaction, some more detailed than others, and not all based on Martino’s information. But this unsubstantiated assumption is not the most serious flaw in Martino’s argument. A bigger problem is that his theory does not attempt to explain how Wilson was briefed before his February 2002 trip on a written summary that, according to the Parlimentary inquiry Marshall cites, would not be received by British intelligence until June 2002. But even this is not the biggest problem with Marshall’s argument. The fatal flaw in his argument is that in the process of making it, he overlooks the evidence of the Priest and DeYoung article he links as his reference on the “written summary”. The article states:
U.S. intelligence officials said they had not even seen the actual evidence, consisting of supposed government documents from Niger, until last month. The source of their information, and their doubts, officials said, was a written summary provided more than six months ago by the Italian intelligence service, which first obtained the documents.226
This article is dated March 22, 2003, so “more than six months ago” means around September 22, 2002. Therefore this is not a reference to a document used to brief Wilson before his February 2002 trip. So Marshall’s defense does not get Wilson off the hook.
Wilson’s own self-defense while standing before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence took a meeker stance than Marshall’s attack on the SSCI’s facts. Instead Wilson suggested that perhaps he had confused his memory of his Niger trip with information that had become public knowledge after ElBaradei’s March 8, 2003 announcement, and perhaps he had misspoken to Pincus when he said he had concluded the documents were forged after his Niger trip. According to this defense, the fault lies with Wilson’s memory and his choice of words when speaking to reporters.
This sounds plausible in the abstract, but in the concrete it does not hold up against the actual evidence of government documents related to Wilson’s trip and his own statements to reporters. Wilson’s memory might be plausibly blamed if what he told reporters only diverged from the facts by miscellaneous errors of detail that could be traced to media reports, but in fact what he said was made up from whole cloth and cannot be explained by memory confusing his experience what the media was reporting.
Wilson was not sent to Niger because of any suspicions of forged documents raised by names and dates. Such suspicions could have been checked from public records without sending anyone to Niger, just as the IAEA later checked the forgeries with Google, and in fact all names mentioned in the intelligence at issue had already been checked out before Wilson was sent:
On February 18,2002, the embassy in Niger disseminated a cable which reported that the alleged Iraq-Niger uranium deal “provides sufficient detail to warrant another hard look at Niger’s uranium sales. The names of GON [government of Niger] officials cited in the report track closely with those we know to be in those, or closely-related positions. However, the purported 4,000-ton annual production listed is fully 1,000 tons more than the mining companies claim to have produced in 2001.”. . .The cable concluded that despite previous assurances from Nigerien officials that no uranium would be sold to rogue nations, “we should not dismiss out of hand the possibility that some scheme could be, or has been, underway to supply Iraq with yellowcake from here.” The cable also suggested raising the issue with the French, who control the uranium mines in Niger, despite France’s solid assurances that no uranium could be diverted to rogue states.227
What prompted US intelligence to check into the report Wilson was sent to investigate was not names and dates. What was at issue were political and logistical considerations, due to the amount of uranium reported and the likelihood that such an increase in production would require the complicity of a French-controlled mining consortium and Nigerien government officials, and also due to the risk Iraq faced of being caught:
At the time, all IC analysts interviewed by Committee staff considered this initial report to be very limited and lacking needed detail. CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and Department of Energy (DOE) analysts considered the reporting to be "possible" while the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) regarded the report as "highly suspect," primarily because INR analysts did not believe that Niger would be likely to engage in such a transaction and did not believe Niger would be able to transfer uranium to Iraq because a French consortium maintained control of the Nigerien uranium industry. . .228IC analysts at the CIA and the DIA were more impressed with the detail and substance of the second report. One analyst noted that the report provided much more information than they had seen previously in similar reporting about alleged uranium transactions to other countries. INR analysts continued to doubt the accuracy of the reporting, again because they thought Niger would be unwilling and unable to sell uranium to Iraq and because they thought Iraq would be unlikely to risk such a transaction when they were "bound to be caught.’’
Thus Wilson was not sent to check into any names and dates. Accordingly before he left for Niger his CIA briefing did not cover any suspect names and dates he was supposed to check into:
On February 20,2002, CPD provided the former ambassador with talking points for his use with contacts in Niger. The talking points were general, asking officials if Niger had been approached, conducted discussions, or entered into any agreements concerning uranium transfers with any "countries of concern" [1/2 line deleted]. The talking points also focused on whether any uranium might be missing from Niger or might have been transferred and asked how Niger accounts for all of its uranium each year. The talking points did not refer to the specific reporting on the alleged Iraq-Niger uranium deal, did not mention names or dates from the reporting, and did not mention that there was any such deal being reported in intelligence channels. 229
Likewise Wilson’s report back to the CIA upon his return did not discuss any forgeries or suspect names or dates:
. . .nothing in the report from the former ambassador’s trip said anything about documents having been forged or the names or dates in the reports having been incorrect. . . 230
So it is not as if there were any suspect documents, names, or dates involved in Wilson’s trip that his memory could have mixed up with what was reported after ElBaradei’s announcement. Bad memory does not explain why Wilson told CNN a day after ElBaradei’s statement, before there had been any significant reporting for his memory to get confused about, “I think it's safe to say that the U.S. government should have or did know that this report was a fake before Dr. ElBaradei mentioned it in his report at the U.N. yesterday.” It does not explain why Nicholas Kristof reported Wilson saying, “The envoy reported, for example, that a Niger minister whose signature was on one of the documents had in fact been out of office for more than a decade.” It does not explain why Walter Pincus quoted him saying, “the ‘dates were wrong and the names were wrong,’ the former U.S. government official said.” It does not explain why John Judis and Spencer Ackerman reported after interviewing him, “He returned after a visit to Niger in February 2002 and reported to the State Department and the CIA that the documents were forgeries.” It does not explain why Andrew Buncombe and Raymond Whitaker reported after interviewing him, “The retired US ambassador said it was all but impossible that British intelligence had not received his report. . .which revealed that documents. . .were forgeries. . . He also learnt that the signatures of officials vital to any transaction were missing from the documents.” Bad memory does not get Wilson off the hook, either. If he embellished his memories of his actual experience with information he had picked up from the news or other sources, it was not a result of bad memory.
Wilson’s defense that he “misspoke” does not work, either. No one “misspeaks” the same story to four different newspapers over a two-month period.
Away from the scrutiny of Senate cross-examination, Wilson has taken a more aggressive defense, accusing the reporters he spoke to of misquoting him. Asked by Paula Zahn to respond to criticisms based on the Senate committee’s findings, Wilson accused all reporters who quoted him prior to his own July 6, 2003 New York Times article of misquoting him:
I'm not exactly sure what public comments they're referring to. If they're referring to leaks or sources, unidentified government sources in articles that appeared before my article in "The New York Times" appeared, those are either misquotes or misattributions if they're attributed to me.231
This of course is not credible. For one thing, Wilson’s claim that he was misquoted contradicts his admission to the Senate that he was Pincus’ source and his defense that he “misspoke”, which was an implicit admission that Pincus quoted him accurately. For another thing, four professional newspapers do not independently misquote someone exactly the same way, using direct quotations. The score is 4 to 1, and Wilson’s credibility loses that game.
But it is not necessary to rest the case on the already-weighty probability of four independent witnesses against one, because there is also the weight of Wilson’s own words to add to the case. When Wilson spoke to the EPIC Iraq Forum after Kristof and Pincus’ articles had already come out, he had an opportunity to correct the reporters he now alleges misquoted him. Instead he enthusiastically identified himself as the source quoted by those reporters and made no corrections to what they had quoted him saying:
. . .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. . .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.
Later in the same lecture’s follow-up question and answer session, as Ray McGovern was discussing the forgeries, Wilson added,
. . .the administration was very careful about only talking, on the forgery, only talking at the Presidential level about uranium sales from Africa, until such time as it came out that they were talking about Niger, and then that was subsequently denied by the State Department, it was difficult to sort of make the case, although I think some of the people inside could have probably talked about it a little bit more openly ahead of time.232
One wonders what “people inside” Wilson is referring to here. This was at least the second occasion when Wilson had implied inside knowledge about the forgeries. The first was his very first public comments on the forgeries to CNN. Wilson has tried to dissociate his CNN comments from later reporting on his Niger trip by emphasizing that he did not speak about his trip during the interview:
The first time I spoke publicly about the Niger issue was in response to the State Department's disclaimer. On CNN a few days later, in response to a question, I replied that I believed the US government knew more about the issue than the State Department spokesman had let on and that he had misspoken. I did not speak of my trip.233
Indeed, Wilson did not speak of his trip. He spoke about the subject he was prompted to speak on by CNN national security reporter David Ensor: the subject of the Niger forgeries (a subject Ensor, who Wilson says just “happened by”, just happened to be investigating, and just happened to interview VIPS’ Ray Close about a few days later). What Wilson said about that subject is quite interesting:
. . .I think it's safe to say that the U.S. government should have or did know that this report was a fake before Dr. ElBaradei mentioned it in his report at the U.N. yesterday.
Now what is so interesting about Wilson’s comment here is that until ElBaradei’s press conference day before, nobody knew about the forgeries outside a small circle in US intelligence and a few foreign intelligence agencies. Who was included in this circle? Seymour Hersh reported,
Vincent Cannistraro. . .told me that copies of the Burba documents were given to the American Embassy, which passed them on to the C.I.A.'s chief of station in Rome, who forwarded them to Washington. Months later, he said, he telephoned a contact at C.I.A. headquarters and was told that ‘the jury was still out on this’--that is, on the authenticity of the documents.”234
According to Cannistraro’s account, he had to call a contact at CIA headquarters to get information about the forgeries. So how was it that a day after ElBaradei went public, in response to an inquiry about a Washington Post article asked by a CNN reporter who just “happened by” and just happened to be doing an investigation of the forgeries, Joseph Wilson just happened to be there at the scene suggesting, as he characterized his comments in his book, “that if the U.S. government checked its files, it would, I believed, discover that it knew more about the case than the spokesman was letting on”?235
And thus, in a twist of ironic justice, Wilson hangs himself with the first words out of his mouth.
/sarcasm
Ping
So much detail, you seem like the internet version of J. Bower Bell.