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*snip* Memory can be unreliable, and misstatements can happen despite pure intentions. It's only fair game to point this out. So say Valerie Plame Wilson, former CIA case manager and Vanity Fair cover girl, and her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, former ambassador to Gabon and extravagant self-promoter. Too bad the Wilsons, a power-mad federal prosecutor, an officious federal judge, a confused jury and a badly misled president wouldn't apply those same common-sense considerations to I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, wrongly convicted of perjury in the case stemming from State Department official Richard Armitage's public identification of Mrs. Wilson as a...

On Saturday, March 8, 2003, CNN’s Renay San Miguel interviewed Joe Wilson.   CNN SATURDAYInterview With Joseph WilsonAired March 8, 2003 - 15:00 ETSAN MIGUEL: How could this happen? It is the perception that documents like these are vetted to within an inch of their life by intelligence agencies. How do you think this managed to slip by?WILSON: Well, this particular case is outrageous. I actually started my foreign service career in Niger and ended my foreign service career doing -- in charge of Africa in the Clinton White House. We know a lot about the uranium business in Niger,...

ON TUESDAY, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald had to take back a key sentence in a brief he had filed earlier with the court concerning charges against Scooter Libby, former top aide to Veep Dick Cheney, for perjury and obstruction of justice in the investigation into who leaked the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame. That sentence had spawned a spate of page-one Bush-bad stories. Fitzgerald had written that President Bush had authorized Libby to tell former New York Times reporter Judith Miller about intelligence involving Saddam Hussein's attempts to procure enriched uranium in Niger, and that Libby understood he should...

Who blinked first? Why did the Times get scooped last night? How come no one seems to know that Miller also turned over notes? Why didn't she accept Scooter's waiver months ago? And more. So who blinked first in the Pat and Judy Show: the federal prosecutor or the jailed journalist? This is among a host of questions raised by Judith Miller's sudden prison breakout after cutting a deal with prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald. Did Miller cave, close to the end of the Plame grand jury's current term, because she feared that Fitzgerald would extend the term for many months?...

The Italian businessman at the centre of a furious row between France and Italy over whose intelligence service was to blame for bogus documents suggesting Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy material for nuclear bombs has admitted that he was in the pay of France.The man, identified by an Italian news agency as Rocco Martino, was the subject of a Telegraph article earlier this month in which he was referred to by his intelligence codename, "Giacomo". His admission to investigating magistrates in Rome on Friday apparently confirms suggestions that - by commissioning "Giacomo" to procure and circulate documents - France...

THE FACTS KEEP “DRIBBLING” ON WILSON’S PARADEDropped By The National Media Now That His Claims Have Been Debunked, Wilson Tells His Story To “The Georgetowner”______________________________________________________________JOSEPH WILSON: “It’ll take a little while to get on top of it. But it will also encourage people for the facts to come dribbling out. And, as they come dribbling out, it will rebound against the administration.”  (Beth Solomon, “High Value Target,” The Georgetowner, 7/21/04)HERE ARE SOME FACTS WILSON DIDN’T LIKE “DRIBBLING” OUT Senate Intelligence Committee Unanimously Concluded That Wilson’s Report “Lent More Credibility” To CIA Reports On Iraqi Attempts To Purchase Uranium From Africa. ...

Media Bias: When ex-diplomat Joseph Wilson said President Bush lied, it set off a media stampede. When he turned out to be wrong, the hoofbeats fell silent. In fact, as the chart below shows, that might be an understatement. The coverage is so one-sided that you might think something was at work here — something like, say, extreme media bias.For a recap, the CIA sent Wilson to Niger to look into charges that Iraq's dictator Saddam Hussein sought nuclear materials from Africa. Wilson reported that, no, Saddam hadn't; it was all a fraud. For some, that was enough to debunk...

Wilson finally shows on the News Hour: Senator Kit Bond directly calls him a liar, suggests Wilson should apologize to President Bush and Vice President Cheney And it was worth the wait. He did everything he could to avoid answering any of the direct charges and allegations, equivocating, changing the subject, and throwing up as many straw man distractions as his time allowed. The audio of the often outrageous, often hilarious and wholly pathetic performance may be found here. Wilson was interviewed by Margaret Warner, who at one point was almost trying to help him out by throwing him a...

Josh Marshall Pounds the Table As Joe Wilson's credibility has collapsed, David Corn has been silent. Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman has gone back to attacking his old employer. But Wilson has one defender left: blogger Josh Marshall, whose efforts to keep alive the Valerie Plame kerfuffle increasingly remind us of Mike Kinsley's defense of monkeyfishing. We beg your indulgence as we quote Marshall's latest posting on the subject in full, though in two parts (the bracketed explanations are ours): There's been a rush of egregious commentary about the Niger uranium story in the last couple days. And one point...

Joe Wilson wasn't a truth-teller.ONE DAY LAST OCTOBER, Ambassador Joe Wilson, his wife Valerie in tow, traveled to the National Press Club in downtown Washington, D.C., for lunch. It was a big day for Wilson. He was the guest of honor at a banquet thrown by the Nation Institute, which publishes the Nation, the venerable lefty weekly. Daniel Ellsberg was there. So was New Jersey senator Jon Corzine. Towards the end of lunch, plates of cold salad shunted aside, Wilson was invited onstage. Looking the part of a globetrotting former diplomat in his Zegna suit and trademark Hermès tie, he...

The `Plame' truth: That Joe Wilson lied By Boston Herald Editorial Staff Sunday, July 18, 2004 It's a good thing former Ambassador Joseph Wilson took advantage of his 15 minutes of fame and already published his book bashing President Bush [related, bio], ironically entitled the ``Politics of Truth.'' It's not the best marketing strategy to have two governments essentially call the author a liar. The Senate Intelligence Committee report released last week about intelligence missteps leading up to the war in Iraq were crystal clear about Wilson's falsehoods. Wilson's insistence that his wife, CIA operative Valerie Plame, had nothing to...

Were those infamous 16 words correct after all? It has been a year and a half since President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, in which he suggested in a single sentence that Iraq might have been trying to acquire uranium in Africa for its nuclear weapons program. And it has been a year since the White House and the C.I.A. acknowledged that the evidence behind that assertion was flawed, opening Mr. Bush to a torrent of criticism about the credibility and reliability of the intelligence he used to justify toppling Saddam Hussein. But now two new reports have...

Something to Yak About – Calling Joe WilsonAnd no, we’re not talking about the Gentleman from South Carolina here, we’re talking about disgraced Kerry henchman Joe Wilson, whose mug was virtually ubiquitous on the talking head circuit when he was accusing the president and most of his administration of all kinds of malfeasance regarding pre-war Iraq intelligence. But now that Joe’s been exposed as a liar, he’s somewhere deep in the tall grass. Try this on for size – Google ‘Joe Wilson’ and ‘Niger,’ and see how many current news items return. It’s fun for the entire family! When a...

So now the British government has published its own inquiry into the intelligence behind the invasion of Iraq, with equally devastating implications for the credibility of the Bush-Blair "lied" crowd. Like last week's 511-page document from the Senate Intelligence Committee, the exhaustive British study found some flawed intelligence but no evidence of "deliberate distortion." Inquiry leader Lord Butler told reporters that Prime Minister Tony Blair had "acted in good faith." What's more, Lord Butler was not ready to dismiss Saddam Hussein as a threat merely because no large "stockpiles" of weapons of mass destruction have been found. The report concludes...

So now the British government has published its own inquiry into the intelligence behind the invasion of Iraq, with equally devastating implications for the credibility of the Bush-Blair "lied" crowd. Like last week's 511-page document from the Senate Intelligence Committee, the exhaustive British study found some flawed intelligence but no evidence of "deliberate distortion." Inquiry leader Lord Butler told reporters that Prime Minister Tony Blair had "acted in good faith." What's more, Lord Butler was not ready to dismiss Saddam Hussein as a threat merely because no large "stockpiles" of weapons of mass destruction have been found. The report concludes...

WASHINGTON -- Like Sherlock Holmes's dog that did not bark, the most remarkable aspect of last week's Senate Intelligence Committee report is what its Democratic members did not say. They did not dissent from the committee's findings that Iraq apparently asked about buying yellowcake uranium from Niger. They neither agreed to a conclusion that former diplomat Joseph Wilson was suggested for a mission to Niger by his CIA employee wife nor defended his statements to the contrary. Wilson's activities constituted the only aspects of the yearlong investigation for which the committee's Republican chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts, was unable to win unanimous...

When President Bush made his surprise visit to the troops in Baghdad last Thanksgiving, he stood in the serving line and helped serve the soldiers their meals before joining them for Thanksgiving dinner. The trip boosted the President's popularitiy because of its daring and the fact that it highlighted Bush's concern for the troops, and their affection for him. This photo of President Bush in the Baghdad dining hall with a Thanksgiving turkey was widely circulated: Anxious to undercut the Baghdad trip's impact with the public, liberal journalists began circulating the false story that the bird Bush had been photographed...

Illicit sales of uranium from Niger were being negotiated with five states including Iraq at least three years before the US-led invasion, senior European intelligence officials have told the Financial Times. Intelligence officers learned between 1999 and 2001 that uranium smugglers planned to sell illicitly mined Nigerien uranium ore, or refined ore called yellow cake, to Iran, Libya, China, North Korea and Iraq. These claims support the assertion made in the British government dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programme in September 2002 that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from an African country, confirmed later as Niger. George...