Posted by
Chestertonrules on Monday, March 26, 2007 11:17:40 AM
DISTORTION:
"The vice president's office asked a serious question. I was asked to help formulate the answer"
July 6, 2003 issue of The New York Times
REALITY:
The report states that a CIA official told the Senate committee that Plame "offered up" Wilson's name for the Niger trip, then on Feb. 12, 2002, sent a memo to a deputy chief in the CIA's Directorate of Operations saying her husband "has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity." The next day, the operations official cabled an overseas officer seeking concurrence with the idea of sending Wilson, the report said.
Wilson has asserted that his wife was not involved in the decision to send him to Niger.
"Valerie had nothing to do with the matter," Wilson wrote in a memoir published this year. "She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39834-2004Jul9.html
DISTORTION:
The office of the vice president, I am absolutely convinced, received a very specific response to the question it asked and that response was based upon my trip out there.
July 6th 2003 Meet the Press
REALITY:
George Tenet, the director of the CIA during Wilson's trip, has said that the administration was not directly briefed on Wilson's report "because this report, in our view, did not resolve whether Iraq was or was not seeking uranium from abroad, it was given a normal and wide distribution (within the intelligence community), but we did not brief it to the President, Vice-President or other senior Administration officials."
Official press release, Central Intelligence Agency July 11, 2003.
DISTORTION:
Then, in January, President Bush, citing the British dossier, repeated the charges about Iraqi efforts to buy uranium from Africa.
The next day, I reminded a friend at the State Department of my trip and suggested that if the president had been referring to Niger, then his conclusion was not borne out by the facts as I understood them.
Joe Wilson: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/opinion/06WILS.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5007&en=6c6aeb1ce960dec0&ex=1372824000&partner=USERLAND
REALITY:
The same former official also said that in June 1999 a businessman approached him and insisted that the former official meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss “expanding commercial relations” between Iraq and Niger. The former official interpreted the overture as an attempt to discuss uranium sales.
An intermediary came to this official, and said, “I want you to meet with these guys. They’re interested in talking about expanding commercial relations.” The person who talked to me said, “Red flags went up immediately, I thought of U.N. Security Council sanctions, I thought of all sorts of other reasons why we didn’t want to have any meeting. I declined the meeting,” and this was out of the country, on the margins of an OIC meeting.
Joe Wilson: October 5, 2003 on Meet the Press
and...
The report also said Wilson provided misleading information to The Washington Post last June. He said then that he concluded the Niger intelligence was based on documents that had clearly 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 Senate panel said. Wilson told the panel he may have been confused and may have "misspoken" to reporters. The documents -- purported sales agreements between Niger and Iraq -- were not in U.S. hands until eight months after Wilson made his trip to Niger.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39834-2004Jul9.html