[lit-ideas] Re: WaPo: Wilson Lied, Plame's Career Died
- From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 01 Sep 2006 21:54:03 -0400
>>this claim was false? He hadn't debunked them? or, he
had but his report hadn't been circulated to senior admin?
(Or, *both*?)
EY: Both, according to Hitch in 2004. (See paragraph four.)
Plame's Lame Game:
What Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife forgot to tell us
about the yellow-cake scandal.
By Christopher Hitchens
Two recent reports allow us to revisit one of the great
non-stories, and one of the great missed stories, of the
Iraq war argument. The non-story is the alleged martyrdom of
Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Wilson, supposed by many to have
suffered cruel exposure for their commitment to the truth.
The missed story is the increasing evidence that Niger, in
West Africa, was indeed the locus of an illegal trade in
uranium ore for rogue states including Iraq.
The Senate's report on intelligence failures would appear to
confirm that Valerie Plame did recommend her husband Joseph
Wilson for the mission to Niger. In a memo written to a
deputy chief in the CIA's Directorate of Operations, she
asserted that Wilson had "good relations with both the Prime
Minister and the former Minister of Mines [of Niger], not to
mention lots of French contacts." This makes a poor fit with
Wilson's claim, in a recent book, that "Valerie had nothing
to do with the matter. She definitely had not proposed that
I make the trip." (It incidentally seems that she was able
to recommend him for the trip because of the contacts he'd
made on an earlier trip, for which she had also proposed him.)
Wilson's earlier claim to the Washington Post that, in the
CIA reports and documents on the Niger case, "the dates were
wrong and the names were wrong," was also false, according
to the Senate report. The relevant papers were not in CIA
hands until eight months after he made his trip. Wilson now
lamely says he may have "misspoken" on this. (See Susan
Schmidt's article in the July 10 Washington Post.)
Now turn to the front page of the June 28 Financial Times
for a report from the paper's national security
correspondent, Mark Huband. He describes a strong consensus
among European intelligence services that between 1999 and
2001 Niger was engaged in illicit negotiations over the
export of its "yellow cake" uranium ore with North Korea,
Libya, Iraq, Iran, and China. The British intelligence
report on this matter, once cited by President Bush, has
never been disowned or withdrawn by its authors. The bogus
document produced by an Italian con man in October 2002,
which has caused such embarrassment, was therefore more like
a forgery than a fake: It was a fabricated version of a true
bill.
Given the CIA's institutional hostility to the "regime
change" case, the blatantly partisan line taken in public by
Wilson himself, and the high probability that an Iraqi
delegation had at least met with suppliers from Niger, how
wrong was it of Robert Novak to draw attention to the
connection between Plame and Wilson's trip? Or of someone
who knew of it to tell Novak?
The Intelligence Identities Protection Act, notionally
violated by this disclosure, is a ridiculous piece of
legislation to begin with. It relies in practice on a high
standard of proof, effectively requiring that the government
demonstrate that someone knowingly intended to divulge the
identity of an American secret agent operating under cover,
with the intention of harming that agent. The United States
managed to get through World War II and most of the Cold War
without such an act on its books. The obvious disadvantage
of the law, apart from its opacity, is that it could be used
to stifle legitimate inquiry about what the CIA was up to.
Indeed, that was its original intent. It was put forward by
right-wingers who wanted to stifle and if possible arrest
Philip Agee, a defector from the 1970s whose whistle-blowing
book Inside The Company had exposed much CIA wrongdoing. The
act is now being piously cited by liberals to criminalize
the disclosure that someone who shuttles dangerously "under
cover" between Georgetown and Virginia and takes a
surreptitious part in an open public debate, works for the
agency and has a track record on a major issue.
To say this is not to defend the Bush administration, which
typically managed to flourish the only allegation made about
Niger that had been faked, and which did not have the
courage to confront Mr. and Mrs. Wilson in public with their
covert political agenda. But it does draw attention to an
interesting aspect of this whole debate: the increasing
solidarity of the left with the CIA. The agency disliked
Ahmad Chalabi and was institutionally committed to the view
that the Saddam regime in Iraq was a) secular and b)
rationally interested in self-preservation. It repeatedly
overlooked important evidence to the contrary, even as it
failed entirely to infiltrate jihadist groups or to act upon
FBI field reports about their activity within our borders.
Bob Woodward has a marvelous encapsulating anecdote in his
recent book: George Tenet on Sept. 11 saying that he sure
hopes this isn't anything to do with those people acting
suspiciously in the flight schools. ... The case for closing
the CIA and starting again has been overwhelming for some
time. But many liberals lately prefer, for reasons of
opportunism, to take CIA evidence at face value.
I prefer the good old days. It was always alleged against
Philip Agee, quite falsely, that he had identified Richard
Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens who was gunned down
by Greek anarchists in 1975. In fact, Agee had never
mentioned his name in any connection. This did not inhibit
the authors of the Protection Act from going ahead, or
Barbara Bush from saying in her memoirs that Agee had
fingered Welch. I actually contacted Agee at that time,
pointing out that the book was being published in London and
suggesting that he sue. He successfully got Mrs. Bush to
change the wording of her paperback version. But we are
still stuck with the gag law that resulted from the original
defamation, and it is still being invoked to prevent us from
discovering what our single worst federal agency is really
up to.
http://www.slate.com/id/2103795/
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