Bush's Worst Enemy

posted by ewing2001 on Monday December 29, @02:14PM

Bush's Worst Enemy

Truthout.org -Tuesday 30 December 2003

By William Rivers Pitt -t r u t h o u t | Perspective

When Ambassador Joseph Wilson speaks of the White House, he tries to take the high road. "It's hard to imagine the government being irrational," he told me over the telephone on Monday afternoon, "and revenge is an irrational act." One breath later, however, Wilson showed why the Bush administration has a great deal to be worried about. "If they thought I was going to go away after they raped my wife," said Wilson, "they were dead wrong."

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Wilson best explains who he is in the New York Times editorial he had published on July 6, 2003 entitled 'What I Didn't Find in Africa.' "For 23 years, from 1976 to 1998, I was a career foreign service officer and ambassador," wrote Wilson. "In 1990, as chargé d'affaires in Baghdad, I was the last American diplomat to meet with Saddam Hussein. (I was also a forceful advocate for his removal from Kuwait.) After Iraq, I was President George H. W. Bush's ambassador to Gabon and São Tomé and Príncipe; under President Bill Clinton, I helped direct Africa policy for the National Security Council. It was my experience in Africa that led me to play a small role in the effort to verify information about Africa's suspected link to Iraq's nonconventional weapons programs. Those news stories about that unnamed former envoy who went to Niger? That's me."

July 6, 2003. That's pretty much when the madness began.

Joseph Wilson had been tasked by the CIA, after a request from Vice President Dick Cheney, to travel to Niger and investigate claims that Saddam Hussein had attempted to procure uranium 'yellowcake' from that African nation to develop a nuclear weapons program. He spent several days there in February of 2002 investigating the matter fully, and returned to state flatly that no evidence of such a transaction existed.

"It did not take long to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place," Wilson wrote in his Times editorial. "Given the structure of the consortiums that operated the mines, it would be exceedingly difficult for Niger to transfer uranium to Iraq. Niger's uranium business consists of two mines, Somair and Cominak, which are run by French, Spanish, Japanese, German and Nigerian interests. If the government wanted to remove uranium from a mine, it would have to notify the consortium, which in turn is strictly monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Moreover, because the two mines are closely regulated, quasi-governmental entities, selling uranium would require the approval of the minister of mines, the prime minister and probably the president. In short, there's simply too much oversight over too small an industry for a sale to have transpired."

Before Wilson left Niger, he briefed the American ambassador to that country, availing her of findings that matched her own. He returned to the United States and briefed the CIA on his findings, as well as the State Department. In short, he covered all the bases and returned home to his normal life. Later, it was revealed that the "evidence" used to support the claim that such a transaction had taken place was a pile of crudely forged documents.

In January of 2003, George W. Bush used the debunked Niger uranium claims during his State of the Union address to buttress his argument that war in Iraq was necessary. This begat the "16 words" scandal that burned briefly this summer before disappearing with nary a ripple. Why did the President use grossly inadequate intelligence data in such an important speech? Was it a deliberate attempt to mislead the American public, a deliberate attempt to fill them with the fear of terrorist mushroom clouds from Iraq? Or was it an incredible failure on the part of the National Security apparatus that this flawed and forged data made it into the speech? A 'yes' answer to any of these questions was profoundly unacceptable, which was the motivation for Wilson's editorial on July 6th...

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