The Invisible Man

Joe Wilson’t reaction to the exposure of his three big lies about Saddam’s efforts to buy uranium in Niger and the Congo is to go into hiding; nobody’s seen the normally camera-hungry employee of the Kerry Campaign on TV for a couple of weeks. The reaction of the liberal media is to either to pretend he never existed or to publish mild stories in the back pages about disputed testimony.

Democratic partisans are similarly split, with some playing dumb (“what’s the big deal here?“) and others circling the wagons and trying to mount an actual defense, as odd as that seems.

So how do you defend a guy who’s been caught lying on three major issues:

1. He was recommended for a CIA mission in Africa by his wife, CIA employee Valerie Plame; he said she had nothing to do with it. (see Novak: “Plame sent out an internal CIA memo saying ”my 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.” A State Department analyst told the committee about an inter-agency meeting in 2002 that was ”apparently convened by [Wilson’s] wife, who had the idea to dispatch [him] to use his contacts to sort out the Iraq-Niger uranium issue.””

2. His mission in Africa concerned the narrow question of whether anyone wanted to admit to selling uranium to Saddam illegally; Wilson said he learned enough to assert that Saddam never had tried to buy uranium.

3. Wilson said the President’s 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address on uranium were a lie, but they’ve been confirmed by the Butler report.

It turns out it’s easy to defend this guy as long as you have a bunker mentality and a tin-foil hat. So far, I’ve seen these techniques used:

1. Find something Wilson said that might actually be true and say “see, he didn’t lie.” I got a three page e-mail with a complete chronology of Wilson’s trip to Niger that tried to do that (see this incredible piece of work here.)

2. Find some disagreement over one of Wilson’s lies and say “see, some people think the gun was only hot and not smoking”. A reader does that in comments regarding the Plame memo of recommendation.

3. Change the subject to the outing of Valerie Plame, preferably with fist-pounding and red-faced outrage. This doesn’t work because the name of Wilson’s wife is all part of the story regarding his selection by the CIA and the stories he subsequently told.

4. Blame the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy on the Wilson outing. This is the approach taken by Salon, and it has the virtue of avoiding the subject of Wilson’s lack of credibility. Written by a former press aide to Wesley Clark, this attack is apparently part of a coordinated response.

The scorecard on the “Bush lied, people died” canard is beginning to tilt pretty strongly in favor of “no, he actually didn’t, but you did” as we know that Wilson, Michael Moore, Richard Clarke, and many other Democratic Party attack dogs aren’t credible.

Overcoming the media bias is going to be the prime issue in this year’s presidential election, so I’ll close with Newsweek editor Evan Thomas’ statement that we can’t afford to forget (h/t Blogs for Bush):

There’s one other base here, the media. Let’s talk a little media bias here. The media, I think, wants Kerry to win and I think they’re going to portray Kerry and Edwards I’m talking about the establishment media, not Fox. They’re going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic and there’s going to be this glow about them, collective glow, the two of them, that’s going to be worth maybe 15 points.

It’s going to take a full-scale, Lott-sized effort to get the Wilson story the prominence it deserves.

Here’s an example of some of the deranged obfuscation from the Left in support of Wilson. Note that it’s all tangential to Wilson’s Three Big Lies:

The Butler report does not dispute Joseph Wilson’s findings in his investigation of February, 2002 (reported to the CIA in March, 2002).

All the Butler Commission found was that it could not be DISPROVED that Iraq wanted to or tried, unsuccessfully to obtain uranium from Niger in 1999 — four years before the invasion. The Commission did not find that Iraq had succeeded in obtaining uranium from Niger or that UN sanctions were not working in preventing that result. It did not even find affirmative evidence that the Saddam Hussein’s regime actually tried to obtain uranium, but only that it was a reasonable conclusion to suppose that it did. Again, we are left with the question whether Saddam Hussein’s desire to obtain uranium, a desire that remained unconsummated thanks to UN sanctions, justified an invasion that has led to so much destruction and loss of life.

It helps actually to read the report, which I’ll quote from below. It also helps to remember the chronology of events of which Wilson’s report was a part.

Briefly: Wilson was dispatched to Niger in February, 2002 to determine whether Iraq had signed an agreement of sale to purchase uranium from Niger, not whether the Iraqi regime had “sought” uranium in Africa. Wilson found that Iraq had not signed such an agreement, and the Butler report agrees with his finding.

The issue of the consistency or inconsistency of those 16 words in the State of the Union address was much discussed at the time, with many arguing that the Administration’s statement wasn’t inconsistent with Wilson’s findings. And it wasn’t: Saddam Hussein could have “sought uranium” in Africa without signing an agreement of sale with Niger. The problem was that the statement in the State of the Union address was not supported by the CIA’s intelligence. The address said it came from British intelligence, and it did, but the CIA did not have access to the underlying intelligence. And of course, in context it was far more alarmist than the credible evidence gathered by ANY intelligence service that we know of.

The specific findings of the Butler report were that it was not unreasonable for British intelligence services to have concluded that Saddam Hussein’s regime was trying to buy uranium in Niger, based on 3 factors: first, because Iraqi officials had been to Niger; second, because uranium is Niger’s main export; and third, because intelligence officials could not rule out that the purpose of the Iraqi contacts with Niger were to purchase uranium. In other words, the commission found no actual evidence of efforts to purchase uranium, only some unconfirmed reports that could not be dispoven.

First, a simple chronology of events:

October, 2001: The CIA first began looking into reports that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger. A foreign intelligence service (Britain’s?) had said Niger was planning to ship several tons of uranium ore, called yellowcake, to Iraq. The foreign service told the CIA that the Iraqi sales agreement dated to 1999 and had been approved by Niger’s president.

Feb. 12, 2002, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) issued a report that Niger “signed an agreement to sell 500 tons of uranium a year to Baghdad.”

February, 2002: Joseph Wilson went to Niger at the request of the CIA (which in turn was responding to questions about the DIA report from Cheney) to investigate the information in the DIA report and determine if a sales agreement existed.

March, 2002: Wilson issued his report, stating that he found no evidence that an agreement of sale had been signed and evidence that such an agreement had *not* been signed. He reported that a Nigerien official had been asked by an intermediary if he would meet with an Iraqi about “commercial sales” and that the Nigerien official declined since that would violate UN sanctions. Wilson also found that an agreement of sale (which the DIA had asserted had been signed) would have required the signatures of numerous Nigerien officials.

September, 2002: A British white paper on Iraq stated that Iraq had sought ‘significant amounts of uranium from Africa’, widely understood to refer to Niger. CIA officials told the White House they thought the British claims were exaggerated.

October, 2002: Documents were obtained by the US embassy in Rome purporting to be correspondence between Niger and Iraqi officials. The US State Department shared the documents with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which determined they were fake.

January, 2003: the State of the Union address claiming that Iraq had sought uranium in Africa. After he heard the address, Wilson called a friend at the Africa bureau of the State Department and asked if the reference had been to Niger. The official said he did not know.

March 7, 2003: In an address to the UN Security Council, the director of IAEA stated that “There is no indication that Iraq has attempted to import uranium since 1990.”

June, 2003: Wilson heard State Department spokesman Richard Boucher say that the U.S. had been fooled by bad intelligence; he realized that his report had been ignored and wrote his op-ed piece in the New York Times.

Now, the relevant information from the Butler report.

493. In early 1999, Iraqi officials visited a number of African countries, including Niger. The visit was detected by intelligence, and some details were subsequently confirmed by Iraq. The purpose of the visit was not immediately known. But uranium ore accounts for almost three-quarters of Niger?s exports. Putting this together with past Iraqi purchases of uranium ore from Niger, the limitations faced by the Iraq regime on access to indigenous uranium ore and other evidence of Iraq seeking to restart its nuclear programme, the JIC judged that Iraqi purchase of uranium ore could have been the subject of discussions and noted in an assessment in December 2000 that:

. . . unconfirmed intelligence indicates Iraqi interest in acquiring uranium.
[JIC, 1 December 2000] (emphasis added)

495. During 2002, the UK received further intelligence from additional sources which identified the purpose of the visit to Niger as having been to negotiate the purchase of uranium ore, though there was disagreement as to whether a sale had been agreed and uranium shipped. (emphasis added)

JG note: the report does not state who those sources were or when in 2002 those reports were received.

500. We also note that, because the intelligence evidence was inconclusive, neither the Government?s dossier nor the Prime Minister went on to say that a deal between the Governments of Iraq and Niger for the supply of uranium had been signed, or uranium shipped.

JG note: Joseph Wilson found that no deal had been signed.

501. We have been told that 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, which in its update report to the United Nations Security Council in March 2003 determined that the papers were forgeries:

JG note: This was well after Joseph Wilson completed his investigation and delivered his report.

The investigation was centred on documents provided by a number of States that pointed to an agreement between Niger and Iraq for the sale of uranium to Iraq between 1999 and 2001. The IAEA has discussed these reports with the Governments of Iraq and Niger,both of which have denied that any such activity took place. For its part,Iraq has provided the IAEA with a comprehensive explanation of its relations with Niger,and has described a visit by an Iraqi official to a number of African countries,including Niger, in February 1999,which Iraq thought might have given rise to the reports. The IAEA was able to review correspondence coming from various bodies of the Government of Niger,and to compare the form, format, contents and signatures of that correspondence with those of the alleged procurement-related documentation. Based on thorough analysis,the IAEA has concluded,with the concurrence of outside experts,that these documents,which formed the basis for the reports of recent uranium transactions between Iraq and Niger,are in fact not authentic. We have therefore concluded that these specific allegations are unfounded. [IAEA GOV/INF/2003/10 Annex of 7 March 2003]

JG note: Again, consistent with Wilson’s findings.

502. We have asked the IAEA what were their grounds for concluding that the visit paid by an Iraqi official to Africa was not for the purpose of acquiring uranium. The IAEA said:

. . . the Director General explained in his report dated 7 March 2004 [sic] to the UN Security Council that Iraq ?described the visit by an Iraqi official to a number of African countries,including Niger, in February 1999,which Iraq thought might have given rise to the reports?. On a number of occasions in early 2003,including in a letter dated 1 February 2003,the IAEA requested Iraq to provide details of all meetings held between Iraqi officials and officials from Niger around the year 2000.
The Director of Iraq?s National Monitoring Directorate responded in a letter of 7 February 2003 to the Director of the IAEA?s Iraq Nuclear Verification Office. (It should be noted that at the time of Iraq?s response Iraq had not been provided by the IAEA with any details contained in documents alleging the existence of a uranium contract.)

The Iraqi response referred to above explained that,on 8 February 1999, Mr. Wissam Al Zahawie,Iraq?s then Ambassador to the Holy See,as part of a trip to four African countries,visited Niger as an envoy of the then President of Iraq to Mr. Ibrahim Bare, the then President of Niger,in order to deliver an official invitation for a visit to Iraq, planned for 20 to 30 April 1999. (N.B. Mr. Bare passed away on 9 April 1999.)

According to the Iraqi information,no such presidential visit from Niger to Iraq took place before 2003.

The Iraqi authorities provided the IAEA with excerpts from Mr. Al Zahawie?s travel report to Niger. These excerpts support the above explanation by the Ambassador regarding the purpose of his visit to Niger and do not contain any references to discussions about uranium supply from Niger.

In order to further clarify the matter,the IAEA interviewed Mr. Al Zahawie on 12 February 2003. The information provided by the Ambassador about details about his 1999 trip to Africa also supported the information obtained previously by the Agency on this visit. The demeanour of the Ambassador and the general tone of the interview did not suggest that he was under particular pressure to hide or fabricate
information.

Notwithstanding the information summarized above,and in view of the fact that the IAEA so far has not obtained any other related information than the forged documents,the IAEA is not in the position to demonstrate that Iraq never sought to import uranium in the past. This is the reason why the IAEA only concluded that it had ?no indication that Iraq attempted to import uranium since 1990? but it would ?follow up any additional evidence,if it emerges,relevant to efforts by Iraq to illicitly
import nuclear materials?. So far no such additional information has been obtained by the Agency.

503. From our examination of the intelligence and other material on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa, we have concluded that:

a. It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999.

b. The British Government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium. Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger?s exports, the intelligence was credible.

JG note: In sum, the finding was that it could not be DISPROVED that Iraq tried to obtain uranium from Niger in 1999. The Commission did not find that Iraq had succeeded in obtaining uranium from Niger or that UN sanctions were not working in preventing that result.