By Mark Goldblatt on 7.20.05 @ 12:06AM
Who signed off on Joe Wilson's cushy CIA connections?
There's a more scandalous question hovering in the background of
Valerie Plame affair than whether presidential adviser Karl Rove
intentionally or inadvertently blew the cover of a CIA agent --
namely, the question of how Plame's husband Joe Wilson wound up as
point man to investigate whether Saddam Hussein had tried to
acquire uranium from Africa.
It was Wilson, recall, who claimed in July 2003 op-ed for the
New York Times that the agency had dispatched him to Niger
-- at the personal request, he insinuated, of Vice President Cheney
-- to look into the Iraq-Africa connection. Wilson insisted that
he'd found no link and accused President Bush of lying in his 2003
State of the Union when he said, "The British government has
learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities
of uranium from Africa."
Wilson's conclusion that Iraq had never sought to buy uranium
from Niger, we now know, wasn't borne out by his own sketchy,
hearsay-filled report; indeed, the British government still stands
by the intelligence Bush cited. Wilson, in short, misrepresented
his own findings in order to undermine the re-election of the
president. In the words of Pat Roberts (R. Kansas), chairman of the
Senate Select Intelligence Committee which looked into the matter,
"[Wilson] seems to have included information he learned from press
accounts and from his beliefs about how the intelligence community
would have or should have handled the information he
provided...Time and again Joe Wilson told anyone who would listen
that the president had lied to the American people...and that he
had 'debunked' the claim that Iraq was seeking uranium from
Africa....Not only did he NOT 'debunk' the claim, he actually gave
some intelligence analysts even more reason to believe [the British
report was] true."
Equally troubling, we now know for certain that Wilson was
recommended for the job not by the Vice President but by his own
wife, the aforementioned Plame -- whom Wilson has always vehemently
denied had anything to do with his assignment. Plame told CIA
director George Tenet, in an interagency memo which has been made
public, that her husband was the man for the Niger job because he
"has good relations with the both the PM (prime minister) and the
former Minister of Mines (not to mention a lot of French contacts),
both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of
activity."
The deeper scandal, thus, doesn't involve Rove but the CIA
itself: How did Plame manage to wangle an assignment of such
magnitude for her husband? The agency, after all, signed off on
Wilson's fact-finding expedition...and the guy turned out to be a
congenital liar and partisan moonbat.
Think about that for a moment.
It's not as if Wilson was sent off to investigate the impact of
reggae on Niger's music industry. He was looking into the
possibility that Saddam had sought to acquire uranium for WMDs.
So Plame put in a good word for her husband. How rampant is
nepotism inside the agency? So Wilson had contacts in Niger.
Whatever happened to psych profiles? Heads should have rolled at
the CIA, chief among them Tenet's, the moment Wilson published his
loopy Times op-ed.
If, in the end, Rove's head winds up in the basket, the Bush
Administration will have no one but themselves to blame.
topics:
Iraq, Africa
