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Joseph Wilson’s War on Bush: Why is this a Top Story on my Television?Uranium ore is currently being mined in Niger. It is a more valuable thing than oil to people who wish to manufacture a rogue nuclear weapon, because purchasing it skips the long and difficult process of mining for it. For those of us who know that Iraq has historically wanted to build a nuclear arsenal and that a nuclear centrifuge for the separation of uranium was recently found in Iraq, it isn’t much of a stretch to believe that Saddam Hussein may have once sought to buy some of Niger’s uranium ore.However, when President Bush first started suggesting that Iraq was a threat to our security because of her ongoing WMD program, the only evidence the US had in terms of Iraq and Niger consisted of forged Italian documents that had been passed on from Britain. Vice President Dick Cheney, seeking to alleviate any fears that these phony documents might be pointing to a real threat, asked the CIA to send somebody to Niger to investigate the possibility that Saddam Hussein may have attempted to get his hands on her uranium. The CIA chose to send Joseph C. Wilson IV. A former ambassador to both Niger and Iraq, he seems like a logical choice for the operation, until one notices that Wilson is a retired diplomat with no investigatory experience, writes for a left-wing paper called Nation, is and has been a very vocal opponent of President Bush from the beginning, is an “adjunct scholar” for the pro-Saudi Middle East Institute, was a campaign contributor to Al Gore, is a campaign contributor to John Kerry, was a keynote speaker for a group called Education for Peace in Iraq that wanted to end sanctions and no-fly zones in Iraq before the war, and was a Clinton appointee to the National Security Council. While I firmly believe that a man should not be unduly judged for his political leanings, Wilson has enough political bias to short circuit Rush Limbaugh’s golden E.I.B. microphone. Therefore, it came as no surprise to anyone that, when Wilson returned from his eight days of “drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people” in Niger, he proclaimed that he could find no evidence of a uranium transaction with Iraq. And then sixteen now-infamous words appeared in President Bush’s State of the Union Address this year: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Suddenly (or, at least, five or six months later, when it was more politically opportune), Wilson and others like him were complaining that those sixteen words were a lie to the American people, used to justify what they considered to be an unjustifiable war. While it is true that the US evidence consisted of nothing more than phony Italian documents and the report of Joseph Wilson, President Bush did not cite that evidence; he cited British intelligence. British intelligence has confirmed that the Italian documents are bad forgeries, that they were passed on to Britain by a reporter who couldn’t use them because of their obvious inauthenticity. However, Britain stands by her assessment, to this day, even amidst political scandals over Iraq that make the ones in the US seem trivial, that Saddam Hussein attempted to buy some of Niger’s uranium ore. They justify it through mutually exclusive evidence that has not been shared with the US, evidence that has since been independently checked and confirmed. Therefore, when the president states that British intelligence believes that Iraq has tried to get uranium from Africa, he is telling the absolute truth. So the scandal failed to hold water, despite the desperate attempts of a willing media machine trying to hold it up for superficial scrutiny. Alas, the scandal is still not over, despite the fact that Iraq has been invaded, a nuclear centrifuge has been found there, and an independent investigation in Britain has confirmed that Hussein looked to Niger for uranium. Once again, it is Joseph C. Wilson IV pointing his finger, this time at Karl Rove and the White House. Call me crazy, but I think he’s hoping he can turn this into the next Watergate, or, at the very least, an independent investigation that will wind up lasting throughout Bush's re-election campaign. The claim is that his wife is a covert operative working for the CIA and that her identity, which was supposedly a tightly-kept secret, was leaked to Republican columnist Robert Novak by the White House as vengeance for the State of the Union Address scandal. By doing this, the White House broke the law and did serious damage to Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame. Let’s examine this claim one premise at a time. 1) Valerie Plame is a covert operative working for the CIA. While it is true that Plame works for the CIA, she is being cited as an analyst, not an operative. When asked about this by CNN anchor Paula Zahn, Wilson expertly evaded the question, saying that Novak should know the difference between an operative and an analyst and that his article used the word “operative,” but Wilson has never confirmed that his wife is or is not an operative. 2) Her identity is a tightly-kept secret. Many people are questioning this, including Clifford D. May, writer for the Republican National Review, and, of course, Robert Novak. Novak points out, in a column published this morning, that her name appeared in Wilson’s Who’s Who in America entry. Besides, if it is such a huge and important secret, Wilson wouldn’t have come forward in July, when the public had never really heard of him, and he certainly wouldn’t be turning this into front-page news today. I’d be willing to bet that the only reason you know the name Valerie Plame is because of the current scandal started by Wilson, not because of Robert Novak’s column. If you really want to know if her identity was secret, ask her friends and family if they knew she worked for the CIA (why isn’t anybody doing this?!). 3) Her name was leaked by the White House. Novak claims that Plame’s name was not given to him, but that he already knew about her when he talked to senior administration officials in preparation for his article naming her. The White House also denies that it leaked her identity and is perfectly happy to let the Justice Department investigate the matter. Of course, several unnamed sources are claiming that other unnamed sources from the administration leaked the information, but that they, the unnamed few, had more journalistic integrity than Robert Novak. 4) Leaking her name is a violation of the law. The Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 provides that it is a federal crime, punishable by up to 10 years in prison and as much as a $50,000 fine, to reveal the identity of a covert agent. However, if Plame is not an operative but an analyst, the act does not apply. Therefore, leaking her name is a violation of law only if the first premise, that she is a covert agent, is proven to be true. 5) Her name appearing in Novak’s column caused serious damage to her. When asked if this were true, Wilson stumbled, “I don’t know ... But I’m not -- we have not been the recipients of any general threats or even -- or specific threats.” In short, this entire scandal is a house of cards, an illusion of smoke and mirrors predicated on the word of a man whose word should not be trusted. This entire thing is wrapped up in so many politics that the true point of it all has been lost eons ago. If you ask me, there is a story in this, but it has nothing to do with the Bush administration, Valerie Plame, Joseph Wilson, Robert Novak, or Karl Rove. This is a story about how easy it is to play the mainstream into seeing a scandal where there is none, how easily lead people are by sound bites and baseless accusations of corruption, and also how we can see, just beneath the surface of the news, the drive of people so blinded by political paranoia and domestic hatred that they disregard the truth in favor of arrogant assumptions and insinuations. I’d be willing to bet that, despite it all, there was once a man who came to Niger from Iraq, a diplomat with a bunch of money who tried to bribe a miner into giving him access to some Nigerian ore. When even the UN acknowledges that uranium was the only missing component of Iraq’s nuclear arsenal, can we really afford to be at each other’s throats over an issue of such pointless minutia when it is possible--just possible--that some Nigerian miner who has no problems lying to a visiting American diplomat is a few hundred thousand dollars richer? (This list does not represent the entirety of my research on this subject) -e. magill, 10/1/2003 |
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