I'M AN IDIOT, NOT A LIAR:

"A Little Literary Flair": Joe Wilson wasn't a truth-teller (Matthew Continetti, 07/26/2004, Weekly Standard)

By last October, when Wilson accepted the "Truth-Teller" award, the Niger scandal had taken an unusual turn. The Justice Department was investigating whether an administration official or officials had broken the law by telling columnist Robert Novak in July 2003 that Wilson's wife was a CIA operative. The Justice Department investigation afforded Wilson further media opportunities. He seized them. Appearing for a second time on Meet the Press on October 5, he was asked by Tim Russert, "Was there a suggestion that this was cronyism, that it was your wife who had arranged the mission?"

"I have no idea what they were trying to suggest in this,"Wilson said. "I can only assume that it was nepotism. And I can tell you that when the decision was made, which was made after a briefing and after a gaming out at the agency with the intelligence community, there was nobody in that room when we went through this that I knew." He makes a similar claim in his memoir, The Politics of Truth, published earlier this year: "Valerie could not--and would not if she could--have had anything to do with the CIA decision to ask me to travel to Niamey." And Wilson told liberal blogger Joshua Micah Marshall the same thing, at greater length, in a September 2003 interview:

For those who would assert that somehow [my wife] was involved in this, it just defies logic. At the time, she was the mother of 2-year-old twins. Therefore, sort of sending her husband off on an eight-day trip leaves her with full responsibility for taking care of two screaming 2-year-olds without help, and anybody who is a parent would understand what that means. Anybody who is a mother would understand it even far better.

And yet here, too, the Senate Intelligence Committee found problems with Wilson's story. "Some CPD [Counterproliferation Division] officials could not recall how the office decided to contact [Wilson]," its report says. "However, interviews and documents provided to the Committee indicate that his wife, a CPD employee, suggested his name for the trip." There's more: "The CPD reports officer told Committee staff that the former ambassador's wife 'offered up his name,' and a memorandum to the Deputy Chief of the CPD on February 12, 2002, from the former ambassador's wife, says, '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.'"

Wilson continued to receive uncritical press. Walter Pincus wrote up his October 5 Meet the Press appearance for the Washington Post the next day, and two days after that, Wilson and his wife were the subjects of another gauzy Washington Post profile by Richard Leiby and Dana Priest. In January 2004 came Vicky Ward's 7,000-word profile of the couple in Vanity Fair. In May 2004, when Wilson's book was released, he appeared once more on Meet the Press, where he scolded Tim Russert:

"Remember," he said, "when you talk about [being] partisan, what I did was my civic duty to hold my government to account for what it had said, a pattern of deception to the Congress of the United States and the American people, including these 16 words in the State of the Union address"--in which the president said Iraq had been seeking uranium for its weapons program in Africa. He paused. "I did not put those 16 words in the State of the Union address. Indeed, had the president heeded the report that I and others had submitted, had the vice president heeded what the CIA briefer had told him, had the national security adviser and her deputy remembered the two memoranda and the telephone call relating to this particular subject, that line might not have been in the president's State of the Union address."

His eyes grew wide with fury.

"Either they were derelict or they were deceptive."

According to the conclusions of Sen. Pat Roberts, the words "derelict" and "deceptive" might better describe Joe Wilson:

During Mr. Wilson's media blitz, he appeared on more than thirty television shows including entertainment venues. Time and again, Joe Wilson told anyone who would listen that the President had lied to the American people, that the Vice President had lied, and that he had "debunked" the claim that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa. As discussed in the Niger section of the report, not only did he NOT "debunk" the claim, he actually gave some intelligence analysts even more reason to believe that it may be true. I believed very strongly that it was important for the Committee to conclude publicly that many of the statements made by Ambassador Wilson were not only incorrect, but had no basis in fact. . . . .

The former Ambassador, either by design or through ignorance, gave the American people and, for that matter, the world a version of events that was inaccurate, unsubstantiated, and misleading.

Pretty much a low point in your life when you hope folks conclude that you're ignorant, rather than the alternative.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 18, 2004 11:27 AM