Observations on the Wilson affair

I had not paid much attention to the huge controversy last summer over the famous “sixteen words” in President Bush’s State of the Union address concerning Iraq’s attempt to buy uranium in Africa, nor, until the last couple of days, much attention to the more recent White House leak controversy which has torn up the capital. But now that I’m looking into it, it is evident from Joseph Wilson’s infamous op-ed in the July 6 New York Times that the tempest he stirred lacks any substantive basis. He established to his (patently unprofessional) satisfaction that Iraq could not have succeeded in purchasing uranium from Niger. He did not establish that Iraq did not attempt to purchase uranium from some other African country. Yet that was the assertion made by British intelligence and referenced in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union. So Wilson’s op-ed, supposedly showing that the administration had ignored his intelligence finding in its supposed rush to war, actually shows no such thing.

Apart from the substantive fraudulence of Wilson’s charge, there are serious unanswered questions concerning his mission to Niger, as discussed by Jed Babbin in NRO:

• Why wasn’t Wilson required to sign a the standard secrecy agreement that provides the Agency the right to approve and censor what the employee may wish to say or write for public consumption?

• Why was Wilson—uncredentialed in the critical areas, and devoted to a political agenda antithetical to the president’s policy—chosen for such an apparently controversial mission?
• Since Wilson made no attempt to talk to certain relevant parties in Niger, why was his verbal report apparently taken at face value? No intelligence professional should have relied on it.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 07, 2003 09:47 AM | Send