While it's not exactly a news flash that Joe Wilson is a self-promoting partisan hack, this story in the Washington Post, (via Andrew Sullivan) pretty much seals the case that he is also a serial liar.
On the matter of whether Wilson's wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame, recommended him for the investigative mission to Niger, apparently it depends on what the definition of the word "recommendation" is:
The report states that a CIA official told the Senate committee that Plame "offered up" Wilson's name for the Niger trip, then on Feb. 12, 2002, sent a memo to a deputy chief in the CIA's Directorate of Operations saying her 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." The next day, the operations official cabled an overseas officer seeking concurrence with the idea of sending Wilson, the report said.Wilson has asserted that his wife was not involved in the decision to send him to Niger.
"Valerie had nothing to do with the matter," Wilson wrote in a memoir published this year. "She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip."
Wilson stood by his assertion in an interview yesterday, saying Plame was not the person who made the decision to send him. Of her memo, he said: "I don't see it as a recommendation to send me."
More importantly, it appears Wilson also lied about the actual substance of his mission and misrepresented his findings:
The report also said Wilson provided misleading information to The Washington Post last June. He said then that he concluded the Niger intelligence was based on documents that had clearly been forged because "the dates were wrong and the names were wrong.""Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the 'dates were wrong and the names were wrong' when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports," the Senate panel said. Wilson told the panel he may have been confused and may have "misspoken" to reporters. The documents -- purported sales agreements between Niger and Iraq -- were not in U.S. hands until eight months after Wilson made his trip to Niger.
Doubtless Wilson would be furious and offended if anyone were to question his patriotism. His trip served its purpose, however. He was able to tell enough lies to temporarily hurt George Bush politically with the "yellowcake" flap from the State of the Union speech, and garner himself enough notoriety to get a book into print. To hell with truth and national security. What a scumbag.
UPDATE 7/10: Power Line comments in "Joe Wilson, Liar" that what Wilson actually told the CIA about his findings is the opposite of what he wrote in his New York Times op-ed:
So: what Wilson actually told the CIA, contrary to his own oft-repeated claims, is that he was told by the former mining minister of Niger that in 1998, Iraq had tried to buy 400 tons of uranium from that country, and that Iraq's overture was renewed the following year. What Wilson reported to the CIA was exactly the same as what President Bush said in his 2003 State of the Union address: there was evidence that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Africa.
Perhaps he just "misspoke".
Posted by dan at July 10, 2004 02:43 PM