This really took off when the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) report - you know, the one that said everything was the CIA's fault and the White House didn't have one silly blessed little thing to do with any screwups - went out of its way to attack Wilson, claiming that he got the assignment to go to Niger because of his wife, outed CIA agent Valerie Plame, that he repeatedly claimed more than he could know, and that he claimed The Big Dick Cheney had been briefed on the matter, which wasn't true.
When I say out of its way, I mean it. None of this really had anything to do with the Committee's work and could have easily been ignored without damage to its, uh, "findings." That a deliberate point was made of calling Wilson, in effect, a liar who got the Niger gig only through nepotism - thus challenging not only his honesty but his qualifications for the job - says that there's a broader point here.
And that could be, of course, the desperate search for an ex post facto justification for attacking Iraq. We found no WMDs. No WMD programs. No collaboration with al-Qaeda. No involvement in 9/11. No giving weapons to terrorists. No threat. After falling back on the "we brought them freedom" line, it now appears that ultimately there may not even be that, neither "democracy" nor even something we could manage to label as some kind of form of it.
But there's a subtler, darker purpose that I think is closer to the mark: By seeking to discredit Wilson and thus by extension Plame, the GOPpers want to take the heat off of the investigation of who illegally leaked Plame's CIA role. As Josh Marshall, who practically owns the Plame story, has noted, there are already noises being made to the effect. As a Washington Post story he quoted on July 10 has it,
[t]he report may bolster the rationale that administration officials provided the information not to intentionally expose an undercover CIA employee, but to call into question Wilson's bona fides as an investigator into trafficking of weapons of mass destruction.That, of course, is utter nonsense - as Marshall says, "there's no 'challenging the bona fides of a political opponent' exception to the law in question" - but it's apparently the best the GOPpers can come up with.
What makes this distressing rather than amusing is how some people who should know better have bought into the character assassination. For example, Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler, who apparently never liked Wilson, seems unfortunately eager to take the chance to gloat, saying "we warned you last year!"
After the SSCI released its report, Wilson wrote a reply to the claims about him, which was published in Salon; he also had a brief recap in the Washington Post. Some of Somerby's readers forwarded those to him and now he's taken an entire column to nitpick at Wilson's response and repeatedly condescend to his readers, who "didn't know" such and such or "didn't read" this and that, the overweening attitude being that his readers are, compared to him, simply too ignorant to make judgments.
For example, he makes much out of a memo included in the report in which Plame notes Wilson's credentials for the Niger trip and contrasts that to Wilson's statement that she had nothing to do with his selection. But he fails to mention the fact that Plame's superiors have insisted all along that she did not propose Wilson but was asked about the idea after it had already come up. Nor did she have the authority to assign him. That is, in effect what happened is that his name came up and she was asked if he'd take the job and she responded to the effect of "Yeah! I think he'd be great!"
Now, in that light it can be argued that Wilson's statement that she had "nothing to do" with his selection may be an overstatement because certainly an endorsement of an idea may serve to advance it. But since the charge being made and responded to was not that she endorsed his selection but that she was directly responsible for it, which she flatly was not, Wilson's description seems to me entirely fair. But to Somerby, it's "fudging of facts." Nonsense.
It's also nonsense to argue, as Somerby does, that Wilson is again "fudging" in reference to a February 19, 2002 meeting in which the issue of a Niger trip was broached with him. By accepted accounts, Plame brought Wilson into the meeting, introduced him, and left to avoid an appearance of conflict. (Somerby himself notes that the SSCI report quotes Plame as saying she was in the meeting for "about three minutes.") So what is the claimed conflict? It's that Wilson said in his book and his Washington Post piece that Plame wasn't at the meeting.
Huh? I have to say that if I was Plame and someone asked me later in normal conversation (i.e., not sworn testimony where you want to be precise with small details, even irrelevant ones) if I'd been at that meeting, I would have said no, in the same way that I wouldn't feel it proper for someone to arrive at work at 9am, leave at 9:03, then go around saying "I went to work today." To say there's some kind of "fudging" going on here is, to quote one of Somerby's favorite words, clownish.
A good deal of Somerby's column is like that, parsing Wilson's words like a trial attorney aggressively cross-examining a hostile witness. "Here, you said the box was about 140-150 centimeters long. But now you say it was about 145 centimeters long! Why can't you get your story straight? Why do you keep changing your answers?"
Then there's the matter of the forged documents. The report and Somerby lash out at Wilson for supposedly having told Walter Pincus of the Washington Post that
he had determined, as part of his trip, that the famous Niger documents were forged. The problem: Wilson had never seen these forged documents. Indeed, the documents weren’t even in US hands when he took his trip to Niger.Aha! We're supposed to cry out! Gotcha!
Except for this, which again is something Somerby does not mention: The US didn't have the actual documents, but it did have a written summary provided by the Italians - a summary that the CIA used to brief Wilson prior to his trip. He hadn't seen the documents, but he was fully aware of what they said. If Wilson concluded, as he did, that there was no way the described transaction could have taken place, that no credence should be given to the claim that Iraq tried to buy yellowcake from Niger, then the documents saying that it did could not be true.
Now, in fairness, which is more than Somerby is willing to extend to Wilson, Wilson could not have concluded the documents were forged, merely that they were clearly wrong, and he's admitted that when he gave Pincus the interview, three months after the International Atomic Energy Agency had declared the documents an inept, transparent forgery, he may have gotten confused between what he knew then and what he had concluded from his trip a year earlier. To Somerby, however, this is not possibly a mistake: It's "absurd on its face." (I note that calling something absurd on its face absolves the claimant from the sometimes-awkward necessity of providing logical or factual proof, and indeed Somerby offers none.)
In the course of his column, Somerby at least three times refers to the report as "unanimous." That is either a distortion or gross sloppiness. As Josh Marshall pointed out on Sunday,
on the Wilson-Niger matter it's not unfair to identify this as a Republican document since the Democrats did not agree with the majority's conclusions on this matter. Indeed, as the Republicans themselves (specifically Sens. Roberts, Bond and Hatch) complained in their 'additional views' (p. 442) section, "Despite our hard and successful work to deliver a unanimous report ... there were two issues on which the Republicans and Democrats could not agree: 1) whether the Committee should conclude that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's public statements were not based on knowledge he actually possessed, and 2) whether the Committee should conclude that it was the former ambassador's wife who recommended him for his trip to Niger."That is, the report itself says it was not unanimous on the very points Somerby is addressing! Apparently, it's not only Somerby's readers who can't read.
Then, on the question of if Cheney got briefed, the report says he didn't. In an interview with Wolf Blitzer, Wilson accepted that but said he was "surprised" because briefing Cheney would have been a normal part of "the way government works." (Particularly true here since it was a question raised by Cheney that lead to the Niger trip in the first place.) Even though Somerby himself refers to it as Wilson's "assumption," admitting that Wilson never said Cheney was briefed but rather that he believed the VP must have been in the normal course of events, our indefatigable nitpicker calls Wilson's acknowledgment "an adjustment" and "zig-zagging." If we're to accept Somerby, Wilson is so dishonest that even an admission of error is an example of it.
Believe it or not, it gets worse. Descending from absurdity into inanity, Somerby takes on the report's claim that "for most analysts, the information in the report lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal." Wilson disputes that conclusion and cites 11 examples from the body of the report that contradict it. (And, it's worth remembering, Wilson's view is the one that came to be accepted, even by those who may have initially had doubts.) So how does Somerby try to body slam Wilson? First by not mentioning a single example Wilson points to and then by repeating back exactly the assertion Wilson disputes! He says this was adopted "unanimously" by the committee as if that ended all discussion - despite the fact that, as Wilson shows, the report itself does not sustain the conclusion.
But all this childish nitpicking idiocy is just to get to Somerby's real target: Wilson says he never claimed to have "debunked" the claim that Iraq sought uranium ore from Africa. Gasp! Horrors! OMIGOD! "Take a seat. Strap yourselves in. Try to believe that he said it." It's an "amazing new admission."
Well, did he claim to have debunked it? So far as I'm aware, he didn't and Somerby never says otherwise. Instead, he blusters "what has the last year been about if Wilson didn't claim to debunk Bush's claim?" For someone whose usual undertaking is to point out how the press misinterprets and distorts what people actually say in service of a media theme - he still trembles with righteous indignation about press treatment of his hero, Al Gore, in the 2000 election - that's a truly odd (not to say self-serving, not to say intellectually bogus) position to take.
Of course, Wilson could not have claimed to have debunked a claim about Iraq seeking ore from Africa. He could only speak about Niger, not the whole continent. Somerby's floundering efforts to prove Wilson said something he actually didn't improperly and misleadingly conflate both Niger with the whole of Africa and what Wilson claimed to have proved himself with what he argued based on all public sources of information.
To sum up in one sentence: Somerby's argument is trash.
And so is the conclusion all of this is evidently intended to reach:
Was Bush's claim [about Iraq seeking uranium from Africa] false? We still don't know — and neither does Wilson!Bullshit. Utter bullshit. Yes, we do know it was false. We do know it was bogus. We know because if there was any chance it was true, the White House would not have admitted it shouldn't have been in the State of the Union address the day after Wilson's New York Times article appeared. We know because the only documents known at the time or that have turned up since indicating such efforts were the clumsy forgeries. We know because as the report itself notes (page 56), the CIA said at the time, "the Iraqis already have 550 metric tons of uranium oxide in their inventory." We know because there is no evidence of an active Iraqi nuclear program anywhere around that time or in fact for several years before.
The very most that can be said is that there were a couple of feelers which may or may not have had to do with uranium ore and if they did may have had to do with some possible dealings at some point in the future. Note that the prime minister of Niger said he "assumed" uranium is what Iraq wanted to talk about but despite having met with an Iraqi delegation, has given no indication the subject ever came up. In short, vapor.
We don't know? Only in the sense that we "don't know" if Bob Somerby is actually a sleeper agent for North Korea and we "don't know" if the Detroit Pistons were secretly replaced with basketball-playing androids. Back here in the real world, where tinfoil is wrapped around sandwiches, not heads, we do know.
Not long ago, I emailed Somerby about something he wrote, suggesting an aspect he hadn't covered that while going beyond his usual focus of how the media deals with issues, I thought merited a mention. He replied that he would be satisfied just to see some accurate reporting.
Would that he practiced what he preached.
Updated to add some links.
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