In the wake of the indictment of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Joe Wilson was everywhere on TV: on "60 Minutes," which did all but elevate him to sainthood, and on just about every other cable and network show, all of which glorified him as a modern-day Nathan Hale who barely escaped being executed by the evil Mr. Libby and his alleged – but un-indicted – partner in a non-crime, Karl Rove. About the only programs that didn't canonize him were "Sesame Street" and "Desperate Housewives."
Wilson was portrayed as a straight-arrow whistle-blower who risked his own and his wife's safety and reputations to alert America that we had been had by George Bush and his cabal of co-conspirators, who he charges had lied egregiously to get us to go to war.
The problem with that portrait is the undisputed fact that it is the elegantly coiffured Mr. Wilson who is the liar, and a serial one at that.
The shame of it is that not one TV news show – not a single one (except, of course, Fox, which knows a phony when they see one) – or mainstream media hack bothered to mention the fact that on the record Joe Wilson couldn't be believed if he swore on a stack of Bibles. About the only truthful thing he has ever said about himself was that he had "too many wives [three] and taken too many drugs. And yes," he added, "I did inhale."
Had Libby or Rove or any other administration figure said anything like that, they would have been out on their ears – or, for that matter, never hired in the first place. But not the sainted Joe Wilson. After all, he outed Bush's "lies" and paid the terrible price of having his CIA agent wife ruthlessly "outed" in retaliation, her CIA career now in tatters.
Listen to him bemoan the public exposure to which his wife has been shamelessly exposed, robbing her of the privacy required by her spook status. He is outraged that her name and photograph have been splashed all over the place ... except, of course, in that Vanity Fair photo, for which the happy couple posed smiling and sitting in his posh convertible.
The list of Wilson lies goes on an on, and Joe Wilson's cover has long since been blown by none other that the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee. He has consistently portrayed himself as a truth teller, a whistle-blower, the victim of a vast right-wing conspiracy – and as Clifford May wrote last year, most of the media have lapped it up and cheered him on.
Writing as far back as July 12, 2004, in National Review Online,
May, a former New York Times foreign correspondent and the president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism, noted that Wilson was already the darling of the lefties in and out of the media despite the fact that he had already been shown to be a liar.
"After a whirl of TV and radio appearances during which he received high-fives and hearty hugs from producers and hosts (I was in some green rooms with him so this is eyewitness reporting), and a wet-kiss profile in Vanity Fair, he gave birth to a quickie book sporting his dapper self on the cover, and verbosely entitled The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity: A Diplomat's Memoir," May reported, adding that nobody bothered mentioning who he was working for (one John Kerry).
The book jacket talks of his "fearless insight" (whatever that's supposed to mean) and "disarming candor" (which does not extend to telling readers for whom he has been working since retiring early from the Foreign Service).
And even back then May reported, "he of the Hermes ties and Jaguar convertibles – has been thoroughly discredited. Last week's bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report concluded that it is he who has been telling lies.
"For starters, he has insisted that his wife, CIA employee Valerie Plame, was not the one who came up with the brilliant idea that the agency send him to Niger to investigate whether Saddam Hussein had been attempting to acquire uranium. 'Valerie had nothing to do with the matter,' Wilson says in his book. 'She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip.' In fact, the Senate panel found, she was the one who got him that assignment. The panel even found a memo by her. (She should have thought to use disappearing ink.)
"Wilson spent a total of eight days in Niger 'drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people,' as he put it. On the basis of this 'investigation' he confidently concluded that there was no way Saddam sought uranium from Africa. Oddly, Wilson didn't bother to write a report saying this. Instead he gave an oral briefing to a CIA official.
"Oddly, too, as an investigator on assignment for the CIA he was not required to keep his mission and its conclusions confidential. And for the New York Times, he was happy to put pen to paper, to write an op-ed charging the Bush administration with 'twisting,' 'manipulating' and 'exaggerating' intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs 'to justify an invasion.'"
He accused President Bush of lying in his 2003 State of the Union address when he said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
The problem here, we now know for certain, is that Wilson was wrong and that Bush's statement was entirely accurate, a fact the media refuse to acknowledge
Wrote May: "The British have consistently stood by that conclusion. In September 2003, an independent British parliamentary committee looked into the matter and determined that the claim made by British intelligence was 'reasonable' (the media forgot to cover that one too). Indeed, Britain's spies stand by their claim to this day. Interestingly, French intelligence also reported an Iraqi attempt to procure uranium from Niger."
Then there was the matter of the forged documents relating to Niger-Iraq yellow-cake sales – and here is a place where Wilson really stepped into a pile of his own dung. As May noted, the forgeries were not the evidence that convinced British intelligence that Saddam may have been shopping for "yellowcake" uranium.
"On the contrary, according to some intelligence sources, the forgery was planted in order to be discovered – as a ruse to discredit the story of a Niger-Iraq link, to persuade people there were no grounds for the charge. If that was the plan, it worked like a charm."
He cites the Financial Times as reporting that "European intelligence officers have now revealed that three years before the fake documents became public, human and electronic intelligence sources from a number of countries picked up repeated discussions of an illicit trade in uranium from Niger. One of the customers discussed by the traders was Iraq."
The Washington Post's Susan Schmidt reported, "Contrary to Wilson's assertions and even the government's previous statements, the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence."
Moreover, May writes that the Senate report "fairly bluntly" charged that Wilson lied to the media. Schmidt notes that the panel found that "Wilson provided misleading information to the Washington Post last June. He said then that he concluded the Niger intelligence was based on a document that had clearly been forged because 'the dates were wrong and the names were wrong.'"
The problem is that Wilson "had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports," the Senate panel discovered. Schmidt notes, "The documents – purported sales agreements between Niger and Iraq – were not in U.S. hands until
There's lot more, but the point is that all of this has been on the public record for more than a year, and the Wilson-loving media have simply ignored it because it thoroughly discredits the man they want desperately to be seen by the public as credible.
I'll give the acid-tongued Christopher Hitchens the last words. Writing in Slate on Monday, July 18, 2005, he loosed this blast:
"the most exploded figure in the entire argument is Joseph Wilson. This is for three reasons. He claimed, in his own book, that his wife had nothing to do with his brief and inconclusive visit to Niger. 'Valerie had nothing to do with the matter,' he wrote. 'She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip.' There isn't enough wiggle room in those two definitive statements to make either of them congruent with a memo written by Valerie Wilson (or Valerie Plame, if you prefer) to a deputy chief in the CIA's directorate of operations. In this memo, in her wifely way, she announced that her husband would be ideal for the mission since he had 'good relations with both the Prime Minister and the former Minister of Mines (of Niger), not to mention lots of French contacts.' If you want to read the original, turn to the Senate committee's published report on the many 'intelligence failures' that we have suffered recently. ...
"Thus, and to begin with, Joseph Wilson comes before us as a man whose word is effectively worthless."
Tragically, it isn't, as far as the media are concerned. To them, St. Joe can do no wrong.
Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor & publisher of Wednesday on the Web (http://www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee which won statehood for Alaska. He is also a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute and a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers
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