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Nosathro -> RE: treason? (3/1/2013 8:15:49 AM)
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ORIGINAL: Kirata
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ORIGINAL: Owner59
And please.....can we have the right wing stop blaming the victims.....the Wilsons.
Joseph Wilson, an ex-ambassador and National Security Council official in the Clinton and Bush I administrations, sparked the "leak" controversy in the first place by writing in The New York Times that Bush had lied in his 2003 State of the Union address about Saddam Hussein's seeking uranium in Africa for nuclear weapons. The CIA had sent Wilson to Niger in 2002 to check out precisely that point, and he claimed to have debunked it. Later, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that nearly everything Wilson wrote or said about Bush, Cheney, Iraq, and his own trip to Africa was untrue. Wilson was a fraud. "It's unfortunate that so many people took him seriously," the Washington Post editorialized sorrowfully last week.
K.
This is what was said at the hearing
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence suggested that the evidence Wilson found could be interpreted differently:
[Wilson's] intelligence report indicated that former Nigerien Prime Minister Ibrahim Mayaki was unaware of any contracts that had been signed between Niger and any rogue states for the sale of yellowcake while he was Prime Minister (1997-1999) or Foreign Minister (1996-1997). Mayaki said that if there had been any such contract during his tenure, he would have been aware of it. Mayaki said, however, that in June 1999, (REDACTED) businessman, approached him and insisted that Mayaki meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations" between Niger and Iraq. The intelligence report said that Mayaki interpreted 'expanding commercial relations' to mean that the delegation wanted to discuss uranium yellowcake sales. The intelligence report also said that "although the meeting took place, Mayaki let the matter drop due to the UN sanctions on Iraq".
Wilson has responded to criticism by observing that uranium was not actually discussed at the 1999 meeting. On Meet the Press, for example, Wilson stated:
At that meeting, uranium was not discussed. It would be a tragedy to think that we went to war over a conversation in which uranium was not discussed because the Niger official was sufficiently sophisticated to think that perhaps he might have wanted to discuss uranium at some later date
The Committe "sugguested the evidence found could be interpreted differently" Wilson was never accused by anyone of fraud nor his report was untrue.
The whole bases for the alleged Niger selling Iraq "yellow cake" was based on an Italian Intelligence Report that Saddam Hussien was attempting to by yellow cake uranium from Niger, it was later found that the Italian Intelligence Report was a forgery.
In February 2002, three different American officials had made efforts to verify the reports. The deputy commander of U.S. Armed Forces Europe, Marine General Carlton W. Fulford, Jr., went to Niger and met with the country's president, Tandja Mamadou. He concluded that, given the controls on Niger's uranium supply, there was little chance any of it could have been diverted to Iraq. His report was sent to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers. The U.S. Ambassador to Niger, Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick, was also present at the meeting and sent similar conclusions to the State Department. CNN reported on 14 March 2003 (before invasion) that the International Atomic Energy Agency found the documents to be forged.
In early October 2002, George Tenet called Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley to ask him to remove reference to the Niger uranium from a speech Bush was to give in Cincinnati on October 7. This was followed up by a memo asking Hadley to remove another, similar line. Another memo was sent to the White House expressing the CIA's view that the Niger claims were false; this memo was given to both Hadley and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.
IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky
We conclude that it is very odd indeed that the Government asserts that it was not relying on the evidence which has since been shown to have been forged, but that eight months later it is still reviewing the other evidence. The assertion "… that Iraq sought the supply of significant amounts of uranium from Africa …" should have been qualified to reflect the uncertainty
In January 2006, The New York Times revealed the existence of a memo which stated that the suggestion of uranium being sold was "unlikely" because of a host of economic, diplomatic and logistical obstacles. The memo, dated March 4, 2002, was distributed at senior levels by the office of former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and by the Defense Intelligence Agency.
In 2005, Vincent Cannistraro, the former head of counterterrorism operations at the CIA and the intelligence director at the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan, expressed the opinion that the documents had been produced in the United States and funneled through the Italians: "The documents were fabricated by supporters of the policy in the United States. The policy being that you had to invade Iraq in order to get rid of Saddam Hussein ...."
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