This is REAL treason Ann Coulter: Someone is going to Jail or worse! - Page 8

Hagel is a Republican, even if not much of a loyalist, and he's pointing at what everyone's saying: that the problem centers on the vice president's office. And people are adding a name: Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice president's chief of staff and close advisor.

Even some Republicans, while united in their belief that there is no need for an outside counsel, say Mr. Ashcroft will be hit hard by his political detractors if the investigation drags on.

"All of these so-called scandals can snowball and every new crumb of information turns into a front-page story above the fold," a Senate Republican aide said. "The Democrats are going to make of this what they will, but the reality is you could have the pope do the investigation and they'd still be screaming bias."

Valerie Plame was among the small subset of Central Intelligence Agency officers who could not disguise their profession by telling friends that they worked for the United States government.

Mr. Wilson said on Wednesday, "Her career as a clandestine officer is over."

TPM: When this became a big issue this summer--and it got a lot of press reportage--
obviously different political players had interests in spinning what happened there in
very different ways. In some retellings of it, in the way some people describe the trip,
you basically went over there and said, "Have you guys been selling Iraq any uranium?"
and they said no, and that was good enough for you.


WILSON: That unfortunately--I think that there was a period there when they had just
hadn't marshaled the facts on this. There was Ari Fleischer who said, that, well, he went
over there and obtained the denials of the government and wouldn't any government
deny this? I did not obtain the denials of the government, in fact, as I pointed out after
Ari said that. What I did is I went over and I looked in some detail at how the uranium
business operates. Who makes up the consortium? When do they meet to discuss
production schedules? How often do they need to revise production schedules? Who
makes the decisions on who gets what out of the production that's done every year?
Who operates the mine? Who is the operating partner? In other words, who actually has
their hands on the product from the time it comes out of the mine to the time it's
delivered to the ultimate customer. I looked into the fact that the mine has been a
money-losing proposition since the mid '80s when the market collapsed with the
introduction of Canadian uranium into the international market. The decision on the
part of the consortium partners to keep the mine open satisfied their own
requirements--


TPM: Who are those partners? Who are those nationalities?


WILSON: They're the French, the Japanese, the Germans, and the Spanish, as well as the
Nigeriens. Nigeriens don't have a nuclear industry. They have not taken a draw in
product since the mid '80s at least, since the collapse of the uranium market. That
doesn't mean that they wouldn't some time in the future. But in order for that to be
profitable, there would have to be a hefty profit placed on the sale of uranium. So I
looked into the business side of it. And then I looked into the government bureaucracy
side, specifically with those officials who had been in government at the time this
document was purportedly signed. And it was much less a question of obtaining their
denials, and much more a question of how would a government make a decision that
would generate this report of a memorandum of agreement.


TPM: And, just to be clear, at this time, you hadn't seen these documents that turned
out to be forgeries?


WILSON: No, I hadn't. I had just been briefed on a memorandum of agreement covering
the sale. Now, my understanding is that there are all sorts of other documents that have
since come to light and Andrea Mitchell showed me some documents which I had not
seen and frankly, I did not have my glasses, so I didn't even get a chance to read them,
and I have not seen them since. The uranium participation in this consortium is done
through a parastatal, which means that the Niger government owns the corporate
identity that is a member of the consortium.


Therefore, if there is going to be a sale, the government itself would have to make a
decision to authorize the parastatal to act on the government's behalf in this matter.
That would require a cabinet-level meeting. And since this purported sale was between
two sovereign governments, the minister of foreign affairs would have to be involved.
Since this involved the sale of uranium, the minister of mines would have to be involved.
Since it involved the government totally, the prime minister would be involved, speaking
on behalf of the government in signing any particular document.


It was also entirely possible, although I don't recall, that the president would also have
to put his signature on a document as the supreme authority in the Niger regime. If this
were to take place, it would be minuted in a council of ministers meeting, and it would
be gazetted. Very much like--printed in their equivalent of the Federal Digest. And this
is all very much as the French do it. It would be very difficult for a legitimate transaction
undertaken by the government of Niger with the government of Iraq to be secret. Not
impossible--and it's sort of worth trying to ask yourself whether or not the president, a
coup leader, could do a side deal outside the context of the government, for his own
account, or for the military.


TPM: Because you had said, there was a great deal of instability in this country in the
late nineties.


WILSON: Well, that's right, and just because you had had the military coups, you had
certain government behaviors that might have been skewed by the fact that you had a
junta there. The problem with that--and I looked at that--the problem with that is that
you still had to figure out a way to actually get the tonnage out of the mines and get it
into barrels, and get it shipped several thousand miles across the Sahel, and down to
the port, get it placed on ships, and get it sent, without anybody else knowing. And all
that, would have involved the consortium. At a minimum, it would have involved the
managing operating partner, which is Cogema, which is the French uranium company.


TPM: So basically the point, just to clarify this, that sort of the operation--I mean, this
is, it's in Niger, it is under their umbrella, but the operational control of this
consortium--which is the whole industry--is, in essence, in foreign hands?


WILSON: The operating partner is a French uranium company. The decision-making
structure that covers production levels is made by the consortium. Niger is one of
several partners within that consortium. And there are actually two mines and two
consortia--two consortiums. The operating partner for each of the mines is the French
uranium company. And the whole thing is set up in such a way that certain taxes paid
that go into the treasury, the ministry of finance, there are export permits that are
required--the whole thing is bureaucratically rather heavy to ensure some semblance of
transparency. And it was all put together in the context of sort of the French system of
doing this. But my point being that even if the two governments had decided they
wanted to do a clandestine transfer of uranium from one country to the other then it
would be very difficult to effect without an awful lot of people knowing. Now--


TPM: Particularly the French ...


WILSON: Particularly the French. Of course, the French are going to know every step of
the way. This was a French colony. The French had been part of every step of their
development over the last 100 years. Even after decolonization in 1960 they were
omnipresent. They were the operating partner in the consortium. And whatever you may
think of the French, the French have a--nuclear energy is an important component of
the French electrical power grid. They need uranium, they need to have a steady source
of supply. They need to make sure that they're irreproachable in that, so they can
continue to have a steady supply of uranium without running afoul of the IAEA or other
international organizations.

WILSON: That's right, that's correct. And the argument that I repeatedly made was that if you are senior enough to ask a question of the CIA briefer or any other briefer of the U.S. government--it just happened to be the CIA because the CIA was the recipient of this bit of information that came over the transom, then you are senior enough to get a very specific response. And, irrespective of what the vice president had to say yesterday, which--he said the briefing got back to him a couple of days later and said that there was nothing more to this. If that system works that way now, that's a marked departure from the way that it worked when I was at the National Security Council.

WILSON: That unfortunately--I think that there was a period there when they had just hadn't marshaled the facts on this. There was Ari Fleischer who said, that, well, he went over there and obtained the denials of the government and wouldn't any government deny this? I did not obtain the denials of the government, in fact, as I pointed out after Ari said that. What I did is I went over and I looked in some detail at how the uranium business operates. Who makes up the consortium? When do they meet to discuss production schedules? How often do they need to revise production schedules? Who makes the decisions on who gets what out of the production that's done every year? Who operates the mine? Who is the operating partner? In other words, who actually has their hands on the product from the time it comes out of the mine to the time it's delivered to the ultimate customer. I looked into the fact that the mine has been a money-losing proposition since the mid '80s when the market collapsed with the introduction of Canadian uranium into the international market. The decision on the part of the consortium partners to keep the mine open satisfied their own requirements--

TPM: Who are those partners? Who are those nationalities?

WILSON: They're the French, the Japanese, the Germans, and the Spanish, as well as the Nigeriens. Nigeriens don't have a nuclear industry. They have not taken a draw in product since the mid '80s at least, since the collapse of the uranium market. That doesn't mean that they wouldn't some time in the future. But in order for that to be profitable, there would have to be a hefty profit placed on the sale of uranium. So I looked into the business side of it. And then I looked into the government bureaucracy side, specifically with those officials who had been in government at the time this document was purportedly signed. And it was much less a question of obtaining their denials, and much more a question of how would a government make a decision that would generate this report of a memorandum of agreement.

TPM: And, just to be clear, at this time, you hadn't seen these documents that turned out to be forgeries?

WILSON: No, I hadn't. I had just been briefed on a memorandum of agreement covering the sale. Now, my understanding is that there are all sorts of other documents that have since come to light and Andrea Mitchell showed me some documents which I had not seen and frankly, I did not have my glasses, so I didn't even get a chance to read them, and I have not seen them since. The uranium participation in this consortium is done through a parastatal, which means that the Niger government owns the corporate identity that is a member of the consortium.

Therefore, if there is going to be a sale, the government itself would have to make a decision to authorize the parastatal to act on the government's behalf in this matter. That would require a cabinet-level meeting. And since this purported sale was between two sovereign governments, the minister of foreign affairs would have to be involved. Since this involved the sale of uranium, the minister of mines would have to be involved. Since it involved the government totally, the prime minister would be involved, speaking on behalf of the government in signing any particular document.

It was also entirely possible, although I don't recall, that the president would also have to put his signature on a document as the supreme authority in the Niger regime. If this were to take place, it would be minuted in a council of ministers meeting, and it would be gazetted. Very much like--printed in their equivalent of the Federal Digest. And this is all very much as the French do it. It would be very difficult for a legitimate transaction undertaken by the government of Niger with the government of Iraq to be secret. Not impossible--and it's sort of worth trying to ask yourself whether or not the president, a coup leader, could do a side deal outside the context of the government, for his own account, or for the military.

TPM: Because you had said, there was a great deal of instability in this country in the late nineties.

WILSON: Well, that's right, and just because you had had the military coups, you had certain government behaviors that might have been skewed by the fact that you had a junta there. The problem with that--and I looked at that--the problem with that is that you still had to figure out a way to actually get the tonnage out of the mines and get it into barrels, and get it shipped several thousand miles across the Sahel, and down to the port, get it placed on ships, and get it sent, without anybody else knowing. And all that, would have involved the consortium. At a minimum, it would have involved the managing operating partner, which is Cogema, which is the French uranium company.

TPM: So basically the point, just to clarify this, that sort of the operation--I mean, this is, it's in Niger, it is under their umbrella, but the operational control of this consortium--which is the whole industry--is, in essence, in foreign hands?

WILSON: The operating partner is a French uranium company. The decision-making structure that covers production levels is made by the consortium. Niger is one of several partners within that consortium. And there are actually two mines and two consortia--two consortiums. The operating partner for each of the mines is the French uranium company. And the whole thing is set up in such a way that certain taxes paid that go into the treasury, the ministry of finance, there are export permits that are required--the whole thing is bureaucratically rather heavy to ensure some semblance of transparency. And it was all put together in the context of sort of the French system of doing this. But my point being that even if the two governments had decided they wanted to do a clandestine transfer of uranium from one country to the other then it would be very difficult to effect without an awful lot of people knowing. Now--

TPM: Particularly the French ...

WILSON: Particularly the French. Of course, the French are going to know every step of the way. This was a French colony. The French had been part of every step of their development over the last 100 years. Even after decolonization in 1960 they were omnipresent. They were the operating partner in the consortium. And whatever you may think of the French, the French have a--nuclear energy is an important component of the French electrical power grid. They need uranium, they need to have a steady source of supply. They need to make sure that they're irreproachable in that, so they can continue to have a steady supply of uranium without running afoul of the IAEA or other international organizations.

TPM: So this is--that's the report you bring back, you report to the CIA.

WILSON: Yeah, I report it. Look, before I left, when I went out there, I saw the ambassador before I did anything. First of all, I went over to see the State Department to make sure it was OK with them. Make sure that the ambassador was informed, the ambassador agreed. I went out there, I talked to the ambassador, and he said, "Look. I've heard this report, I thought that I had debunked it already, I've already talked to the President and with the government." And I said, "That's fine, my value added is I can talk to people who I know better than you know because they were in government, they were out of government before you got here. I can talk to the old government." I did it, I came back, I reported to her, she said--I said, "Well, this essentially confirms what you knew," and I also reported to somebody else on the mission staff, and then submitted--should have submitted--a separate report, or at least would have been aware of it.

TPM: That would have gone through the State Department channels, as opposed to--

WILSON: Everything that--everything in Niger goes through the State Department channels. Nonetheless, it gets bifurcated when it gets back, it goes to the--whoever the agency is who asked for the information. I returned. Within an hour of my setting down at Dulles, I was having Chinese food with the reports officer of the CIA, and I was giving him an oral briefing. I did not--I brought back notes, I did not bring back a complete report, because at the end of the day, reports officers are paid to turn briefings such as the one I'm giving you into something that's comprehensible for their particular consumer. That is the way it is done. That is the way it's always done. It also was done within an hour of my arriving back in Washington, DC, because I was leaving, actually, on a business trip the next day, and I did not have all my life to devote to this pro-bono activity.

TPM: From that point on, your firsthand knowledge of sort of where this channeled up through the ranks ends, if I understand right--

WILSON: That's true--

TPM: And you're going on your understanding of basically how the U.S. government and the nexus of the intelligence community and the executive branch works, and that tells you that since Cheney was the one who asked for the report, the report would have come back to him in some fashion or another.

WILSON: That's correct.

TPM: He may well not have known that you--

WILSON: He wouldn't have known. He would not have known that it was me. There's where there would be--

TPM: So, it's probably accurate, that assuming that this report made its way back to the vice president, that he wouldn't have know that it was you.

WILSON: No. In fact, on the contrary. The way that these things are done, particularly when it comes to U.S. citizens, is you're not identified by name. These reports essentially will give you a grade as to whether or not you're a credible reporter, and by extension, will give the report a grade. And, you know, I have some reason to believe that the grade that was given both to my credibility as well as to the report was something other than a "junk bond" grade. And, you know, it's important to remember that in addition to my report, you also had the ambassador's own report, and then you had--

TPM: The U.S. ambassador to Niger?

WILSON: The U.S. ambassador to Niger, and then you had a four-star Marine Corps general. Now, those two reports may have been in the same report because they may have been when she was taking him around on meetings, but nonetheless, these two very senior officials in our system of government of representation both were comfortable that this report of sales just simply could not have taken place. Those reports were also in files. So mine was not the only report. So when they say it was inconclusive because, you know, there was this meeting that did or did not take place at which uranium was not discussed but maybe they might have wanted to discuss uranium sometime in the future--they used that as an argument that my report was not conclusive. Well, in actual fact, there were at least two, and quite possibly three, separate reports, all of which said that this could not have taken place, this was not on. Despite that, in U.S. government files, the one report that they kept harping back to, the one that sort of allowed them to then cite, insist upon citing, the British white paper, was a report that didn't even pass muster with an Italian weekly tabloid, that never showed any hesitation about putting even bare breasts between its covers.

TPM: But on this narrow question of--and this comes up in the vice president's interview with Tim Russert--the narrow question, he's probably telling the truth when he says that he had no reason to know of your involvement with--

WILSON: Absolutely.

TPM: At the time. Before--obviously now he knows, but at the time.

WILSON: Absolutely, sure.

According to a testimony given by Alan Foley, a senior CIA official, to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on July 17, the Africa-uranium claim was included in President Bushs January 28 State of the Union address as a result of pressure from Robert Joseph, director for nonproliferation at the National Security Council (NSC). Foley, pressed by the Democrats on the committee, said that Robert Joseph had suggested including the controversial claim during a telephone conversation that had happened just one or two days before the speech. [Washington Post, 7/17/03; New York Times, 7/17/03] When Foley warned that the allegation had little evidence to support it, Mr. Joseph instead requested that the speech include a remark saying that the British had learned that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa, leaving out the bit about Niger and the exact quantity of uranium that was allegedly sought. [New York Times, 7/17/03; Washington Post, 7/27/03] Joseph said he could not recall the discussion and White House communications director Dan Bartlett referred to Foleys version of events as a conspiracy theory. [Washington Post, 7/27/03]

Statements.

(1) On July 14, 2003, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said Britains evidence was not based on the forged documents, contending that it had come from another country. He also claimed that U.S. intelligence had not yet seen it. [Reuters, 7/14/03]

(2) In a late July 2003 statement, Britains Foreign office said that it had intelligence from more than one source. [BBC, 7/30/03]

(D) Evidence suggesting that such evidence did not exist

(1) Reports.

(a) Reuters reported in late March 2003: The IAEA asked the U.S. and Britain if they had any other evidence backing the claim that Iraq tried to buy uranium. The answer was no. [Reuters, 3/26/03]

(b) The Washington Post reported, An informed U.N. official said the United States and Britain were repeatedly asked for all information they had to support the charge. Neither government, the official said, ever indicated that they had any information on any other country. [Washington Post, 3/22/03]

(c) When the IAEA asked Britain to supply evidence to back its claims, Blairs government refused, arguing that it had come from a third country which had requested anonymity. But according to the international legislation which had sent the agencys inspectors to investigate Iraq's nuclear capabilities, all signatory countries were required to cooperate with the IAEA. And as critics have noted, there was no exemption for countries that claim evidence was provided by a third party. [Independent, 7/17/03]

(2) Statements

(a) Melissa Fleming, spokesperson for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

(i) In mid-July 2003, she told Reuters that the IAEA suspected that Londons assertions had been entirely based on the alleged transaction referred to in the forged documents. [Reuters, 7/14/03]

(b) Unnamed Western diplomat.

(i) Reuters reported: A Western diplomat close to the IAEA said the agency had the impression the evidence that Britain said was genuine was ultimately referring to the same alleged transaction described in a series of fake documents. The news agency quoted the diplomat explaining, I understand that it concerned the same group of documents and the same transaction. [Reuters, 7/14/03]

(c) Unnamed Western diplomat

(i) Despite requests, the British Government has provided no such evidence. Senior officials at the agency think it is involved in an information black-out. [Independent, 7/17/03]

While what you posted is correct, it's interesting that you did not provide a citation. What's further interesting is that you apparently just got it off of findlaw rather than go directly to the real source and call it by it's name: the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. That would not only have been the clear and proper way to do it (which a real professor should do out of habit), but it is also the easy way.

Originally posted by OBJRA10
See, since I am a "real professor" I actually understand how these things work.

Actually, I pulled it straight off of the Government Printing Offices Access Site and copied it directly for you. And it had a citation.. did you look at the bottom of what I posted?

Furthermore, the link you posted goes to the Federation of American Scientists? Is this somehow a more reliable source than the Government Printing Office?

As for the name, I called it what it is US Code Title 50: War and National Defense, Chapter 15 (National Security), Subchapter 4 (Protection of Certain National Security Information) Section 421.

If you'd like some help, you can find it directly for yourself at the ACTUAL homepage for the US CODE not at some FEderation of American Scientists (which by the way you included the wrong link anyway).