The verdict on Wilson's Niger trip was that it wasn't very thorough.No, our intel COULDN'T SUPPORT the claim. It didn't contradict it.
For all the so-called outrage I keep hearing about, it seems to me people are less interested in finding the leaker than they are in making sure this one gets pinned on Rove.
Zaphod, what does "not very thorough" mean? Can you be more specific? One tidbit for you: the fraudulent documents were almost immediately recognizable- having had a forged signature from an official who had been out of office for nearly 10 years!
Our intelligence directly contradicted British intelligence. We said there was no sale of "yellowcake uranium" from Niger to Iraq. British intelligence said there was a sale. How much clearer contrast can you get between questions of Yes and No? The fact that the US already refuted that claim and then its President having relied on foreign intelligence is not something that's up for debate. Opponents merely suggest that the Executive Branch "forgot" about the report, or "never got the report." "Oops! I don't remember any such memo I sent out" as Condy Rice is fond of saying. I don't know what you're arguing about, really.
Also: The reason the Justice Department is conducting an investigation is because it feels the law has been broken. If she was an analyst there would be no investigation.
Zaphod, what does "not very thorough" mean? Can you be more specific?
Well for one thing, there was NO mention in the report of the forged documents. For another, it wasn't briefed to the "President, Vice-President or other senior Administration officials." Which is to say, the CIA didn't place a whole lot of value on it. (link)
Quote:
... Our intelligence directly contradicted British intelligence...
Also from that link: "this report, in our view, did not resolve whether Iraq was or was not seeking uranium from abroad..." (my emphasis)
One tidbit for you: according to NBC's Andrea Mitchell, Tenet didn't find out about the forged documents until March 7th! He heard about them the same way the many of us did - from a news report he saw on television.
That's interesting to read again, because it is clearly incorrect. Cheney said himself that he did ask for more information during the CIA briefing. And as Wilson pointed out in the TPM interview:
Quote:
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.
Now, we know that Tenet's NYT piece that you are citing was in fact a political move to take the blame for something that did not rest on his shoulders. Reading it now, you can see he's trying to downplay everything opposing the uranium claim, and this apparently includes Wilson's trip. It was clear at the time, and even clearer today, that this statement was a political move by Tenet and can not be taken at face value. The main issue addressed, that the CIA was solely responsible for the inclusion of the 16 words, we now know to also be inaccurate since the CIA did make it clear that it did not stand up and members of the white house went ahead anyway.
Furthermore, you might want to look at what he actually found out on the trip:
Quote:
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.
[edit: there you have it twice now. Maybe you can learn about it for once.]
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.
Joseph Wilson's report was very thorough and conclusive. I have a PDF of his July 6th NYTimes Op-Ed, if you want it.
I have to Op-Ed too. I already know what Wilson thinks of his own product. For the record, what did he have to say about the 1999 trade delegation Iraq sent to Niger?
I have to Op-Ed too. I already know what Wilson thinks of his own product. For the record, what did he have to say about the 1999 trade delegation Iraq sent to Niger?
I'm not sure what you're getting at, Zaphod. Are you saying that Wilson's report was wrong- that Iraq really did buy "yellowcake uranium" from Niger? That's been proved universally wrong- first by Wilson 11 months before Bush's State of the Union address, then by everyone else.
Not to steer the thread to the actual subject or anything but an ex CIA agent has written a piece for the LA Times..(insert "liberal media" cliches here) since thorough report or not (it was) a "Senior Admin Offical" outed a CIA operative soley for political revenge and as a result put people and this country at risk.
The United States government has never, to my knowledge, publicly identified one of its own undercover intelligence operatives as a deliberate political act. Although there were turncoats in the past ? like Philip Agee, who in the 1970s launched a campaign to publish the names of purported CIA operatives ? they were immediately labeled for what they were, traitors to the cause of freedom and this country.
The exposure of Valerie Plame ? who I have reason to believe operated undercover ? apparently by a senior administration official, is nothing less than a despicable act for which someone should be held accountable. This case is especially upsetting to me because she was my agency classmate as well as my friend.
The result of such exposure in the past has been the death of our own citizens and of foreign nationals around the world who similarly chose to work on behalf of the United States. It is believed, for instance, that Agee's high-profile campaign led to the 1975 assassination of Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens. The men and women who take these jobs know there are dangers involved. Being an undercover operative overseas, as I was, always involves risk; working in a hostile country heightens the risk.
Working undercover means performing clandestine acts while simultaneously maintaining a normal life. If an overseas operative is exposed, a good foreign ? and perhaps very hostile ? intelligence service will begin to piece together the "mosaic" of that person's life, placing many innocent and unsuspecting people in harm's way. In fact, even though very few social or ordinary contacts with people in a foreign land are intelligence- related, once an operative is exposed, everyone who has come into contact with the operative will come under scrutiny and will risk imprisonment or even death.
Even if the operative and her agents are able to escape harm, what is the comfort level for other foreign nationals who may want to work with us, knowing that at any time they could be exposed by a political actor in the U.S.? That is why someone guilty of exposing an operative faces severe criminal penalties.
In choosing to further the initial offense, the actions of the media are only slightly less despicable but dastardly nonetheless. Does the public good of the release outweigh the potential damage? It was simply not necessary to print the ambassador's wife's name and occupation, and the damage was far-reaching.
How far politically and ethically are we going to sink before we hold someone accountable or before someone takes responsibility?
I ask that question to the "President" that was going to restore "honesty and integrity" to the white house...
... Are you saying that Wilson's report was wrong- that Iraq really did buy "yellowcake uranium" from Niger?
For the sake of precision, the State of the Union never said anything about yellow cake from Niger. Bush spoke of Iraq attempting to get "uranium from Africa". He backed up the claim by citing British intel which the Brits STILL maintain is accurate.
Quote:
... That's been proved universally wrong- first by Wilson 11 months before Bush's State of the Union address, then by everyone else.
No, it wasn't. Wilson was only able to investigate the leads our people gave him. He wouldn't have been in any position to debunk British intel.
I'm not sure what you're getting at, Zaphod. Are you saying that Wilson's report was wrong- that Iraq really did buy "yellowcake uranium" from Niger? That's been proved universally wrong- first by Wilson 11 months before Bush's State of the Union address, then by everyone else.
Well that would mean........well I don't want to draw any direct conclusions here or get off topic as certain conservative factions have implied. I'll give you a hint though. It rymes with " Bush died ".
So I ask again, before anyone is convicted or even accused, what penalty should we see? It might turn out the Bill Clinton did it, but I stand my my choice. What about any of you?
I'm saying his report wasn't thorough.For the sake of precision, the State of the Union never said anything about yellow cake from Niger. Bush spoke of Iraq attempting to get "uranium from Africa". He backed up the claim by citing British intel which the Brits STILL maintain is accurate. No, it wasn't. Wilson was only able to investigate the leads our people gave him. He wouldn't have been in any position to debunk British intel.
What the hell are you talking about? Are you being intentionally obtuse?
I really think that 10 years for something that might have brought down whole networks trying to undercover plots against our national secuirty is too little.
Comments
Originally posted by giant
Now you are just making stuff up! Of course, it's much easier to regurgitate a short Cliff May op-ed...
I did this? What was that about making stuff up?
Originally posted by zaphod_beeblebrox
I did this? What was that about making stuff up?
Do you need me to repeat it for you?
Originally posted by zaphod_beeblebrox
The verdict on Wilson's Niger trip was that it wasn't very thorough.No, our intel COULDN'T SUPPORT the claim. It didn't contradict it.
For all the so-called outrage I keep hearing about, it seems to me people are less interested in finding the leaker than they are in making sure this one gets pinned on Rove.
Zaphod, what does "not very thorough" mean? Can you be more specific? One tidbit for you: the fraudulent documents were almost immediately recognizable- having had a forged signature from an official who had been out of office for nearly 10 years!
Our intelligence directly contradicted British intelligence. We said there was no sale of "yellowcake uranium" from Niger to Iraq. British intelligence said there was a sale. How much clearer contrast can you get between questions of Yes and No? The fact that the US already refuted that claim and then its President having relied on foreign intelligence is not something that's up for debate. Opponents merely suggest that the Executive Branch "forgot" about the report, or "never got the report." "Oops! I don't remember any such memo I sent out" as Condy Rice is fond of saying. I don't know what you're arguing about, really.
I'll post the relevant parts from TPM's interview with Joseph Wilson (PDF) regarding "thoroughness:"
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.
Originally posted by ShawnJ
Zaphod, what does "not very thorough" mean? Can you be more specific?
Well for one thing, there was NO mention in the report of the forged documents. For another, it wasn't briefed to the "President, Vice-President or other senior Administration officials." Which is to say, the CIA didn't place a whole lot of value on it. (link)
... Our intelligence directly contradicted British intelligence...
Also from that link: "this report, in our view, did not resolve whether Iraq was or was not seeking uranium from abroad..." (my emphasis)
One tidbit for you: according to NBC's Andrea Mitchell, Tenet didn't find out about the forged documents until March 7th! He heard about them the same way the many of us did - from a news report he saw on television.
Originally posted by giant
Do you need me to repeat it for you?
No, I'd like for you to back up your accusation but, of course, you can't. I know where I got my information. It wasn't Cliff May.
Originally posted by zaphod_beeblebrox
(link)
That's interesting to read again, because it is clearly incorrect. Cheney said himself that he did ask for more information during the CIA briefing. And as Wilson pointed out in the TPM interview:
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.
Now, we know that Tenet's NYT piece that you are citing was in fact a political move to take the blame for something that did not rest on his shoulders. Reading it now, you can see he's trying to downplay everything opposing the uranium claim, and this apparently includes Wilson's trip. It was clear at the time, and even clearer today, that this statement was a political move by Tenet and can not be taken at face value. The main issue addressed, that the CIA was solely responsible for the inclusion of the 16 words, we now know to also be inaccurate since the CIA did make it clear that it did not stand up and members of the white house went ahead anyway.
Furthermore, you might want to look at what he actually found out on the trip:
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.
[edit: there you have it twice now. Maybe you can learn about it for once.]
Originally posted by ShawnJ
I advise you to read my edited post to see what Wilson has to say about that.
Say about what? The forged documents? When Tenet learned about them? The value the CIA placed on Wilson's report?
Originally posted by zaphod_beeblebrox
Say about what? The forged documents? When Tenet learned about them? The value the CIA placed on Wilson's report?
Joseph Wilson's report was very thorough and conclusive. I have a PDF of his July 6th NYTimes Op-Ed, if you want it.
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.
Originally posted by ShawnJ
Joseph Wilson's report was very thorough and conclusive. I have a PDF of his July 6th NYTimes Op-Ed, if you want it.
I have to Op-Ed too. I already know what Wilson thinks of his own product. For the record, what did he have to say about the 1999 trade delegation Iraq sent to Niger?
Originally posted by zaphod_beeblebrox
I have to Op-Ed too. I already know what Wilson thinks of his own product. For the record, what did he have to say about the 1999 trade delegation Iraq sent to Niger?
I'm not sure what you're getting at, Zaphod. Are you saying that Wilson's report was wrong- that Iraq really did buy "yellowcake uranium" from Niger? That's been proved universally wrong- first by Wilson 11 months before Bush's State of the Union address, then by everyone else.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/...mment-opinions
The United States government has never, to my knowledge, publicly identified one of its own undercover intelligence operatives as a deliberate political act. Although there were turncoats in the past ? like Philip Agee, who in the 1970s launched a campaign to publish the names of purported CIA operatives ? they were immediately labeled for what they were, traitors to the cause of freedom and this country.
The exposure of Valerie Plame ? who I have reason to believe operated undercover ? apparently by a senior administration official, is nothing less than a despicable act for which someone should be held accountable. This case is especially upsetting to me because she was my agency classmate as well as my friend.
The result of such exposure in the past has been the death of our own citizens and of foreign nationals around the world who similarly chose to work on behalf of the United States. It is believed, for instance, that Agee's high-profile campaign led to the 1975 assassination of Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens. The men and women who take these jobs know there are dangers involved. Being an undercover operative overseas, as I was, always involves risk; working in a hostile country heightens the risk.
Working undercover means performing clandestine acts while simultaneously maintaining a normal life. If an overseas operative is exposed, a good foreign ? and perhaps very hostile ? intelligence service will begin to piece together the "mosaic" of that person's life, placing many innocent and unsuspecting people in harm's way. In fact, even though very few social or ordinary contacts with people in a foreign land are intelligence- related, once an operative is exposed, everyone who has come into contact with the operative will come under scrutiny and will risk imprisonment or even death.
Even if the operative and her agents are able to escape harm, what is the comfort level for other foreign nationals who may want to work with us, knowing that at any time they could be exposed by a political actor in the U.S.? That is why someone guilty of exposing an operative faces severe criminal penalties.
In choosing to further the initial offense, the actions of the media are only slightly less despicable but dastardly nonetheless. Does the public good of the release outweigh the potential damage? It was simply not necessary to print the ambassador's wife's name and occupation, and the damage was far-reaching.
How far politically and ethically are we going to sink before we hold someone accountable or before someone takes responsibility?
I ask that question to the "President" that was going to restore "honesty and integrity" to the white house...
Originally posted by ShawnJ
I'm not sure what you're getting at, Zaphod...
I'm saying his report wasn't thorough.
... Are you saying that Wilson's report was wrong- that Iraq really did buy "yellowcake uranium" from Niger?
For the sake of precision, the State of the Union never said anything about yellow cake from Niger. Bush spoke of Iraq attempting to get "uranium from Africa". He backed up the claim by citing British intel which the Brits STILL maintain is accurate.
... That's been proved universally wrong- first by Wilson 11 months before Bush's State of the Union address, then by everyone else.
No, it wasn't. Wilson was only able to investigate the leads our people gave him. He wouldn't have been in any position to debunk British intel.
Originally posted by ShawnJ
I'm not sure what you're getting at, Zaphod. Are you saying that Wilson's report was wrong- that Iraq really did buy "yellowcake uranium" from Niger? That's been proved universally wrong- first by Wilson 11 months before Bush's State of the Union address, then by everyone else.
Well that would mean........well I don't want to draw any direct conclusions here or get off topic as certain conservative factions have implied. I'll give you a hint though. It rymes with " Bush died ".
Originally posted by zaphod_beeblebrox
For the record, what did he have to say about the 1999 trade delegation Iraq sent to Niger?
Why even bother with this kid? Why are you asking us when the answer has been posted at least three times?
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/doc....interview.pdf
Originally posted by zaphod_beeblebrox
I'm saying his report wasn't thorough.For the sake of precision, the State of the Union never said anything about yellow cake from Niger. Bush spoke of Iraq attempting to get "uranium from Africa". He backed up the claim by citing British intel which the Brits STILL maintain is accurate. No, it wasn't. Wilson was only able to investigate the leads our people gave him. He wouldn't have been in any position to debunk British intel.
What the hell are you talking about? Are you being intentionally obtuse?
Call me a soft on crime liberal if you must...