When it hits the fan, it splatters
Diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV, sent by President Bush in 2002 to Niger to investigate whether Saddam Hussein was trying to obtain uranium there, has accused the White House of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. It seems that someone fingered Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a covert CIA operative specializing in WMD matters. Wilson specifically blames Karl Rove.

Wilson will not confirm that his wife is CIA, of course, but his insinuations that "if" she is then serious damage has been done by identifying her leave little room for doubt of what he means.

Wilson discredited the report by British intelligence that Saddam was trying to buy uranium from Niger, but Bush included the report in January's State of the Union message anyway. Since then, the administration has had to back pedal.

The administration has since had to repudiate the claim. CIA Director George Tenet said the 16-word sentence should not have been included in Bush's Jan. 28 speech and publicly accepted responsibility for allowing it to remain in the president's text.

Wilson published an article in July alleging, however, that the White House recklessly made the charge knowing it was false. "We spend billions of dollars on intelligence," Wilson wrote. "But we end up putting something in the State of the Union address, something we got from another intelligence agency, something we cannot independently verify, in an area of Africa where the British have no on-the-ground presence."

And the identification of Wilson's wife as an intelligence officer, if such she is, is interpreted as retaliation for Wilson's denial of the uranium plot.

Wilson was the ambassador to Iraq who immediately preceded the hapless Amb. April Glaspie, who has been blamed for inavertantly giving Saddam the green light to invade Kuwait in 1990. (She didn't, but that's another story.) I happen to have been a seminar attendee in 1993 in which Wilson was a speaker one day. There were only about two dozen attendees, some of us military and others civilian government factotums from all branches of government. So we had very informal and engaging discussions with the daily speakers.

I found Wilson to be expertly knowledgeable on the Middle East and quite sober-minded. I rate his credibility extremely high, so I find the charges he has made very credible and very disturbing.

Update: Alan of Petrified Truth emails:

While Mr. Wilson is obviously experienced and knowledgeable, he may not be exactly unbiased about the Bush administration and the policy towards Iraq. NRO published an article in July that offered information about his background -- the author outright called him: "a pro-Saudi, leftist partisan with an ax to grind."

The Slate article itself is pegged around remarks made by Wilson at at "a forum about intelligence failures on Iraq held by Rep. Jay Inslee, a fervently anti-war Democrat."

And according to Wilson's NYT article, he wasn't sent to Niger "by President Bush" but rather by the unnamed officials at the CIA.

My point is not to argue with your post, but to ask your opinion, as an experienced observer of national security issues, if you consider this other information to have weight when assessing the seriousness of Wilson's charges. Is it likely that Wilson is making an unfair accusation, or more likely that the WH would "out" his wife?

I freely confess that I have no personal experience with Amb. Wilson apart from the day I spent in conversation with him 10 years ago. And whatever his personal politics are, they weren't on the agenda that day.

Is it credible that he is way off base here, and politically motivated? Sure. But the information about his wife came from somewhere, and it does not strike me at this time as unreasonable that the White House is the source. But even if it did, I don't think that Karl Rove is stupid or inexperienced enough to have been the leak. We can only wait and see. Now, having said that, I will also say that it is quite possible that Wilson is an arabist at heart, too.

Update: Bill Hobbs posts that Plame's "secret identity" probably wasn't ever really secret to begin with, and that Wilson is less balanced and sober-minded than he seemed to me to be 10 years ago, writing quoting John LeCarre in The Nation that under Bush, "America has entered one of it periods of historical madness." So now I am starting to think that the whole doth stinketh of manufactured scandal.
Update: Mike Forester points out that the "historical madness" quote is actually from John LeCarre (hebnce the correction above), which is true; Wilson cited it in his March 3, 2003 article, "Empire or Republic?"

by Donald Sensing, 9/27/2003 11:34:42 AM. Permalink |