No, actually it was Wilson who LIED.

When will we see Wilson, who was treated as a God of Righteousness, and his poor "I Was a CIA Agent Whose Life is Now in Danger" wife, excoriated in the press with the same publicity with which he was introduced back when he was the personal embodiment of the Bush LIED argument.

Now it sems that not only was he DEAD WRONG and The President absolutely right on the "Iraq/African Uranium" story, but the 911 Commission says that it was not just the British who said so: The damn FRENCH told us the same thing.

And remember when WIlson, who has always been wildly anit-Bush, claimed his CIA wife had nothing to do with him being sent on this "mission"

Well, turns out that she had EVERYTHING to do with it.

This guy was THE big evidence that Bush LIED. Turns out, it was Wilson feeding us the lies.

MARK STEYN calls it like it is on this butthole.


Last summer, the comparatively minor matter of uranium from Niger was all over the front pages and the news shows. Do you think Butler's report will be? Do you think Terry McAuliffe and John Kerry and Howard Dean will be eating humble yellowcake? . . .

Bush didn't LIE!!!! He was right, and the CIA were wrong. That doesn't mean they LIED!!!! either. Intelligence is never 100 percent. You make a judgment, and in this instance the judgments of the British and Europeans were right, and the judgment of the principal intelligence agency of the world's hyperpower was wrong. That should be a cause of great concern -- for all Americans. . . .

And in the most exquisite reductio of this now universal rule, if it's a choice between Bush and the CIA, the left sides with the CIA. . . .

This isn't an anti-war movement. This is a movement in denial.

Andrew Suliavan has this:

The report also said Wilson provided misleading information to The Washington Post last June. He said then that he concluded the Niger intelligence was based on documents that had clearly been forged because "the dates were wrong and the names were wrong."

"Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the 'dates were wrong and the names were wrong' when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports," the Senate panel said. Wilson told the panel he may have been confused and may have "misspoken" to reporters.

The documents -- purported sales agreements between Niger and Iraq -- were not in U.S. hands until eight months after Wilson made his trip to Niger.


Wilson's lies were on the front page of every paper in the country. I wonder if these revelations will get the same play?

 

More on the Wilson story, which the WaPo is running on PAGE 9.

What page was it they ran his lies on?

So: what Wilson actually told the CIA, contrary to his own oft-repeated claims, is that he was told by the former mining minister of Niger that in 1998, Iraq had tried to buy 400 tons of uranium from that country, and that Iraq's overture was renewed the following year. What Wilson reported to the CIA was exactly the same as what President Bush said in his 2003 State of the Union address: there was evidence that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Africa.

Recall Wilson's famous op-ed in the New York Times, published on July 6, 2003, which ignited the whole firestorm over the famous "sixteen words" in Bush's State of the Union speech. In that op-ed, Wilson identified himself as the formerly-unnamed person who had gone to Niger to investigate rumors of a possible uranium deal between Iraq and Niger. Here are the key words in Wilson's article:

n January, President Bush, citing the British dossier, repeated the charges about Iraqi efforts to buy uranium from Africa. The next day, I reminded a friend at the State Department of my trip and suggested that if the president had been referring to Niger, then his conclusion was not borne out by the facts as I understood them.
It was this flat-out lie about what Wilson learned in Niger, and what he reported to the CIA upon his return, that fueled the "sixteen words" controversy and led to the publication of Wilson's best-selling account, titled, ironically, The Politics of Truth.

One can only conclude that Joseph Wilson has perpetrated one of the most astonishing hoaxes in American history. But here is what I really don't get: didn't the administration have access to all of this information about Wilson's report? And if so, why didn't they use it when Wilson was dominating the news cycle with his lies?