Wilson's Findings

If we're going to be so concerned with specific words such as "involved", "identity", "name", "leak", etc. (and I think we should) we should be concerned with all the words. I've heard a lot this weekend about what Wilson's trip to Niger found. The facts seem to be that he found that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium but didn't succeed.

In a Boston Globe article today Diedtra Henderson wrote: "In a first-person article about his grand jury testimony in this week's issue of Time, Cooper said he called Rove about Joseph C. Wilson IV, author of a New York Times op-ed article on his mission to Niger in which he found no evidence that Saddam Hussein was trying to procure uranium to make nuclear weapons. The Bush administration justified going to war in Iraq as necessary to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and Wilson's article said it twisted intelligence to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." The sentence structure is screwy but I think the bit about the Niger trip is her summary of the facts rather than referring to the op-ed article or Time article. If so, they're false.

The following is all according to the Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence Report (pages 39-46). Wilson went to Niger, reported verbally to the CIA, the CIA wrote a routine report based on the trip which Wilson never saw. The report said that that in June 1999 an Iraqi delegation wanted to meet with former Nigerian Prime Minister Mayaki (it's not clear if he was Prime Minister in 1999 but he was definately not when Wilson met with him in 2002) about "expanding commerical relations" and that the meeting took place but that Mayaki never discussed what they meant by that phrase. Wilson also reported that no sale happened, that Mayaki didn't want to discuss trade issues with a country under UN sanctions, and that due to how the uranium mines in Niger are structured it would be very difficult to conseal any such sales.

That report got an internal, routine grade of "good" and the reports officer said it "merited because the information responded to at least some of the outstanding questions in the Intelligence Community, but did not provide substantial new information. He said he judged that the most important fact in the report was that the Nigerien officials admitted that the Iraqi delegation had traveled there in 1999, and that the Nigerien Prime Minister believed the Iraqis were interested in purchasing uranium, because this provided some confirmation of foreign government service reporting."

The Senate's report says "When the former ambassador spoke to Committee staff, his description of his findings differed from the DO intelligence report and his account of information provided to him by the CIA differed from the CIA officials' accounts in some respects. First, the former ambassador described his findings to Committee staff as more directly related to Iraq and, specifically, as refuting both the possibility that Niger could have sold uranium to Iraq and that Iraq approached Niger to purchase uranium." The intelligence report described how the structure of Niger's uranium mines would make it difficult, if not impossibIe, for Niger to sell uranium to rouge nations, and noted that Nigerien officials denied knowledge of any deals to sell uranium to any rogue states, but did not refute the possibility that Iraq had approached Niger to purchase uranium." it goes on to describe other discrepancies.

So when you see all the stuff on the air about what Wilson found and reported, keep the above in mind. And to be clear, the Senate report is quite damning of the intelligence used to justify war. It's over 500 pages and I haven't read it all, but Republicans should not be proud of its conclusions.