Wilson's Perspectives

Ambassador Joseph Wilson has spoken up, loudly, as the threat to Rove continues for another day. Wilson says Rove must be fired for abusing his power in the outing of Wilson's wife as an active covert CIA agent. McClellan keeps refusing to sing [as Matt Cooper, in the end, decided to do], and Bush, in a Cabinet meeting, kept his distance as well.

The Right has pursued a very limited scope of talking points, from Newt Gingrich hustling with Bill O'Reilly the concept that Wilson's whole career is dedicated to Anti-Bushian tactics and rhetoric; to false claims that Wilson fibbed about the authorities that sent him to Niger; to claims of CIA nepotism in Wilson and Plame's relationship that makes Rove, somehow, a Whistleblower deserving of the Congressional Medal of Honor or something.

But none of them deal with the ethical choice that Rove made, and how much he and president Bush knew about it. And none of them deal with Bush's declarations that he would fire those who were part and partial to the leak of Plame's name, and the compromised position they finally find themselves in because of these declarations.

And Ambassador Wilson isn't too happy about any of this. But even more, he's clear about his criticism of The Administration- and clear about the reasons that his wife was outed- Political scheming:

CLG: OK, getting to some of the nitty-gritty of the matter: What was your personal feeling about Robert Novak illegally revealing the job function of your wife, Valerie Plame? You must have been understandably very angry. Did you fear for your wife’s life? Did you fear for your own life?

JW: I was obviously upset. After all, they compromised the identity of one of their own national security assets. How dumb, and how mean. I feared for my wife and kids as any husband and father would. As to my own safety, after one has faced down Saddam Hussein, as I did in the first Gulf war, it is hard to take Karl Rove and his motley crew of school yard bullies very seriously as a physical threat.

CLG: Who did you think was the source of the leak to Novak? Did you think that Rove was involved prior to the latest news? Do you think that Rove was indeed a source or the source?

JW: I wrote in my book that there was a conspiracy in the white house to find out everything they could about me and then use it against me. I think the logical place to look for the conspiracy is in the White House Iraq group (WHIG) which included Rove, Scooter Libby, Karen Hughes, Ari Fleischer and others. I don’t know who among them might have been the leaker or authorized the leak.

CLG: Do you feel that reporters Matthew Cooper of Time and Judith Miller of The New York Times should have turned over their documents regarding the Plame affair? Do you think Novak is more to blame, since he actually revealed the identity of a covert operative’s name? Or are the sources the only ones to blame? (I don’t want to drag you into a 1st Amendment discussion here, just your general sense of the matter).

JW: No Comment.

CLG: What punishment if any would you recommend for the person(s) who leaked the memo, if they are found guilty?

JW: The law calls for ten years and a substantial fine. I think that is appropriate.

CLG: Do you think Rove should explain his role in the outing of Valerie NOW, as some House Democrats are insisting, rather than hiding behind lawyers even before any legal charges are brought (if indeed they ever are)?

JW: Absolutely. He is a senior adviser to the President of the United States, after all.

But Wilson, in this fascinating interview, talks about all the scheming behind the curtain in the build up to the war in Iraq, and how so much more information has come forward that justifies what his postion was during the Yellowcake affair, and his criticism of The Administration's choice to go to war on very dubious claims:

Mr. Ambassador, when you listened to George W. Bush’s speech in January of 2003 and his mention of the ’yellowcake from Niger,’ did you think that he was lying or simply that he was misled?’ I know you gave a formal response to the New York Times in the July editorial ["What I Didn’t Find in Africa "], and in subsequent interviews, but I wonder if the word "liar" crossed your mind at the time, or thereafter.

Ambassador Joseph Wilson: At the time of the State of the Union, I had no idea the President was referring to Niger. Remember, his statement was ’the British government have learned that Saddam Hussein recently attempted to purchase uranium yellowcake from Africa’. There are four countries in Africa that produce yellowcake, so he could have been speaking about one of the other three. It was only in March when it became apparent that Niger was the country in question that I came to understand that the administration had misstated the facts. To this day, I don’t know whether the President lied or was misled. I don’t expect him to be a fact checker on every detail in the State of the Union but at the same time he did say that he was responsible for every word in the speech. It is clear that the administration was intent in making the nuclear threat case (How many times did we hear, "we cannot afford to wait for the smoking gun to come in the form of a mushroom cloud"?) The administration was required by the use of force authorization resolution passed by congress to convince itself of the gravity of the WMD threat, and the nuclear case was the one they pushed.

CLG: Do you think that the Bush Administration pressured the CIA, as the ’Downing Street Memo’ put it, to "fix" the facts around the policy about the war in Iraq?

JW: Absolutely. The pressure was sometimes subtle, like asking analysts the same question thirty times until they received the answer they wanted and sometimes heavy handed such as the several trips Cheney took to the agency to press analysts to find something. And the administration also set up separate cells within the bureaucracy to stovepipe information directly to the White House bypassing the normal analysis channels. That may be how the yellowcake information came to the attention of the VP. The problem with the cell structure is that much of the information they passed up the chain was completely bogus. A cursory analysis by the intelligence community would have kept a lot of that bogus information out of the decision-making loop. Instead, the falsehoods formed the foundation of the case for invading, conquering, and now occupying Iraq.

CLG: If you answered yes to the above question, do you think the Bush Administration lied to justify the invasion of Iraq?

JW: It is clear from the Downing Street Memos that the administration decided to go to war with Iraq far earlier than generally assumed. The administration did not even request a national intelligence estimate before making its decision (the request came from Congress). The cherry-picking of the intelligence, the lack of analysis, the use of information that was so clearly disputable or unrealistic and known to be so, lead me to conclude that the administration consciously misled the congress and the American people. Yes, it lied to justify the invasion of Iraq. [Emphasis mine]

And there's even some of that ol' reliable Crisis of Masculinity in the works, but in Wilson's estimation, it is the key to the puzzle - an exertion of an overwraught American Male desire to change the ideology of the Middle East:

CLG: As Mary Wollstonecraft wrote about male domination in the late 18th century, "[n]o man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, which is the good he seeks." Does this explain the push for war in Iraq by the Bush team? Did they really believe they were doing the right thing for the US and the world? Or, was there some less noble objective in mind from the start? In short, what do you think was behind Bush’s obsession with Iraq? Was it Bush’s personal antipathy for Hussein? Was it oil? (After all, maps of Iraq’s oil fields were part of the Cheney secret energy team papers that were finally turned over, thanks to Judicial Watch’s suit.) Was it a broader geopolitical objective--privatizing water rights, gaining oil and protecting Israel? Did it involve allowing key contractors to make a tremendous amount of money that could not - and will likely never - be accounted for? Was it all of the above or something else entirely?

JW: I would not presume to speak for the President’s underlying motives. I heard him say that ’after all Saddam tried to kill my dad’ and I have heard the oil arguments, the protecting of Israel, etc. But I think that the best explanation came from Bill Kristol in a debate we had in Texas. He said it was all about changing the political dynamics in the Middle East. The problem is war breeds extremism, as we clearly see, and those are not the dynamics we wanted to change to. If it was for oil, we surely screwed up as two years after the fact, Iraqi production is flat. If it was for Israel, it is hard to see how we have made it more stable, since the hatred we have spawned is intense and the instability that has resulted from our invasion cannot reassure Israel that its neighborhood is now safer.

Why is the case of Karl Rove's outing of Wilson's wife's covert CIA occupation important? Because it is, in fact, the culmination of the entire US Governmental process of going to war in Iraq. It is at the very center of the miscalculations and intelligence manipulations; it is a key parallel line to The Administration's continued and deliberate obsfucations of evidence, and propagandist techniques to send the nation to war; it is, essentially, boiled down to one family, among the most interesting stories of political over-domination and vehemence in the build up to the war- it is the divisive nature of ideology of this Administration, it is the condescension and the vengeance.

This case is part of the greater web of the reasons for this war- it is connected to every single facet of the methods used to manipulate a country into Invasion.

Why is Plame important? Because she has become the symbol of The Administration's violence behind all of these lies.


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And by the way, Bushie, your loyalty is begining to cost you personally. And since that's the only time you take action ["After all, this is the man that tried to kill my dad"]... it's time.

And billmon.org has some thoughts on even the game of slandering the Wilsons is a Rove-designed distration attempt that the Left should avoid. It's compelling...