Mullings: An American Cyber-column By Rich Galen

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Joe Wilson Can't Find the Truth, Either

Rich Galen

Monday July 19, 2004

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A week ago the Senate Intelligence Committee released its report on the quality of the intelligence prior to the start of the war in Iraq. The Democrats and their allies in the popular press were in full projectile sweat over whether the need for war had been, to put it gently, overstated.

During the Senate investigation, a guy named Joe Wilson was a principal player. He had been sent to Niger (which, until about sixteen hours ago was known as NYE-jer but now is known as nah-ZHEER)�

SIDEBAR:

How do these things happen without my knowing about it? Two more examples:
All my life I was told to wait for Halley's Comet. But it was pronounced "HAILey's Comet." When the thing finally dropped by for its every-76-years-or-so visit to the neighborhood its name was changed to HALLEY's Comet.
One wonders whether Rock 'n Roll would ever have gotten started if "Rock Around the Clock" would have been played by "Bill Hailey and the Barbours." (Now, THAT's political humor.)
I had been successfully plugging things into walls since shortly after electricity had been invented with nary a problem. One day I tried to plug something into the wall and one side of the plug was larger than the other. Now, my chances are no better than 50-50 of getting it right on the first try.

END SIDEBAR

� to find out whether or not the Iraqis had been snooping around trying to purchase the ore from which Uranium is produced.

The big deal about Wilson was that Robert Novak leaked the name of his wife who works - or used to work - for the CIA. The issue Novak was writing about was whether or not the wife (who shall remain nameless here lest a federal investigatory agency come, like The Raven, "rapping, rapping at my chamber door") had used her influence to get him hired for this mission.

Wilson, wringing his hands in agony last fall, said it was all a Karl Rove plot. As recently as this past weekend Wilson told CNN's Wolf Blitzer that "She was nothing more than a conduit" to his getting the gig.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, however, made it clear that Wilson scored a free trip to beautiful downtown Niamey (the Capital of Nah-ZHEER) largely because of the Missus. According to the Committee report, "� interviews and documents provided to the Committee indicate that his wife, a Counter-Proliferation Division employee [of the CIA], suggested his name for the trip.

Further, the Committee report states, "A CPD officer told Committee staff that the former ambassador's wife 'offered up his name...'"

Wilson, for his part, reported in an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times that he had "spent the next eight days drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people," while sitting at a bar in Nah-ZHEER.

It should not surprise you to find that Mullings was on top of this story last fall in a column titled, "The Sweet Mint Tea Pot Dome Scandal." Which looked at the low-level of skill Wilson had brought to this particular mission.

A month later I found myself in Baghdad. Heeeeeyyyy. Wait just a minute!

In any event, there has been an unsurprising lack of enthusiasm in the big-time media to hold Wilson up to the scorn he deserves for having lied about whether mama got him the job and his self-serving claims that he has been unfairly dealt with.

How about the central issue: Whether or not the Iraqis were Yellowcake shopping? According to the report.

"[CIA's Deputy Chief of Counter-Proliferation Division] said he judged that the most important fact in [Wilson's] 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�"

Don't look for Joe Wilson to have much of a speaking role next week at the Democratic National Convention. But don't look for an apology from the Democratic spin machine, either.

On the Secret Decoder Ring Page today: A link to last October's column on the Joe Wilson debacle, and a link to the excellent research on the Republican National Committee's website.

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