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Wilson Talks about Niger Mission; Blasts Bush Foreign Policy
By Jeff Gannon
Talon News
October 28, 2003

WASHINGTON (Talon News) -- Ambassador Joe Wilson, the man at the heart of the White House/CIA leak controversy, recently sat down with Talon News for an exclusive interview to discuss his mission to Africa to investigate Iraq's desire to purchase uranium for weapons, the leak of his wife's position within the CIA, the foreign policy of President Bush and his administration, and a host of other issues.

Below is Part 1 of the exclusive Talon News interview with Ambassador Joe Wilson.

Background: In February 2002, former Ambassador Joe Wilson was sent to Niger by the CIA to investigate allegations that Iraq had tried to buy uranium. He says that he told the administration that the allegations were probably false. In the January 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush made reference to British intelligence that differed with Wilson's conclusion. The subsequent controversy over the "16 words" was the result of the former ambassador's July article in The New York Times that accused the White House of exaggerating the threat posed by Iraq. A week later, columnist Robert Novak published the name of Wilson's wife, identifying Valerie Plame as a CIA operative. Wilson accused the Bush administration of leaking his wife's name to Novak.

TN: Regarding the mission to Niger to investigate the possibility of Iraq purchasing uranium to develop nuclear weapons, why were you selected to go?

Wilson: Well, remember that in February 2002, I had not yet spoken out on any aspect of the proposed gulf war. Remember also that when I did speak out -- if you take a look at my writings, you can find the 3 articles I did for the San Jose News, you can find them on their website under perspective -- I argued that disarmament was a legitimate national security objective and one that was underpinned by international law and that in order to get there we might actually have to have a credible threat of force facing Saddam, and for that threat of force to be credible, we would have to be prepared to use it.

So nowhere in anything that I said was I saying that we might not or should not consider the use of military force. What I did say was 2 things. One, if we were going to use military force, it ought to be smart military force for the right reasons rather than something dumb, and frankly the invasion, conquest, and occupation of Iraq for the purpose of disarming Saddam struck me as the highest risk, lowest reward option. I also argued that to do this seriously, we ought to understand that sending our men and women to kill and to die for our country is the most solemn decision a government has to make and we damn well ought to have that debate before we get them into harm's way instead of after.

Those were the premises under which I argued that we ought not to rush into an invasion, conquest, occupation, war. That said, that all took place well after my trip. I was selected to go to Niger because there was maybe one other person in the U.S. government who knew those who had been in office at the time this purported agreement memorandum was signed, and his credibility was somewhat damaged not by anything he did, but by the fact that he had been an ambassador out there and as a consequence, he had to be the daily point of friction with the military junta during the time he was out there. I was senior director for African affairs at the time. I started my career in Niger and had a whole series of relationships and a great credibility with that group of people who had been in power at the time.

I also happen to know a fair amount about the uranium business, having served in 3 of the 4 countries in Africa that produce uranium, including having been ambassador to the Gabonese Republic which is also a uranium exporter.

TN: Did your wife suggest you for the mission?

Wilson: No. The decision to ask me to go out to Niger was taken in a meeting at which there were about a dozen analysts from both the CIA and the State Department. A couple of them came up and said to me when we're going through the introductory phase, "We have met at previous briefings that you have done on other subjects, Africa-related."

Not one of those at that meeting could I have told you what they look like, would I recognize on the street, or remember their name today. And as old as I am, I can still recognize my wife, and I still do remember her name. That was the meeting at which the decision was made to ask me if I would clear my schedule to go.

TN: An internal government memo prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel details a meeting in early 2002 where your wife, a member of the agency for clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested that you could be sent to investigate the reports. Do you dispute that?

Wilson: I don't know anything about a meeting, I can only tell you about the meeting I was at where I was asked if I would prepare to go, and there was nobody at that meeting that I know. Now that fact that my wife knows that I know a lot about the uranium business and that I know a lot about Niger and that she happens to be involved in weapons of mass destruction, it should come as no surprise to anyone that we know of each others activities.

TN: Did the White House have any advance notice that you were going on this mission?

Wilson: I doubt it. The way that this works is that the vice president is acknowledged as asking the CIA briefer if he has anything on this subject. That is taken by the CIA briefer as a tasker. The CIA briefer goes back and tasks it at the operational level. The operators then decide how best to answer the question and in this case they did a number of things that I am aware of. One, they had this meeting at which they tried to fill in all information gaps they had, and two, they asked me if I would clear my schedule to go, and three, after I said that I might be prepared to do that, we gamed out what might be gained by my going out there.

There were also two other reports that were produced, one by the ambassador in the field who went to the government and got their explanation of how the business works and their denials that this would have happened. There was another visit by a four-star Marine Corps general Carlton Fulford who was the DSINC at COLCOM and he also reported as was quoted in the Washington Post as saying there was nothing to this.

But there would not be any particular reason for the White House to have known how the question was answered. All the vice president cares about is the answer. When the report is done, American law and procedures are such that you do every thing you can to protect the identity of the person who actually makes the trip. That's called protection of sources.

But remember of course, February of 2002 was well before I had taken any position whatsoever on the war. I was not partisan in any sense on any of this stuff, nor am I now for that matter.

TN: How would you compare your investigation and conclusions about Iraq's efforts to purchase uranium from Africa to the investigation and conclusions of the British government?

Wilson: All I know is what the British government put in its white paper which is essentially that Iraq was attempting to purchase uranium in Africa. They have since said that part of that information that led to that conclusion in the white paper was the same forged documents that we have acknowledged that we had and the IAEA has sort of said were forgeries. They also said they have one additional piece of information of which they are not telling anybody about.

Now Article 10 of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 calls on all member nations to turn over whatever information they have on prohibited weapons programs to the IAEA. They have not done so. They did not share with us the details of that specific piece of additional intelligence they have. Now it's hard for us in the United States, [even with a] $40 billion a year intelligence apparatus, to determine if this information was useful or not useful because they have not been able to subject it to any testing. They haven't been able to run it though our files, they haven't been able to independently verify it. They don't know the details of it, so you are essentially taking on faith that this one bit of information that the British continue to claim they have but haven't shared with anybody is accurate.

TN: I sense doubt from you.

Wilson: It's not so much doubt as it is a given in the intelligence business that you are skeptical of information until you are able to subject it to independent verification one way or another. At the end of the day, the analytical community sees thousands of bits of information every day, a good part of that information is bogus or in some way tainted. Their job is to go through the information, test it, verify it, compare it with what we already know to determine what the real facts on the ground are.

TN: You have mentioned that you are not partisan. Doesn't that appear to be the case considering the candidates you've supported?

Wilson: Including Bush. When Ed Gillespie was running around doing his little schpiel, he knew that I contributed to the Bush campaign but decided he would selectively use information on candidates I have supported to bolster a case that simply cannot be made. I contributed to the Bush campaign, the Gore campaign, and I contributed to the campaign of Ed Royce on several occasions. He is a conservative Republican from Orange County, California, and I have contributed to a number of other candidates. I contributed to the Kerry campaign after I made my trip out to Niger -- well after that. Almost a year and a half after that. But I will tell you this: I reserve the right to participate in the political process of my country just like any other citizen.

I was named ambassador to Gabon by George Herbert Walker Bush. One of the highlights of my professional career was serving a charges d'affair in Baghdad in the run up to the gulf war. When I came back to Washington and was introduced to the war cabinet, President Bush introduced me as a true American hero, and I take great pride in that.

TN: Your activities of late have some suggesting that there's certainly a partisan motivation.

Wilson: I make no bones about the fact that I believe that the President of the United States and the policies that he has pursued have been inconsistent with the approach that he articulated in his speech at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley as a candidate and inconsistent with his statements in the debates he had on foreign policy with Al Gore. I make no bones about that fact that I do not subscribe to the neo-conservative agenda. I think it is horribly dangerous. I do not subscribe to the strategy for a clean break -- a new strategy for the security of the realm, which is Mr. Perle's study group's approach to how Israel should position itself in relationship to the United States. I make no bones about that.

TN: The so-called neo-cons, who do you think that they are?

Wilson: I think the administration is dominated by two groups in the foreign policy apparatus who have forged an alliance of convenience in the aftermath of 9/11. The one group, I call the whack-a-moles, and that group is championed principally by Vice President Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, and I think they are probably characterized as best I can see by an approach that says we see a threat, we whack it, we bring our boys home, the threat reemerges, we go whack it again. So that group is for aggressive military action without the subsequent devotion to reconstruction or nation-building in the aftermath.

The second group, I call the johnpur and pith helmet crowd, the ill-liberal imperialists and I think their names include people like Mr. Libby, Mr. Abrams, Mr. Wolfowitz, and the other signatories of the 1998 letter to President Clinton calling for the regime change to be translated into the military overthrow of Saddam Hussein. I think their approach is articulated by people like Mac Boot who wants to establish a beachhead in Iraq for the purposes of redrawing the political map of the middle East.

TN: Is that something you don't agree with?

Wilson: It's not whether I agree with it or not. It's that if that is the agenda, we as a society have not debated that as a reason for having conducted this war. We debated this war on three pillars, based on the three pillars that the president put forward. The threat posed to our national security by weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein. The operational ties between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, in other words terrorists with a global reach. The half-pillar, I call it, that there might be a linkage between the weapons of mass destruction state and the terrorist groups, that is the transfer of weapons of mass destruction. The third pillar was the liberation of the Iraqi people from the tyranny of thirty years' duration. Those are the grounds on which we debated going to war. We did not debate on the grounds of redrawing the map of the Middle East.

TN: Certainly you could have foreseen that the removal of Saddam's regime would lead to something of that sort. Correct?

Wilson: The argument that I tried to make was that the weapons of mass destruction were the only legitimate national security issue we faced. There was international legal underpinning for an approach to that which included as I called it, the muscular disarmament. In other words, the disarmament of the regime that included a credible use of force to ensure he complied. The president went up and got 1441 which allowed us to do that. The problem in my judgment was that they short-circuited that process and decided instead of allowing the process to move to its natural conclusion, or test it a little longer, that they would just go ahead and march to Baghdad. I think the collateral damage and the consequences of that are not in our nation's interest. I think that at the end of the day we will find it has been a tremendous recruiting tool for al Qaeda and other like-minded international terrorist organizations.

The great irony is that at a time when our military prowess is at its peak, our political and moral authority is at its lowest ebb. A year or two years after we had the sympathy of the world, we are looked upon as a real menace in the world by a large percentage of the population, and I don't think that bodes well for our future.

TN: Is there any threshold or any amount of weapons of mass destruction that would have caused you to support the war?

Wilson: I supported the disarmament. I thought there were a number of things we could have done before putting Americans in and occupying Iraq. Some of those were articulated in the Carnegie endowment study -- in fact that particular chapter was written by Gen. Chuck Boyd, a retired 4-star Air Force general and former POW and former deputy commander in chief of U.S. forces Europe.

There were others who thought that there were other steps we could take including Bill Owen who talked about the possibility of putting in a complete information umbrella over Iraq as well as steadily increasing the pressure by putting a number of other inspectors there. What was forgotten in all of this is that the use of military force is always the bluntest instrument in our arsenal.

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This interview will be continued in Part 2.

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