Joe Wilson and the Neocon Lie That Supersedes All Others

Or, Nothing Plus Nothing Makes Nothing

"Wilson's report, as a bipartisan commission found, was not disputing what the president said in those 16 words. It was mildly supportive." David Brooks on The NewsHour, March 16, 2007

"I think Joe Wilson started this all by making a series of sensational and now we know false charges." David Brooks on The NewsHour, March 9, 2007

"Are they guilty of manipulating intelligence on WMD? That, I think, is the thing they are least guilty of. .. the Robb report, which showed there was no political pressure; there was a Senate intelligence report; there was a Butler report. There were all of these reports. None of them found manipulation of intelligence." David Brooks on The NewsHour, November 4, 2005

To buy into the Republican party line - that Joe Wilson never debunked any pre-war "intelligence" - you need to ignore statements from the President's guy, Charles Duelfer. Duelfer, who headed the Iraq Survey Group that investigated WMD in post-invasion Iraq, presented the definitive report on the nuclear threat from Saddam.

Duelfer's report did not equivocate: There was zero evidence of any nuclear weapons program. Period. There never was any "circumstantial evidence" or "unsubstantiated evidence" or "fragmentary evidence" or any other kind of evidence. Just nothing. Bupkis. The Iraq Survey Group all but plagiarized a passage from the report by Nobel Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei, head the International Atomic Energy Agency. Dr. ElBaradei's report, issued days before the invasion of Iraq, said:

"[W]e have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq. "

Deufler's report said the same thing over and over:

"Iraq did not possess a nuclear device, nor had it tried to reconstitute a capability to produce nuclear weapons after 1991."

"ISG has uncovered no information to support allegations of Iraqi pursuit of uranium from abroad in the post-Operation Desert Storm era."

"ISG, however, has uncovered no indication that Iraq had resumed fissile material or nuclear weapon research and development activities since 1991".

ISG has not found evidence to show that Iraq sought uranium from abroad after 1991 or renewed indigenous production of such material."

"So far, ISG has found only one offer of uranium to Baghdad since 1991--an approach Iraq appears to have turned down."

"Regarding specific allegations of uranium pursuits from Niger, Ja'far claims that after 1998 Iraq had only two contacts with Niamey [Niger]--neither of which involved uranium."

And as for that claim that Iraq was noncompliant with inspection ground rules during the 12 years prior to the war:

"Iraq collaborated with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to produce a series of Full, Final, and Complete Disclosure (FFCD) statements, including a "final" presented to the IAEA in September 1996, which reported its review findings to the UN Security Council in October 1997" (The IAEA inspectors left in 1998 and returned four years later in 2002.)


That's why the notion of Joe Wilson "bolstering" the case for a uranium sale is such a crock. (For a recap on the phony parsing used to malign Wilson, see this here).

The Vice President had every reason to know there was zero evidence of a nuclear threat in July 2003, which is why Libby's attempt to expose "facts" about Wilson's credibility was always a sham. Wilson was wrong only in one sense - the President's people did not manipulate evidence; they made it up.

How is it possible that the case for an Iraqi nuclear threat had zero basis in fact? The answer is simple. "Evidence" is more than crap you throw against the wall and hope it sticks. Evidence, as explained by the Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Law is "something that furnishes or tends to furnish proof."

Here's an example to explain the distinction. Suppose I handed you a piece of paper showing a facsimile of a Harvard Medical School diploma awarded to Paris Hilton. Anyone with a passing knowledge of Paris Hilton would know why she would never attend Harvard Medical School. And a simple phone call to Harvard would have confirmed that the so-called diploma was bogus. Does the piece of paper constitute evidence of Paris Hilton's academic record? Of course not.

The phony Harvard diploma is exactly like the phony uranium sales agreement between Niger and Iraq. Anyone with a passing knowledge of Niger knew that such a sale was as probable as Castro selling time shares in Guantanamo. Just as Cuba exercises no physical control over Guantanamo, Niger exercises no physical control over its uranium reserves. A foreign consortium - comprised of entities from France, Germany, Spain and Japan - exercises exclusive control over Niger's uranium. That's why the State Department never took the uranium sales story seriously. The subsequent inquiries about the so-called deal - conducted by the U.S. Ambassador to Niger, General Carlton Fulford and Joe Wilson - all confirmed what was obvious from the beginning.

One of Wilson's Niger contacts had recounted a visit by Iraqi officials in1999, during which the Nigeriens avoiding any discussion of trade or uranium. Contrary to what Wilson's enemies assert, this trip wasn't evidence of a uranium sale, only evidence of some febrile imaginations desperate to make a case for war. Months after Wilson's trip, the CIA received a crude forgery received months could have been discredited with a simple web search.There was never any evidence of a uranium deal, only crap that didn't stick to the wall.

Was it all a big mistake by our intelligence services? Hardly. If you read the Senate Intelligence Committee Report carefully, you can see there were deliberate steps taken to preempt honest members of the intelligence community from asserting the truth to The White House.

A week before the invasion of Iraq, the CIA acknowledged that ElBaradei was right - there was no uranium deal between Niger and Iraq. That didn't stop Dick Cheney from going on Meet the Press to state that:

[W]e know he [Saddam] has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong.

The same type of fraud applies to the phony aluminum tube "evidence." CIA analyst Joe Turner, with his friends Andrew Szady and Joseph Dooley conspired to put out false documents about the aluminum tubes. And finger prints tracing the fraud back to the White House, are evident from the stilted reporting of Judith Miller and Michael Gordon in the New York Times. Turner (then only known as "Joe T.") continued lying to Senate investigators looking into pre-war WMD intelligence. It's all detailed, step-by-step, here.

(Defenders of the aluminum tube theory point out that experts conceded that use of aluminum, as a material for uranium enrichment centrifuges, was conceivable. But it was still ridiculous, since so many other commonly available materials are more durable. To analogize, using aluminum tubes made as much sense as building a large passenger plane out of wood. Sixty years ago, Howard Hughes proved a large wooden plane could fly, but no one in this day in age would take the idea of a wooden plane, or an aluminum centrifuge, seriously.)

Finally, there's the claim that new magnet production facility was intended for a centrifuge program. No one in the intelligence community was able to produce anything to support that claim, so CIA analysts quickly told Senate investigators it was a "mistake."

The entire case for Iraq's nuclear program was based on the supposed uranium sale, the supposed nuclear application for some aluminum tubes, and the supposed nuclear application of Iraqi magnet production. That's why Duelfer's report and ElBaradi's report concurred that there was nothing.

And four years after the invasion, David Brooks persists in making something out of nothing. And the contents of the Duelfer Report, which received scant coverage when released a month before the 2004 election, seem to languish in obscurity.

And that's why Joe Wilson's story is more important than it was four years ago. The David Brooks types persist in compounding their lies about the run up to the war in Iraq. When caught in a lie, they lie more. Otherwise, how could they ask anyone listen to them? The Iraq war proved they were in way over their heads and had no idea what they were talking about.