Light up the sky like a plame, Plame!

Stephen Hayes is a model of what a journalist should be. He has done tremendous work at the Weekly Standard documenting the relationships between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Al Qaeda. (Yes, those who read only the MSM will be stunned to learn there were relationships between the two.)

Lately Hayes has been following the Plame case, which will come to some kind of resolution this week as Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald wraps up his grand jury.

In the October 24th issue of the Weekly Standard, Hayes laid out a detailed timeline of what occurred when in this strange case, and showed that once again, the MSM has missed the point by focusing on Rove and Libby.

I can't reproduce it all in detail here, read the article for yourself. But I'll summarize it as best I can.

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The chain of events that gave rise to a grand jury investigation

October 15, 2001 - The CIA received a report from a foreign government service that the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein had struck a deal with the government of Niger to purchase several tons of partially processed uranium

October 18, 2001 - The CIA published a Senior Executive Intelligence Bulletin that discussed the finding. The report noted the sourcing: "There is no corroboration from other sources that such an agreement was reached or that uranium was transferred."

February 5, 2002 - A second report came from "a foreign government service." It contained more details of the alleged transaction. An official from the CIA's directorate of operations said that the new information came from "a very credible source"

February 12, 2002 - Analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency wrote a report using the new information and included in the daily intelligence briefing prepared for Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney asked his CIA briefer for more information, including the CIA's analysis of the report

February 12, 2002 - Officials at the agency's Counterproliferation Division discussed how they might investigate further. An employee of the division, Valerie Wilson, suggested the agency send her husband, Joseph Wilson, a former U.S. ambassador to Gabon with experience in Niger, to Africa to make inquiries

February 18, 2002 - The U.S. embassy in Niger sent a cable describing a new account of the alleged deal. cable further warned against dismissing the allegations prematurely.

February 19, 2002 - Back at Langley, representatives of several U.S. intelligence agencies met with Ambassador Wilson to discuss the trip

Hayes writes at this point:

Here is how Wilson would later recall his investigation in his now-famous New York Times op-ed.

"In late February 2002, I arrived in Niger's capital, Niamey, where I had been a diplomat in the mid-70s and visited as a National Security Council official in the late 90s. The city was much as I remembered it. Seasonal winds had clogged the air with dust and sand. Through the haze, I could see camel caravans crossing the Niger River (over the John F. Kennedy bridge), the setting sun behind them. Most people had wrapped scarves around their faces to protect against the grit, leaving only their eyes visible."

Wilson met with U.S. Ambassador to Niger Barbara Owens-Kirkpatrick, who, like the State Department's intelligence bureau, thought the alleged sale unlikely. Wilson continued:

"I spent the next eight days drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people: current government officials, former government officials, people associated with the country's uranium business. It did not take long to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place."

March 5, 2002 - Wilson was debriefed by two CIA officials at his home. He never filed a written report. The resulting CIA report was published and disseminated in the regular intelligence stream three days later

Hayes writes:

Reactions to the report differed. The INR analyst believed Wilson's report supported his assessment that deals between Iraq and Niger were unlikely. Analysts at the CIA thought the Wilson report added little to the overall knowledge of the Iraq-Niger allegations but noted with particular interest the visit of the Iraqi delegation in 1999. That report may have seemed noteworthy because of the timing of the Iraqi visit. The CIA had several previous reports of Iraq seeking uranium in Africa in 1999, specifically from Congo and Somalia.

On balance, then, Wilson's trip seemed to several analysts to make the original claims of an Iraq-Niger deal more plausible.

September 2002 - A DIA paper was titled Iraq's Reemerging Nuclear Program. It declared: "Iraq has been vigorously trying to procure uranium ore and yellowcake."

September 11, 2002 - Language was cleared by the CIA that contained several references to the Iraq-Niger intelligence--some more direct than others--for use in speeches written for President Bush

September 24, 2002 - First public mention of the intelligence reporting on Iraq and Niger came in a white paper produced by the British government

September 24, 2002 - Staffers at the National Security Council (NSC) asked the CIA to clear additional language on Iraq and Niger. "We also have intelligence that Iraq has sought large amounts of uranium and uranium oxide, known as yellowcake, from Africa. Yellowcake is an essential ingredient in the process to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." The CIA once again approved the language, but once again the president did not use it.

October 1, 2002 - CIA had published the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi WMD, Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction. This classified document--the U.S. government's official position on Iraqi WMD programs--lifted almost verbatim the aggressive language used in the aforementioned DIA study, Iraq's Reemerging Nuclear Program, published just two weeks earlier

October 2, 2002 - Senate Select Intelligence Committee met and questioned senior U.S. intelligence officials in closed session about the threat from Iraq. Here, for the first time, a senior CIA official raised doubts about the reporting on Iraq and Niger

October 7, 2002 - Bush gives a speech in Cincinnati. On draft six of the speech, the CIA objected to this sentence: "The [Iraqi] regime has been caught attempting to purchase up to 500 metric tons of uranium oxide from Africa--an essential ingredient in the enrichment process." The two officials responsible for coordinating the translation of intelligence into public rhetoric were unaware that any substantive objections had been raised to the Niger intelligence.

October 9, 2002 - An Italian journalist walked into the U.S. embassy in Rome and delivered a set of documents purportedly showing that Iraq had indeed purchased uranium from Niger. The embassy provided the documents to the State Department and the CIA. At State, an INR analyst almost instantly suspected the documents might be forgeries.

December 7, 2002 - Iraq submitted to the United Nations an 11,000-page document on its weapons programs, as required by U.N. Resolution 1441. Among the scores of objections to the document was the fact that Iraq had failed to account for its attempts to acquire uranium from Africa.

January 28, 2003 - Bush gives State of the Union address. Among his many claims that night was this one: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

March 3, 2003 - The IAEA shared with the U.S. government its assessment that the October 2002 documents on an Iraq-Niger deal for uranium were forgeries. The following day, the French government announced that the assessment it had previously given the United States--that an Iraq-Niger deal had taken place--was based on the same forged documents. (Some current and former Bush administration officials remain convinced that the French role in this matter was no accident. They speculate that French intelligence, seeking to embarrass the U.S. government, may have been the original source of the bad documents. An FBI investigation into the matter continues.)

May 6, 2003 - New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof examined prewar U.S. claims of WMD in Iraq. His article included this curious passage:

I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged.

The envoy reported, for example, that a Niger minister whose signature was on one of the documents had in fact been out of office for more than a decade. In addition, the Niger mining program was structured so that the uranium diversion had been impossible. The envoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted--except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway.

It was the first of many times Joseph Wilson would tell his story to a reporter and the first of many times he would overstate his role and invent his supposed findings

June 12, 2003 - Walter Pincus of the Washington Post writes the following:

During his trip, the CIA's envoy spoke with the president of Niger and other Niger officials mentioned as being involved in the Iraqi effort, some of whose signatures purportedly appeared on the documents.

After returning to the United States, the envoy reported to the CIA that the uranium-purchase story was false, the sources said. Among the envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong," the former U.S. government official said.

June 14, 2003 - Joseph Wilson speaks at a forum. He says (speaking about himself, obviously):

I just want to assure you that that American ambassador who has been cited in reports in the New York Times and in the Washington Post, and now in the Guardian over in London, who actually went over to Niger on behalf of the government--not of the CIA but of the government--and came back in February of 2002 and told the government that there was nothing to this story

The website for EPIC includes a biography of Wilson under the June 14, 2003, event that concludes with this sentence: "He is married to the former Valerie Plame and has four children".

Hayes write at this point:

It should be clear by now that the only one telling flat-out lies was Joseph Wilson. Again, Wilson's trip to Niger took place in February 2002, some eight months before the U.S. government received the phony Iraq-Niger documents in October 2002. So it is not possible, as he told the Washington Post, that he advised the CIA that "the dates were wrong and the names were wrong." And it is not possible, as Wilson claimed to the New York Times, that he debunked the documents as forgeries.

July 6, 2003 - New York Times published Wilson's now-famous op-ed. That account differs in important ways from the story Wilson had anonymously provided the Times, the Washington Post and the New Republic. Wilson acknowledged for the first time that he had not seen any forged document.

July 14, 2003 - Robert Novak wrote a column in which he named Joseph Wilson's wife, "CIA operative" Valerie Plame. Novak sourced this information to "two senior administration officials."

December 30, 2003 - The CIA concluded that the reference had compromised Plame's undercover status and asked the Justice Department to investigate. U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald is named special prosecutor

July 23, 2005 - New York Times published a lengthy, front-page article detailing the work of two senior Bush administration officials, Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, on the Niger-uranium story.

But there is one curious omission: July 7, 2004. On that date, the bipartisan Senate Select Intelligence Committee released a 511-page report on the intelligence that served as the foundation for the Bush administration's case for war in Iraq. The Senate report includes a 48-page section on Wilson that demonstrates, in painstaking detail, that virtually everything Joseph Wilson said publicly about his trip, from its origins to his conclusions, was false.
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There is more in the article. But factor all this in as you read claims that the Bush administration lied to get us into Iraq, and that an evil Bush administration smeared the two noble Americans, Wilson and his wife.

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Stephen Spruiell at the Media Blog issues an open letter to the press asking them to tell the truth about Uncle Joe Wilson.