© Jack Cashill

WorldNetDaily.com
March 8, 2007

Anyone who has followed the Scooter Libby trial closely knows that Patrick Fitzgerald tried the wrong man. Among other things, Wilson has lied conspicuously about who sent him to Niger, who did not send him, what he found, what he did not find, and how he reported his findings.

Wilson did all of this during wartime in an effort to undermine the commander in chief. If there is not a law about this sort of mischief, there should be.

For all the reporting on the Wilson affair, however, the media have been preposterously silent about two critical and related understandings: the first is why Joseph Wilson originally insisted we not go into Iraq; and the second is why the Bush administration chose not to “find” what Wilson assured us we would find.

Both of these stories have been hiding in plain sight.

At the suggestion of his CIA agent wife, Valerie Plame, Wilson made his critical trip to the African hellhole of Niger in February 2002. He had been there before. In the preface to the paperback version of his comically titled book, The Politics of Truth, Wilson claims he went to Niger in 1999 “at the request of the CIA to look into other uranium-related matters.”

The Joseph Wilson that mainstream America knows is a man of conscience who began to oppose the impending war with Iraq because his trip to Niger had proved to him the emptiness of Saddam’s WMD boasts. This is the story line that the major media continue to run with. Unfortunately, however, it is simply and demonstrably not true.

Conveniently overlooked by the media is an op-ed piece that unravels this lie in a stroke. Wilson wrote it for the San Jose Mercury News on October 13, 2002. Although anti-war in its thrust, its message runs fully counter to the one that would make Wilson famous.

In it, Wilson argues that threatening to oust Saddam “will ensure that Saddam will use every weapon in his arsenal to defend himself.”By every weapon, of course, he means the soon-to-be mocked WMDs. “As the just-released CIA report suggests,” Wilson continues, “when cornered, Saddam is very likely to fight dirty.”

Two weeks before the op-ed, in fact, the CIA had published a National Intelligence Estimate titled Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction. Wilson’s trip eight months earlier had obviously failed to persuade him or Plame that Iraq was not planning to fight dirty.

“ Iraq [has been] vigorously trying to procure uranium ore and yellowcake,” reads the CIA report. “Acquiring either would shorten the time to produce nuclear weapons.” Plame was a WMD specialist by the way.

In his Mercury News op-ed, Wilson proceeds to make an elaborate and unconvincing argument that Saddam will desist from using his WMDs only if he is assured of keeping his job.

“One of the strongest arguments for a militarily supported inspection plan,” continues Wilson, “is that it doesn't threaten Saddam with extinction, a threat that could push him to fight back with the very weapons we're seeking to destroy.”

To understand why Wilson was working overtime to keep Saddam on the job is to understand that Saddam did indeed have something to hide. Although the evidence strongly suggests that Saddam was able to move most of his WMDs out of country with Russian help, he did not move them all.

A few weeks back I received an email from a scientist affiliated with a major university’s nuclear program. In the email, he casually referred to the “ 1.77 tons of enriched uranium” the U.S. found in Iraq.

More than a little skeptical, I emailed the scientist back, “Tell me how we know about the 1.77 tons.” He referred me to a fascinating article from BBC News online dated 7 July, 2004.

Titled “US reveals Iraq nuclear operation,” the article details how 20 experts from the US Energy Department's secret laboratories packaged and removed 1.77 tons of enriched uranium and then flew the material out of Iraq aboard a military plane.

The article quotes a smiling Spencer Abraham, Secretary of the DOE, saying, "This operation was a major achievement.” And just as suddenly as the story appeared, it disappeared. Not a word was heard of it from the major networks. The only American media to follow up on it was WorldNetDaily.

This is exactly the kind of story that the major media do not want to disseminate. They much prefer the Wilson story line, however absurd on the face of it, that Bush lied us into war with manufactured stories of WMDs that never existed.

The question remains, though, why did the administration cooperate in spiking the story. “ My feeling is that Abraham didn't get the memo,” writes my scientist contact. “He opened his mouth and then everybody scrambled to have him never do it again. “

The scientist speculates that Abraham may not have understood what the American forces had discovered. “He made enriched-u look like dirty bomb material, and that's that,” adds the scientist. “But that isn't that.”

“Enriched uranium = nuclear weapons,” the scientist continues. He argues that the administration prefers that the American people remain ignorant on the subject, possibly to avoid panic.

“’Enriched uranium’ means nothing to them. But it's everything. A machinist, a physicist, and plastic explosive are all you need to make a Hiroshima sized bang.”

There is a second reason for discretion, namely that this material was not manufactured by Saddam. “I think that the French gave Saddam the enriched-u,” observes the scientist, and once Saddam decided to quit fighting Iran and start supporting Abu Nidal in earnest, we decided ‘enough of that’.”

“Knowing the French,” he adds, “they'd demand their hooch back after starting all the trouble with it.”

The French connection almost assuredly got Joseph Wilson involved in this story in the first place. In 2002, he worked as an international consultant and had a long and deep involvement with French interests, mining interests in particular. Plame herself boasted of her husband’s numerous “French contacts.”

To be sure, the French government and hundreds of its key industries wanted to keep Saddam in power. Saddam had long been among the very best customers of its defense industry.

Along with the Russians, the French were also the primary beneficiaries of the shamefully corrupt United Nations Oil-for-Food program.

Even if Wilson had no involvement with the ill-concealed scandal, he had to know how Saddam’s continued reign benefited his clients and potential clients. Why else would a Washington-based consultant write an op-ed for a San Jose newspaper?

One of the major media’s grubby little secrets is that many of their op-eds are written for hire by individuals whose primary goal is to advance their client’s interests. Given Wilson’s humble stature in October 2002, San Jose was likely the best placement he could get. That would change. Within a year, the newly famous Wilson would be writing op-eds for the New York Times.

Indeed, Wilson’s public relations work on behalf of his clients and allies deserves its own Harvard case study. Consider what is known beyond doubt:

• Wilson finessed at least two all-expense paid trips to Niger from the CIA.
• He used his new-found authority as a weapons inspector to argue publicly against a war that would harm his clients’ interest.
  
• Initially, he waged the argument that Saddam had to remain in power lest he use his arsenal of WMDs against American troops.
  
• When the forged documents were exposed, he insinuated to at least three different publications that he was the first one to debunk the forgeries.
  
• He used his CIA operative wife to enhance his credibility with the first of those reporters, Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times, despite the risk to her career in so doing.
  
• Once his wife was exposed, and his own fame heightened as a consequence, he used his visibility to argue that the French ought to be cut in on Iraq reconstruction contracts.
  
• He used his celebrity to repeat the canard that there never had been any WMDs and that the Bush administration lied about them to seduce the nation into war. This too had the effect of making his “French contacts” seems less immoral and more worthy of the spoils and his Democratic clients more likely to regain the Congress and the presidency.

As to the 1.77 tons of enriched uranium, my scientist contact believes it would have been shipped to Oak Ridge or Lawrence Livermore to run the forensics on it.

Once completed, we would know where it came from. And for whatever reason, our government has decided that taking a hit on WMDs is more constructive than sharing that information.