Let's Forge Ahead With Joe Wilson

Let fill in some of the new details about Joe Wilson and his debunked forgeries. Susan Schmidt told us that Ambassador Wilson misled the Washington Post but her excerpt did not do justice to a bit of a comedy classic - here is the Senate report:

The former ambassador also told Committee staff that he was the source of a Washington Post article (“CIA Did Not Share Doubt on Iraq Data: Bush Used Report of Uranium Bid,” June 12, 2003) which said, “among the Envoy’s conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because ‘the dates were wrong and the names were wrong.’” Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the “dates were wrong and the names were wrong” when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports. The former ambassador said that he may have “misspoken” to the reporter when he said he concluded that the documents were “forged.” He also said he may have become confused about his own recollection after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported in March 2003 that the names and dates on the documents were not correct and may have thought he had seen the names himself. The former ambassador reiterated that he had been able to collect the names of the government officials which should have been on the documents.

Hmm, confused about the difference between what you have lived and what you have read? Get a blog!

MORE: Sy Hersh's original article about the forgeries:

It took Baute's team only a few hours to determine that the documents were fake. The agency had been given about a half-dozen letters and other communications between officials in Niger and Iraq, many of them written on letterheads of the Niger government. The problems were glaring. One letter, dated October 10, 2000, was signed with the name of Allele Habibou, a Niger Minister of Foreign Affairs and Coöperation, who had been out of office since 1989. Another letter, allegedly from Tandja Mamadou, the President of Niger, had a signature that had obviously been faked and a text with inaccuracies so egregious, the senior I.A.E.A. official said, that "they could be spotted by someone using Google on the Internet."

OK. But see p. 47 of the Senate report for this:

On March 25, 2002, the Do issued a third and final intelligence report from the same "(foreign) government service". The report said that the 2000 agreement by Niger to provide uranium to Iraq specified that 500 tons of uranium per year would be delivered in XXX...

As in the two previous reports, the government service was not identified as the foreign government service. the foreign government service did not provide the DO with information about its source and the DO, to date, remains uncertain as tohow the foreign government service collected the information in the three intelligence reports. There were no obvious inconsistencies in the names of officials mentioned or the dates of the transactions in any of the three reports. Of the seven names mentioned in the reporting, two were former high ranking officials who were the individuals in the positions described in the reports at the time described and five were lower ranking officials. Of the five lower ranking, two were not the individuals in the positions described in the reports, however, those do not appear to be names or positions with which intelligence analysts would have been familiar. For example, an INR analyst who had recently returned from a position as Deputy Chief of Mission at teh US Embassy in Niger told Committee staff that they did not notice any inconsistencies with the names of the officials mentioned. The only mistake in any of the reports regarding dates, is that one date, July 7, is said tobe a Wednesday in the report, but was actually a Friday.

Beats me.

Comments

[Patrick R. Sullivan]

Which reminds me to get around to viewing my new DVD of "Blow Up".

[Brad DeLong]

Cruel!... But effective!

[TM]

Thanks. I'm actually back-pedaling a bit, or at least toning down my evil, hysterical cackling, in an Unsolved Mysteries post. My issues with Amb. Wilson notwithstanding, there is a larger story here.

[Patrick]

The July/Aug 2004 American Spectator has an excellent article that shows how Sy Hersh is an unreliable lying conspiracy-monger, and takes apart his various discredited muck-raking stories and the con-men that were 'sources' for Sy Hersh's fictions. This includes Sy's slander of an Indian politician, his concocted fictions about Israel, his JFK "dark side of camelot" which turns out to be a cut-n-paste job of conspiracy theories that would do Oliver Stone proud, a slander against McCaffrey and our soldiers in 1991 Gulf War.

Read the article. A keeper.

It is totally unsurprising that Sy Hersh would peddle stories about Niger Uranium that turn to be discredited, that he attempts (and fails) to concoct a link between Abu Graib and Rumsfeld based on 'anonymous' sources that so often turn out to be nothing more than his presumptions.

After his 'journalism' gets discredited so many times, why is he given any byline in any 'respectable' journal?

At long last, has the New Yorker no shame?