Sweet Yellowcake Lies

This past Sunday it was revealed that the US is in the process of removing yellowcake uranium from Iraq. Now hold on, hasn't the anti-war crowd been screaming for all these years that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was no threat at all to its neighbors or the West and that under his benevolent rule, the people of Iraq enjoyed a blissful existence interrupted by imperialist American troops storming into their utopia in March of 2003? And didn't Bush lie about WMDs and Saddam's nuclear capability? Evidently not:

While yellowcake alone is not considered potent enough for a so-called "dirty bomb" - a conventional explosive that disperses radioactive material - it could stir widespread panic if incorporated in a blast. Yellowcake also can be enriched for use in reactors and, at higher levels, nuclear weapons using sophisticated equipment.

It is, of course, impossible to talk about yellowcake uranium without mentioning two of the most pathetic losers to ever stain Washington with their presence since the turn of the century: Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame. The Democratic Party's toadies in the mainstream media would have you believe that Joe Wilson was an honorable State Department employee who undertook a fact-finding trip to Niger (by the way, that's pronounced "NYE-jer," not "knee-JEHR") on behalf of the US government to investigate rumors that Saddam had sought to purchase yellowcake uranium from that country. It was subsequently asserted that the Bush Administrated outed Joe Wilson's wife, the supposedly-covert CIA intelligence officer Valerie Plame, to strike back at Wilson for having found that Iraq had never sought to purchase any yellowcake uranium from Niger.

Truth is, it was at Valerie Plame's insistence that the Central Intelligence Agency send her husband Joe to Nigeria to investigate the yellowcake rumors, which he did in 1999 and later in 2002. This declassified government memo proves so about the 1999 trip (h/t Gateway Pundit):


The relevant part of the memo reads:

Meeting apparently convened by Valerie Wilson, a CIA WMD managerial type and the wife of Amb. Joe Wilson, with the idea that the agency and the larger USG could dispatch Joe to Niger to use his contacts there to sort out the Niger/Iraq uranium sale question. Joe went to Niger in late 1999 in regard to Niger's uranium program, apparently with CIA support.

And regarding the 2002 trip, The Washington Post adds:

The [Senate intelligence committee] report states that a CIA official told the Senate committee that Plame "offered up" Wilson's name for the Niger trip, then on Feb. 12, 2002, sent a memo to a deputy chief in the CIA's Directorate of Operations saying her husband "has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity." The next day, the operations official cabled an overseas officer seeking concurrence with the idea of sending Wilson, the report said.

But in his memoir, Wilson stated otherwise:

Valerie had nothing to do with the matter...She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip.

Liar.

Need more proof? Consider this information from the same Washintgon Post article referenced above:

Wilson last year launched a public firestorm [link added by me] with his accusations that the administration had manipulated intelligence to build a case for war. He has said that his trip to Niger should have laid to rest any notion that Iraq sought uranium there and has said his findings were ignored by the White House.

Wilson's assertions -- both about what he found in Niger and what the Bush administration did with the information -- were undermined yesterday in a bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report. The panel found that Wilson's report, rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, bolstered the case for most intelligence analysts. And contrary to Wilson's assertions and even the government's previous statements, the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence that made its way into 16 fateful words in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address.

Wilson's allegations against the Bush Administration were made a month before Robert Novak's fateful July 14, 2003 column, in which Novak revealed that Wilson's wife Valerie was a CIA officer and the impetus behind Wilson's trip to Niger - information provided to Novak by then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. It should also be noted that both Joe Wilson's and Valerie Plame's names were listed on the program for the 2003 Education for Peace in Iraq Center (EPIC) conference where Wilson first made his allegations.

In closing, what happened here was that a years-long investigation of the Bush Administration was launched on the basis of lies from two media-hungry bozos (Wilson and Plame) with political axes to grind - two individuals who are poster children for everything wrong with today's State Department and CIA. In a ridiculously self-serving speech at Brown University in 2005, reported by The Providence Journal, Wilson tried to cast his rather undistinguished diplomatic career in a more positive light:

Before the intrigue began, Wilson said, he had hoped his obituary would read, "the last American diplomat to meet with Saddam Hussein before the first Gulf War."

"It now, of course, will read, 'the husband of the first American spy to have her identity compromised by her own government'," he said.

I would hope that several decades from now, my obituary will read that I was a good man and someone who pursued his career with quiet professionalism. If so, I will have accomplished something Joe Wilson never did.