Oh look. Notice how Valerie Plame is guarding her “covert operative status.” Here’s a picture of Valerie Plame guarding her privacy–from Vanity Fair, July 2005. Please note: Plame wasn’t working in the field, and hadn’t been working in the field the entire time Bush has been in the Whitehouse. Plame was assigned a non-covert desk job in 1997, she just wasn’t taken off the “covert” list. All of this was told to Rove by reporters. Yeah. Some deep cover.

Captain Ed has two very comprehensive posts up about Joe Wilson and the Plame “leak”. Is there no end to the amazing depths of depravity the left will sink to in order to somehow implicate the Bush administration with some kind of falsehood that will somehow bring it down? To me, the facts are explicit and crystal clear.

Wilson claims in the July 6, 2003 op ed piece at the NY Times that the CIA asked him to investigate claims that Iraq attempted buying yellow cake from Niger. It seems Wilson is somewhat confused about the difference between Iraq’s completing a sale for yellow cake and attempting to purchase it. He cleverly shifts from “no transaction was completed” which was true, to Iraq didn’t make any attempts to buy yellow cake from Niger, which is false.

When push comes to shove, this guy reveals himself as a total idiot, IMO. Why do I say that? Well for one thing, before the publication of that piece of his in the NYT, he leaked information to the Washington Post critical of the use of his Niger 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 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.

The icing on the cake is the content of the actual SSIC report in which Wilson himself verified that Iraq had opened trade secret negotiations with Niger. This isn’t a wild and crazy assumption, as Dr. Obeidi wrote in his book (The Bomb in My Garden) that the method they used to obtain the components for his uranium enrichment program for the gas centrifuge were obtained all over the world, and on the black market.

One hundred tons of maraging steel was conceivably enough to produce ten thousand centrifuges, which in turn could yield 150 kilograms of highly enriched uranium per year. That would be enough uranium for Iraq to annually produce ten bombs with the destructive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, or nearly one a month. The idea of dozens of nuclear bombs in Saddam’s hands is horrifying in retrospect. When I think of leaders like Saddam in the world today and those who will no doubt emerge in the future, we are bound to see a proliferation of the world’s most destructive weapon. The specter arises of dozens of countries with nuclear arsenals at their disposal, with all their potential quarrels and conflicts, raising the likliehood of devastating nuclear encounters.

Out of necessity, I put these concerns out of my mind as I focused on assembling the components and resources for the centrifuge program. Every success led us closer to the urgent goal of pleasing Saddam and keeping me and my staff out of his dungeons. But it required a careful strategy. We needed both the materials and the technical skills to build a prototype and later, the large-scale manufacturing facilities. I developed a two-prong approach: purchasing the tools and raw materials to manufacture as many of the components as possible inside Iraq and outsourcing the manufacture of other parts. We followed both tracks for many of the most sensitive parts. Secrecy was essential. I scattered our efforts throughout many countries in an effort to avoid detection. I broke the centrifuge designs into subcomponents that, individually, would be hard to recognize. I focused on soft targets in the private sector: companies that could produce fine parts and machines without suspecting their final use.

Unfortunately, there aren’t many uses for yellow cake uranium, and that is what had the international community in an uproar; the fact that Saddam was attempting to procure this dangerous commodity. His attitude and posturing was a real cause for concern.

After all, the Israelis had caught wind of their working on WMD years before and had destroyed their nuclear reactor.

In the end, the Ammuz reactor never went live. Just days before we planned to install the radioactive reactor core, on Sunday, June 7, eight Israeli fighter jets flew more than a thousand miles to reach Baghdad, weaving across the borders of Jordan and Saudi Arabia and flying at low altitude through western Iraq to avoid detection by radar. They roared over the capital just after 5:30 p.m. as the sun shone directly behind them in the west. Caught completely off-guard, the Iraqi air defenses had trouble targeting the fighters int he blinding sunlight. The First F-16 dropped an unguided bomb directly onto the dome over the reactor, tearing a gaping hole in it. With incredible precision, six of the other seven jets dropped bombs straight through the hole and they exploded within the reactor hall. The entire attack lasted less than two minutes. After delivering their payload, the Israeli planes outmanuevered Iraqi surface-to-air missiles and returned home unscathed.

I heard about the bombing at home that evening on the radio. Several colleagues called me during the night to express their disbelief, and we agreed to meet at Tuwaitha first thing in the morning. Daybreak revealed the extent of the damage. The cylindrical beam that had supported the dome tilted wildly to one side, and the dome had collapsed down onto the reactor core. Sunlight streamed in from above, and we could see the bombing had completely destroyed the reactor block. It was irreparable, finished.

Within two weeks of the bombing, the UN Security Council condemned Israel for violating international law in the unprovoked attack. Israel’s Prime Minister Menachem Begin countered that once the Tammuz reactor was functioning, it could soon lead to a nuclear-armed Iraq that would threaten his country. Prefiguring by more than twenty years the rationale of the 2003 war on Iraq, Israel claimed it was acting in “anticipatory self-defense”. It argued that as a belligerent state, Iraq couldn’t be allowed to develop the ultimate weapon of mass destruction, and that unilateral action had been needed to remove a perceived threat.

Unfortunately, Dr. Obeidi had hoped for nuclear energy to produce power to change the standard of living for common Iraqis, and for important research; the goal of any scientist with the dream of working to better his country and the lives of his fellow man–this dream evaporated as the international debate flared about Saddam’s nuclear weapons capabilities, and his desire to acquire them. And this was 30 years ago. Sadly, the western mind has such a short attention span and such a ridiculously short recollection of historical events!

As Captain Ed says:

Given that Niger exports a total of four commodities, that assumption of Iraqi interest in uranium ore should have appeared rather solid. No one goes into secret talks to discuss the purchase of livestock, cowpeas, or onions, the only other Nigerien exports. This demonstrated that Saddam still planned on pursuing WMD and had actively searched for new resources for a nuclear-weapons program. Stevenson got this exactly wrong.

It was, in fact, Wilson’s wife who suggested him for the Niger investigation. In the NYT piece, Richard Stevenson makes several factual errors…a) Karl Rove, in fact, couldn’t have made a trip to Niger (so he couldn’t have been the leaker), b) it is apparent that Iraq tried to open trade secret negotiations with Niger, and c) Wilson’s wife was the primary reason he was chosen for the job.

Plame didn’t just make an off-hand suggestion and then play hostess once. She repeatedly suggested Wilson for the job, wrote a memorandum requesting him for the mission, and then delivered the assignment to Wilson herself.

All this begs the question: why was Plame so set on using her husband for the job? Wilson told the SSIC that she had characterized the initial report of Iraq-Niger contacts as “crazy”. After Wilson returned, he reported that the Iraqis had indeed tried to start trade talks in secret with Niger, and that the Nigerian PM believed that to be an effort to get yellowcake uranium. However, after the invasion of Iraq, Wilson started leaking a warped version to journalists such as Walter Pincus, also described in the SSIC report and determined to be false.

It looks like Plame wanted a specific result from the Niger investigation, and she selected the man who she felt would guarantee it.

The emphasis throughout this post is mine, btw.

Captain Ed draws the conclusion that these are gross errors, or deliberate attempts to warp the record, or both. I personally believe it’s another smear/propaganda campaign against the Bush administration. It’s a deliberate partisan propaganda aimed at warping the record and stacking more public opinion against the Bush administration and Karl Rove. Mr. Karl Rove, you rock.

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