Fuel for the pro-war blogs

It takes a strong stomach to plunge into the sea of malice, mendacity and misrepresentation that now churns around the affair of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV and his wife, Valerie Plame.

But while a quick immersion in the muck may not completely clarify some of this case’s hazier facts, it is disturbingly instructive about some of the tendencies playing themselves out in the American media over this contentious election year.

Wilson, you will recall, is the retired American diplomat who in February 2002 was sent to Niger by the Central Intelligence Agency to investigate reports that Iraq had purchased or attempted to buy uranium ore. Niger has two uranium mines, both controlled by a European consortium managed by the French. Plame is a CIA operative -- formerly undercover -- who works on nonproliferation issues. Wilson returned from the African nation reporting that he had found “nothing to support allegations” that Baghdad had attempted to purchase the ore, commonly referred to as “yellowcake.”

However, in his January 2003 State of the Union Address making the case for a preemptive war against Iraq, President Bush said that “the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

Six months later, Wilson wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times in which he recounted his secret mission and his conclusions about the Iraqi’s alleged interest in Niger’s uranium. He also charged that his findings had been ignored and suppressed as part of a general administration effort to twist intelligence data into a justification for war. Within a week, columnist Robert Novak wrote that “two senior Administration officials” had told him that Wilson’s wife was a covert CIA agent and that she had recommended her husband for the African mission. Revealing a covert agent’s identity can -- under certain extremely limited circumstances -- be a crime, and a special prosecutor and the FBI still are investigating the sources of Novak’s information.

All of this quite naturally produced a series of news stories, many of which ran on the front pages of leading newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times.

Earlier this year, Wilson published a book, “The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies That Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity,” bitterly critical of the Bush administration and its conduct in the run-up to the war. It got mixed reviews, including here, though its author was interviewed on every imaginable network news show and made the cover of Time.

Last week, the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a 511-page report documenting the catastrophic failure of U.S. intelligence on Iraq. When the U.S. and its allies attacked his regime, Saddam Hussein had no stores of poison gas, biotoxins or covert nuclear program. This week, a British inquiry into prewar intelligence failures reached similar conclusions, though it continued to assert that Britain had “credible” intelligence that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger as recently as 1999. No support was offered.

Taken together, though, these reports were enough to kindle a fury among the politically minded Internet bloggers, who have become a major presence on the Net’s freewheeling fringes. To them, Wilson -- who has a flair for self-promotion -- is the poster boy for a nearly traitorous opposition to the war.

The bloggers, whose rhetoric gains heat and velocity as it ricochets from one site to another through a chain of self-referential links, basically formulated a two-count indictment: First, Wilson lied by saying he was not recruited for the mission by his wife and about the conclusiveness of what he had found once in Niger. (The former charge is crucial in certain conspiratorial quarters because many neo-conservative bloggers believe the CIA, Plame’s employer, was soft on Saddam and against the war.) Second, major newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, were alleged to be suppressing the story of Wilson’s mendacity. In other words, why won’t the media tell us the truth?

The back and forth

Something of the flavor of the invective could be found in this description by Roger L. Simon, the screenwriter and novelist turned pro-war blogger: “Wilson is no ordinary rat, the likes of which have abounded in virtually every political party since time immemorial,” Simon wrote on his site, www.rogerlsimon.com. “He is a deeply evil human being willing to lie and obfuscate for temporary political gain about a homicidal dictator’s search for weapon’s grade uranium.”

By week’s end, as Mary Jacoby wrote in Salon, slightly less hyperbolic versions of this line had migrated into more mainstream channels: “Choreographed editorials and Op-Ed pieces ... in the Wall Street Journal and National Review and by conservative columnist Robert Novak signaled the revving up of a Republican campaign to discredit former ambassador Joseph Wilson and his claims that President Bush trumpeted flimsy intelligence in the drive to invade Iraq.”

But did the mainstream media, in the meantime, actually ignore the story? Given the magnitude of the implications in both the U.S. and Britain’s intelligence assessments, the Plame/Wilson affair is a bit of a footnote. In fact, over the past week, the Washington Post, New York Times and Los Angeles Times have worked their way through the reports’ main themes and all eventually published dense accounts of their conclusions concerning Wilson.

But are those conclusions really as clear-cut as the bloggers and their mainstream allies make them out to be? While the Senate report says that Plame “offered up” her husband’s name for the mission, a senior CIA official this week told the Los Angeles Times’ Doyle McManus: “Her bosses say she did not initiate the idea of her husband going.... They asked her if he’d be willing to go, and she said yes.”

As Wilson himself pointed out to the Senate committee in a letter sent Thursday, CIA officials have said precisely the same thing over the past year to Newsday reporters Tim Phelps and Kenneth Rogers and to CNN’s David Ensor.

Wilson also pointed the committee to these excerpts from its own report:

* “On Oct. 5, 2002, ... the ADDI [associate deputy director for Intelligence] said an Iraqi nuclear analyst -- he could not remember who -- raised concerns about the sourcing and some of the facts of the Niger reporting, specifically that the control of the mines in Niger would have made it very difficult to get yellowcake to Iraq.” (Page 55)

“Based on the analyst’s comments, the ADDI faxed a memo to the deputy national security advisor that said, ‘Remove the sentence because the amount is in dispute and it is debatable whether it can be acquired from this source. We told Congress that the Brits have exaggerated this issue. Finally, the Iraqis already have 550 metric tons of uranium oxide in their inventory.’ ” (Page 56)

* “On Oct. 6, 2002, the [director of Central Intelligence] called the deputy national security advisor directly to outline the CIA’s concerns. The [director] testified to the [Senate committee] on July 16, 2003, that he told the deputy national security advisor that the ‘president should not be a fact witness on this issue,’ because his analysts had told him the ‘reporting was weak.’ ” (Page 56)

* “On Oct. 6, 2002, the CIA sent a second fax to the White House that said, ‘More on why we recommend removing the sentence about procuring uranium oxide from Africa: Three points (1) The evidence is weak. One of the two mines cited by the source as the location of the uranium oxide is flooded. The other mine cited by the source is under the control of the French authorities. (2) The procurement is not particularly significant to Iraq’s nuclear ambitions because the Iraqis already have a large stock of uranium oxide in their inventory. And (3) we have shared points one and two with Congress, telling them that the Africa story is overblown and telling them this is one of the two issues where we differed with the British.’ ” (Page 56)

There you have it: full disclosure. As they say on television, you decide.