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By Ben Fritz and Brendan Nyhan
The recent Senate Intelligence Committee report (13.7 MB PDF file) on US intelligence failures before the war in Iraq has sparked a furor by appearing to undermine some of the claims made by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson about alleged Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Niger. However, much of the evidence is muddled, and some journalists and commentators have exaggerated it and misrepresented what the report actually found.
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Critics have focused on evidence gathered by Senate investigators indicating that Wilson's wife, CIA operative Valerie Plame, proposed that he travel to Niger to investigate a reported Iraqi attempt to secure uranium, but other Agency sources, including one quoted in a recent Los Angeles Times story on the matter, continue to stand by Wilson's claim that Plame did not propose him for the job. (Plame's identity was revealed last year by columnist Robert Novak, prompting a criminal investigation into the source of the leak.)
In a memo quoted in the report (page 49), Plame wrote, "My husband has good relations with both the PM [the prime minister of Niger] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could shed light on this sort of activity." It's not clear whether Plame was promoting her husband as a candidate to investigate the Niger allegations or simply describing his credentials (as Wilson has claimed), but the memo does show he was being dishonest when he wrote in his book, The Politics of Truth, that "Apart from being the conduit of a message from a colleague in her office asking if I would be willing to have a conversation about Niger's uranium industry, Valerie had had nothing to do with the matter."
The report leaves the question of whether Plame suggested Wilson open, a fact that USA Today columnist Richard Benedetto misreprsented when he wrote that "the Senate report said that Wilson 'was specifically recommended for the mission by his wife, a CIA employee, contrary to what he has said publicly.'" But the report didn't use those words - the quote comes from a Washington Post article by Susan Schmidt. (Blogger Josh Marshall has already noted this error.)
Similarly, in his syndicated column on July 19, US News & World Report senior editor Michael Barone wrote, "The report flatly denied Wilson's statements that his wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame, had nothing to do with his mission to Niger -- it quotes Plame's memo taking credit for the appointment." But the bipartisan portion of the report did not flatly deny that - only an appendix signed by senior Republicans.
Furthermore, the memo Barone cites does not show Plame "taking credit for the appointment." Plame could not take credit for the appointment in a memo written before Wilson had been chosen. Indeed, the Senate Republicans suggest that the memo proposed Wilson, not that it crowed about his choice after the fact.
The issue of whether Iraq did try to acquire uranium from Niger is also highly muddled. Wilson has publicly stated that the evidence he gathered "debunked" the Iraq/Niger story, as he claimed on NBC's "Meet the Press" on July 6, 2003, or showed it to be "false," as he wrote in his book. But, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee report, his findings bolstered the case that Iraq had sought to acquire uranium in Niger among "most [intelligence] analysts" in the US government, though not those in the State Department.
Benedetto, however, omitted the State Department caveat, writing that the report "found that Wilson's investigative trip to Niger in 2002 actually 'lent more credibility to the original CIA reports on the uranium deal.'" But this is not a fair representation of what the report said. In full, conclusion 13 on page 72 of the report states, "For most analysts, the information in the report lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal, but State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) analysts believed that the report supported their assessment that Niger was unlikely to be willing or able to sell uranium to Iraq" (our emphasis).
Finally, Republicans on the committee accused Wilson of promulgating inaccurate information in a statement to the Washington Post printed in a June 12, 2003 article:
After returning to the United States, the envoy reported to the CIA that the uranium-purchase story was false, the sources said. Among the envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong," the former US government official said.
It turns out that Wilson could not have seen the documents in question and therefore did not draw any conclusions from them in assessing the Iraq/Niger claim. Schmidt suggested in her article that Wilson was the "former US government official" who was quoted in the Post article, but after originally telling the Senate committee that he may have "misspoken," the former ambassador later said on CNN that, though he was a source for the article, "If it is referring to me, it is a misattribution, of facts that were already in the public domain and had been so since March." Was Wilson the source? It seems very likely, but again, we don't know for sure, nor do we know what the source in question said to Post reporter Walter Pincus at the time.
What's more clear, though, is that Wilson was dishonest when he served as an anonymous source for New York Times columns by Nicholas Kristof in May and June 2003. As Kevin Drum pointed out on his Political Animal blog, Kristof wrote that when Wilson (his source) returned from Niger in March 2002, "[T]his senior envoy briefed the C.I.A. and State Department and reported that the documents were bogus, for two main reasons. First, the documents seemed phony on their face — for example, the Niger minister of energy and mines who had signed them had left that position years earlier. Second, an examination of Niger's uranium industry showed that an international consortium controls the yellowcake closely, so the Niger government does not have any yellowcake to sell. " But Wilson could not have debunked the forgery because "the documents seemed phony on their face." He admitted in his July 2003 op-ed in the New York Times that, "as for the actual memorandum, I never saw it."
In the rush to partisanship by both sides, careful attention to the facts is too often lost.
Update 7/20 6:07 PM EST: Per a reader comment, this post has been updated to provide more of Wilson's statement from his book about his wife's involvement in the decision to send him to Niger.
Update 7/21 7:53 PM EST: The quote from Nicholas Kristof's column has been expanded to give a fuller picture of what Wilson told him about allegedly debunking documents related to Iraq purchasing uranium from Niger.
Update 7/22 11:39 AM EST: A version of this article appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer today.
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