1 Boring Old Man

The "Scooter" Libby Trial and Uranium from Africa, Part 7: The Under-Reported War on Joseph Wilson – Part II

---

^{7. Conclusions}

^{When former Ambassador Joseph Wilson returned from Niger in early 2002, he narrated an incident conveyed to him by one of his sources, the former Nigerien PM Ibrahim Mayaki. Wilson told the CIA that Mayaki met an Iraqi delegation at the margins of an Organization for African Unity (OAU) meeting in Algiers in mid-1999. In this post, I showed that the CIA DO report on Wilson’s trip did not state the location of this meeting. Yet, the CIA DO reports officer and some WINPAC and DIA analysts later claimed to the SSCI that the meeting occurred in Niger, contradicting Wilson’s claim. Surprisingly, the British Butler report accurately reported what Wilson said, even as the Phase I SSCI report that was released around the same time parroted the incorrect claims of the CIA DO reports officer and the WINPAC/DIA analysts without correcting their claims. A review of additional U.S. IC documents suggests that the Algiers-Niger switch in U.S. IC documents occurred no later than April 3, 2003 and very likely prior to that. A more detailed investigation into this matter would be desirable.}

^{The significance of the Algiers-Niger switch – which constituted another piece of deceptive, revisionist history about Joseph Wilson’s report – is twofold. First, there are possible implications surrounding any "secret" Iraqi trip to Niger that was otherwise unknown. The Iraq-Niger meeting in Algiers in mid-1999 – narrated by Wilson – was never considered suspicious, as the Butler report pointed out. The Wissam Al-Zahawie trip to Niger in Feb 1999 had always been known to Western intelligence agencies (since 1999) and was never really considered suspicious until Al-Zahawie’s name got inserted in the context of uranium into the forged Niger documents. Hence, the notion that there was a separate and secret mid-1999 trip by Iraq to Niger could be easily misused to claim that Iraq was secretly seeking uranium. Second, those indulging in this distortion of Wilson’s claim were able to confuse people by swapping Wilson’s claim about a 1999 Iraq-Niger meeting in Algiers with a 1999 Iraq-Niger meeting in Niger. By taking "mid" out of "mid 1999", it became possible to make Wilson’s claim sound a lot like the claim from SISMI (originating from the forged Niger documents) that fraudulently distorted the objective of Wissam Al-Zahawie’s visit to Niger in (early) 1999. The net result is that the distorted narrative about Wilson’s trip could be misused by frauds in the Bush White House to further cement their allegation about Iraq seeking uranium in Niger. In a follow-up post I will show examples of how this distortion was misused.}

Either eriposte‘s writing is becoming clearer or I’m catching up and more able to follow him, because this one is crystal clear. Recall that his current series is an investigation of the Niger Forgery story in light of the new documents available from the Scooter Libby Trial. Also recall that Cheney, Douglas Feith, and others keep saying that Joseph Wilson’s oped strengthened the suspicion that Iraq was after Yellow-Cake Uranium in Niger, rather than debunking the story. How did they conclude that?

In this article, eriposte shows how Joseph Wilson’s comment about an offhand meeting between Nigerien PM Ibrahim Mayaki and some Iraqis at an Algerian Conference was inappropriately morphed into a visit by Iraqis to Niger in search of Yellow-Cake Uranium – something that never happened, but ‘sort of’ fit the allegations of the Niger Forgeries. In other words, it was a distortion, the very thing Joseph Wilson accused the Administration of doing.

Did they think no one would ever notice?