Wilson went to Niger in February/March 2002 to investigate a report of a uranium deal between Niger and Iraq. He found that there was probably no deal. He reported this to the US ambassador to Niger (who had looked into the matter herself and came to the same conclusion) and to the CIA; according to the
Seante Committee report, Wilson's findings changed few minds. People at the CIA thought any deal was only a possibility and those at the INR at the State Department thought it was very unlikely.
Presumably, Wilson's findings were passed on to policymakers and Wilson thought nothing more about it until January 2003 when Mr. Bush said in the State of the Union message that Iraq was attempting to buy uranium from an African state. Wilson's recollections of what he said when debriefed is that Iraq did not approach Niger at all; the debriefing officer's report states that Wilson merely said that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for such a deal to be enacted in light of the structure of Niger's uranium mines (see p. 44 of the Senate committee report).
Let's take a look at what Mr. Bush actually said in
2003 SOTU:
The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production. Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide.
The dictator of Iraq is not disarming. To the contrary; he is deceiving.
He made no claim that Saddam actually bought uranium, only that he
sought to buy it. However, rather than pointing out that little nuance, he followed it with a report about aluminum tubing (another now famous piece of hooey) and rhetoric designed to heighten alarm.
Whichever way one chooses to interpret Wilson's report, the language in the SOTU was deceptive.
Again, Wilson recalls stating that he doubted that Iraq even approached Niger for a sale. When he heard the SOTU, he at first felt that either Mr. Bush was speaking of some other deal with some other African state or that there was some subsequent information about the deal he researched that was not available to him ten months earlier. In any case, he looked into it and came to understand that Mr. Bush was talking about the same deal that never was and there was no reason to change his conclusions.
That is when Wilson went public with his article in
The New York Times. From that article:
The question now is how that answer was or was not used by our political leadership. If my information was deemed inaccurate, I understand (though I would be very interested to know why). If, however, the information was ignored because it did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq, then a legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses. (It's worth remembering that in his March "Meet the Press" appearance, Mr. Cheney said that Saddam Hussein was "trying once again to produce nuclear weapons.") At a minimum, Congress, which authorized the use of military force at the president's behest, should want to know if the assertions about Iraq were warranted.
The Bush regime's credibility is a big problem. They got everything wrong when making their case for war against Iraq. There were no weapons of mass destruction; if Saddam had any thoughts of reconstituting Iraq's nuclear program, they were only thoughts; and there was no working relationship with any jihadist terror organization. How could they have gotten everything wrong, assuming they were actually looking for facts?
If the regime's case for war against Iraq had panned out -- even just most of it -- the Wilson matter would have been a very small story. If US troops had found Iraq swimming in weapons grade biochemical toxins, nuclear weapons under construction and archives full of documentation concerning cash, training and arms provided by Saddam's regime to al Qaida, few would have cared much if sixteen words of the 2003 SOTU about a uranium deal between Niger and Iraq turned out to have been all wet. That would have been written off to human error. Wilson may have never bothered to write his article, and even if he had, most people would have forgotten about it in less time than it took to read it.
Many suspected, and the Downing Street documents now confirm, that the answer is that instead of looking for facts and making a decision based thereon about whether or not to go to war, the Bush regime decided to go to war independent of the facts and then started looking for talking points.
Thus, Wilson is a witness to the regime's deception on the Iraq war, although only in a small way. Nevertheless, in order to maintain support for their efforts in Iraq, the regime must also keep up the deception that there was no deception. For that reason, Wilson must be discredited and hence the smear campaign against him and his wife.
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