The Endless Smearing of Joe Wilson By Robert Parry

[seemslikeadream]

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/072608.html


Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee reminded everyone that rules barred personal attacks on George W. Bush during Friday’s hearing on his presidential abuses, but they didn’t feel obliged to forego the lashing of a favorite whipping boy, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson.


In a continuation of what has amounted to a five-year campaign to destroy Wilson’s reputation, Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, flourished two pieces of evidence that supposedly showed that Wilson was a perjurer and that President Bush was right all along when he accused Iraq of seeking yellowcake uranium from Niger.

King cited the CIA’s now-declassified report on its debriefing of Wilson after he returned from a fact-finding trip to Niger in early 2002 in which he checked out a bogus claim that Iraq had been trying to buy yellowcake uranium from the African nation.

King also noted recent press reports about the current Iraqi government selling 550 metric tons of leftover yellowcake uranium to Canada. The linkage presumably was to show that Bush had been vindicated about the yellowcake and that Wilson was a liar.

However, what King failed to note – and no Democrat on the committee bothered to challenge him on – was that neither piece of information was revelatory and neither supported King’s conclusions about Bush’s vindication or Wilson’s dishonesty.

If people had given this "evidence" even a cursory review, they would have realized that King was behaving like some dimwitted Inspector Clouseau, who adds two and two to get five.

Though King treated a section of the CIA debriefing report like some smoking gun – that former Nigerien Prime Minister Ibrahim Mayaki had suspected that an Iraqi commercial delegation to Niger in 1999 might have been interested in buying yellowcake – this inconsequential fact had long been known, indeed from Wilson’s own public accounts.

[shraby]

1. Also that yellowcake had been sealed and tagged

by UN inspectors. It was well known that Iraq had it and the US didn't guard it and protect it from being stolen when we invaded. Finally after several YEARS of it sitting there, they moved it to Canada. Guess they realized the terrorists weren't going to steal it for them so they could scare us about it.