[Mb-civic] Cheney Spearheaded Effort to Discredit Wilson

[Mike Blaxill]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/020906J.shtml

Cheney Spearheaded Effort to Discredit Wilson
    By Jason Leopold
    t r u t h o u t | Report

    Thursday 09 February 2006

    Vice President Dick Cheney and then-Deputy
National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley led a
campaign beginning in March 2003 to discredit
former Ambassador Joseph Wilson for publicly
criticizing the Bush administration's
intelligence on Iraq, according to current and
former administration officials.

    The officials work or had worked in the State
Department, the CIA and the National Security
Council in a senior capacity and had direct
knowledge of the Vice President's campaign to
discredit Wilson.

    In interviews over the course of two days
this week, these officials were urged to speak on
the record for this story. But they resisted,
saying they had already testified before a grand
jury investigating the leak of Wilson's wife,
covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, and
added that speaking out against the
administration and specifically Vice President
Cheney would cause them to lose their jobs and
subject their families to vitriolic attacks by
the White House.

    The officials said they decided to speak out
now because they have become disillusioned with
the Bush administration's policies regarding Iraq
and the flawed intelligence that led to the war.

    They said their roles, along with several
others at the CIA and State Department, included
digging up or "inventing" embarrassing
information on the former Ambassador that could
be used against him, preparing memos and
classified material on Wilson for Cheney and the
National Security Council, and attending meetings
in Cheney's office to discuss with Cheney,
Hadley, and others the efforts that would be
taken to discredit Wilson.

    A former CIA official who has worked in the
counter-proliferation division, and is familiar
with the undercover work Wilson's wife did for
the agency, said Cheney and Hadley visited CIA
headquarters a day or two after Joseph Wilson was
interviewed on CNN.

    In the interview, which took place two and a
half weeks before the start of the Iraq war,
Wilson said the administration was more
interested in redrawing the map of the Middle
East to pursue its own foreign policy objectives
than in dealing with the so-called terrorist
threat.

    "The underlying objective, as I see it, the
more I look at this, is less and less
disarmament, and it really has little to do with
terrorism, because everybody knows that a war to
invade and conquer and occupy Iraq is going to
spawn a new generation of terrorists," Wilson
said in a March 2, 2003, interview with CNN.

    "So you look at what's underpinning this, and
you go back and you take a look at who's been
influencing the process. And it's been those who
really believe that our objective must be far
grander, and that is to redraw the political map
of the Middle East," Wilson added.

    But it wasn't Wilson who Cheney was so upset
about when he visited the CIA in March 2003.

    During the same CNN segment in which Wilson
was interviewed, former United Nations weapons
inspector David Albright made similar comments
about the rationale for the Iraq war and added
that he believed UN weapons inspectors should be
given more time to search the country for weapons
of mass destruction.

    The National Security Council and CIA
officials said Cheney had visited CIA
headquarters and asked several CIA officials to
dig up dirt on Albright, and to put together a
dossier that would discredit his work that could
be distributed to the media.

    "Vice President Cheney was more concerned
with Mr. Albright," the CIA official said. "The
international community had been saying that
inspectors should have more time, that the US
should not set a deadline. The Vice President
felt Mr. Albright's remarks would fuel the
debate."

    The officials said a "binder" was sent to the
Vice President's office that contained material
that could be used by the White House to
discredit Albright if he continued to comment on
the administration's war plans. However, it's
unclear whether Cheney or other White House
officials used the information against Albright.

    A week later, Wilson was interviewed on CNN
again. This was the first time Wilson ridiculed
the Bush administration's intelligence that
claimed Iraq tried to purchase yellowcake uranium
from Niger.

    "Well, this particular case is outrageous. We
know a lot about the uranium business in Niger,
and for something like this to go unchallenged by
US - the US government - is just simply stupid.
It would have taken a couple of phone calls. We
have had an embassy there since the early '60s.
All this stuff is open. It's a restricted market
of buyers and sellers," Wilson said in the March
8, 2003, CNN interview. "For this to have gotten
to the IAEA is on the face of it dumb, but more
to the point, it taints the whole rest of the
case that the government is trying to build
against Iraq."

    What Wilson wasn't at liberty to disclose
during that interview, because the information
was still classified, was that he had personally
traveled to Niger a year earlier on behalf of the
CIA to investigate whether Iraq had in fact tried
to purchase uranium from the African country.
Cheney had asked the CIA in 2002 to look into the
allegation, which turned out to be based on
forged documents, but was included in President
Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address
nonetheless.

    Wilson's comments enraged Cheney, all of the
officials said, because they were seen as a
personal attack against the Vice President, who
was instrumental in getting the intelligence
community to cite the Niger claims in government
reports to build a case for war against Iraq.

    The former Ambassador's stinging rebuke also
caught the attention of Stephen Hadley, who
played an even bigger role in the Niger
controversy, having been responsible for allowing
President Bush to cite the allegations in his
State of the Union address.

    At this time, the international community,
various media outlets, and the International
Atomic Energy Association had called into
question the veracity of the Niger documents.
Mohammed ElBaradei, head of IAEA, told the UN
Security Council on March 7, 2003, that the Niger
documents were forgeries and could not be used to
prove Iraq was a nuclear threat.

    Wilson's comments in addition to ElBaradei's
UN report were seen as a threat to the
administration's attack plans against Iraq, the
officials said, which would take place 11 days
later.

    Hadley had avoided making public comments
about the veracity of the Niger documents, going
as far as ignoring a written request by IAEA head
Mohammed ElBaradei to share the intelligence with
his agency so his inspectors could verify the
claims. Hadley is said to have known the Niger
documents were crude forgeries, but pushed the
administration to cite it as evidence that Iraq
was a nuclear threat, according to the State
Department officials, who said they personally
told Hadley in a written report that the
documents were bogus.

    The CIA and State Department officials said
that a day after Wilson's March 8, 2003, CNN
appearance, they attended a meeting at the Vice
President's office chaired by Cheney, and it was
there that a decision was made to discredit
Wilson. Those who attended the meeting included
I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's former chief
of staff who was indicted in October for lying to
investigators, perjury and obstruction of justice
related to his role in the Plame Wilson leak,
Hadley, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl
Rove, and John Hannah, Cheney's deputy national
security adviser, the officials said.

    "The way I remember it," the CIA official
said about that first meeting he attended in
Cheney's office, "is that the vice president was
obsessed with Wilson. He called him an 'asshole,'
a son-of-a-bitch. He took his comments very
personally. He wanted us to do everything in our
power to destroy his reputation and he wanted to
be kept up to date about the progress."

    A spokeswoman for Cheney would not comment
for this story, saying the investigation into the
leak is ongoing. The spokeswoman refused to give
her name. Additional calls made to Cheney's
office were not returned.

    The CIA, State Department and National
Security Council officials said that early on
they had passed on information about Wilson to
Cheney and Libby that purportedly showed Wilson
as being a "womanizer" and that he had dabbled in
drugs during his youth, allegations that are
apparently false, they said.

    The officials said that during the meeting,
Hadley said he would respond to Wilson's comments
by writing an editorial about the Iraqi threat,
which it was hoped would be a first step in
overshadowing Wilson's CNN appearance.

    A column written by Hadley that appeared in
the Chicago Tribune on February 16, 2003, was
redistributed to newspaper editors by the State
Department on March 10, 2003, two days after
Wilson was interviewed on CNN. The column, "Two
Potent Iraqi Weapons: Denial and Deception" once
again raised the issue that Iraq had tried to
purchase uranium from Niger.

    Cheney appeared on Meet the Press on March
16, 2003, to respond to ElBaradei's assertion
that the Niger documents were forgeries.

    "I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong,"
Cheney said during the interview. "[The IAEA] has
consistently underestimated or missed what it was
Saddam Hussein was doing. I don't have any reason
to believe they're any more valid this time than
they've been in the past."

    Cheney knew the State Department had prepared
a report saying the Niger claims were false, but
he thought the report had no merit, the two State
Department officials said. Meanwhile, the CIA was
preparing information for the vice president and
his senior aides on Wilson should the former
ambassador decide to speak out against the
administration again.

    Behind the scenes, Wilson had been speaking
to various members of Congress about the
administration's use of the Niger documents and
had said the intelligence the White House relied
upon was flawed, said one of the State Department
officials who had a conversation with Wilson.
Wilson's criticism of the administration's
intelligence eventually leaked out to reporters,
but with the Iraq war just a week away, the story
was never covered.

    It's unclear whether anyone disseminated
information on Wilson in March 2003, following
the meeting in Cheney's office. Although the
officials said they helped prepare negative
information on Wilson about his personal and
professional life and had given it to Libby and
Cheney, Wilson seemed to drop off the radar once
the Iraq war started on March 19, 2003.

    With no sign of weapons of mass destruction
to be found in Iraq, news accounts started to
call into question the credibility of the
administration's pre-war intelligence. In May
2003, Wilson re-emerged at a political conference
in Washington sponsored by the Senate Democratic
Policy Committee. There he told the New York
Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff that he had
been the special envoy who traveled to Niger in
February 2002 to check out allegations that Iraq
tried to purchase uranium from the country. He
told Kristoff he briefed a CIA analyst that the
claims were untrue. Wilson said he believed the
administration had ignored his report and were
dishonest with Congress and the American people.

    When Kristoff's column was published in the
Times, the CIA official said, "a request came in
from Cheney that was passed to me that said 'the
vice president wants to know whether Joe Wilson
went to Niger.' I'm paraphrasing. But that's more
or less what I was asked to find out."

    In his column, Kristoff Had accused Cheney of
allowing the truth about the Niger documents the
administration used to build a case for war to go
"missing in action." The failure of US armed
forces to find any WMDs in Iraq in two months
following the start of the war had been blamed on
Cheney.

    What in the previous months had been a
request to gather information that could be used
to discredit Wilson now turned into a full-scale
effort involving the Office of the Vice
President, the National Security Council, and the
State Department to find out how Wilson came to
be chosen to investigate the Niger uranium
allegations.

    "Cheney and Libby made it clear that Wilson
had to be shut down," the CIA official said.
"This wasn't just about protecting the
credibility of the White House. For the vice
president, going after Wilson was purely
personal, in my opinion."

    Cheney was personally involved in this aspect
of the information gathering process as well,
visiting CIA headquarters to inquire about
Wilson, the CIA official said. Hadley had also
raised questions about Wilson during this month
with the State Department officials and asked
that information regarding Wilson's trip to Niger
be sent to his attention at the National Security
Council.

    That's when Valerie Plame Wilson's name
popped up showing that she was a covert CIA
operative. The former CIA official who works in
the counter-proliferation division said another
meeting about Wilson took place in Cheney's
office, attended by the same individuals who were
there in March. But Cheney didn't take part in
it, the officials said.

    "Libby led the meeting," one of the State
Department officials said. "But he was just as
upset about Wilson as Cheney was."

    The officials said that as of late May 2003
the only correspondence they had had was with
Libby and Hadley. They said they were unaware who
had made the decision to unmask Plame Wilson's
undercover CIA status to a handful of reporters.

    George Tenet, the former director of the CIA,
took responsibility for allowing what is widely
referred to as the infamous "sixteen words" to be
included in Bush's State of the Union address.
Tenet's mea culpa came one day after Wilson
penned an op-ed for the New York Times in which
he accused the administration of "twisting"
intelligence on Iraq. In the column, Wilson
revealed that he was the special envoy who
traveled to Niger to investigate the uranium
claims.

    Tenet is working on a book titled At the
Center of the Storm with former CIA spokesman
Bill Harlow, which it is expected will be
published later this year. Tenet will reportedly
come clean on how the "sixteen words made it into
the President's State of the Union speech,
according to publishersmarketplace.com, an
industry newsletter.

    Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who
has been investigating the Plame Wilson leak for
more than two years, questioned Cheney about his
role in the leak in 2004. Cheney did not testify
under oath, and it's unknown what he told the
special prosecutor.

    On September 14, 2003, during an interview
with Tim Russert of NBC's "Meet the Press,"
Cheney maintained that he didn't know Wilson or
have any knowledge about his Niger trip or who
was responsible for leaking his wife's name to
the media.

    "I don't know Joe Wilson," Cheney said, in
response to Russert, who quoted Wilson as saying
there was no truth to the Niger uranium claims.
"I've never met Joe Wilson. And Joe Wilson - I
don't who sent Joe Wilson. He never submitted a
report that I ever saw when he came back ... I
don't know Mr. Wilson. I probably shouldn't judge
him. I have no idea who hired him."

    Jason Leopold spent two years covering
California's electricity crisis as Los Angeles
bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. Jason has
spent the last year cultivating sources close to
the CIA leak investigation, and is a regular
contributer to t r u t h o u t.