Ah, the good ol' American values of this Midland, Texas President and high-minded administration (made up of the same people who worked for his CIA father, Reagan, Ford and Nixon and who gave you Cambodia secret bombings, Chile CIA support, American support for despots like Hussein, Watergate, Iran/Contra scandals, the pardoning of Nixon and the Iran/Contra gang, the CA energy crisis, the Niger story, etc., etc.) who are working their unique magic once again.


A War On Wilson?
Inside the Bush Administration's feud with the diplomat who poured cold water on the Iraq-uranium connection
By MATTHEW COOPER, MASSIMO CALABRESI AND JOHN DICKERSON / TIME.COM

Has the Bush Administration declared war on a former ambassador who conducted a fact-finding mission to probe possible Iraqi interest in African uranium? Former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson raised the Administration's ire with an op-ed piece in The New York Times on July 6 charging that the Administration had "twisted" intelligence to "exaggerate" the Iraqi threat. Since then Administration officials have taken public and private whacks at Wilson, charging that his 2002 report, made at the behest of U.S. intelligence, was faulty and that his mission was a scheme cooked up by mid-level operatives. Some government officials, noting that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, is a CIA official who monitors the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, intimate that she was involved in his being dispatched Niger to investigate reports that Saddam Hussein's government had sought to purchase large quantities of uranium ore, sometimes referred to as yellow cake, for the purposes of building nuclear devices.

Wilson is fighting back. In an interview with TIME, Wilson, who served as an ambassador to Gabon and as a senior American diplomat in Baghdad under the current president's father, angrily said that his wife had nothing to do with his trip to Africa. "That is bulls__t. That is absolutely not the case," Wilson told TIME. "I met with between six and eight analysts and operators from CIA and elsewhere [before the Feb 2002 trip]. None of the people in that meeting did I know, and they took the decision to send me. This is a smear job"...




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