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--- Begin Message ----Caveat Lector- http://www.sun-sentinel.com/features/booksmags/sfl-bkciamay16,0,576346.story ?coll=sfla-features-books Ex-diplomat rages over betrayal by Bush & Co. By Tim Rutten Los Angeles Times Posted May 16 2004The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity: A Diplomat's Memoir. Joseph Wilson. Carroll & Graf. $26. 528 pp. No administration in history ever has approached its re-election campaign with so many insider accounts of its most sensitive deliberations freely circulating through the country's bookstores and libraries. To the expanding shelf of books that propose descriptions of how President Bush and his advisers did or did not meet the threat posed by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida and of how and why they marshaled the march to war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq, we now can add former ambassador Joseph Wilson's The Politics of Truth. This is a fascinating if somewhat awkward book whose character is fairly summarized by not one but two subtitles: "Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity" and "A Diplomat's Memoir." You don't have to know much about marketing books to figure out who insisted on that first one. In any event, it's a blunt-force reminder of Wilson's reluctant relevance to the current moment. The whole affair actually turns on 16 words spoken by Bush during his State of the Union address on Jan. 28, 2003. At the time, the administration's principal justification for a preemptive invasion of Iraq was the allegation that Hussein either possessed or was on the verge of acquiring weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear devices. That night, Bush flatly declared: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." It wasn't true. A month later, when the administration submitted the supporting documents to the International Atomic Energy Agency, it concluded they were "not authentic." Within 24 hours, the State Department alleged that it had been taken in by forged intelligence claiming that Iraq had attempted to purchase 40 tons of cake uranium from the African country of Niger, where it is mined. For its part, the White House continued to insist not only that Saddam might already have the bomb, but also that the president had relayed the fraudulent allegation about the Nigerian purchase in good faith. Wilson, however, knew that for nearly a year the administration had had not one but three reports debunking claims of the uranium transfer, which first had surfaced in an Italian magazine. Wilson, a then-retired diplomat with long experience in Niger, had been asked by the CIA to go to that country to investigate the claims. He easily discredited them, partly because the sums generated by such a sale would have been easily traced in desperately poor Niger, partly because the country's uranium mines are operated with a consortium of foreign partners and managed by a French firm. All would have had to have been in on the deal. Wilson's conclusions were seconded in subsequent investigative reports. Beginning in March 2003, Wilson repeatedly urged the White House, the State Department and the staffs of the Senate and House intelligence committees to come clean about the African allegation. Finally, on July 6, he laid the whole story out in an Op-Ed piece for The New York Times, which the paper titled "What I Didn't Find in Africa." The roof fell in, which rather touchingly seems to have taken Wilson by surprise. He was denounced as a partisan Democrat, when actually he comes from a very Republican San Francisco family and voted for then-President George Bush -- whom he still very much admires -- over Bill Clinton in 1992. He was dismissed as a diplomatic nonentity, a failure, though he had risen through the foreign service to ambassadorial rank and had adroitly, even heroically, served as the acting U.S. ambassador in Baghdad in the tense period between Saddam's invasion of Kuwait and the outbreak of the Persian Gulf War. Worse was to follow. Eight days after his essay appeared in The New York Times, conservative columnist Robert Novak wrote that Wilson's "wife, Valerie Plame, is a (CIA) operative on weapons of mass destruction." Plame is, in fact, a covert CIA agent who had long worked undercover as an international energy executive. Publishing the identity of an undercover intelligence agent is a crime, and a Justice Department-appointed special prosecutor is investigating the identities of Novak's sources, which he has steadfastly refused to disclose. The Politics of Truth begins with a dramatic recapitulation of the Novak incident, clearly intended as a kind of foreshadowing. It then breaks off into an extended memoir of Wilson's family history and his long and quite interesting diplomatic career. Wilson's point is that the administration distorted and lied about our intelligence on these issues and then behaved abominably when it was discovered. The author's rage over this alleged bad conduct -- indecency, really -- is what animates The Politics of Truth. He is, at the end of the day, a patriot and a public servant, and he is furious over what he feels is a betrayal. This is dissent not from the radical fringe but from the heart of the establishment. The Los Angeles Times is a Tribune Co. newspaper. -__ ___ _ ___ __ ___ _ _ _ __ /-_|-0-\-V-/-\|-|-__|-|-|-/-_| \_-\--_/\-/|-\\-|-_||-V-V-\_-\ |__/_|--//-|_|\_|___|\_A_/|__/ SPY NEWS is OSINT newsletter and discussion list associated to Mario's Cyberspace Station - The Global Intelligence News Portal http://mprofaca.cro.net ######## CAUTION! ######### Since you are receiving and reading documents, news stories, comments and opinions not only from so called (or self-proclaimed) "reliable sources", but also a lot of possible misinformation collected by Spy News moderator and subscribers and posted to Spy News for OSINT purposes - it should be a serious reason (particularly to journalists and web publishers) to think twice before using it for their story writing, further publishing or forwarding throughout Cyberspace. 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That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ <A HREF="http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/">ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
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