[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 102 (Wednesday, July 21, 2004)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8503-S8505]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
SENATE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE REPORT
Mr. BOND. Mr. President, it is interesting today that some of our
colleagues are on the floor talking about the wonderful expose
Ambassador Joe Wilson made. Joe Wilson and his wife have become quite a
cause celebre. He has had 30 appearances, he is writing books and, oh,
yes, now he is on the Web site of Senator Kerry. The Web site is
ironically entitled ``RestoreHonesty.com.''
On that Web site, Mr. Wilson said:
. . . this President misled the nation in his State of the
Union Address.
Then he goes on to say:
They tried to intimidate me and others who were willing to
speak up and tell the truth. . . . I was courageous to speak
truth to the power of the Bush White House. . . .
George Bush's Administration has betrayed our trust--I know
that personally.
That is quite an indictment. It goes along with quite a few other
points.
I understand on the first page of his book--I did not buy it and I do
not intend to. I was told that three times on page 7 he said President
Bush lied. Why did he do that? It was all because of 16 words in the
State of the Union Address on January 28, 2003.
I addressed this issue last week in this body, and I think I raised
some very serious questions about the veracity of Ambassador Wilson's
suggestions. I was given the opportunity last night on the Jim Lehrer
PBS ``NewsHour'' to have a discussion with Mr. Wilson. Margaret Warner
was the interviewer. Unlike many of the other sound-bite discussions on
TV these days, we had a full 10 minutes. It was a very interesting
discussion because I had the opportunity to make my points, and Mr.
Wilson made his points. I commend PBS for giving us the opportunity.
What I cited when the interviewer asked me about my contentions that
Mr. Wilson was not truthful was I noted that the basis of his charge
and the basis of so much nonsense we have seen disseminated in the
press and repeated by some of my colleagues on this floor and covered
in scam political pieces being put out by friends of the Democratic
nominee that President Bush lied was totally debunked, among other
things, by the finding of Lord Butler's commission in the United
Kingdom.
He said in paragraph 499 of the report released last week:
We conclude that on the basis of intelligence estimates at
the time covering both Niger and the Democratic Republic of
Congo, the statements on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from
Africa in the Government's dossier and by the Prime Minister
and the House of Commons were well-founded.
This is the important point. This is the examination of British
intelligence:
By extension, we conclude also that the statement in
President Bush's State of the Union Address of January 28,
2003, ``The British Government has learned that Saddam
Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium
from Africa'' was well-founded.
Mr. President, the British went back and looked at it, and they said
what President Bush said about British intelligence was well-founded.
He says:
The British Government had intelligence from several
different sources indicating that this visit was for the
purpose of acquiring uranium.
Now, we get a little bit more of that. Actually, the one piece of
information that Ambassador Joe Wilson brought back from his trip to
Niger in February-March of 2003--the only useful data he brought back
was the fact that the Prime Minister of Niger told him the Iraqi
delegation met with him in 1999 to begin discussions to establish
commercial contacts. What do you think they wanted to import from
Niger? Well, there are a couple of choices. Niger's second and third
largest exports are mung beans and goats. Niger's largest export--
three-quarters--is yellowcake uranium. The Prime Minister reasonably
concluded that they were probably seeking yellowcake uranium. There is
no evidence they actually purchased it. It was not conclusive. There
was a forged document about purchases that was not truthful, but that
does not debunk or in any way take away from the fact that President
Bush was correct, and the British intelligence is still correct in
saying that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa.
Based on that, and since Ambassador Wilson, who came back finding
only that there had been one contact, and that contact, according to
most analysts, suggested there was even more of a basis for the
conclusion in the State of the Union Address--he came back and debunked
the whole thing, made it a lie.
The conclusion, unanimously reached in the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence, after over a year of investigation, 15,000 documents
reviewed, over 200 interviews, signed on by all members of the
committee, including Senator John Edwards, says in conclusion 12:
It was reasonable for analysts to assess that Iraq may have
been seeking uranium from Africa based upon Central
Intelligence Agency reporting and other available
intelligence.
Conclusion 13 says:
The report on the former ambassador's trip to Niger,
disseminated in March 2002, did not change any analyst's
assessment of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal. For most analysts,
the information in the report lent more credibility to the
original Central Intelligence Agency reports on the uranium
deal.
You talk about thoroughly debunking the debunker. Our staff asked Mr.
Wilson how he knew some of the things he was stating publicly with such
confidence. On at least two occasions, he admitted he had no direct
knowledge to support some of his claims, and he was either drawing on
unrelated past experience or no information at all. For example, when
they asked him specifically how he knew the intelligence community had
rejected the possibility of a Niger uranium deal, or even exploration
for a deal, as he wrote in his book, he told the committee his
assertion may have involved a ``little literary flare.''
That is a heck of a thing to call a whopping lie, a ``little literary
flare.'' Back home, we call that a fraud and a hoax. Now, I suggest to
Mr. Wilson once again that he owes a public apology to the President
and the Vice President. By the way, he said he knew the Vice President
knew of his report. The Vice President did not get his report. There is
no evidence of that. If he had, it would have been with the analysts'
conclusion that his report probably made it more likely and not less
likely that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger. Anyhow, he stood by
it.
I tell you, the whole premise of this smear campaign that was started
by Ambassador Wilson to call the President a liar has been totally
debunked by the British intelligence report, by Lord Butler, and by our
own Senate Intelligence Committee's unanimous report.
By the way, we have been hearing a lot--and I understand we are going
to hear a lot more--about Ambassador Wilson's wife. Let me deal with
that. In our report, we found good evidence that she had actually made
recommendations to the CIA to send her husband to Niger. On page 39 of
the Intelligence Committee report, we state:
The former Ambassador had traveled previously to Niger on
the CIA's behalf. The former ambassador was selected for the
1999 trip after his wife mentioned to her supervisors that
her husband was planning a business trip to Niger in the near
future and might be willing to use his contacts in the
region.
Also, on page 39:
. . . interviews and documents provided to the Committee
indicate that his wife, a CPD employee, suggested his name
for the trip. The CPD {} reports officer told Committee staff
that . . . . On February 19, 2002, CPD hosted a meeting with
[Mr. Wilson], intelligence analysts from both the CIA and
INR, and several individuals from the DO's Africa and CPD
divisions. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the
merits of [sending the Ambassador]. . . . The INR analyst's
notes indicate that the meeting was apparently convened by
the former ambassador's wife, who had the idea to dispatch
him to use his contacts to sort out the Iraq-Niger uranium
issue. She left after she set it up, but she managed to get
the job done.
But we didn't stop there. Even though Mr. Wilson had angrily denied
and used barnyard expletives in Time magazine to say that his wife had
nothing to do with the trip to Africa, and Joshua Marshall quoted him
saying that it defies logic that his wife sent him, the most compelling
answers of all that his wife gave to our staff when interviewed in
January 2004, 6 months after the Wilson hoax began, and the
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months and months of charges and Joe Wilson's fierce denials that his
wife had anything to do with his selection--let me repeat. Ambassador
Wilson angrily said his wife had nothing to do with his trip to Africa.
That is bull [expletive]. That is absolutely not the case.
That is what Wilson told Time magazine on July 17, 2003.
So he had denied it. What did she say? Did she deny it? Six months
after she heard her husband angrily denying it and knowing what he had
been saying for months and what he wrote in his book, I had staff go
back and see what she said when asked about this issue. Her quote was:
I honestly do not recall if I suggested it to my boss. . .
.
That is what she said. That is from the transcript. Frankly, I think
that is very telling. She doesn't recall if she suggested it to her
boss after 6 months, and her husband has been out there saying she had
nothing to do with it. Are you kidding? Just who is the Ambassador's
source for all of his denials? Yet 6 months later she cannot remember
if she suggested it to her boss?
I know the occupant of the chair has interviewed some witnesses and
tried some cases. When you get a person who has knowledge that is right
on point, and it is an issue that has been the focus of great
discussion for months and you ask them, Did you, in fact, say what the
other witnesses said, you can do two things: Say, absolutely not, I
didn't say it. But if that is not true, you have all these other
witnesses who said you did. So what do you say? You say: I honestly do
not recall.
I think that leaves us pretty clearly in the camp of saying that what
the analysts and others said the February 12 memo she prepared means,
and that is that she was the one who proposed sending her husband to
Iraq.
Joe Wilson said that the CIA said to a couple of reporters who asked
about that--and this is from last night--that she did not recommend her
husband to undertake the Niger assignment. He stated that the officers
who did ask him to check the uranium story were aware of who he was
married to, which is not surprising; she did not recommend her husband.
Well, Ambassador Wilson may have found some people who were willing
to say that, but we sent this whole report to the CIA. They fact-
checked the whole thing. We even set out the facts that she recommended
sending her husband. The CIA commented on almost everything that we had
in the report. It was a lengthy report. It took them a long time. Not
one comment, not one change, in the findings in our report that she was
the one who recommended him to go.
That has been discussed at great length on the floor by people who
are charging that somehow there was a criminal conspiracy to ``out''
Ambassador Wilson's wife in retaliation.
I believe the Wall Street Journal has been doing a very interesting
analysis of this, and I ask unanimous consent that yesterday's Wall
Street Journal article ``Mr. Wilson's Defense,'' be printed in the
Record after my remarks.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
(See exhibit 1.)
Mr. BOND. In fact, it was such a traumatic experience to have Mr.
Wilson's wife identified that I saw their pictures in the paper. They
posed for Vanity Fair in front of the White House. It must have been a
crushing blow to them to have her identity publicly disclosed. So they
had to get on the cover and make 30 appearances? And I trust his book
sales are going well. Maybe he will even have a movie contract.
Anybody who reads the Kerry Web site, listens to his interviews, or
goes to a movie should know that his whole thesis is a fraud and a
hoax.
Regrettably, that is merely a continuation of a plan that we have
seen implemented by opponents of President Bush and Vice President
Cheney.
I joined the Intelligence Committee in January of 2003 because I
realized that intelligence is absolutely critical in the war on
terrorism. We cannot stop terrorism by retaliating against suicide
bombers. We cannot prosecute them. We cannot find enough to identify
them, much less prosecute them. So I joined the Intelligence Committee.
Clearly, we used to have a history that politics stops at the water's
edge. Well, I understood that politics stopped at the entrance to the
Intelligence Committee, but it has not been that way.
There are those in the Intelligence Committee on the other side who
want to use the Intelligence Committee as a vehicle not to improve our
intelligence, not to find out what the weaknesses are and how to build
a stronger case, but to attack the President. That is what this
November 2003 minority staff memo says: Here are our options under the
rules and we have identified the best approach. Our plan is as follows:
One, pull the majority along as far as we can on issues that may lead
to major new disclosures regarding improper or questionable conduct by
the administration. And they certainly they have done it.
Two, essentially prepare Democratic additional views to attach to any
interim or final reports, and we intend to take full advantage of it.
They have done that, and either today or tomorrow I will discuss the
politicization in those views.
They also go on to say: We will identify the most exaggerated claims
and contrast them with the intelligence estimates that have since been
declassified.
Well, tough luck, guys. There were no exaggerated claims, nothing to
contrast with the intelligence estimates. In fact, the big claim that
they make that the administration was pressuring analysts to change
their conclusion has been debunked. It has been debunked thoroughly and
repeatedly throughout, and I have described this on the floor numerous
times.
The conclusions are there was no pressure to change conclusions on
weapons of mass destruction or on terrorism. We found in the
conclusions that the Vice President's visits and questions to CIA were
not only not pressuring to change the views but were expected.
One of the problems we find is that there is not enough questioning
by policy users. By the way, one of the things they are attacking and
one of the things that some of my colleagues have attacked is the
office of Doug Feith, special policy--a two- or three-man operation--
had a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst working with him. They
reviewed for the Department of Defense the Secretary of Defense, the
intelligence estimates they had, and they questioned them. That is what
they should have done.
Somehow this office is being called unlawful by one of my colleagues.
How bizarre. That is so far beyond the pale it is bizarre to say it is
unlawful for a DIA agent working for the Secretary of Defense to
question the CIA. Come on, gang. We need the CIA and the DIA to
interact, get rid of group think, challenge those assessments.
Unfortunately, this attack on Doug Feith in the Office of Special
Projects has heavy overtones of anti-Semitism. We can see the charges.
They talk about the ``neocons'' who are warping our intelligence.
Unfortunately, that is their code word for Jewish public servants, and
I believe that is an unacceptable way to go about challenging policy.
It is not a fruitful endeavor.
Going back to the political memo of 2003, as I said, they wanted to
contrast the views. They also said:
Once we identify solid leads the majority does not want to
pursue, we could attract more coverage and have greater
credibility in that contact than one in which we simply
launch an independent investigation based on principled but
vague notions regarding the ``use'' of intelligence.
Well, they are doing that because they are saying they want to go
back and investigate Doug Feith's office. They had no findings of
anything that Mr. Feith did was illegal, unlawful, or unwarranted
pressure, but they are choosing to attack him because he represents the
``neocons.'' I think my colleagues get what I mean.
They go on to say:
In the meantime, even without a specifically authorized
independent investigation, we continue to act independently
when we encounter foot-dragging on the part of the majority.
They say, in summary, that intelligence issues are clearly secondary
to the public's concern regarding the insurgency in Iraq. Yet we have
an important role to play in revealing the misleading, if not
flagrantly dishonest, methods and motives of the senior administration
officials who made the
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case for a unilateral preemptive war. The approach outlined above seems
to offer the best prospect for exposing the administration's dubious
motives and methods.
That was the game plan that some of my colleagues took into this
investigation of pre-Iraq war intelligence. That is deeply
disappointing--disgusting, I would say--to say this is the game plan
being played out on the floor to politicize intelligence.
Their conclusions about ``misleading,'' about ``pressure,''
unfortunately, are not supported by the facts. There was exhaustive
examination and interviews. Chairman Roberts invited in anybody who
claimed to know about improper pressure on the analysts and nobody
could come forward with anything. Nobody could come forward with any.
No wrongdoing by Doug Feith, but they are still going at it.
My colleagues on the other side of the aisle are not troubled by an
absence of fact. They have a political jihad. They have their crusade.
They have sold, to too many people, the base canard that President Bush
and Vice President Cheney were not telling the truth when, in fact, the
whole basis of that charge was a fraud and a hoax.
As my colleague from Georgia said, we need to improve the
intelligence operations. We have a lot of work to do. But we also have
some work to do in the Congress, and that is to get over attempting to
use the Intelligence Committee and the intelligence community as a
political weapon to attack our opponents.
I yield the floor.
Exhibit 1
[From the Wall Street Journal, July 20, 2004]
Mr. Wilson's Defense
After U.S. and British intelligence reports exposed his
falsehoods in the last 10 days, Joe Wilson is finally
defending himself. We're therefore glad to return to this
story one more time, because there are some larger lessons
here about the law, and for the Beltway media and Bush White
House.
Mr. Wilson's defense, in essence, is that the ``Republican-
written'' Senate Intelligence Committee report is a partisan
hatchet job. We could forgive people for being taken in by
this, considering the way the Committee's ranking Democrat,
Jay Rockefeller, has been spinning it over the past week. But
the fact is that the three most damning conclusions are
contained not in Chairman Pat Roberts's ``Additional Views,''
but in the main body of the report approved by Mr.
Rockefeller and seven other Democrats.
Number one: The winner of last year's Award for Truth
Telling from the Nation magazine foundation didn't tell the
truth when he wrote that his wife, CIA officer Valerie Plame,
``had nothing to do with'' his selection for the Niger
mission. Mr. Wilson is now pretending there is some kind of
important distinction between whether she ``recommended'' or
``proposed'' him for the trip.
Mr. Wilson had been denying any involvement at all on Ms.
Plame's part, in order to suggest that her identity was
disclosed by a still-unknown Administration official out of
pure malice. If instead an Administration official cited
nepotism truthfully in order to explain the oddity of Mr.
Wilson's selection for the Niger mission, then there was no
underlying crime. Motive is crucial under the controlling
statute.
The 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act was written
in the wake of the Philip Agee scandal to protect the CIA
from deliberate subversion, not to protect the identities of
agents and their spouses who choose to enter into a national
political debate. In short, the entire leak probe now looks
like a familiar Beltway case of criminalizing political
differences. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald should
fold up his tent.
Number two: Joe Wilson didn't tell the truth about how he
supposedly came to realize that it was ``highly doubtful''
there was anything to the story he'd been sent to Niger to
investigate. He told everyone that he'd recognized as obvious
forgeries the documents purporting to show an Iraq-Niger
uranium deal. But the forged documents to which he referred
didn't reach U.S. intelligence until eight months after his
trip. Mr. Wilson has said that he ``misspoke''--multiple
times, apparently--on this issue.
Number three: Joe Wilson was also not telling the truth
when he said that his final report to the CIA had
``debunked'' the Niger story. The Senate Intelligence
report--again, the bipartisan portion of it--says Mr.
Wilson's debrief was interpreted as providing ``some
confirmation of foreign government service reporting'' that
Iraq had sought uranium in Niger. That's because Niger's
former Prime Minister had told Mr. Wilson he interpreted a
1999 visit from an Iraqi trade delegation as showing an
interest in uranium.
This is a remarkable record of falsehood. We'll let our
readers judge if they think Mr. Wilson was deliberately
wrong, and therefore can be said to have ``lied.'' We
certainly know what critics would say if President Bush had
been caught saying such things. But in any event, we'd think
that the news outlets that broadcast Mr. Wilson's story over
the past year would want to retrace their own missteps.
Mr. Wilson made three separate appearances on NBC's ``Meet
the Press,'' according to the Weekly Standard. New York Times
columnist Nick Kristof first brought the still anonymous
Niger envoy to public attention in May 2003, so he too must
feel burned by his source. Alone among major sellers of the
Wilson story, the Washington Post has done an admirable job
so far of correcting the record.
Also remarkable is that the views of former CIA employee
Larry Johnson continue to be cited anywhere on this and
related issues. Mr. Johnson was certain last October that the
disclosure of Ms. Plame's identity was a purely ``political
attack,'' now disproven. He is also a friend of Ms. Plame and
the author of a summer 2001 op-ed titled ``The Declining
Terrorist Threat.'' You'd think reporters would at least
quote him with a political warning label.
The final canard advanced by Mr. Wilson's defenders is that
our own recent editorials and other criticism was somehow
``orchestrated.'' Well, by whom? Certainly not by the same
White House that has been all too silent about this entire
episode, in large part because it prematurely apologized last
year for the ``16 words'' in a State of the Union address
that have now been declared ``well-founded'' by Lord Butler's
inquiry in Britain. If Mr. Bush ends up losing the election
over Iraq, it won't be because he oversold the case for war
but because he's sometimes appeared to have lost confidence
in the cause.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wyoming.
Mr. THOMAS. How much time do we have remaining?
The PRESIDING OFFICER. There is 4\1/2\ minutes remaining.
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