[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

[[Page S8504]]

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

[[Page S8505]]

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.

                          ____________________