The Importance of Being Joe Wilson

By Lakshmi Chaudhry, AlterNet. Posted November 3, 2003.

Joseph Wilson is the man who ignited the scandal that envelops the Bush administration today. The former ambassador, who served under both President Bush Sr. and President Clinton, has become the White House's biggest nightmare over the course of the last four months.

His story really starts back in February 2002, when, in response to a request from Vice President Dick Cheney, Wilson was asked by the CIA to investigate allegations regarding Saddam Hussein's uranium purchases. He shared the conclusion of his investigation -- that there was no truth to the reports -- with both the CIA and the White House. When he witnessed Bush utter the now infamous 16 words in his State of the Union speech in January 2003, Wilson felt compelled to speak out.

In July Wilson revealed in a New York Times op-ed that the Bush administration's claim that Saddam was seeking to acquire uranium from the African nation of Niger was false. More importantly, he offered irrefutable evidence that the administration knew it was wrong nearly a year before President Bush made the discredited claim in SOTU address.

Wilson's editorial was the first piece of concrete evidence that the administration had outright lied to the American people in order to take the nation to war. It sparked a media firestorm and earned him the wrath of the White House. On July 14, two senior administration officials told conservative columnist Robert Novak that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative and had been responsible for sending him to Niger.

The effort to intimidate Wilson, however, has proved to be futile. He continues to speak out against the tactics of the administration. His latest effort is his participation in producer Robert Greenwald's documentary film, "Uncovered: The Truth About The War in Iraq," which features in-depth, revealing interviews with members of the CIA, the Pentagon, the Foreign Service and the weapons inspection teams.

Wilson talked to AlterNet by phone from Washington.

Let's start by talking about the movie. Tell me a little about why you decided to participate in making the Greenwald documentary and what you're hoping it will achieve.

I've believed ever since I started that it is important to speak out on this. That the integrity of the government and the integrity of the reasons that underpinned the going to war were suspect. And in any society, especially in a democracy, the most solemn decision that a government has to make is the sending of its sons and daughters to die and to kill for our country. In a democracy, such decisions are based upon a debate or the consequences of such a debate. And that debate is based upon a set of commonly accepted facts around which people voice their opinions.

If that information was not fact, but bits of idle chit-chat and gossip, and if it was pulled out of thin air because it happened to conform to a political decision that had already been made, then there is considerable reason to conclude that the war we just embarked on was a war that was undertaken under false pretenses.

What do you think of the administration's strategy in trying to deal with the information you brought forward challenging their claims? Most recently, the neoconservative hawk Michael Ledeen suggested that the enriched uranium might have ended up in Iran, for example.

Well, I quite frankly think they're pathetic. The more people look into this, the more implausible this was from the very beginning. I was just with somebody who is in this business today who said, "They didn't need to send you. All they needed was to come down and talk to us. We could have told them that this was bullshit." Ledeen's case that he is building is that some enriched uranium in Iraq was somehow being smuggled into Iran, which is equally unlikely.

When the U.S. government said the day after my article appeared that the 16 words did not rise to the level to deserve inclusion in the State of the Union address, it took me completely out of the game. The questions that I'd raised had been answered. As of that day, I'd stopped accepting invitations to go on and talk about my article or anything else related to the Iraq business. There was no need for me to be seen to be gloating or rubbing salt in the wounds.

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