Joe Wilsons defense

Tuesday, July 20, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

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.

More at: http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110005375