Joe Wilson at the Take Back America conference (Democracy Now)

[stickdog]

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/02/1428216

JOE WILSON: On my road to Boston, I was ambushed. I was ambushed by the Republican National Committee directed smear campaign based upon lies and distortions. You have seen it in the Wall Street Journal, you have seen it in the right wing blogs. You have seen it in Bill Safire's article. I have been accused of being a traitor to my country and of being a liar. But if you take a look at the Senate Select Committee intelligence report, it is hard to see how they conclude that somehow my contribution to this debate and my calling on my country and on my government to account for what it has said and done in our name has been anything less than truthful. There have been assertions made that my wife was somehow responsible for my trip, as if it made a difference. As I remind people, this was pro bono and Niger ain't Paris. And yet the committee that wrote this recommendation that showed up in the body of the report didn't bother to call the C.I.A. Had they called the C.I.A., as two enterprising reporters did a week after Mr. Novak's article appeared, they would have heard the official C.I.A. position -- which was, Wilson's wife had nothing to do with this. That was several months before I ever spoke out about my wife and anything other than hypothetical terms. They did not ask the C.I.A. They did not ask the head of the task force who made the decision, they misquoted a reports officer who came to see my wife after the report came out in tears and said, "What can I do?"

And he has since written a letter, but his wife will not let him publish it, because they are afraid. The report says that somehow my report bolstered the analysts' views and yet on October 2, 2002, three-and-a-half months before the State of the Union address, the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence gave the intelligence community's corporate view of this assertion to the Senate Select committee on intelligence. The senior -- a senior C.I.A. Official testified to the same committee that wrote this report, and what did he say? He said, "The reporting on this case has not been made. This is one of the areas where we disagree with the British. We believe they have stretched the information."

Four days later, the Director of Central Intelligence called the Deputy national security adviser and said, "I don't want the president to be a witness of fact in this matter, because the reporting is weak." They sent a fax the same day and they said, "One of the mines is flooded, the French have control of the other mine, and we have already told Congress we think that the British have overstated the evidence."

The day after my article appeared, the president's spokesman came out and told the Washington Post those 16 words did not rise to the level of inclusion in the state of the union address. They have never taken that off the table. They have never taken that off the table. So who are they calling liars? Now, let me just say -- because it hinges on the debate -- there are two reasons for this smear campaign, one which was exposed in the Wall Street Journal opinion piece. One is to wrap up this criminal investigation that's going on. In other words, their "argument" is, "We have so discredited Wilson and his wife that there's no point of pursuing who betrayed the country by leaking her name."

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[kaitykaity]

1. Thanks for posting this.

I don't think Wilson's done with the Bushies yet.
I really don't.

I saw him on MTP up against some RW hack, and he was
pissed. He was angry down to his socks he was mad.