I normally don't spend a lot of time quibbling over arguments with which I basically agree. But in the case of Bob Somerby's take on the Plame case and related matters, I find myself doing just that.
Somerby's main argument has two parts. One is that our sad excuse for a press corps has oversimplified the significance of Joe Wilson's report on the Niger uranium document forgeries to the point of blurring the facts, at best a sloppy approach.
As he puts it in Friday's (10/21/05) Daily Howler:
At any rate, the press corps was beginning to look for a tale which would illustrate their (accurate) new conclusion: Bush misled us on the way into war. But right up to this very day, Wilson’s “contradiction” doesn’t quite parse. Result? To this day, scribes misstate what Wilson said. It builds a more dramatic tale, in which contradictions are more direct. But that’s what Aesop’s press corps typically does when it decides to convince us rubes of the truth of its latest Group Judgment.
In this case, their judgment was accurate. They just chose a rather weak tale with which to convey that new judgment.
Somerby also makes a specific argument that Wilson himself amplified the results of his findings in acting as a source for the following articles:
Missing in Action: Truth by Nicholas Kristof New York Times 05/06/03 (CommonDreams.org reprint)
CIA Did Not Share Doubt on Iraq Data: Bush Used Report Of Uranium Bid by Walter Pincus Washington Post 06/12/03
The First Casualty by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman New Republic (06/19/03; 06/30/05 print edition) Link to New Republic pay-archive version here.
The amplification he thinks Wilson made was to say that he had not only debunked the report of uranium sales to Niger, but that he had also determined that the documents were forgeries.
There are lots of people who are far more immersed in the Plame case and its many side-stories than I am. So I'm not going to try to cite chapter and verse here. But the following is my basic understanding of these two questions.
First of all, there are the famous "16 words". Often when politicians get caught saying something false and/or stupid, they will complain that they were "quoted out of context." In this case, the real meaning of what Bush said only makes sense if it is examined in its relevant context, the 2003 State of the Union (SOTU) address:
Today, the gravest danger in the war on terror, the gravest danger facing America and the world, is outlaw regimes that seek and possess nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. These regimes could use such weapons for blackmail, terror, and mass murder. They could also give or sell those weapons to terrorist allies, who would use them without the least hesitation. ...
Now, in this century, the ideology of power and domination has appeared again, and seeks to gain the ultimate weapons of terror. Once again, this nation and all our friends are all that stand between a world at peace, and a world of chaos and constant alarm. Once again, we are called to defend the safety of our people, and the hopes of all mankind. And we accept this responsibility. (Applause.)
Here is the paragraph with the notorious 16 words (my emphasis):
The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in the 1990s that Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design for a nuclear weapon and was working on five different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb. The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production. Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide.
And he elaborated on the alleged threat in the paragraphs after the "16words". For example:
Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained. But chemical agents, lethal viruses and shadowy terrorist networks are not easily contained. Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans -- this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known. We will do everything in our power to make sure that that day never comes. (Applause.)
Following the passage quoted above which begins, "Today, the gravest danger ...", Bush painted a pretty scary picture with phrases like the following:
* ... learn the lessons of the Korean Peninsula and not allow an even greater threat to rise up in Iraq.
* A brutal dictator ... will not be permitted to ... threaten the United States. (Applause.)
* ... Saddam Hussein [between 1991 and 2003] ... pursued chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons ...
* Nothing to date has restrained him from his pursuit of these weapons ...
* It is up to Iraq to show exactly where it is hiding its banned weapons, lay those weapons out for the world to see, and destroy them as directed. Nothing like this has happened.
* The dictator of Iraq is not disarming. To the contrary; he is deceiving. ...
* With nuclear arms or a full arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, Saddam Hussein ...
* Evidence ... reveal [sic] that Saddam Husseinaids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda. Secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own.
* If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late.
* The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons ...
* ... a serious and mounting threat to our country ...
* Iraq's ongoing defiance of the world. ...
* ... for the safety of our people and for the peace of the world ...
In the context, it's hard to see how anyone could doubt Bush's belief in the credibility of what "British intelligence has learned ..." Yes, if we parse the exact words, Bush did not say, "Iraq has procured uranium from Niger." But the claim about Iraq seeking uranium was clearly not only meant to be taken by his audience as fact or high liklihood. It was also the most frightening of all the claims about Iraq's (non-existent) nuclear weapons programs. If Iraq had designs for nuclear bombs that included five different methods of enriching uranium to weapons-grade, and he also had uranium, then it was only a matter of time before he got the Bomb. Aluminum tubes had to be spun heavily to make a connection in the average's listener's mind (including those in Congress) with nuclear weapons. "Uranium" isn't nearly so hard to connect.
Since many of the relevant documents are not public at this point - e.g., the British intelligence report(s), the CIA's report on Wilson's Niger trip - it's impossible to say with certainty to what extent the claim in the "16 words" was based on the allegation that Wilson was investigating about Iraq have actually procured uranium from Niger.
But as I mentioned in my post of 10/18/05, the Bush administration certainly reacted as though Wilson's op-ed and his anonymous conversations with the press were a threat to the credibility of that claim in 2003 SOTU.
So, I buy Somerby's argument inthe narrow sense, which is that reporters and some bloggers are being somewhat sloppy in the way they talk about the relation of Joe Wilson's public criticisms to Bush's actual claim about uranium in the 2003 SOTU.
But he goes beyond arguing that the writers should be more careful. He argues as well that there is no reason to find any contradiction between Wilson's accounts on his Niger mission and the SOTU claim. For instance, from the 10/21/05 Howler:
* Yep! Bush said Iraq sought uranium from Niger. Wilson said a sale couldn’t likely take place. But from Day One, the press corps acted as if Wilson had flatly contradicted Bush’s troubling statement.
* But perhaps it took a bit of time for the press to notice an awkward fact - Wilson’s column didn’t really contradict what Bush had said in his State of the Union.
* But Bush never said a transaction took place!
If this were an argument over whether Bush violated the federal law that makes it a crime to lie to Congress, even when one is not under oath, those points of Somerby's would be well taken.
But in the context of the Plame case and the "16 words", that part of his argument is silly. The reaction of the administration to Wilson is developing into what promises to be a major public scandal. And let's look at a quick chronology:
07/05/03: Wilson's famous op-ed What I Didn't Find in Africa dated 07/06/05 appears late in the evening on the New York Times Web site.
07/06/03: Wilson is interviewed by Andrea Mitchell - who is Alan Greenspan's wife, by the way, although her husband's job is not classified information - on Meet the Press. According to this unofficial transcript, part of the exchange went as follows (Joe Wilson with Andrea Mitchell, July 6, 2003 Just One Minute blog 07/20/04):
MS. MITCHELL: Now,we only learned later when U.N. inspectors first looked at the documents, this was a year later, that, in fact, these documents were fraudulent, a year after your first trip. What did you think when you first saw the president making that comment in the State of the Union?
AMB. WILSON: Well, first of all, Andrea, when the president made the comment, he was referring to a British White Paper Report that came out in September of the previous year, September 2002; again, referring to uranium sales from an African country to Iraq. Now, there are four African countries that produce uranium or have uranium stockpiles: South Africa, Namibia, Gabon and Niger.So throughout this, whenever the British and then the president were mentioningAfrica, I assumed that they were talking about one of the other countries and not Niger since we had, I believed, at the time effectively debunked the Niger arms uranium sale.
MS. MITCHELL: But, in fact, many officials, including the president, the vice president, Donald Rumsfeld, were referring to the Niger issue as though it were fact, as though it were true and they were told by the CIA, this information was passed on in the national intelligence estimate, I’ve been told, with a caveat from the State Department that it was highly dubious based on your trip but that that caveat was buried in a footnote, in the appendix. So was the White House misled? Were they not properly briefed on the fact that you had the previous February been there and that it wasn’t true?
AMB. WILSON: No. No. In actual fact, in my judgment, I have not seen the estimate either, but there were reports based upon my trip that were submitted to the appropriate officials. The question was asked of the CIA by the office of the vice president. The office of the vice president, I am absolutely convinced, received a very specific response to the question it asked and that response was based upon my trip out there.
MS. MITCHELL: So they knew months and months before they passed on these allegations that, in fact, that particular charge was not true. Do you think, based on all of this, that the intelligence was hyped?
AMB. WILSON: My judgment on this is that if they were referring to Niger when they were referring to uranium sales from Africa to Iraq, that information was erroneous and that they knew about it well ahead of both the publication of the British White Paper and the president’s State of the Union address.
07/07/03, later in the day: A "senior administration official" tells reporters: "Knowing all that we know now, the reference to Iraq's attempt to acquire uranium from Africa should not have been included in the State of the Union speech." See White House Backs Off Claim on Iraqi Buy by Walter Pincus Washington Post 07/08/03 (from the Web site of the University of Missouri Journalism School's Freedom of Information Center).
The opening paragraphs of Pincus' story remind us that Wilson's op-ed was not the only source of pressure over the "16 words", a point which is in favor of Somerby's argument:
The Bush administration acknowledged for the first time yesterday that President Bush should not have alleged in his State of the Union address in January that Iraq had sought to buy uranium in Africa to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program.
The statement was prompted by publication of a British parliamentary commission report, which raised serious questions about the reliability of British intelligence that was cited by Bush as part of his effort to convince Congress and the American people that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction program were a threat to U.S. security.
The British panel said it was unclear why the British government asserted as a "bald claim" that there was intelligence that Iraq had sought to buy significant amounts of uranium in Africa. It noted that the CIA had already debunked this intelligence, and questioned why an official British government intelligence dossier published four months before Bush's speech included the allegation as part of an effort to make the case for going to war against Iraq.
Yet it's also notable that this statement cam on the day after Wilson's op-ed appeared on the Times Web site. And, working against Somerby's argument, it was clear right away that the White House and the Republican attack machine were going after Wilson.
07/11/03 - CIA Director George Tenet issues statement on the uranium claim in the SOTU: Statement by George J. Tenet, Director of Central Intelligence CIA Press Release 07/11/05. Tenet said:
Legitimate questions have arisen about how remarks on alleged Iraqi attempts to obtain uranium in Africa made it into the President’s State of the Union speech. ... These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the President. ...
Although the documents related to the alleged Niger-Iraqi uranium deal had not yet been determined to be forgeries, officials who were reviewing the draft remarks onuranium raised several concerns about the fragmentary natureof the intelligence with National Security Council colleagues. Some of the language was changed.From what we know now, Agency officials in the end concurred that the text in the speech was factually correct - i.e. that the British government report said that Iraq sought uranium from Africa. This should not have been the test for clearing a Presidential address. This did not rise to the level of certainty which should be required for Presidential speeches, and CIA should have ensured that it was removed.
Since we're in Howler close-reading mode here, we should note that Tenet here treats the "16 words" in more-or-less the way Somerby does, as though on the face of it, the statement was technically just a straightforward acknowledgement that the British had produced such a report. I'm quite confident that when most listeners understood Bush's statement in those 16 words that the "British government has learned that Saddam Hussein ...", they understood it to be an endorsement by the President of the findings of that report as he stated, not as a matter-of-fact comment that such a report existed.
Tenet's statement has been widely understood, then and since, as his taking the rap for the deception.
The Republicans publicly attacked Wilson and his credibility in the days following. Here's Clifford May at National Review Online of 07/11/03: Scandal! Bush’s enemies aren't telling the truth about what he said.
Josh Marshall on that same day had a brief response from Wilson on the charge.
If you look at Marshall's other blog posts for the few days before and after, you can certainly get a sense that Wilson's criticisms over the uranium claim were taken as challenges to Bush's credibility in the SOTU, though by no means the only one.
The second major element of Somerby's argument is that Wilson has made careless claims at times in connection with the controversy. In his 10/21/05 post, Somerby criticizes him for claiming/suggesting that he had discovered that the Niger documents were forgeries. Wilson had not examined the forged documents himself in his Niger trip.
It seems to me that Somerby, in his criticism over that, is jumping to conclusions that the material he cites don't justify. To make his argument, Somerby assumes that Kristof in the article cited above recorded Wilson's information exactly right, and he assumes that the "sources" cited by Pincus in the 2003 article were actually one source, Joe Wilson. And Somerby puts undue confidence, it seems to me, in the Senate cover-up report on prewar intelligence (aka, Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq 07/07/04; *.pdf file), which I discussed last year, including its treatment of Wilson.
And, in general, I think he makes an exaggerated distinction between the idea that Iraq "sought" uranium (Bush's SOTU) and the "the sale of uranium yellowcake ... by Niger to Iraq" (Wilson's description of what he investigated from his 07/06/03 op-ed). After all, an agreement to make a sale or an actual sale, whether or not delivery of the uranium occurred, would also have meant that Iraq "sought" uranium.
He also cites a vague report, mentioned in Tenet's statement quoted above, which could be used in the very narrow sense to say that there was evidence that Iraq "sought" uranium. As discussed in the Senate cover-up report, former Nigerian Prime Minister Ibrahim Mayaki related to Wilson on his Niger trip "that in June 1999, [portion redacted] businessman, approached him and insisted that Mayaki meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss 'expanding commercial relations' between Niger and Iraq." Mayaki told Wilson that he had not followed up on it because of the UN sanctions against Iraq, though he did meet with the Iraqi delegation. Somerby argues that such a meeting could be evidence that Iraq "sought" uranium.
At this point, the hair-splitting gets to be absurd. No one interpreted Bush's "16 words" in the 2003 SOTU to mean, "Well, four years ago there was a group that represented itself as an Iraq delegation that had very preliminary discussion with Niger about the possibility ofexpanding trade relations, which meant they were trying to get uranium, because that's Niger's main export. Nothing came of it, and arranging such a sale would have been effectively impossible because of the French and Nigerien controls in place. And there's no evidence that even a preliminary approach like this one was ever made again."
For all the information in the public information provided by Tenet and by Sen. Pat Roberts' cover-up report, this "Iraqi delegation" could have been a few of Ahmad Chalabi's guys up to some scam of their own.
Also, speaking directly to the objection that Somerby raises on what Wilson was refuting, the cover-up committee reported on p. 44 of their report that Wilson's presentation to their staff indicated he saw his findings from his Niger mission as "refuting both the possibility that Niger could have sold uranium to Iraq and that Iraq approached Niger to purchase uranium." They note that the report written by the CIA based on their debriefing of Wilson "did not refute the possibility that Iraq had approached Niger to purchase uranium."
My conclusion is that, on the story of Joe Wilson and the outing of Valerie Plame, Somerby's dissecting of the coverage suffers in part from not being able to see the forest for the trees.
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