Ironically, Senate investigators found that at least some of what Wilson told his CIA briefer not only failed to persuade the agency that there was nothing to reports of Niger-Iraq link — his information actually created additional suspicion.

A former prime minister of Niger, Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, told Wilson that in June 1999, a businessman approached him, insisting that he meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss “expanding commercial relations.” Mayaki, knowing how few commodities for export are produced by impoverished Niger, interpreted that to mean that Saddam was seeking uranium.

Another former government official told Wilson that Iran had tried to buy 400 tons of uranium in 1998. That’s the same year that Saddam forced the weapons inspectors to leave Iraq. Could the former official have meant Iraq rather than Iran? If someone were to try to connect those dots, what picture might emerge?
Schmidt adds that the Senate panel was alarmed to find that the CIA never “fully investigated possible efforts by Iraq to buy uranium from Niger destined for Iraq and stored in a warehouse in Benin.” .

http://www.nationalreview.com/may/may200407121105.asp
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39834-2004Jul9.html

Either present some credible evidence Wilson lied about the Niger yellowcake claims or admit that was just another figment of your nutty imagination.

In Wilson’s verbal report to the CIA he said the rumors were true or at least plausible, once something is true it can hardly be considered a rumor.

So why didn’t he file a report? If the CIA told him not to or that they would not accept a written report, he would not offer one. His butt was already covered by the report of the Embassy staff in Nigeria. Wilson is not some mid level bureaucrat scared about his role in a land development.

Wilson dealt with upper echelon diplomats and CIA, and the nature of his mission to Nigeria was at the time secret. But they underestimated his integrity. When he went public, which would have been a terrifying thing to do in July 2003, his message set the stage for realizations (i.e. the Downing Street memo) about Americans cherry picking intelligence to fit their agenda to attack Iraq.

Had Wilson found that the “yellowcake” rumours to be true, you can bet the CIA would have demanded that he file a written report and it may even have gone to the newspapers the next day.

It seems you are attempting to suggest that Wilson verbally reported the exact opposite of what (a) he originally stated that he found out from American embassy officials immediately upon arrival in Nigeria (that the yellowcake rumours were already debunked), and (b) of what he determined from his own meetings and analysis (the yellowcake claims had no basis in truth.) What evidence do you have that he lied in his report?

You might do well to review his initial statement to the New York Times about his report, and then consider how irrelevant, underhanded, (i.e. potentially treasonous) and petty it would be at that point for Bush’s administration to drag his wife into the fray:

What I Didn’t Find in Africa, By JOSEPH C. WILSON 4th
…Though I did not file a written report, there should be at least four documents in United States government archives confirming my mission. The documents should include the ambassador’s report of my debriefing in Niamey, a separate report written by the embassy staff, a C.I.A. report summing up my trip, and a specific answer from the agency to the office of the vice president (this may have been delivered orally). While I have not seen any of these reports, I have spent enough time in government to know that this is standard operating procedure.

…Having encountered Mr. Hussein and his thugs in the run-up to the Persian Gulf war of 1991, I was only too aware of the dangers he posed. …But were these dangers the same ones the administration told us about? We have to find out. America’s foreign policy depends on the sanctity of its information. For this reason, questioning the selective use of intelligence to justify the war in Iraq is neither idle sniping nor “revisionist history,” as Mr. Bush has suggested. The act of war is the last option of a democracy, taken when there is a grave threat to our national security. More than 200 American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq already. We have a duty to ensure that their sacrifice came for the right reasons.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/opinion/06WILS.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5007&en=6c6aeb1ce960dec0&ex=1372824000&partner=USERLAND

Given all the events since then, including Richard Perle’s recent public admission that the invasion of Iraq was contrary to international law (see below), Joseph Wilson’s concluding paragraph has proven to be a howl of dire portent. (And the Plame-gate events that followed that howl was an omen (threat) to all who might opposed the new official policy of wars forevermore.)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0%2C2763%2C1089158%2C00.html

Let me take one of the points just to give you an idea of how far to port you are. Number 8 “He then returned to the states and reported his findings” He did, but he never filed a written report, and in the verbal report he gave to an agent that debriefed him, he said there was evidence Sadam had tried to acquire yellow cake from Niger, but in his book he said just the opposite. Now why he never filed a report is problematic, I have to file a report if I go to Mississippi to look at a machine, surely if this was such an important trip that a 5 year war depended on it, a few paragraphs were in order.

So my statement would be that he never filed a report, and you would have to find that he did, a lot of work on your part as well.

That is the type of thing I would refute, and the way I would do it. But I have a lot going on at work right and probably don’t have time for it anyway.

My understanding is that there were some very poorly forged documents in England that indicated Saddam was trying to purchase “yellowcake” uranium from Nigeria to create a nuclear bomb. It had already been determined by the British that it was a forgery, but the Americans wanted to determine whether there was any truth to the claim. Wilson, an experienced diplomat with the right skill set for the task, was selected by a senior CIA officer (not Valerie Plame) to go to Nigeria. His wife, Valerie Plame, herself a middle-east CIA agent (field commander?), asked him to go as requested by her CIA superiors. Wilson did extensive interviews with senior Nigerian officials etc.

He then returned to the states and reported his findings (confirming the “yellowcake” claims were bogus) to his superiors and senior members in the Bush administration. Then a short time (long time?) later Wilson was astonished to see the claims repeated in Bush’s state of the union address as justification for attacking Iraq, and Bush had no supporting evidence other than the original forgery. Incredulous, Wilson went public that the administration knew they were making false “yellowcake” claims in their path to war.

In what seemed like retaliation but was surely at least an attempt to retain some credibility, the administration attacked Wilson. Rather than comment on what Wilson’s role was, what he determined, when he reported it and the veracity of his findings, there was a campaign to discredit him which included suggesting that the Niger trip was nothing but a ridiculous junket authorised by his wife.

The Wilson’s were dumbfounded by that attack, because they realised it was not true, that it was nothing but a smear attempt, but mostly because they believed that Valerie’s role with the CIA included some covert status protections that were treasonous to disclose, and they were livid that her fellow CIA covert agent’s lives may have been jeapardized by this administration purely to save political face.

Why is it that the more details I get from shcb the more obfuscated the issue becomes?

Right-wing lawyer Victoria Toensing received widespread media
coverage when she claimed that Plame was not a “covert” officer under the definition of the 1982 law protecting the identities of intelligence agents because it only applied to CIA personnel who had “resided” or were “stationed” abroad in the previous five years.

Toensing argued that since Plame, the mother of young twins, was stationed at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and resided in the Washington area, she wasn’t “covert” even if that was her official CIA status. But Toensing was misrepresenting the law that she said she had helped draft while a congressional staffer in the early 1980s.

The actual wording of the law as it pertained to CIA and other
clandestine officers was “served” abroad, which is not synonymous with “stationed” or “resided,” the words that Toensing had substituted.

One can be stationed or reside inside the United States and still “serve” abroad by undertaking secret missions overseas, which Plame had done.

But many in the right-wing news media and even at prestige newspapers like the Washington Post adopted Toensing’s word games as reality. It became an article of faith in some political circles that Plame was not a “covert” officer and that therefore there was “no underlying crime” in the leaking of her identity.

Bush’s Guilt?

But what does this ongoing pattern of deception and character
assassination against Wilson and Plame suggest about Bush’s innocence or guilt?
… etc.

The full article here:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/printer_112707O.shtml

You should absolutely take my comments through a filter just as you should take the Judge’s remarks through a similar filter. Napolitano is a brilliant man and a great speaker as a guest on the talk shows, he can explain complex legal doctrine in a way even slow folks like me can understand, he gets it said quickly and then he shuts up and lets someone else talk. He also doesn’t waver in his beliefs and doesn’t seem too partisan. I just don’t agree with all his conclusions. But that is why we have chocolate vanilla and strawberry

As for your other comments, points taken but with a few grains of salt given your biases. I think a judge making statements like those - even with the statements helping promote his book - is a flashing red neon sign that there is lots of rancid tuna in the casserole.

And that stinks more than a mixed metaphor.

That is a good question, I have heard where the wall originated, but don’t remember for sure. I think it was formed, if that is the right word, after Iran/Contra. But I could be way off base. Conservatives, Limbaugh in particular blamed the Clinton administration. And there was a lot they did that was wrong, their biggest mistake was in trying to defeat this threat through the courts, making it a crime to be a terrorist rather than looking at actions like the Cole bombing and the first attack on the World Trade Center as an act of war. But in my humble opinion, that was overblown, there were many obstacles that had been erected in the decades before Clinton took office, and even Bush’s administration had extended “the Wall” just a month or so before the 911 attack. I think you could even make the point that the CIA and FBI in some ways didn’t want the wall to be torn down. Let me be clear, probably most agents individually wanted it removed, but institutionally, probably not. These agencies are bureaucracies, and as such they don’t mind hiding behind rules like this if they can, they are also quite competitive and in some ways don’t mind not telling the “other side” what they are doing. If there is a drug smuggler who is also a terrorist, they want their team to be the one that catches him. There was plenty of blame to go around here and I don’t think you can find one single item that caused this breakdown; it was just a bunch of little things.

That is a good clip of the Judge; it shows very well what I was talking about. He starts out with the premise that our constitutional rights are absolute, they aren’t. The classic example is yelling fire in a crowded theater, or slander or liable laws, that’s for the first amendment. Not being able to own fully automatic weapons or hand grenades without restriction, second amendment… He makes a good point after that but he starts off with a false premise, probably making his good point a bigger issue than it really is. If what he says is true about not being able to talk to a lawyer then that is a portion of the Patriot Act that should be addressed, at least as it pertains to US citizens.

PS, He says we have an absolute right to free speech, I wonder how he squares that statement with client attorney privilege. If an attorney had a juicy story he could make millions on, but that information was given to him in confidence, would the good judge say the client has no recourse? Of course not, he would say that a client has an absolute right. So what happened to the attorney’s absolute right? I believe Daniel Webster said “good manners are more important than good laws, because most good laws come from good manners.”

You are wrong about the Judge not saying these things before 2004. I think he started on Fox during the 2000 election. And he has always taken the civil libertarian stance, it’s just who he is.