Americans must take government back from ideologues, ex-diplomat says
Joseph Wilson, a retired ambassador and husband of the CIA officer whose exposed identity set off a federal leak investigation, spoke Monday in Kresge Auditorium.
BY LISA TREI
Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, the husband of Valerie Plame Wilson, the CIA operative whose leaked identity has sparked a high-stakes federal investigation, called on students on Oct. 24 to take their republic back from the "neoconservative ideologues" controlling the White House.
"Sometimes in life you have to stand up to the bullies," the career diplomat said during an event at Kresge Auditorium sponsored by the speakers bureau of the Associated Students of Stanford University. "This issue is not about us, it's about what we're going to tolerate in the conduct of our elected officials and the conduct of public discourse."
On July 14, 2003, Valerie Wilson's covert identity was revealed by newspaper columnist Robert Novak. Some political observers allege she was targeted in retaliation for her husband's criticism of the Bush administration's case for invading Iraq, which he made public in an op-ed in the New York Times on July 6, 2003. "Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war," he wrote, "I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."
In December 2003, Special Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald began investigating whether the exposure of Valerie Wilson's identity was a violation of federal law. Fitzgerald is expected to bring charges in the case by Oct. 28, when the term of his grand jury expires. I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, and Karl Rove, President Bush's senior adviser, both face the possibility of indictment. "Tomorrow's New York Times will say that Dick Cheney told Scooter Libby the name of my wife," Wilson announced unexpectedly, evoking gasps and applause from the audience. The statement contradicts Libby's grand jury testimony that he first learned of Valerie Wilson's identity from journalists.
At the heart of the scandal, Wilson said, is the broader damage that has been done to the United States. He asserted that the Bush administration's stated premise for invading Iraq—to remove weapons of mass destruction—was false and that the president knew it at the time. Wilson said the invasion was instead part of a sweeping plan devised by neoconservative zealots to change America from a republic into an empire. Such a strategy, he said, was embodied in a document called the "Project for the New American Century," which contains a series of ideological assertions that have come to dominate the Bush administration.
In August 2002, Wilson said, the administration created the White House Iraq Group to "market" the war by highlighting the threat of Saddam Hussein's alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. As top Bush officials repeated, "We can't afford to wait for the smoking gun to come in the form of a mushroom cloud," public support for the war surged, he said.
In promoting such claims, Wilson said, the Bush administration deceived the American people as it prepared to send U.S. troops to Iraq. "There is no more solemn decision that a society and a government has to make than the decision to send people to kill and die in our name," he said. "We were not getting the facts we needed to help us make that decision."
Wilson, a former diplomat in Niger, decided to speak out after the State of the Union address in 2003 when Bush said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." In 2002, the CIA had asked Wilson to investigate claims that Hussein was trying to acquire uranium yellowcake from Niger to advance his nuclear program. Wilson found nothing and reported back to officials in Washington that the claims were false.
Despite this, the assertion was included in Bush's address. From March to July 2003, Wilson said, he tried to get the administration to correct the record, but to no avail. On July 6 of that year, his New York Times op-ed was published. The following day, he said, the White House called the Times and the Washington Post and said the sentence should not have been included in the address. "It was correcting the record," Wilson said. "But that wasn't enough for this administration, which operates on a 'take no prisoners'" strategy. Wilson said he was prepared for personal repercussions, but never expected his wife would be attacked and her career ruined.
"It's now clear that senior administration officials were involved—Rove, Libby, perhaps Cheney—and it's clear there was a conspiracy to attack us and perhaps deprive us of our civil rights and constitutional rights," he said. "It's equally clear that everything is becoming unraveled for this administration."
The new Iraqi constitution that voters approved in an Oct. 15 nationwide referendum is little more than a peace agreement between Shiites and Kurds at the expense of Sunni Arabs, he said: "What it will effectively do is institutionalize violence for the foreseeable future."
The United States should immediately "stop putting American soldiers in harm's way," Wilson said, and their role should be limited to training Iraqi troops and providing logistical support and intelligence. "This idea of American troops killing Arabs is making us more enemies and absolutely no friends," he said. "We are killing Sunnis on behalf of Shiites. We are involving our troops in somebody else's civil war—on one side."
Wilson called for the United States to include other countries, particularly the European nations, in mediation efforts to end the conflict. Russia, Iran and Syria also should be invited to participate so they can be part of the solution, not part of the problem, he said.
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