Surprisingly, Joe Wilson doesn’t think of himself as a whistle-blower, even though he exposed the myth of nuclear weapons that formed the basis for the war in Iraq. Wilson thinks of himself as a citizen who asked his government to do what was right.
And, Wilson told a packed auditorium at the University of Colorado’s annual Conference on World Affairs on Thursday, his government eventually did. But not before the Bush administration dragged this country into a war that has not protected Americans from terrorism.
Wilson may not be as much of a household name as his wife, ex-CIA agent Valerie Plame. But Wilson is the reason we all know Plame’s name and her former job. Wilson is the reason the chief of staff of the vice president of the United States now faces prison time for lying to a grand jury about how Plame’s name leaked to reporters.
“What makes our government strong is to hold it accountable,” Wilson said. “You do that by going to the planning commission or the city council meeting. You do it when you petition the mayor.”
Wilson did it by calling bull hockey on the president of the United States.
He also did it by allowing the system to work once the White House outed his wife as a secret agent, a possible violation of federal law.
“When they did that,” Wilson said, “the institutions of government that protect us from such abuses of power kicked in.”
In a situation that is the best test of democracy, those institutions did their job, Wilson said. The convictions of Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, are proof.
“We had the help of the FBI and the U.S. attorney,” Wilson told the crowd. Those agencies followed the trail of the leak all the way to the White House.
Wilson, a career diplomat and former ambassador, made enemies in high places after the CIA sent him to the African country of Niger in 2002 to find out if Saddam Hussein was buying yellowcake uranium to build nuclear weapons.
“If Saddam wanted 500 tons of yellowcake,” said Wilson, “there was only one reason. He wanted to revive his nuclear weapons program. But if you’re going to ask the question, you have to be prepared to accept the answer.”
It was Wilson who found out the uranium sale never happened. And it was Wilson who accused the Bush administration of ignoring that information as it justified the invasion of Iraq.
The White House mantra for war, said Wilson, was: “We cannot afford to wait for the smoking gun to come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
But, he added, it was also: “We cannot wait for the smoking gun to come in the form of a smoking gun.”
Admitting that Hussein had no nukes would have smoked plenty.
When Wilson called out the administration in an essay that ran in The New York Times on George W. Bush’s birthday, July 6, 2003, the Bushies went ballistic.
Wilson suggested that the White House knew that Niger hadn’t sold Hussein uranium but still wanted Bush to say it happened in the State of the Union address. Wilson also wrote that an “argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses.”
“That would have been a three-day story,” Wilson said, “had the administration not bumbled it.”
First, he said, the White House was “going to go after me as a womanizer, because I’ve been married more than once. Then, they were going to go after me because I dabbled in drugs in college. I wasn’t embarrassed. So they went after my wife.”
In doing so, Wilson added, “they committed treason.”
Whether the outing of Valerie Plame rose to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors, Libby’s conviction and its continuing fallout are the kinds of things Wilson referred to after his speech.
An earnest young man challenged Wilson about America’s many shortcomings.
“We’re not perfect,” Wilson told the young man, “but the struggle for democracy moves us in the right direction.”
Even if that direction leads from the White House to the penitentiary.
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at 303-954-1771, jspencer@denverpost.com or blogs.denverpost.com/spencer.
