RF, I have personal reason to know a whole lot about Gabon and know quite a bit about Big Joe the Surfer Wilson and his exploits therein. Premier Bongo, et al. I might discuss it offline sometime.

He and Val were an "item" long before Cutie Katie and even Knucklehead Novak!

Joe had zero cred in West Africa. And for good reason!

From what I've read about ratings, they'd better figure out just WHY they hired her and what went wrong.

Me?  I'da been happy to take what they paid her for "fluff" news.

What went wrong with Katie is they tried to turn her into a Fox Newsette. 

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Of course he was right, Oenghus.  That's why they went after his wife.

Even the Mafia doesn't go after your family.  (Your horse, sometimes...)  But this Administration has a *LOOOOONG* history (repeated again a few weeks ago) of blowing intelligence operations for political gain.

Not really. Niger (and just like Dems all of a sudden want to be called "democratic" instead of Democrats, all of a sudden its now called Nee jere' ! What a load!

It was always Nie jur!

But I digress. Overtures were made to Niger re yellowcake. Wilson only got partial information and divulged later what was good for his case.

Wilson had zero cred in West Afric, be it Cote de Ivoire, Gabon, Niger, Ghana, even Angola!

http://www.dailykos.com/sto...

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And he was right, ChiQuita.  He even pronounced it correctly.    You can admit that and move on, I *KNOW* you can.

Oenghus, your perceptiveness is exceeded only by the prescience of your handle.

You don't really have to know the inside baseball of West Africa (it helps) to know that Big Joe Wislon is the biggest phony who ever came down the pike.

And his wife was about as "deep" undercover as Pee Wee Herman.

Gee, to that four-star resort known as Niger.  I'm gonna get me one of them junkets, too.

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He.  Was. Right.  About.  The.  Yellowcake.  That's all you have to say.

Something that also would also help alleviate the excess fuel problem would be to allow people to harvest the deadfall for firewood.

The Forest Service has closed a lot of areas to wood collection for folks who heat with wood, then they go and burn it off in place.

Actually, if you knew anything about it, you can live the "high life" even in Zaire, Niger, Gabon, Ghana, Cote de Ivoire (Ivory Coast), etc.

And thats what Joe did.

Not to mention the fact that getting over there you can Swiss Aire and "have" to go through Zurich or Geneva!

You could even go through Rio!

Joe knew what he was doing. You don't

Katie let her fame go to her head and thought she was a real newswoman.

I never thought being "cute" was enough of a qualification.  Especially  when you're reporting "hard" news.

Even in the Green Zone, if you don't mind the occasional suicide bombing.

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And he was *RIGHT*.  That's the thing that really burns you.  The thing which fuels your ad-hominem attacks.  He.  Was.  Right.

Audrey..I agree on that note.  Too bad they don't stay where they are admired instead of lusting for a "hard news" title where they are ridiculed.

Greed in anything is a bad thing....whether it's money or fame.  One trick in life is to know your limitations as well as your talents.

Oh, I think he'd settle the lawsuit pretty quick if offered Katie's terms.

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Oh, and for those who wonder what Bush does when he finishes with the coloring books, apparently he's designed a new logo for a CIA program:

https://www.cia.gov/news-information/cia-the-war- on-terrorism/dci-counterterrorist-center-terroris t-buster-logo.html

Random:

Joe Wilson “uncovered” wrongdoing? No

His trip confirmed that the Iraqis had been poking around Niger trying to get Uranium. (Read Senate Intelligence Cmte report)

He lied about 1) his findings 2) that his wife set him up to go 3) he pulled his stunt in the NY Times (with their connivance likely)

He is beyond unseemly: he is a traitor. He is both a politically motivated traitor and a self-aggrandizing POS. He fancies himself a "California Surfer" and told anyone who would listen that he was a hippy surfer in CA prior to D.C. He and Val were very open in D.C. cocktail circuits about where whe worked even though at one time she was a "gofer" and traveled overseas to carry messages. Too bad so many denizens of this country heap praise on him He is scum.

I'm glad his bureaucrat wife got her case thrown out of court. She has nobody to blame but herself, her husband, and their circle of traitorous pals (BTW, Weren't Mister and Missus Rosenberg executed?) These two may not deserve execution but they certainly don’t deserve adulation.

Convincing defense? You're easily convinced RF. Let's review. In his NYT op-ed Wilson charged that his trip to Niger had proved that Iraq had not bought uranium from Niger, and that the vice president's office knew this and disregarded it. None of this was true. As the Senate committee report showed, the CIA concluded that Wilson's trip actually supported the theory that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger because it showed that Iraq had tried to open commercial relations with Niger -- a fact that Wilson omitted from his op-ed.

Wilson didn't expose administration wrongdoing. Through his reckless misstatements, he provoked it.

Wilson's report confirmed the obvious, that the Iraqis HAD BEEN shopping for yellowcake

He simply lied about his own report (and all the other circumstances of his trip) once he got back

Saddam was feinting that he had the bomb (he sure wanted one and made all the deceptions he could to intimidate/bluff)

His bluff was called. The war may be a disaster, but many a fool has brandished a toy gun and been killed for their mistake

Fitzgerald did not bring criminal charges against anyone for allegedly leaking her identity. That's what made his prosecution of Libby an abuse of discretion and warranted Bush's commuting of the jail sentence to allow Libby to proceed with his appeal without him having to go to jail.

I have often wondered if Wilson was really the only “operative” the CIA sent to Niger. Given his mediocrity, that part (regardless of his wife's involvement) has always seemed strange to some of us.

Aren't these two just too cool?

Media darlings for sure!

He was right, wasn't he, Cheek.  Just three little words.  Come on, you can do it.  You can admit the right-wing propaganda and character assassination boils down to those three words:  He.  Was.  Right. 

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Come on, even the White House admitted he was right--before they started the coordinated campaign to attack his family.

If it hadn't been for the Bush Administration, Valerie Plame would still be trying to keep the US safe from nuclear proliferation.

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Of course, if it hadn't been for the BA, 3834 Americans might be alive this morning, too...

Audrey does  have a valid point

But Big Joe should NEVER have been sent to Niger to begin with!

And RF, I have posted some substance and some references. You haven't

He was right because you say so?

Good one!

Why not?  He got the job done, and he was *RIGHT*.

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Ah, shifting your personal attacks from Ambassador Wilson and his wife to me.  Wouldn't it be easier just to say "he was right"?

No, he was right because the White House said so.

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Good one!

More substance and references:

http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog...

Media darlings or Katie Couric replacements.  You decide.

More substance and references:

http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog... s_oidt="0">http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog...[/quote

How does that link support Wilson's lies?

The officials are Bearden; Colonel W. Patrick Lang, who served as the D.I.A.'s defense intelligence officer for the Middle East, South Asia, and terrorism; Colonel Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell; Melvin Goodman, a former division chief and senior analyst at the C.I.A. and the State Department; Ray McGovern, a C.I.A. analyst for 27 years; Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia division in 2002 and 2003; Larry C. Johnson, a former C.I.A. officer who was deputy director of the State Department Office of Counterterrorism from 1989 to 1993; former C.I.A. official Philip Giraldi; and Vincent Cannistraro, the former chief of operations of the C.I.A.'s Counterterrorism Center.

In addition, Vanity Fair has found at least 14 instances prior to the 2003 State of the Union in which analysts at the C.I.A., the State Department, or other government agencies who had examined the Niger documents or reports about them raised serious doubts about their legitimacy—only to be rebuffed by Bush-administration officials who wanted to use the material. "They were just relentless," says Wilkerson, who later prepared Colin Powell's presentation before the United Nations General Assembly. "You would take it out and they would stick it back in. That was their favorite bureaucratic technique—ruthless relentlessness." Vanity Fair 2006

and

 http://www.csmonitor.com/20... 

http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/s...

http://abcnews.go.com/Inter...        & nbsp; Right

Yeah RF, he got the "job" done!

Trashed Bush, tried and convicted Libby, discredited Rove?

That was really the "job" all along wasn't it?

Audrey: The pics are really funny. Seriously! Bush reminds me of someone in his pic. I just can't put my finger on it!

Not Sigourney Weaver, but similar............

Ironically, this would have been the subject of a 60 minutes piece back in 2004--if they hadn't been laid low by (possibly) forged documents substantiating their true story about Bush's absence from his Air National Guard duty.

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Rather--no pun intended--fortuitious if someone provided phony documents which kept them from exposing phony documents, eh?

a blog is as good as RF can come up with oenghus

I actually knew Bearden BTW Sage

But he was right, wasn't he?

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How would he have "discredited Rove" if Rove hadn't behaved like a cowardly street thug, forgoing a battle with Wilson and declaring his wife "fair game" instead?  How would Libby have been convicted if Fitzgerald hadn't had enough evidence to convince a jury?  How would he have "trashed" Bush if Bush hadn't used phony "intelligence" in his speech?

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Sounds a lot like the Scooby Doo defense:  "And I would've gotten *AWAY* with it, too, if it weren't for those *MEDDLING KIDS!*" 

You don't seem to understand Random

Even were the docs referred to by all the Bush Bashers forged (re yellowcake from Niger), there were other corroroberating sources saying the yellowcake "feelers" put out by Sadaam were real. This is substantiated by MI6 BTW.

In his typical sloppy staff work fashion, Big Joe Wilson didn't follow up enough to find all corroborating sources (assuming he was at least "trying" to do his job)

Oh, I understand just fine.

First, they *WERE* forged.  Nobody who doesn't instinctively hate Ambassador Wilson for being right about the claim argues otherwise.

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Second, the British reports were based entirely on the forged documents.  That they were seen as "corroborating" those documents, which spurred them, is ironic.

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Third, Wilson didn't *HAVE* to follow up.  Getting there, he saw and heard enough to know there wasn't any "there" there.  He wasn't the only one to come to that conclusion.