“So you look at what's underpinning this, and you go back and you take a look at who's been influencing the process. And it's been those who really believe that our objective must be far grander, and that is to redraw the political map of the Middle East," Wilson added.
A week later, Wilson was interviewed on CNN again. This was the first time Wilson ridiculed the Bush administration's claim that Iraq had tried to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger. "Well, this particular case is outrageous. We know a lot about the uranium business in Niger, and for something like this to go unchallenged by the US - the US government - is just simply stupid. It would have taken a couple of phone calls. We have had an embassy there since the early 1960s. All this stuff is open. It's a restricted market of buyers and sellers," Wilson said in the March 8, 2003, CNN interview. "For this to have gotten to the IAEA is on the face of it dumb, but more to the point, it taints the whole rest of the case that the government is trying to build against Iraq."
Wilson's comments enraged Cheney because it was seen as a personal attack against the vice president, who was instrumental in getting his underlings to cite the Niger claims in government reports to build a case for war against Iraq.
Cheney appeared on "Meet the Press" on March 16, 2003, to respond to ElBaradei's assertion that the Niger documents were forgeries.
“I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong," Cheney said during the interview. "[The IAEA] has consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing. I don't have any reason to believe they're any more valid this time than they've been in the past."
The former ambassador's stinging rebuke also caught the attention of Hadley, who had played an even bigger role in the Niger controversy by failing to heed written warnings by the CIA to remove the reference from President Bush’s State of the Union.
Hadley responded to Wilson's comments by writing an editorial about the threat Iraq posed to the U.S., in an attempt to discredit Wilson's comments on CNN.
A column written by Hadley that was published in the Chicago Tribune on February 16, 2003, was redistributed to newspaper editors by the State Department on March 10, 2003, two days after Wilson was interviewed on CNN. The column, "Two Potent Iraqi Weapons: Denial and Deception" once again raised the issue that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from Niger.
Second State Department Memo
Wilson spoke to at least two journalists in May 2003 about the bogus Niger intelligence. A phone call to the White House by one of the reporters, Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, seeking comment about Wilson’s accusations prompted I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s former chief of staff to inquire about Wilson’s trip to Niger. Libby contacted the State Department. A memo, dated June 10, 2003, drafted by Carl Ford Jr., the former head of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, was issued and sent to Libby. It said Wilson undertook the mission to Niger to investigate the Niger intelligence.
The White House has long maintained that they were never briefed about the State Department's or the CIA's concerns related to the Niger uranium claims..
But in a previous interview with me, the memo's author, Carl Ford, said he has no doubt the State Department's reservations about the Niger intelligence made their way to President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
“This was the very first time there was written evidence - not notes, but a request for a report - from the State Department that documented why the Niger intel was bullshit," Ford told me. "It was the only thing in writing, and it had a certain value because it didn't come from the IAEA. It came from State. It scared the heck out of a lot of people because it proved that this guy Wilson's story was credible. I don't think anybody wanted the media to know that the State Department disagreed with the intelligence used by the White House."
Ford added that when the request came from Cheney's office for a report on Wilson's Niger trip it was an opportunity to put in writing a document that would remind the White House that it had been warned about the Niger claims early on.
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