‘Yellowcake’ and black marks

As the idiom goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Last summer, Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV made some fairly extraordinary claims about the Bush administration, which earned him a spot on the John Kerry campaign (see www.restorehonesty.com). The recently released Senate Intelligence Committee report addresses Ambassador Wilson on many of his allegations. In nearly every case, the report concludes, the ambassador was wrong, and, in some cases, deliberately so.

Traversing the talk-show circuit last summer, Ambassador Wilson explained to a fawning press corps how the Bush administration had ignored his 2002 mission to Niger, in which he was responsible for investigating intelligence suggesting that Saddam Hussein had attempted to buy enriched uranium — “yellowcake” — from there (the ambassador’s conclusion, based on a highly intensive eight days of sweet-mint-tea drinking: no evidence); and how senior administration officials had purposefully and maliciously “outed” his CIA-operative wife, Valerie Plame, to columnist Robert Novak, for spite. At the time, Ambassador Wilson was at the height of his fame, which he packaged in a book with a title as long as the author’s ego: “The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity: A Diplomat’s Memoir.”

Those were his extraordinary claims, designed with the explicit intention of casting the entire Bush administration as a bunch of liars and crooks. Now, the Senate Intelligence report provides the lack of extraordinary proof. First, as for the “yellowcake” matter, the report finds that Ambassador Wilson’s 2002 Niger mission did nothing if not give further evidence that negotiations with Iraq had taken place. As we’ve said before, the “yellowcake” fiasco is pretty much over. Those “16 words” in the president’s speech were correct exactly as the president spoke them. But to belabor the point, and show just how wrong the ambassador actually was, the British intelligence report, released Wednesday, also vindicates the president: “We conclude also that the statement in President Bush’s State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003 … was well-founded.”

It gets worse for Ambassador Wilson, however. According to a July 10 article in The Washington Post, the ambassador “provided misleading information to The Washington Post last June. He said then that he concluded the Niger intelligence was based on documents that had clearly been forged.” Problem is, The Post reports, Ambassador Wilson hadn’t seen those documents at the time he made his conclusions. Moreover, the Senate report found a memo written by Mrs. Plame recommending her husband for the Niger mission — a finding contrary to the account given by the ambassador in his book — just as Mr. Novak reported. Indeed, this might help explain why a former ambassador with no experience in conducting these kinds of investigations was chosen in the first place.

Once championed by the likes of John Kerry and an adoring media, the ambassador is now thoroughly discredited. As occasionally happens in Washington, the “truth” of Ambassador Wilson’s flagrant assertions has been disproven by the facts.