Joe Wilson Lies -- Again

Watching This Week. Joe Wilson is on. He is lying again. He says:

Several months before the State of the Union address [in 2003], the White House and the Senate were advised, "don't use this information, it is baseless." If you then use that information, you are twisting intelligence to support political decisions that have already been made."

Of course, as astute readers of this space know, that information was not used. The "16 words" were based on completely separate information.

And then he goes on to just completely make more things up out of thin air. He adds:

If you're going to say, "get the information out," that basically means declassify the National Intelligence Estimate, not selective pieces of this that support decisions you've made, even though they are not grounded in fact, and that's what Mr. Libby did.

That too is a lie. First, we do not know what Bush said, we only have a paraphrase of hearsay of what Bush said. Second, and more importantly, that paraphrase said precisely the opposite of what Wilson says: that Bush authorized him to "disclose certain information in the NIE," not, as Wilson implies, the whole thing.

And third, far from releasing only information that supported their claims, the released information included several examples of people in the intelligence community arguing against the claims of Tenet and Bush: in the document released to the press on July 18, 2003, under the heading "INR's Alternative View: Iraq's Attempts to Acquire Aluminum Tubes," it reads: "the claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are, in INR's assessment, highly dubious."

Wilson once again proves he is not to be taken seriously, that he has no credibility.

Don't be fooled by the haters ...