Who Read The Memo?

Reader Suzanne D sent me this tantalizing little tid-bit this morning. Last night I wondered who received this 2003 classified State Department Memo and it seems that Fred Barnes answered that question, at least in one respect, back in July of 2003:

Nonetheless, it was reported in the media and repeated by politicians that Cheney had asked the CIA to send someone to Niger to look into the matter. This is untrue. What did happen is that CIA officials, without the knowledge of Cheney or Tenet, dispatched a former ambassador, Joseph Wilson, to investigate. Columnist Robert Novak has reported that Wilson’s wife, a CIA employee, recommended him for the job. Wilson traveled to Niger, interviewed current and former officials, and decided that no deal for uranium had been made with Iraq.

When Wilson returned, he gave an oral report to the CIA. But he didn’t meet with Cheney or send him a written report on his trip. Cheney didn’t learn of Wilson’s trip until he read in the New York Times in May 2003 that an ex-ambassador had been sent. Cheney later received a document from an American diplomat who had debriefed Wilson. It was marked with a warning that the information might be unreliable. Leaders in Niger were not likely to admit to an American envoy that they’d violated United Nations sanctions by selling uranium to Saddam, it suggested.

If this document from an “American diplomat” who had debriefed Wilson is the same classified state department document from June of 2003 we are now talking about, Vice President Dick Cheney was one person who was aware that it was being alleged that “Wilson’s wife” had sent him on the trip. Perhaps he didn’t receive it until after Wilson’s op-ed, but it seems unlikely since that wasn’t published until two months after Cheney became aware of Wilson’s charges. Is it reasonable to believe that he would have waitied that long to inquire about someone who was saying the intelligence was fixed in Iraq? I seriously doubt it.

If that’s the case, then the idea that Libby and Rove didn’t see it is preposterous.

I think that the oddest thing about this memo is that it was written in June of 2003. Surely, there were earlier real-time documents that reflect Wilson’s debriefing upon his return? Why did they need to create this new memo at all? If Cheney really was unaware of Wilson’s trip (and he may very well have been) why didn’t they just send over the original debriefing instead of writing a new one?

And here’s another piece of information in that article that I hadn’t heard before:

Finally, last week, the truth started to emerge. At his press conference with President Bush, Prime Minister Blair said, “In case people should think that the whole idea of a link between Iraq and Niger was some invention, in the 1980s we know for sure that Iraq purchased round about 270 tons of uranium from Niger.” The White House, for its part, had had enough and started what it’s calling a “counteroffensive.”

The first step was to declassify and release the portion of the NIE entitled “Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction.” Iraq, the intelligence document says, has been “vigorously trying to procure uranium ore” in Somalia and Congo as well as Niger. And there’s more to come in the campaign for Bush’s recovery. Congressional Republicans are joining the fight. The White House has brought back Mary Matalin, the Republican operative and ex-Cheney aide, to manage the media campaign. Maybe it will work. But the truth is, it shouldn’t have been necessary at all.

The media campaign she was managing was the media campaign that also happened to smear Wilson. This was the period in which Karl Rove admits to pushing the story all over town — reportedly claiming it is perfectly legitimate to ferociously discredit (smear) your political critics and use the entire Republican Noise Machine to do it. It appears that Mary Matalin was right in the middle of that.

We haven’t seen much of her lately, have we?

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