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HERE’S the real scandal: On the question of whether Saddam Hussein was seeking to obtain uranium in Africa-a vital national-security concern-the Central Intelligence Agency did not send its most seasoned spies and experienced detectives. Instead, the CIA-which had failed to penetrate Saddam’s government, the Iranian mullahs’ regime, the Taliban, and al-Qaeda-sent a retired diplomat with no investigative experience and whose inquiry, by his own admission, consisted of spending eight days at an African hotel “drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people.” What is the likelihood that one of those people, upon being asked by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, “Did Saddam Hussein ever attempt to buy uranium from any of you chaps?” would have answered, “Funny you mention that. As a matter of fact, I sold a few kilos to one of his cronies just the other day”?

Wilson’s supporters portray him as a moderate, non-ideological professional diplomat. But the facts-reported on National Review Online on July 11, 2003, three days before syndicated columnist Robert Novak first wrote about Wilson-are quite different: Wilson was an “adjunct scholar” at the Saudigovernment-supported Middle East Institute, which advocates for Saudi interests. He had written in the March 3, 2003, edition of the left-wing Nation magazine that the Bush administration has “imperial ambitions”; he also wrote that the “new imperialists will not rest until governments that ape our world-view are implanted throughout the [Mideast], a breathtakingly ambitious undertaking, smacking of hubris in the extreme.” Furthermore, he was the keynote speaker for a meeting of a far-left group that opposed not only the U.S. military intervention in Iraq but also the sanctions against Saddam’s regime- and even the no-fly zones that protected hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Kurds and Shias from being slaughtered.

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Clifford D. May

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HERE’S the real scandal: On the question of whether Saddam Hussein was seeking to obtain uranium in Africa-a vital national-security concern-the Central Intelligence Agency did not send its most seasoned spies and experienced detectives. Instead, the CIA-which had failed to penetrate Saddam’s government, the Iranian mullahs’ regime, the Taliban, and al-Qaeda-sent a retired diplomat with no investigative experience and whose inquiry, by his own admission, consisted of spending eight days at an African hotel “drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people.” What is the likelihood that one of those people, upon being asked by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, “Did Saddam Hussein ever attempt to buy uranium from any of you chaps?” would have answered, “Funny you mention that. As a matter of fact, I sold a few kilos to one of his cronies just the other day”?

Wilson’s supporters portray him as a moderate, non-ideological professional diplomat. But the facts-reported on National Review Online on July 11, 2003, three days before syndicated columnist Robert Novak first wrote about Wilson-are quite different: Wilson was an “adjunct scholar” at the Saudigovernment-supported Middle East Institute, which advocates for Saudi interests. He had written in the March 3, 2003, edition of the left-wing Nation magazine that the Bush administration has “imperial ambitions”; he also wrote that the “new imperialists will not rest until governments that ape our world-view are implanted throughout the [Mideast], a breathtakingly ambitious undertaking, smacking of hubris in the extreme.” Furthermore, he was the keynote speaker for a meeting of a far-left group that opposed not only the U.S. military intervention in Iraq but also the sanctions against Saddam’s regime- and even the no-fly zones that protected hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Kurds and Shias from being slaughtered.