Mac Ranger teases us some more with his still pending analysis of the Niger/Africa uranium trade, the Wilson trips to Niger, and the forgery scam clumsily used to try and win Joe Wilson a seat on the Kerry campaign. I have posted on this same theory here (with links to other posts) and continue to suspect the Niger trips were for some other purpose than assumed so far.

One thing to remember is that Wilson was US Ambassador to Gabon, which also had a small uranium mining trade with French company connections similar to that in Niger. As a commenter pointed out on the post referred to above, there are lots of similarities between Gabon and Niger, not to mention the EU and Oil For Food Scandal:

Wilson was ambassador to Gabon, another Uranium exporter. In 1999 (that year again), Cogema ended its Uranium extraction. For years Cogema had been dumping tailings into the nearby creek. After years of environmental negligence, [it] was discovered the EU paid for certain sizable aspects of the cleanup. Nobody really knows why the EU would pay for the environmental hazard a private French company had produced. What did Cogema do for the French government or the EU?

Cogema is a major player in the Hussein bribery scandals. Was Wilson looking for illegal uranium trade with Saddam or covering it up? Wilson claims uranium could not be shipped out of Niger because the French are watching. But being an expert on the region and the uranium trade, one has to assume Wilson would know this claim is false due to this:

“Mines can be abandoned by Cogema when they become unproductive. This doesn’t mean that people near the mines can’t keep on extracting,” a senior European counter-proliferation official said.

Does anyone believe regional expert Wilson did not know about this loop-hole and simply forgot to mention it to the US intelligence?

And that brings me to this WorldNetDaily article which highlights more Wilson lies, lies tied directly to the question of what kind of trade was Wilson dealing in during these business trips to Niger and the region.

First let’s establish Wilson’s credibility by pointing out a series of completely unnecessary lies little noticed in the press or blogosphere.

Given his profession, one has to believe that Wilson donated $1,000 to the George W. Bush presidential campaign to hedge his bets should Bush prevail in 2000. Lobbyists routinely do such things.
…
Like Bill Clinton, however, Wilson insists on lying even when he does not have to. In a Nation interview, he claims that he had been attracted by Bush’s “compassionate conservatism.” In his book, he specifies that “Bush’s rhetoric of conservative compassion appealed to me” and thus gave Bush money “before the South Carolina primary.”

Only when Bush allegedly “tacked hard to the right” and “started spreading malicious rumors” to beat McCain in the South Carolina primary did Wilson realize that Bush was “not a good choice”.
…
In the book, Wilson claims that “after the South Carolina primary,” he made a donation to the Gore campaign and joined his foreign policy group. In fact, Wilson had donated his $1,000 to the Bush campaign nearly a year before the South Carolina primary and in the weeks prior to that donation gave $2,000 to Al Gore and $1,000 to Ted Kennedy. Plame had also donated $1,000 to Gore’s campaign in 1999, using her married name “Valerie Wilson” and listing her employment as an “analyst” with Brewster-Jennings & Associates, a CIA front.

Actually, the truth is still different, though the Wilson lie is still the same lie. We have pointed out that Joe Wilson made the initial $2,000 donation to Kerry, and then a month later came in and redistributed $1,000 of that in his wife’s name to Kerry. Therefore Wilson lied to why and when he donoted to Kerry, and probably was the one who outed Plame’s cover at Brewster-Jennings (and where is Fitzgerald investigating the outing of a CIA cover company?).

So Wilson did not change his mind after the SC primary, and yet he lied about it and the press ate it up since it fit into their fantasies of taking Bush down. So we know Wilson lies about the most trivial, which means he lies about the most critical as well.

Back to Wilson and Niger and uranium:

As a private citizen, Wilson reports that he made three trips to Niger, a landlocked hellhole in the Sahara, culminating the fateful trip of February 2002. The only reason he cites for his first trip in 1998 was to “participate in a cultural festival,” at best a half-truth.

It was in 1999, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee report, that Plame first recommended her husband be sent on a fact-finding trip to Niger. Wilson “was selected for the 1999 trip,” reads the report, “after his wife mentioned to her supervisors that her husband was planning a business trip to Niger in the near future and might be willing to use his contacts in the region.”

In his book, however, Wilson claims that he went at the request of a former prime minister to give a “crash course” to a new president who had just taken power after the murder of his predecessor.

Well, the Strata-Sphere has Wilson, in his own words, contradicting that fiction during a UVA event in 2003 where he clearly indicates he was in Niger after the coupe d’etat that year, but before the new President was elected. Wilson also says clearly he was working for the Niger government (his business trip) when he met with the prime minister who had taken control of Niger at the time:

The only chance he [the prime minister] had was to get out and effect a change back to democratic rule as quickly as possible. I told him, I said, that you need to understand from my experience in Africa that your successor president probably will not be very comfortable with you standing watching his back after you have effected the transition. After all, your organization was responsible for the assassination of your predecessor shooting him in the back. Therefore, I said to him, I think that you probably ought to leave the country for a while. Those are pretty strong words to walk into a military barracks and tell a guy who has assassinated his predecessor and has assumed responsibility for his country.

I came back a year later during the course of the transition and the president met me at the airport.

Two things. The coupe was in May of 1999 and the new government was voted in in October-November of that same year. Therefore he was not asked to meet with the new President of Niger at the behest of the Prime Minister. But more importantly, Wilson also says he was in Niger in 2000 (‘a year later’), when the transitions finally took place. So WND is missing a fourth, 2000 trip to Niger by Wilson. WND also misses the fact Joe Wilson was in the hire of Niger or some other African government during that period. WND has this on the period:

Although little is clear about this 1999 trip to Niger, the rationale for sending Wilson seems no more sinister than a fortuitous bit of nepotism. Wilson’s clients had interests in that part of the world, and Wilson’s traveling on behalf of the CIA had to enhance his business credentials and, ideally, the Wilsons’ income.

These were Wilson’s words on his efforts in Niger at UVA:

So, I knew these guys intimately. They were in Washington all of the time. I was out there both in government and in African government helping them.

Wilson was clearly working for the African governments, most likely on his signature corporate focus: International Trade. So now we get to the scandal the liberal media missed, but the blogosphere and now conservative media has been circling in on. Again from WND:

A second possibility should have warned Plame off as well. As will be seen, Wilson almost surely had clients and associates in Francophone West Africa who wanted Saddam to remain in power, as indeed did the French government. Plame may not have known this, but given that her business is intelligence, she should have suspected.

WND is giving Plame too much credit. Her job was to monitor WMD trade. Her husband’s dealings in the uranium trade with a government reeling from a recent coupe d’etat had to raise flags. It is the response to those flags that is important. Did the CIA become concerned with the breaking news or did it lose visibility into what was going on in that part of the world. Was the intelligence found in this FT article regarding that period lost due to a cover-up inside the CIA? Was there an illegal WMD trade in uranium that came to light due to some rabid partisan game in the 2003 Kerry campaign?

One does not have to be a cynic to question Wilson’s motives. He has had a long and deep involvement with French interests. In an article for the American Thinker, “Joseph Wilson IV: The French Connection,” James Lewis makes a strong case for French manipulation of the entire Plame affair. He notes that Wilson met his first wife at the French Embassy in Washington, that his second wife was a “cultural attaché” in Francophone Africa, that Niger’s mines are owned by a French consortium, “which operates cheek-by-jowl with the Quai d’Orsay,” and that Plame herself boasted of her husband’s numerous “French contacts.”

To be sure, the French government and hundreds of its key industries wanted to keep Saddam in power. Along with the Russians, they were the primary beneficiaries of the shamefully corrupt United Nations Oil-for-Food program. The Times of London estimated that from 1996 to 2003 French firms earned $3.7 ill-gotten billions from the program. As CIA chief weapons inspector Charles Duelfer would later report, Oil-For-Food kept Saddam awash in funds, corrupted the debates over Iraq, undermined sanctions and allowed Iraq to contemplate rebuilding its nuclear program. Even if Wilson had no involvement with the ill-concealed scandal, he had to know how it benefited his clients and potential clients.

Read the rest of jack Cashill’s excellent round up on Joe Wilson, congenital liar who appears to be the one who blew the Brewster-Jennings CIA cover operation.