I cannot wait for Joe Wilson to take the stand (with Larry Johnson and a few others) at the Libby trial. The guy is just such a laughable egotist. Check out this self aggrandizing recollection of how he saved Niger after a coup de tat [dated October 31, 2003]:

I had served there in the mid 1970’s. I had retained many ties and friendships including with the Niger Ambassador to the United States for the subsequent twenty-five years. When I was senior director for Africa at the National Security Council in the mid 1990’s, the government that was in place at the time of these purported documents covering the memorandum of agreement for the sale of Uranium from Niger to Iraq, that was the government that was in place when I was in the White House. I had worked very closely with them to try and move what was at the time a military’s dictatorship back to the Democratic side of the ledger. 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. In fact after the President, the military dictator had been assassinated, I went to see his successor and at the request of some of my friends there and some of the colleagues with whom I had been working, I went to see the new military dictator and I told him in no uncertain terms, that the only way he was going to get out of this mess, not just alive, but perhaps with a chance to restore his own personal honor, and the honor of his organization, the Presidential guard that had been responsible for the assassination of his predecessor. The only chance he 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. He was on his way to Nigeria. He was still present as the transition had not taken place although the elections had taken place. He called me into the Presidential Suite while all the other diplomats were out there having their canopies and cocktails. He called me into the Presidential Suite which made the hair on the neck of the Liberian Ambassador stand up. He said to me, “Remember that conversation we had last year?” I said, you bet, sure do. He told me that he had done everything that I had suggested that he do. I told him yes and that I was proud of him for having done it.

I can see Joe patting the little fella on the head while he tells him what a good boy he was! What a sap. And note how he cannot resist noting the jealousy of the Liberian Ambassador! Geez Joe, are you really this shallow?

To pick up on Mac Rangers latest theories, good ‘ol Joe placed all his trust in the French to make sure no uranium left Niger undocumented (like they were suppose to watch Saddam mind his sanctions and the Oil For Food program):

Now, I went out there and I spent eight days out there and I talked to everybody who knows anything about the business. I looked at two pieces of this. I looked at how the uranium business operates. Could it happen? I found that there is a consortium of international partners. The managing partner of this is the French and that means the French own the product from the time that it is in the ground until the time that it gets to the consumer. Nothing could happen in this regard without the French knowing and abetting it.

Mac is right about one thing, the OFF scandal shows how naive Wilson is, or how gullible he thinks the American people are. But for perjury, we have Wilson’s own words claiming the President or Vice President saw his ‘report’:

I went back and I reported that back to my government at the most senior levels. If not the President of the United States, certainly the office of the Vice President received a copy of my report.

Folks, he reported back to two CIA DO analysts at his house in DC with Valerie playing hostess (like a good CIA agent). And more detailed lies about the Niger Forgeries:

We have information to the contrary. It cannot be authentic unless it contains three signatures. None of which were on those documents.
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Instead, they based that lie in the State of the Union address on forged documents that were so obviously forged that the IAEA had said that a twenty minute search on Google would have told a lay person that these were forgeries. The forgeries were so bad that they could not make it into an Italian weekly tabloid which was perfectly comfortable publishing the bare breasts of Italian women inside its folds. This could not even pass the smell test for that and yet somebody allowed this to get into the President’s speech.

I love this part

If they lied about this, what else might they have lied about? For two, who is going to believe the President of the United States next time when he goes before the world and when he goes before the American people and when he goes before the Congress of the United States and says we have a real weapons of mass destruction problem here. Who is going to believe him?

Well Joe, following your logic no one should believe a word you say! And here is a snippet (the guy is a real windbag) of his plans for Iraq, 7 months after the invasion

But, we are there now and the President articulated a vision in an American Enterprises Institute speech in February in which he talked about Iraq as a democracy beacon for the rest of the region. Now, that is an enormous undertaking. If anyone has ever done democratization, and Pat knows this having watched it as long as I have or longer, this is tough sledding. It is not easy. It is even more difficult at the point of a gun. Somebody once said, and I have forgotten who it was, although it was somebody famous. I don’t attribute it to them anyway. Democracy is not unlike an English lawn. In order to get it to look really good, you have to seed it, water it, fertilize it and then roll it every day for six hundred years.
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Over there, frankly, politics is blood sport. So, it is going to be very tough to do it. It is even tougher to do it if those responsible for it are doing such a bad job of managing it. So badly in fact that I think the cynics could be excused if they believed that failure for these people might be success. By that I mean that far from achieving the President’s articulated vision of a single nation state which is a democracy in Iraq, the people who are bringing the reconstruction would find acceptable the vulcanization of Iraq and essentially a sore in the middle of the Arab world which is unstable for the foreseeable future. And that is what we will come up against if we do not do this right.

So, my way ahead on all this is to take a look at it or try to describe it as one would describe any failing business venture. If you have a vision and you think the vision is still good, but you don’t have quite the resources that you need to achieve that vision, what do you do? Well, you go back into the market and you seek outside equity partners.
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We only have a limited amount of time to internationalize this and it does not mean that we give up a lot of responsibility or authority, but it means we get a lot of different faces and a lot of different languages out there because at the end of the day, you want to change attitudes in Iraq.

…[note to Joe – the Iraqis wanted nothing to do with the UN, France, Germany and those who looked the other way to make money with Saddam. And these international partners had not interest in participating – as NATO pointed out time and time again]…

As it stands now, they see this as a foreign occupation for whatever reason. You ask an Iraqi and he will give you five different reasons from Israel to oil to American business to US interests.

We need more faces in there. It has to be something more than the UN flag by the way because the UN is about as the manager of the sanction program, viewed about as positive as we are.

Well, no one said you had to be bright to be Ambassador. This was a joint appearance with another infamous person Pat Lang. Who strangely makes the case for Bush

I went to Iraq a lot during the Iran Iraq war, which was kind of a combination battle that went on for seven or eight years with horrendous casualties on both sides. I used to go over there periodically to visit the Embassy that he later ran. We had a defense attaché then that I would go over and visit with this guy and schmooze with the Iraqis. They would take me up and show me their units and their lines so that I would have some idea of what they were like.
I did that for a long time and then along came the cease -fire after the Iraqis essentially defeated the Iranians. There was a period of peace and then came the first Gulf War where we got to put all that knowledge we had to work in a useful way. There is no doubt that in the run up to the first Gulf War, they had chemical weapons on a massive scale. We watched them in the Iran Iraq war progressively learn to use them with greater and greater sophistication on the battlefield to say nothing of their use against the Kurdish insurgence.

But, on the battlefield, they learned to integrate chemical fires with conventional fire in a way which has not been seen since World War I. They were really inventing a new military methodology for all intents and purposes and they used that with great success.

We knew they had biological warfare laboratories they were working on, but those were fairly common in the Middle East. I mean the Syrians had similar things and a lot of people like to play with that because all you need is a lab and a few scientists and you can tell everyone how you are a serious player in this field.

But, it was really in the nuclear area and ballistic missiles that they got to be really impressive and pretty scary. There was a great argument inside the US intelligence community before the first Gulf War that never gets reported correctly in the press. On the one hand, you had the regional people like me, what the scientific people called the ring leaders. On the other side, you had what we call the technical people like nuclear scientists, engineers, things like that. We used to have these tremendous fights that were knocked down agency lines between CIA, DIA, and others. But split amongst these two populations, were the ones that did not fit into either category. We insisted from the available evidence that they were within a year or so of their first detonation.

My, how the stories change….