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Joseph C. Wilson IV was a United States career foreign service officer and later a diplomat between 1976 and 1998. He served as ambassador to Gabon and São Tomé and Príncipe under President George H. W. Bush, and helped direct Africa policy for the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton. In 1990, he also became the last American diplomat to meet with Saddam Hussein (Wilson, 2003).

Wilson achieved wide notoriety due to his involvement in the verification of intelligence regarding Iraq. In 2002 he was sent to Niger to investigate the possibility that uranium yellowcake had been sold to Iraq. Wilson concluded that since uranium mining is managed by an international consortium and supervised by the International Atomic Energy Agency, this was unlikely (Wilson, 2003).

Controversy ensued when the British government issued a white paper asserting an imminent threat from Iraq, on the basis of intelligence that later proved to be a forgery. In his 2003 State of the Union Address, President Bush referred to attempts by Saddam to acquire uranium from Africa. The Bush Administration explicitly denied this was a reference to Niger, and the later Butler Report revealed the existence of intelligence suggesting Saddam was attempting to acquire uranium from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Nonetheless, the critics of the administration insisted that Bush was referring to the Niger claim.

Wilson criticized the President over the Niger claims, and shortly thereafter an anonymous source leaked his wife's identity (Valerie Plame - a CIA agent) to reporter Robert Novak. Wilson accused the Bush administration of attempting to discredit and intimidate him. The U.S. Congress has set up an inquiry to determine who was involved with the leak, headed by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. Subsequent investigations by the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that Wilson had misled the public and the media about his wife's involvement in the controversy and his own investigation. (Schmidt, et al., 2004) Wilson denies having lied.

In the imagination of partisans and others, Wilson became both a hero and a villain, depending on their opinions of the Bush administration and the nature of the evidence provided by Wilson and his detractors. Bush opponents and others claim Wilson is a brave man who spoke truth to power, a meme that is played up in the title of Wilson's website ('RestoreHonesty.com') and his book ('The Politics of Truth'). Bush supporters and others consider subsequent revelations both to have ironically reversed evaluations of Wilson’s professions of seeking truth-telling and to have portrayed Wilson as opportunistically pursuing political influence himself at the expense of the credibility of a U. S. President during a time of war, the two together discrediting his conclusions concerning Iraq’s dealings with Niger as well as his claims of victimization (see Schmidt, et al., References).

References

• Wilson, Joseph (July 6, 2003): “What I Didn't Find in Africa”. New York Times reprinted at Common Dreams News Center http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0706-02.htm

• Bedard, Paul, (October 20, 2003). Wilson adds ammo to hit war credibility gap. USNews.com “Washington Whispers”
• May, Clifford D. (July 12, 2004). Our Man in Niger. National Review Online.
• Novak, Robert (July 15, 2004). Errant Former Ambassador. Townhall.com
• Schmidt, Susan (July 9, 2004). www.washingtonpost.com

Several months after the scandal broke, Susan Schmidt of the Washington Post wrote that the Senate Intelligence Committee investigating intelligence failures in Iraq had determined that Wilson misled the media and the public about his wife's involvement and his own investigation.

External links

• Continetti, Matthew (July 26, 2004). “A Little Literary Flair” Weekly Standard reviews the claims (sometimes misleading, sometimes contradicted by sworn testimony) that punctuated Wilson’s declarations of his findings in Niger and the U. S. Government’s use of them, providing evidence that Wilson was deliberately trying to paint a false picture of the Bush Administration.
• Coulter, Ann (July 14, 2004). Wilson Lied, Kids Died!. anncoulter.com. Retrieved from http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2004/071404.htm

For other individuals with similar names, see Joe Wilson.