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Those are the facts surrounding my efforts. The vice president's office asked a serious question. I was asked to help formulate the answer. I did so,… - Joseph C. Wilson
" "Those are the facts surrounding my efforts. The vice president's office asked a serious question. I was asked to help formulate the answer. I did so, and I have every confidence that the answer I provided was circulated to the appropriate officials within our government. The question now is how that answer was or was not used by our political leadership. If my information was deemed inaccurate, I understand (though I would be very interested to know why). If, however, the information was ignored because it did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq, then a legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses.
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About Joseph C. Wilson
Joseph C. Wilson (November 6, 1949 – September 27, 2019) was an American diplomat who served as the U.S. Ambassador to Gabon and to Sao Tome and Principe from 1992 to 1995. Wilson was known for an opinion-editorial published in the New York Times, entitled "What I Didn't Find in Africa," in which he documents a February 2002 trip investigating whether Iraq purchased or attempted to purchase Yellowcake from Niger in the late 1990s. He accused the Bush administration of "exaggerating the Iraqi threat" in order to justify war, which resulted in the public disclosure of his wife Valerie Plame as a CIA officer, in what became known as "the Plame affair."
Also Known As
Native Name:
Joseph C. Wilson IV
Alternative Names:
Joseph Charles Wilson
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Joseph Charles Wilson IV
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Joseph Wilson
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Additional quotes by Joseph C. Wilson
I was convinced before the war that the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein required a vigorous and sustained international response to disarm him. Iraq possessed and had used chemical weapons; it had an active biological weapons program and quite possibly a nuclear research program — all of which were in violation of United Nations resolutions. Having encountered Mr. Hussein and his thugs in the run-up to the Persian Gulf war of 1991, I was only too aware of the dangers he posed. But were these dangers the same ones the administration told us about? We have to find out. America's foreign policy depends on the sanctity of its information. For this reason, questioning the selective use of intelligence to justify the war in Iraq is neither idle sniping nor "revisionist history," as Mr. Bush has suggested. The act of war is the last option of a democracy, taken when there is a grave threat to our national security. More than 200 American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq already. We have a duty to ensure that their sacrifice came for the right reasons.
Those news stories about that unnamed former envoy who went to Niger? That's me. In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake — a form of lightly processed ore — by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990's. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office.
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For reasons that are understandable, the embassy staff has always kept a close eye on Niger's uranium business. I was not surprised, then, when the ambassador told me that she knew about the allegations of uranium sales to Iraq — and that she felt she had already debunked them in her reports to Washington. Nevertheless, she and I agreed that my time would be best spent interviewing people who had been in government when the deal supposedly took place, which was before her arrival.
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