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“I Find That A Travesty”–Joseph Wilson On Reports the White House May Invoke Executive Privilege In the Investigation of the Outting of His Wife As a CIA Operative

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Joseph Wilson, the former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, joins us in our firehouse studios to discuss the ongoing investigation as to who outted his wife as a CIA operative days after he blew the whistle on the White House’s key case that Saddam Hussein was rebuilding his nuclear program.

Ambassador Joseph Wilson is the last US official to meet with Saddam Hussein before the start of the war 12 years ago. As the acting US ambassador to Iraq in the weeks leading up to the war, the White House consulted Wilson daily. He was formally commended by the Bush administration for his bravery and heroism in the weeks leading up to the war. In that time, Wilson helped evacuate thousands of foreigners from Kuwait, negotiated the release of more than 120 American hostages and sheltered nearly 800 Americans in the embassy compound.

But Wilson’s work in Iraq that won him praise from the current president’s father is not what he is now known for. For months, he has been at the center of a controversy that could prove to be one of the clearest cases of documentable criminal conduct by an administration since Watergate and the Iran-Contra scandal.

Wilson is the man who debunked the White House’s key case that Saddam Hussein was rebuilding his nuclear program — the so-called Niger connection. A few days after Wilson blew the whistle, conservative columnist Robert Novak wrote a column in which he cited two senior administration officials and stated that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative dealing with weapons of mass destruction.

We also take a look at some of the background of this story as told in the new documentary “Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War” produced by Robert Greenwald. Among the voices you will hear: National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Milt Bearden, the former CIA station chief in Pakistan, John Dean, President Nixon’s White House Counsel, Senator Bob Graham and Mohamed El Baradei, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

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