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JOE MEALEY: Hello again. I hope you enjoyed your lunch and now we’re going to begin our exciting program. I’m going to say few words about our guest of honor, Joe Wilson, and then I’d like to introduce Patt Morrison, who we are very fortunate to have as the host of our event. But first I’d like everybody to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. When saying it, let’s remember that there is a monument at Memorial Park with the names of our local soldiers who have lost their lives at war. There are three casualties of the Iraq War on that monument. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Next I would like to thank the folks who spent months preparing for this day, and I would ask that they stand as I say their names. Elaine Hurd, who envisioned the idea and spearheaded the effort. Joanne McBurney and Carol Stewart, who have worked tirelessly to pull this thing off. Gerard Fierro, who has been our club treasurer since the club was formed and has done the very difficult task of, among other things, making sure that 250 separate financial transactions actually happened. Connie Stewart, who is not even a member of the club but knows how important it is to turn this district blue. Ellen Portantino and Hope Fierro, who organized this amazing silent auction. Marcia Hymanson, who is responsible for finding this wonderful band. Mary Knapp, for providing scholarships for our young Democrats to attend today. And finally, Celina Lew, who formed this club in January of 2005, in reaction to George Bush’s second victory. Celina was the first president for two years, and she continues to save the day on a regular basis. Now I’d like to speak briefly about Ambassador Wilson. I wonder how many of you have seen Ken Burns’ remarkable PBS series on World War II. Watching it, I come away shocked by the catastrophic losses of that war. But I also come away with no question in my mind that the United States’ involvement in World War II was right. In many ways, America literally saved the world. Occasionally I watch Fox News for as long as I can stomach it. It is shocking to see the glee on the faces of certain conservative commentators, none of whom has actually been in battle, when they fantasize about another world war against undefined Muslim terrorists. History judges every war. One wonders how badly history will judge the decision to invade Iraq. Already, four years into the chaos and with no light at the end of the tunnel, the overwhelming majority of Americans agree that launching the war in Iraq was a tragic mistake. But at the time of the invasion, the country’s mood was very different. We were reeling from 9/11, and eager for a fight. Few had the knowledge or the courage to question the White House’s alarming battle cry that Iraq was developing WMDs. One man had both. That man was Ambassador Joseph Wilson. He knew the truth and he had the guts to say it. As history judges this war, one of its unwitting heroes will certainly be Joe Wilson. And sadly, what the White House did to Joe Wilson for speaking the truth is a national disgrace. Why did George Bush, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove use the full political force of the White House to go after Joe Wilson? Folks write op-eds every day blasting White House policies. Why was Joe Wilson different? Because when the White House sold the invasion of Iraq with images of mushroom clouds over America and weapons of mass destruction, Joe Wilson knew the facts and exposed the fraud. They thought they could intimidate and silence him, but had they bothered to study our recent history, they would have learned that the first President George Bush called him a true American hero for his efforts in freeing more than 100 American hostages at the beginning of the first Gulf War. Joe Wilson stood up to Saddam Hussein under the threat of being hanged. Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and their Swiftboating machine would not intimidate him. I don’t know how many of you remember the old movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Time after time, Robert Redford and Paul Newman think they’ve lost the men who are tracking them. And time after time, as they hear the hoof beats of the horses bearing down on them, they turn to each other and say, “Who are those guys?” George Bush, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove must have asked themselves a similar question: “Who is this Joe Wilson?” They should have asked that question before they tried to destroy him and his family. I am truly honored that he is with us today. Now I’d like to introduce Patt Morrison. Patt is a writer and columnist for the Los Angeles Times. She was part of the Los Angeles Times reporting teams that won two Pulitzer Prizes. Patt also is a regular contributor to one of my favorite websites, The Huffington Post. Patt has won five Emmies and four Golden Mike awards as founding host and commentator on Life and Times Tonight on KCET. It is my belief her talent and intellectual strength is the key ingredient that has made that show, Life and Times, a southern California institution. Patt is the host of “Patt Morrison” a two-hour magazine program on KPCC, airing every weekday. Since 1994, her commentaries have been heard on NPR’s Morning Edition and she has been a commentator on BBC, CNN, CNBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Company, Good Morning America, and ABC News. And Fox once. She has received the Joseph M. Quinn award from the Los Angeles Press Club for her lifetime achievement. She also has been honored by the Associated Press Newspaper Editors Association, the Los Angeles Press Club, the Aviation Space Writers Association, the National Association of Newspaper Columnists, the League of Women Voters of Beverly Hills -- I spent a long time cutting out half ….-- it’s amazing -- the American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood of America, the Los Angeles Chapter of Women in Communications, and the YWCA of Greater Los Angeles. She is the author of Real L.A., Tales from the Los Angeles River, which is for sale here and which spent six weeks on the bestseller list and was ranked as one of the year’s best in the Los Angeles Time Book Review. Let me add one personal experience with Patt. For several years I was a freelance documentary cameraman. And one really great aspect of that profession is that you often get paid to be a fly on the wall. It’s a great study of human nature. A few years ago, I was at the Beverly Hills Hotel to shoot an interview by Patt with a famous and very accomplished author. I won’t mention his name, but here’s a hint: he specialized in books about crimes involving the rich and famous, and he’s a frequent contributor to a magazine with the initials V.F. I would call him cantankerous, and he was very annoyed to be there. He also liked being the smartest person in the room. When Patt showed up, it was clear that he wasn’t and he wasn’t very happy about that. For the next 20 minutes his answers were either “yes,” “no” or they were downright hostile. But Patt is the consummate professional. She persevered and finally turned him around. If you watched the interview on KCET, you would have thought, one, he was fascinating and two, they were very best friends. With that, please welcome Patt Morrison. PATT MORRISON: 1862 was the first full year of the Civil War. It wasn’t going very well for the union and in the White House, Abraham Lincoln invited to meet with him a woman who had written the book Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Her name was Harriet Beecher Stowe. And when they met, he said, so you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started the Great War, because the book was so influential in arousing feelings in the north and in the south about slavery. Well, Ambassador Wilson is not Harriet Beecher Stowe, he’s a lot taller for one thing, and an op-ed piece in the New York Times isn’t quite Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but this one caused a tremendous stir and the consequences of it are still being felt today. This is the first domino of the scores that toppled through the Bush Administration in the more than four years since it appeared. In January 2003, I was in the front row of the gallery for the State
of the Union speech when George Bush uttered those 16 words about Iraq’s
nuclear intentions and the Niger yellowcake. Six months later, I found
myself at Norman and Lynn Lear’s house. (I sound like Forrest
Gump, don’t I?) I was at Norman and Lynn Lear’s house,
and I met Joe Wilson shortly after this op-ed piece appeared and had
set many of those things in motion. The outing of his wife, Valerie
Plame, a covert CIA operative, by Robert Novak, courtesy of someone
or someones in the Administration, revealing the identity of an undercover
agent was made a federal crime by the Reagan Administration. This was
a White House leak and a White House eureka moment as it turned out.
What they found was that they were like so many other administrations
and had some of the same problems. The White House attempt at the cover-up,
which everyone knows the cover-up is always at least as consequential
as the event that triggers it, and the smearing and distorting of Ambassador
Wilson and his wife, his mission, his motive to Niger, they even characterized
it as a junket as if it were a pleasure trip, you know, you’re
going to Phuket or you going to go to Niger, oh what a choice. This
was a fact-finding mission by a diplomat that the President’s
father, George Herbert Walker Bush, had called “his man” in
Baghdad. He was sent there in 2002 to Niger to look into whether Saddam
Hussein was trying to get nuclear-grade uranium and he reported that
he found no basis for those claims. And then came the State of the
Union speech with its questionable intelligence and Joe Wilson’s
New York Times op-ed, Special Counsel, congressional investigation
subpoenas, denials and in the end, the conviction of Scooter Libby.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is what they call blow-back. JOE WILSON: It’s great to be here. As I was walking in, I heard the local members of the John Birch Society and the RNC were up in arms because I happened to venture into this part of the Los Angeles area. I want you to know that I come from a California Republican family. My great uncle was the Republican mayor of San Francisco from 1913 to 1928 and a Republican Governor of California from 1929 to 1933 when he died in office. My mother’s sister who now lives in Arizona has been active in the Arizona Republican party for a generation has been known in my family as Mrs. John Birch since we fought the fluoride wars in the Fifties. I know these guys. I’m not afraid of ‘em. I’ve still got my teeth, thanks to the fact that we defeated them. I wanted to take the high road today, but I think I’ll avoid doing that. This Republican party isn’t my daddy’s Republican party. I was feeling really very benevolent today at breakfast and I picked up the Pasadena Star-News and I saw the lead article about the poor, disadvantaged, rural white male who has no voice in California to articulate on his behalf his anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-government views. That’s the lead article in the Pasadena Star-News today and the guy they quote is …. Hagen, who is already a graduate of the University of California Santa Barbara. I don’t know where he went wrong, but it was just appalling to me. I just testified before Congress a few days ago -- a couple months ago now I guess -- and one of the guys that I was testifying before was Darrell Issa. Twice arrested auto thief, had the audacity to assert that my wife had committed perjury when she testified, which of course is an absolute untruth, and I took advantage of the occasion to demand the right of reply at which I said, “what you just said, Congressman, is outrageous.” And I said to him, my family has sat in your seat before. My great uncle was responsible for putting in Statuary Hall in the House of Representatives the statue of Father Junipero Serra. Don’t try to lay no boogie-woogie on the king of rock ‘n roll, you asshole. (There’s a three-second delay on the microphone.) I said that not because I thought it would make an impact on him, but because I wanted to make sure that every time he walks through Statuary Hall from now on, he will think of me. It might make his time up there a little less pleasant. And it certainly will be less pleasant after 2008, when we once again sweep the congressional elections. And we will do so because of the Bush Administration and the alliance of Neoconservatives and Theoconservatives who’ve stolen the heart and soul of the Republican party, what they have done to that party and what they have done to the country and until they are thrown out of office they will not -- Republicans will not -- have that debate that they have to have over who owns the party. Is it your neighbors? Or is it the Neoconservatives who want to change this country from a republic to an empire? And their friends, the Theoconservatives who wish to replace constitutional rule with rule by their interpretation of the book of “Revelations” of The Bible. That is the discussion they have to have. And they will not have it so long as they are in power. A number of years ago I was on a train coming from New York to Washington and a couple of ladies were sitting across from me, they recognized me as I didn’t have the beard and the rock ‘n’ roll haircut- now they think I’m Alice Cooper over at the hotel. Which is great, you can get away with anything if you’re Alice Cooper. And they said to me, Mr. Ambassador, we love your book, we love the stand you’re taking. I said, thank you, ladies. They said, you know, we’re married to Republicans. What do you think we should do? And I said to them, ladies, you’re young, and you’re attractive, life is too short, take the money and run! But it’s a fact that we all -- particularly if you live in places like La Cañada Flintridge, Pasadena, San Marino, where I lived for three years. And by the way, I’m from this area. My father went to high school with Jackie Robinson in Pasadena, Pasadena High School. My grandparents’ ashes are in the mausoleum in Altadena over here. I lived on the corner of Fair Oaks and Marengo for a while and I lived in San Marino for a few years. I had dinner last night with a friend who has been a friend of my family for two generations, he’s sort of the last survivor of my father’s generation, a good ole Republican, 87 years old, just as cranky as you can be at 87 years old. First thing he said is, “they’re all useless, all of ‘em, both sides,” by which I understood that he was saying these Republicans are really dumb sons of bitches. So I agreed with him. But the fact of the matter is, the chances are pretty good that in this room there may actually be a few Republicans, there generally are. Because they like to come out so they can tell Brit Hume what I’ve been saying so that he can trash me on Fox News. And if there’s no Republican here, then chances are pretty good that some of you may actually be married to Republicans or you may have Republicans as neighbors, and you may play golf with Republicans, or you may know Republicans. And it’s just a cross you have to bear. But at the end of the day, the Republicans you know are probably people who actually believe in such concepts as fiscal responsibility because they like to tout that. When was the last time a budget was balanced? Bill Clinton. When was the time before that that a budget was balanced? Lyndon Baynes Johnson. But Republicans would like to argue that yeah, we’re fiscal, fiscally responsible. And Republicans argue that we believe in the limited size of the federal government. Has anybody looked at how much this federal government has grown? I know a little bit about that because housing prices stayed very stable in Washington, D.C. I made a fortune when I sold my house, thanks to the Republicans having grown the government. Now it wasn’t as good everywhere else, it’s certainly not as good today. They have grown the government exponentially. Republicans like to believe that they believe in an individual’s rights and that in fact there ought to be an upper limit to how much time the federal government should spend peeking in your bedroom window. These are all the sorts of lines you probably hear from your Republican friends. So ask them, what does it mean when your federal government, your administration, borrows at a minimum $500 billion a year -- that we know about -- from our strategic competitors, the Chinese, to pay for the hole they’ve blown in the federal budget since they came into office in 2001? And ask them how it is that they’ve taken the federal government and turned it into this intrusive organization that feels free to suspend habeas corpus, to engage in warrantless wiretapping, to open a prison called Guantanamo and to torture in violation of international treaties our enemies in places like Abu Graib. And ask your Republican friends how they feel when they see a Republican administration and a Republican legislature politicizing that most personal of human tragedies, Terry Shiavo. And ask your Republican friends how it feels when the party of Lincoln that fought to end discrimination against fellow American citizens because of their color now wants to legislate and put a constitutional amendment in place that will discriminate against people because of their sexual orientation. Fellow Americans. Because that is today’s Republican party. And I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of your Republican friends, spouses and even those of you in here who might be Republicans or might have some sympathy for the Republican party would be aghast at that. The party of Lincoln becoming the party of Strom Thurmond, Trent Lott, Newt Gingrich, Southern reactionaries. They need to be defeated in order to have the fight over who owns them. I was in North Carolina last week campaigning for a fellow by the name of Larry Kissell, he’s running against Robin Hayes in North Carolina. And as I was thinking about this, and I’m not a political type. I said this in Santa Barbara a couple years ago with Lois Capps. I said that I actually am a policy wonk, a foreign policy guy who got dragged into the political swamp as a consequence of this little article I wrote in the New York Times and I’d had to learn how to swim with the sharks and Lois Capps jumped in and said, well you know a lot of the sharks had jumped out of the water once you got in. So maybe I learned to swim with them. But I was thinking about what I wanted to say ‘cause I’m from the West. I grew up here, I grew up surfing. And I said to them -- and I grew up in the Fifties here -- and I said to them that, as I thought about the South, ‘cause I’ve never understood the South, I’ve never understood this Southern Exceptionalism, and what drives them. We still fight the Civil War back in Washington, except now the bad guys across the Potomac are occupying the White House. But I said to him as I was thinking about this that the Southern progressives were the conscience of the country for the second half of the 20th Century. Southern progressives were on the front lines, fighting for civil rights, when I was out there fighting for waves at Trestles Beach. I have enormous respect and admiration for them. And yet, as I look out at the political landscape, if everything goes as it should in 2008, if the Democrats do everything they should do, and God that’s asking a lot for Democrats. Will Rodgers was in fact not kidding when he said, “I belong to no organized party, I’m a Democrat.” But if it all happens as it should -- and by the way, if it happens, it will be as much because you’ve got George Bush as President as it is for anything anybody else has to do -- when you’re the President of the United States and you say, I want $200 billion so more Americans can kill and die in Iraq, but I don’t want $35 billion so more kids can get health insurance in the United States, there is something fundamentally wrong with your vision. But I said out there, if everything goes as it should, at the end of 2008, at the end of the next election cycle, the South should really be the last bastion for the Republican party, the Republican party should be relegated to a party of the deep South. And that it was incumbent upon us not to allow them to make their last stand in the South, we should deny them that as well. We owe that to Southern progressives, we owe that to those who led the fight for civil rights in this country not to allow the reactionaries even a redoubt in the deep South. We should hound them everywhere until they decide that they want to operate within the parameters of Constitutional rule in our country. It’s as simple as that. Now I spent 23 years serving my country, I’ve served every President from Gerry Ford to Bill Clinton, a lot of whom were Republicans. I’ve served overseas as an American diplomat. Wes Clark used to say when I was a military officer I wore U.S. on my shoulders, as a diplomat I wore U.S. in my lapel or on my tie. I served my country, I swore an oath not to Republican, not to Democrat, but to the Constitution of the United States. And I was proud to do so. My wife was proud to do so. And I did so because the values for which we stand were worthy of promotion and of defense. It’s what sets us apart from the rest of the world. It’s what makes the United States what Ronald Reagan called the City on the Hill. Borrowing from John Winthrop, using it in a different context for those of you who are historians and might want to challenge me on my knowledge of that particular statement. And what he meant by that, and what I mean by what I have to say, is that it is not that we Americans are inherently better than other human beings. Indeed, if you want to know how Americans are viewed overseas, try bathing in the fountain of Trevi in Rome in August and see how the Italians react to that little gesture on the part of Americans and their people. It is not that. It is the fact that we have a system of governance that guarantees certain freedoms and rights and indeed responsibilities of its citizens that sets it apart from everybody. It is the guaranty of the freedom of press, right of assembly, freedom of worship or not to worship, the opportunity to participate in the election and selection of your political leaders, that’s what sets us apart. Those are the freedoms that are lacking elsewhere. That is what attracts people to our shores. That is what makes our system of governance unique. And that’s what makes the United States the City on the Hill. And those are the freedoms, those are the rights, those are the responsibilities that I spent most of my adult life fighting on behalf. Indeed, I like to point out that I’ve lived in dictatorships from Franco’s Spain to Saddam’s Iraq and many, many in Africa before, in between and afterwards. And I fought for those freedoms there. I fought for those values. Those values that we cherish, those values that we hold dear, those values that we too often take for granted until they are beginning to be taken away from us. I never thought that I would have to come back and fight for those values here in my own country. I never believed that it would come to what it has come to in this space of so little time. From 2001 to 2007. And yet, as I look around and I see that our time at the top of the heap which should have been recognized and remembered for its commitment to human rights, to individual freedoms, to the rights of individuals and minorities to participate in their own destiny will likely be remembered now more for Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, suspension of habeas corpus, warrantless wiretapping, and wholesale violation of those rights. Not just here in our own country but, more importantly, overseas. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I have gotten into this political arena. And that is why I have been willing to stand up and fight. Fight this administration, why I continue to put myself out there, even though, and I’m quite sure if you haven’t already gotten -- and there’s some members of the press here -- if you haven’t already gotten a blast e-mail or fax from the RNC, you’ll probably get one as soon as you write your letter or your article, because that’s what they do. Because the RNC, the Republican Party, and the reactionary right of this country have become nothing more than a huge propaganda organ. They offer no prescriptions, they offer no solutions, their preferred method of dealing with issues is to drive their adversaries out of the public square through a concerted smear campaign. A huge propaganda organ. Now I generally try and insert a Larry Craig story here at this point. But this is obviously a refined audience, so I’ll pass on that. My story is really a very simple one. I got into the debate on the war on Iraq for one reason and one reason alone. It was because I believed that a government has no more solemn decision to make than that decision to send our fellow citizens off to kill and to die in our name as citizens. And we as citizens have an obligation to ensure that we understand fully what it is our government is asking our fellow citizens to do before 4,000 have been killed, before 30,000 have been wounded, before $750 billion have been spent, before hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed, wounded, maimed, made internally displaced or made refugees, not afterwards. And I actually thought that the debate might benefit from my experience. I’d actually been there. The first line of my obituary used to read, “The last American diplomat to confront Saddam Hussein before the first Gulf War.” The first line of my obituary now reads, “Mr. Valerie Plame, the husband of the first American spy to have her identity betrayed by her own government.” I debated Bill Kristol, he of the Weekly Standard fame, not of -- they call him the “Merchant of Death” now in the blogosphere. It was Bill Kristol, Weekly Standard, not of “Analyze This,” “Analyze That” fame although they’re both equally ridiculous if not humorous. I debated him in Midland, Texas. Actually, it was on the Odessa side of the airport. So it’s the University of Texas, Permian Basin, U. Texas likes to say it’s in Midland but it’s really on the working-class side of the airport, Odessa, which by the way is a great old town, it’s like Phoenix and Scottsdale used to be in the Fifties …. And we were talking, the moderator was Eleanor Clift, and she asked Bill, she said, “have you ever had any experience in the region?” And Bill Kristol’s response was, I’ve always believed that on the ground, experience is highly overrated. And that was the nature of the debate. The ideologues. People had no experience. We know they had no experience in war. Dick Cheney had other priorities. George Bush was face down in some gutter in Alabama for most of it. But they also had no experience on the ground to understand the geopolitical situation and what it was they were planning to unleash. Their theory, their doctrine was published in a paper called “The Project For the New American Century.” It purports to be the way ahead for the United States in foreign policy. What it is in fact is a set of ideological assertions that bear no relationship to reality whatsoever and it has now been demonstrated to be so, and if you haven’t already read it or even if you have read it, I would encourage you to go back and read it again, just to see for yourself precisely how fatuous a document it is and how pretentious a document it is, and how utterly disconnected from the real world it is. Don’t take my word for it, read it for yourself. And it was borne of this idea that the time for the American Republic had ended. It was time for us to be an empire. Or as Max Boot, one of their leading sophists, wrote -- in the L.A. Times in fact, among other places -- he was talking about Afghanistan but it was their vision of America of the future, we should strive proudly across our empire in jodhpurs and pith helmets as the British did in the 19th century. How many of you have got pith helmets in your closets? We ride in Levi’s. We don’t ride in jodhpurs in America. Max Boot didn’t even get that part of it right. And he’s a graduate of Berkeley, so he should know where Levi’s were made. Those of us -- even before my article about the lies of this Administration was written -- those of us who were in this debate offering the realists’ point of view were few and were intimidated. Does anybody know the name of Chas Freeman or Ned Walker? They were in the debate early on and they represented organizations, but although they were speaking their personal capacity. And very shortly they got driven off the airwaves because the Right Wing drove them out of the public square by contacting their organizations and saying, if he continues to speak out on this issue we will organize a campaign to stop the contributions to your organization. Myself, they found my client list and they went after every one of my clients and destroyed my consulting business in Washington in order to drive me out of the square. It wasn’t by virtue of better facts or better ideas. It was by virtue of their willingness to engage in a concerted effort to destroy their adversary that they won the debate. Brent Scowcroft was belittled in the pages of the Wall Street Journal even after his article was published there. The so-called, derisively called Scowcroftian School of Real Politick which held us frankly in very good stead for a generation. That was their strategy. Because they could not win the debate on the ideas, the value of their ideas, the value of their facts. I got into the debate because I actually thought we might benefit from it. I didn’t anticipate that we would win, but I thought the fight was worth fighting because I really honestly do believe that we as citizens have a right to fully understand what it is we’re asking our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines to do before they go out and do it, and not afterwards. And that we understand the potential consequences. Now the second part of my story of course is what happens when you suggest that your government has twisted the intelligence to fit a political conclusion that’s already been made. I wrote an article for the New York Times based on my own personal experience which said that, you know what, somebody put a lie in the President’s mouth. You know, people say that all the time. In fact, it’s a great country when you can get up every morning and stand out at your front stoop and shout out as loud as you possibly can, the President of the United States, the Vice-President of the United States, Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State are lying sons of bitches and survive to see the sun go down. I know, I do it most days. Now my taxes get audited more frequently than yours do but it’s a small price to pay for our liberty. I wrote this article not because I needed any particular notoriety, because I didn’t. Not because I wanted to draw any attention to myself, because I didn’t. I wrote the article because, after six months of trying to get the Administration to acknowledge that they had mislead the American people, I was rebuffed at every turn. Including in June of 2003, when the Secretary of State, who was then National Security Adviser, Dr. Rice, was on Meet the Press and in response to a question about Niger uranium said, perhaps somebody in the bowels of the agency knew something about this, but nobody in my circle. The day after my article appeared, the White House acknowledged the 16 words should never have been in the State of the Union Address. Three days after that, the Deputy National Security Adviser offered his resignation because you know what? There were papers in his files which indicated that they did in fact know over at the National Security Council that there was nothing to this. In fact, they had known for months that these allegations were bogus. Not because of what I had said, but because of what a number of others who had looked into it at the same time had said. In fact, in October of 2002, fully four months before the State of the Union Address, the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence testified before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and he said, in response to a question from Arizona Senator John Kyl, that one of the areas where we believe the British have exaggerated the case beyond where we would take it is on uranium sales from Niger to Iraq -- from Africa to Iraq. When in three days this has now come out, the Director of Central Intelligence had spoken to the White House once, for which there is a memorandum of conversation, in writing, and had sent them two faxes or e-mails in which he said, I do not want the President to be a witness of fact in this matter because the evidence is weak and we believe the British have exaggerated the case. Three weeks before the State of the Union Address, the National Intelligence officers circulated a memorandum through the U.S. government of which Dick Cheney is a part, no matter what he might say depending on the day, and the memorandum said, allegations that Niger has sold uranium to Iraq are baseless and should not be used. All this is in the public record now. The White House knew it, and the White House ignored it. And the White House used the 16 words because the White House wanted to make sure that the nation believed that we really had to fear that the smoking gun would come in the form of an Iraqi-generated mushroom cloud. That’s what it was all about. The day after my article appeared, the White House acknowledged that, a week after that the White House had a change of heart, in fact they have since said that the one place where they believe that they went wrong in dealing with Wilson, the Wilson problem they had, was in ever acknowledging the truth. You know, the lesson Dick Cheney learned from Watergate was not “don’t do it,” it was “be sure you burn the tapes.” That’s the sort of man Dick Cheney is. Or as Hillary likes to call him, Darth Vader. I was interviewed three times on Meet the Press -- this is a little sideline and then I’ll get back to my comments -- and the third time Timmy Russert, they call him “Timmy” in the blogosphere, was interviewing me, we were about three-quarters of the way through the interview and it got to the point where Tim asked that “I gotcha” question, you know the one where you’re supposed to be embarrassed, you’re supposed to get all red in the face and break out in a cold sweat and get all clammy and be flustered. You see it occasionally when you actually get somebody. And the question for me, this was in two thousand and -- must have been 2004, the question was, “Ambassador Wilson, you were recently in Iowa giving a speech and it’s been reported that you said of the Vice-President that you called him -- and then he looked down portentously, reading his notes and he looked up, looked down again, looked up, and he said, well you called him a lying SOB, what do you have to say about that. And that’s when I’m supposed to get all red in the face. And I leaned forward, I clasped my hands, and I said, Tim, I think frankly that’s about the nicest thing I’ve had to say about the Vice-President in a long time. Let me be very clear. When the Vice-President writes on a newspaper article for his staff members, those are not just idle doodlings. Those are action memoranda. I say that from experience having been at the National Security Council and having been on the receiving end of little notes written by the President or the Vice-President. Indeed they often are opportunities to move policy in a different direction because if you are speaking on behalf of an interest expressed by the President or the Vice-President within a U.S. bureaucracy, you have a lot of legitimacy. The Vice-President said this, ergo we should do it. So when the Vice-President says, did his wife send him on a junket, that becomes the talking point that is used by Scooter Libby. Now my wife was a covert CIA officer. My wife’s identity was protected. And it wasn’t protected just to be protecting it, it was protected because of the impact the disclosure of her name on our national security might have. Had the Vice-President’s minions -- Mr. Libby, Mr. Rove, Mr. Armitage -- been speaking to the Russian military attaché, the North Korean ambassador or the Chinese about -- for the purposes of disclosing the name of a covert CIA officer of the identity of a covert CIA officer, what would you call that? [Audience: treason] Why would you call it anything differently just because that information was brokered through somebody who likes to call himself a journalist by the name of Bob Novak? Why would you call it anything different? You wouldn’t. You wouldn’t. Dick Cheney, Benedict Arnold. What’s the difference? Does anybody know the name of the person who put the lie in the President’s speech? Just raise your hand if you think you know. Let the record show that in an audience of a couple of hundred people, one person raised his hand. Does anybody not know my wife’s name, please raise your hand. There may be three people who don’t know my wife’s name. Now isn’t there something wrong with this picture where nobody knows the name of the person who put a lie in the President’s mouth in the most important speech a president gives in any year, but particularly important in this year when it was a call to arms to take this country to war, but everybody knows the name of a covert CIA officer for one reason and one reason alone, because she happens to be married to me. Isn’t there something wrong with this? Now why did they do that? They did it because they wanted to change the subject. They wanted to change the subject from the President’s misstatement of facts to Wilson and his wife. So that the press would follow the shiny object. And they have an enormously powerful propaganda machine to affect that. A huge propaganda organ as I like to say, to do that sort of stuff. And they did it to stifle discussion about this subject in other circles. At the time that my article appeared, there were also leaks to the press about the undue influence being brought to bear on the analytical community by the Vice-President and by Mr. Libby. Their repeated trips out to CIA headquarters, their asking the same questions 30 times ‘til they got the answer they wanted, and by doing this to Valerie they sent a shot across the bow to the foreign policy and intelligence community. What they said was, if you do to us what Wilson just did to us, we will do to you what we just did to his family. Be afraid, be very, very afraid. And they’ve been doing that ever since. Four-and-a-half years of a sustained character assassination campaign. And then they had the audacity, when I decided that, you know, I wasn’t going to go away, I was going to stand my ground. You remember John Delulio? He’s the guy who called them Mayberry Machiavellis? They came at him once and he disappeared? Remember Paul O’Neil? He said on the Today show, I can’t understand why they’re mad, and then he disappeared back to Pittsburgh? And they thought that they would be able to do that to me and then when I didn’t disappear, then they started calling me, the last one was a “preening careerist.” A guy who actively goes out and seeks out this publicity. In fact, the narrative is, well, Wilson and his wife created this great conspiracy. They knew two years before the war that we were going to use the uranium allegation as a reason to go to war; therefore, they decided two years before the fact that they would undermine it by Wilson going out there, sitting on the information and writing the article afterwards because he didn’t like Dick Cheney and that would be a way of getting at them. As my wife said, if I was that prescient, we would have won the lottery a long time ago. But that’s the alternative narrative that they’ve tried to create in all of this. The facts of the matter are very clear and it’s a very simple case. The President of the United States lied in the justification for taking America to war. And when Joe Wilson called him on his lie, his Administration decided that they would cover up, they would obstruct, they would justify by attacking Wilson, rather than acknowledging the truth to maintain the fixture. And that’s where we are now, and it is played out in the political realm. And it’s a great disservice to the country. It was a three-day story. They acknowledged on the second day that they should never have said the 16 words. If they had just stuck with that acknowledgment. And three days after that just said to the press, the President has moved on, the press would have moved on as well. Because the press was in no mood to challenge the President then. But they could not help themselves. They couldn’t help themselves because Dick Cheney is thin-skinned in addition to being a lying son of a bitch and a traitor. They couldn’t help themselves that Karl Rove was running around the White House saying, Wilson’s a Democrat, as if being a Democrat was like being a cockroach that was worthy of being stepped on. And to this day, Eddie “Enron” Gillespie and Ken Mellman have airbrushed from my curriculum vitae the fact that my one political appointment as ambassador was in the administration of George Herbert Walker Bush, and if you read the RNC stuff, it’s so Democrat partisan, Democrat hack and that sort of crap. That’s the narrative that they tried to create. And they tried to create it because they just simply refused to accept responsibility for their actions. This is the unaccountable administration. Blame others rather than accept responsibility for your actions. Just the other day Karl Rove left his office at the White House. And regrettably, not being frog-marched in handcuffs, and Bob Novak and Byron York of the National Review online, and Rich Lawry of the National Review all wrote articles saying that Karl had to leave because Wilson had just been so mean to him. Because of the CIA leakgate affairs, it was my fault that they leaked my wife’s name. And Ed Schultz, the radio talk show host, had me on and asked me about that. And I’ll tell you what I said to him, I said Ed, you know in a time really of unaccountable government, if they want to make me responsible for Karl Rove’s departure, I am more than willing to stand up and be held accountable for that in the hopes that perhaps we can set an example for accepting responsibility for one’s actions. Let me close with this, because I want to save time for questions. If there’s a lesson in what Valerie and I have been through in the past four-and-a-half years -- and make no mistake about it, how ever bad it has been, and there have been some really nasty articles written, Jonah Goldberg who writes -- somehow has space on the L.A. Times editorial page -- called me Mark Sklar at one point, you know the guy who claimed he was Jon-Benet’s killer. However bad it has been, for us it has really been mere inconvenience compared to what this country has done -- what this administration has done to our country and in particular what this administration has done to our military and to their families. If you need only one reason, one reason to walk away from the Republican party, I can give it to you in two words: Webb amendment. These Republicans decided that they would put their loyalty to a failed president, a failed presidency, and a failed foreign policy, above the troops. It’s as simple as that. The example though, that we would hope that our experience leaves for people is this: a democracy is only as strong as the participation of its citizens. We participated. In writing a 1500-word article for the New York Times entitled “What I Did Not Find in Africa” I was not looking for the invective or the adulation that I’ve received over the past four years, being called hero and things that people flatter me with. It’s not true. It was an act of citizenship. The last phrase of the First Amendment says that there shall be no law passed to abrogate a citizen’s right to petition his government for the redress of a grievance. There are some elected officials here today, ask them afterwards what their “in” boxes look like when they go in in the morning and they will tell you they’re full of petitions from their constituents for the redress of a grievance. The only possible accolade that I would have liked to have received as a consequence of my 1500-word article was from my third grade teacher down here at Carver School in San Marino or maybe the South Pas Junior High in South Pas who gave me a “C” in citizenship. And I would have liked her to have given me a call and said, you know, you done better. Over the years you done better. Our country, our democracy is only as strong as the willingness of its citizens to participate. We have to participate. Thomas Jefferson once said, I have nothing to fear from the people. In fact, what he also said was, when a people is scared of its government, that is tyranny. When the government is frightened of the people, that is democracy. Let us make our government frightened of us. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks very much. Q&A: PATT MORRISON: JOE WILSON: Finally, I would argue that the military talks in terms of troop-to-task exercises. That’s how you build an army, you define the task you want the military to accomplish, and then you figure out how many troops it’s going to take to accomplish the task, whether that task is kill the enemy or pick up the garbage in the streets. And what we really ought to be doing is talking about this in terms the military can understand, what are the tasks that we can reasonably be asking our military to accomplish at this late stage of the occupation. Now with that as a backdrop I would say first and foremost we ought to get American troops out of harm’s way, to the maximum extent possible. It doesn’t do our national interest any good, it doesn’t do our presence in the region any good, it doesn’t do our troops any good to have them kicking down gates and killing Arabs and getting killed by Arabs at this late stage any more than is absolutely necessary. So I would redefine the task in such a way as to get them out of the middle of somebody else’s civil war, as much as possible. There is a role for them to play. And the role is to be one of the three legs. And so I would argue that we need to devote more attention to the other two legs and in particular, the political reconciliation leg. And I’ve had some experience in this. Having been in Baghdad in the first Gulf War, I was on the front lines and saw what President Bush and Jim Baker did to put together the coalition that ultimately led to the withdrawal or the departure -- or the driving of Saddam out of Kuwait. It included the president making phone calls every day to world leaders, putting the moral and political authority and the international leadership capacity of the office he occupies to the task of building an international coalition that included a military arm, a financing arm and a legal umbrella over what we did. And you also have the Secretary of State. Some of you are old enough to remember the first Gulf War, the Secretary of State was on airplanes going around the world, everywhere from Ulan Bator, to Moscow to Paris to the Middle East putting together the consensus that defined how we did the first Gulf War, which by the way in my judgment will be a case study in how one manages international crises in the aftermath of the Cold War. I admit my prejudice having been part of that, so I’m more than willing to entertain other views on that. The second one that I was intimately involved in was forming Yugoslavia, and you had some similarities. You had the President of the United States, Bill Clinton in this case, deeply involved in contacting leaders in the region and around the world to put together the consensus on how to deal with the genocide and ethnic cleansing in the war and form Yugoslavia. And you had Dick Holbrook as special envoy. The third one I was involved with with President Clinton very directly was bringing an end to the air war between Ethiopia and Eritrea which we were able to do with an intense weekend negotiation. All three had similar characteristics: exercise presidential leadership and the really hard work of the Secretary of State or the President’s special envoy to achieve the political consensus. This President, of course, doesn’t even pick up the phone to call the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom when there’s flooding in the U.K., much less the King of Saudi Arabia, the King of Jordan, the President of Egypt. And we won’t talk to the Iranians. And we won’t talk to the Syrians. Because this administration believes that just by talking to them you’re granting some concession. Now I find that rather silly. I talk to my neighbor, even if I don’t like him very much. And I would want my president to be exercising all of the power of his office for diplomatic solutions. And by the way, by not engaging in the political process, you make it more dangerous for the troops. Because you’re not creating incentive for the people to stop shooting each other. You’re not giving them another way of dealing with their problems. And what we should be doing is we should be doing everything in our power to bring people around the table where they can yell at each other, because that is less destructive than standing across the street from each other shooting each other. PATT MORRISON: JOE WILSON: PATT MORRISON: JOE WILSON: PATT MORRISON: JOE WILSON: I said earlier to this journalist, this young lady, that the single least represented cohort in the ballot box, in the ballot voting booth, are single females between the ages of 18 and 34. Now, one of the key social issues that has been under discussion and has driven sort of the right-wing for the past decade has been Roe v. Wade, has been the debate on right to life, right to choice. Now, it doesn’t matter to me where on that spectrum you are for the purposes of this discussion, but what ought to be absolutely clear to everybody is the people who are most affected by the outcome of this debate are going to be what? Single females between the ages of 18 and 34. Guys like me, we don’t get pregnant. I don’t get pregnant. Even if I was 34, I wouldn’t get pregnant. The people who are most affected by the outcome, by a decision made, by a body composed largely of over-age, overweight, white males are young females between the ages of 18 and 34, they should not be surprised if the outcome is not what they wanted it to be if they don’t participate. And you can take any issue and get out there and vote, get out there and participate. De Tocqueville said in the 19th century, America is interest-group politics. Well, let’s get interested. PATT MORRISON: JOE WILSON: PATT MORRISON: JOE WILSON: PATT MORRISON: JOE WILSON: PATT MORRISON: JOE WILSON: PATT MORRISON: JOE WILSON: But I can talk about the policy, but I will tell you that during the darkest days, during the darkest days when every morning I woke up to the Wall Street Journal editorial page and a few of the other clowns of the reactionary Right Wing taking me to task and accusing me of everything because they had lied to the American people. They had betrayed the national security of my country in compromising my wife’s identity and they were still trying to make this all about me instead of about them, and those darkest days when we thought we were literally living in Alice in Wonderland, the one person in Washington who reached out to us repeatedly and frequently was Hillary Clinton, to share with us her own experience as having gone through the Republican smear machine for eight years as First Lady. One of the few people in Washington, a city that is littered with the carcasses of those who have been destroyed by the propaganda organ. Some literally, Vince Foster. Some figuratively, Web Hubbell and others. And the number of people who have actually grown, as people, as humans, and rededicated themselves to the fight for the freedom and liberty in the Constitution of this United States promises us are few and far between. One of whom is Hillary Clinton. She shared with us her experiences. She shared with us what this was all about. The larger issue. Which is really important. It was important to understand (1) that it was really about them and not about us, they would just try to make it about us, and (2) the reason they were doing so was because we had actually hit a raw nerve. Now, I think now in retrospect it’s pretty clear. The president was 50% when he started attacking me, he’s down to 29% now. The Vice-President’s down to about 19, and he can’t even go to Jackson, Wyoming. So, at a time when -- you know they used to say about, Harry Truman used to say about Washington, if you want a friend, buy a dog, he was wrong. They’ve gone after Hillary Clinton for 15 years, and they’ve argued she’s too polarizing, she’s aloof, she’s mechanical, I guarantee you that’s not the Hilary Clinton that I know and have known for 10 years, I know her in policy, I’ve been to Africa with her for 11 days when we took Bill Clinton to Africa and all that, we can talk about that chapter and verse, but if you want to know about Hillary Clinton, you want to know what she’s like as a human being, ask her about Chelsea sometime. Watch her light up. Or even more to the point, watch her pay attention when you’re talking about your own kids. This is somebody who could have walked away from it all in 2000. And didn’t. She could have taken any number of appointed positions and been active. She put herself out there again. Not only that, but she went to another state, so she had to fight the whole carpetbagger thing. Anybody here from New York? Anybody here from upstate New York? You all know upstate New York? It’s tough for a Democrat in upstate New York. She wins in upstate New York. She wins. And she wins because she cares. And she gets in there and she talks to people and she listens. She has an enormous capacity for growth, I’ve seen her in meetings; I take experts to see her. A lot of them actually have been people I’ve worked with in Republican administrations. And I’ve seen her literally grow from the beginning of a meeting on Iraq to the end of a meeting on Iraq. You don’t often see that at that level in politics. PATT MORRISON: JOE WILSON: Now, as how I would like to see my grandchildren’s view of our world -- and Valerie says this, quite clearly -- that as we look back, and we often get asked, would you do it again, knowing what you know now? And my response is generally, well yeah, I’m too stupid to do it differently. But Valerie makes the point that, at the end of the day we have to look at our friends, ourselves and our children in the eyes every day, and the question will come up, what did you do to save your country as it was going down the tubes, how did you react when confronted with something that was such an abomination, such a threat to the Constitution of the Untied States, and we want to be able to tell our kids that we did what we could. History is written by the winners. We are condemned to succeed so we can write the history. And it’s a history that has been written in this country by every generation. Ours is not the first generation where those who are in power have tried to usurp power. Where they’ve tried to subvert the Constitution of the United States for their own ends. And indeed if you look back over the history of the country you’ll see that in virtually every generation there has been an assault on the citizenry for the sake of accruing power for the few. So ours is really just the latest in a long line of battles to preserve the genius of our founding fathers who understood that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely and therefore, you have to have different centers of power, and it has to be nicely balanced so that no one branch gets an overwhelming amount of it. That’s the best way to preserve our freedoms and our rights. And the only way you can do that is by exercising your responsibilities, which is the other side of that coin. PATT MORRISON: JOE WILSON: - End - |
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Transcript
of Ambassador Joe Wilson
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