By Jason Sibert<\/p>\n
Former Ambassador Joseph P. Wilson, who was 69, passed away in his home in Sante Fe, NM at the end of September.<\/p>\n
Wilson died of organ failure, according to reports. He worked for the State Department in the Foreign Service for 23 years, working mostly in Africa. In 2002, the Central Intelligence Agency asked him to fly to Niger to investigate if Iraq had tried to purchase uranium yellowcakes so then Iraq Leader Saddam Hussein could make a nuclear weapon. He was a private citizen at the time. Wilson\u2019s investigation found that no yellowcakes transaction occurred. Had the results of his investigation been fully taken into account by the George W. Bush Administration, there would have been no Iraq War. The Bush Administration told the public at the time they were going to war in Iraq because Hussein had acquired nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n
Wilson was surprised in 2003 when President Bush declared in the State of the Union address that Iraq had \u201crecently bought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.\u201d The former Ambassador struck back at the war-prone administration and published a New York Times op-ed titled \u201cWhat I Didn\u2019t Find in Africa.\u201d The op-ed questioned the administration\u2019s rationale for going to war. \u00a0The claims that Iraq held weapons of mass destruction turned out to be false.<\/p>\n
Vice-President Dick Cheney and others in the administration were furious. A week later, columnist Robert Novak wrote a column that blew Valarie Plame\u2019s cover as a CIA agent. Plame and Wilson were married at the time. This resulted in charges being filed against Cheney\u2019s Chief of Staff \u201cScooter\u201d Libby. \u00a0Libby was convicted of obstruction of justice and lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.<\/p>\n
Wilson and Plame\u2019s ordeal was the basis of the movie \u201cFair Game.\u201d Actor Sean Penn played Wilson.<\/p>\n
Jason Sibert is the Executive Director of the Peace Economy Project<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Jason Sibert Former Ambassador Joseph P. Wilson, who was 69, passed away in his home in Sante Fe, NM at the end of September. Wilson died of organ failure, according to reports. He worked for the State Department in the Foreign Service for 23 years, working mostly in Africa. In 2002, the Central Intelligence […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5838"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5838\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5841,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5838\/revisions\/5841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}