Joe Wilson - he's most proud of Jersey Girls - Buzzflash Interview

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/04/04/int04023.html

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It was important that the government correct the report that Iraq obtained uranium from Niger. And it was important that if, in fact, the government was going to come after me, which I fully understood they would, that the story was fully understood by the American people before they in fact destroyed the messenger. In urging the government to come clean on this Niger business, I was doing nothing more and nothing less than any American has been taught from social studies in seventh grade -- it is the responsibility of any American citizen in our democracy. We have checks and balances, and we have rights, and we have protections to ensure that we hold our government accountable for its actions. And that’s exactly what I was doing.

Now understanding that they would come after me, I didn’t feel that I had anything personally to worry about. After all, as you correctly pointed out, the former President Bush had called me an American hero and had written me any number of laudatory handwritten letters. What did shock me and I think shocks most Americans was what this Administration decided when they couldn’t discredit me to their satisfaction. Somebody close to the President of the United States decided that in order to defend Bush’s political agenda, that individual or individuals would violate the national security of the country and expose my wife’s name and her profession.

That was absolutely unexpected, that this government would take a national security asset off the table, working in an area that is of primordial importance to the national security of the United States -– the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction into the hands of rogue states and non-state actors. Yet for some reason, either because they wanted to discourage other people from stepping forward and telling the truth, or out of simple revenge, as was reported in the Washington Post, this government decided that it would go ahead and take that national security asset off the table.

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Ambassador Wilson: I’ll tell you the ones that I’m most proud of, as I look out at this, are the Jersey girls -- the widows of those Americans who gave their lives in the World Trade Center. These brave women have insisted since 9/11 that the U.S. government come clean on what it knew before the attacks and what it might have done to prevent this from happening. I think that they have been profiles in American courage. And it sickened me when I saw them savaged by Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard in a television appearance, and then subsequently in a Wall Street Journal editorial by Dorothy Rabinowitz.

But what I have to say to people who might come forward is that one of the great things about our democracy is freedom of the press. And if we don’t exercise that, we run the risk of losing it. One must always keep one’s government under control. The government serves the people -- not vice-versa.