Joe Wilson's credibility problem

Christopher Hitchens asks in his most recent column "Clueless Joe Wilson": "How did the CIA's special envoy miss Zahawie's trip to Niger?" I dunno...maybe he was too busy drinking sweet mint tea to be bothered by such trivialities such as why he was in freakin' Niger to begin with! From Hitchens:

Nobody appears to dispute what I wrote in last week's Slate to the effect that in February 1999, Saddam Hussein dispatched his former envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency, and former delegate to non-proliferation conferences at the United Nations, to Niger. Wissam al-Zahawie was, at the time of his visit, the accredited ambassador of Iraq to the Vatican: a more senior post than it may sound, given that the Vatican was almost the only full European embassy that Iraq then possessed. And nobody has proposed an answer to my question: Given the fact that Niger is synonymous with uranium (and was Iraq's source of "yellowcake" in 1981), and given that Zahawie had been Iraq's main man in nuclear diplomacy, what innocent explanation can be found for his trip?

I'm sure it was one great big coincidink! Continuing:

Once again, the details and implications of Zahawie's own IAEA background are ignored (as they were in the IAEA's own report to the United Nations about the forged Italian documents that were later circulated about Zahawie's visit). In the same press interviews to which Wilson alludes (and which I cited last week), Zahawie went a bit further than saying that uranium was "not on his agenda." He claimed not to know that Niger produced uranium at all! You may if you wish choose to take that at face value—along with his story that all he was trying to do was violate sanctions on flights to Iraq. Joseph Wilson appears to be, as they say, "comfortable" with that explanation.

And it's true that the two men knew each other during the Gulf crisis of 1990-1991. Indeed, in his book The Politics of Truth, Wilson records Zahawie as having been in the room, as under-secretary for foreign affairs, during his last meeting with Saddam Hussein. (Quite a senior guy for a humble mission like violating flight-bans from distant Niger and Burkina Faso.) I cite this because it is the only mention of Zahawie that Wilson makes in his entire narrative.

In other words (I am prepared to keep on repeating this until at least one cow comes home), Joseph Wilson went to Niger in 2002 to investigate whether or not the country had renewed its uranium-based relationship with Iraq, spent a few days (by his own account) sipping mint tea with officials of that country who were (by his wife's account) already friendly to him, and came back with the news that all was above-board. Again to repeat myself, this must mean either that A) he did not know that Zahawie had come calling or B) that he did know but didn't think it worth mentioning that one of Saddam's point men on nukes had been in town. In neither case, it seems to me, should he be trusted with another mission that requires any sort of curiosity.

Bush lied, eh? Nah...Wilson did:

Wilson has had to alter his story so many times—he first denied that the CIA had anything to do with selecting him for the Niger mission and later claimed that he had exposed a forgery that wasn't disclosed until after he returned—that the mind reels at having to reread his conceited book.

As Hitchens notes about Wilson, "It seems that your contacts in the Niger Ministry of Mines—the ones that your wife told the CIA made you such a good choice for the trip—didn't rate you highly enough to tell you about the Zahawie visit. It would, interestingly, have been a name you already knew. But you didn't even get as far as having to explain it away—or not until last week—because you were that far in the dark." True, Hitch, he was indeed...but why let a little thing like that get in the way of being an MSM darling?