This comes from a column from 2004, but I don't know if it was ever rebutted. Although Somerby has always been harsh towards Wilson, one can hardly say he's on the side of the Republicans. Is he making good points in the following excerpt? Yesterday's column suggests he'll have more on Wilson today.
http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh072004.shtml<edit>
Our conclusionDemocrats should be quite upset with their blowhard hero, Joe Wilson. Those “rebuttals” he’s been sending out are largely overblown, misleading junk, like so much of his past year’s work. Sorry, but Wilson’s wife did play some role in his selection for the trip (not that there’s anything wrong with it). And Wilson did keep saying that Cheney must have been briefed, a thundering judgment he now says was wrong. The Committee did judge that most analysts felt his report strengthened the case about Iraq’s pursuit of uranium. And did he make bogus statements to Pincus? We don’t know, and probably never will. In his TV interviews, Blitzer and Zahn were too inept to ask him the relevant questions. For the record, Wilson’s explanations seem mighty shaky compared the account of this matter in the unanimous report.
What did Wilson learn from his trip to Niger? Actually, he learned fairly little, as the Committee report notes. He judged that it would be hard to complete a uranium transaction in Niger, but Bush never said that Iraq bought uranium—he only said Iraq sought it. Wilson now tells us that he never claimed to have debunked that claim! And Bush referred to British intelligence, whose contents Wilson couldn’t review. Simply put, Wilson never had any way of knowing whether Iraq sought uranium in Africa. (Don’t even ask about the Congo and Somalia.) And now, at last, after one solid year, he finally says what we said all along: He had no way to debunk this allegation. Last week, Lord Butler said Bush’s claim was “well-founded.” And Wilson has no way of knowing if that judgment is correct. He never knew if Bush’s claim was true or false, despite all his loudmouth posturing.
But along the way, Wilson’s loud, dramatic overstatements distracted Dems from stronger pursuits. Bush’s 16-word statement was always a relatively weak example of the Admin’s pre-war embellishment. Yes, Bush’s statement was poorly founded; he had to rely on British intelligence because our own intel was inconclusive. But other examples of dissembling were much more clear; Admin officials often said things in the run-up to war that were, as a matter of fact, baldly wrong. No matter! Loudmouth Wilson kept banging the drums, leading us down that Niger road. Now, he’s being called the latest liberal liar, and the charge is close enough to true so that, in part, it’s going to stick. Lord Butler said Bush’s claim was well-founded—and Wilson admits he can’t debunk it! Given those facts, many American are going to wonder why Bush was trashed for those 16 words. This was always a weak side road, with Wilson the piper who led Dems down it. He continued his bull-roar in his letters last week—and readers heaped praise on his work.
OVERSTATEMENT CENTRAL: “I never claimed to have ‘debunked’ the allegation that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa,” Wilson says. But he calls the allegation a “lie” all through his overstated book. Here’s one example of his overstatements—the first one that we turn to:
WILSON (page 337): Had I been the chief executive of this operation, as President Bush likes to say that he is, I would have been furious that a member of my staff had inserted such an obviously false claim in the most important speech I might ever make.
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