Trying to Smear Joe Wilson

by Larry C. Johnson (bio below)

There they go again. Rightwing hacks making up facts. The latest comes from retired Generals and Fox News Contributors Paul Vallely and Tom McInerney who went on John Batchelor’s radio show and claimed:

that Joe Wilson more than once in 2002 in the green room at Fox New Channel in Washington D.C. boasted about his wife the “CIA desk officer.” McInerney has the same memory and more, since both he and Vallely were on FNC between 150 and 200 times in 2002 each…

Well boys and girls, I too was a Fox News Contributor in 2002 and spent a lot of time in the Green Room with both Vallely and McInerney. I saw them but never saw Joe Wilson. What is really curious is that I know I spent more time with Vallely and McInerney than Joe Wilson ever did and the subject of my wife (or their wives) never came up.

I first met Joe Wilson in the Spring of 2003 and he did not mention his wife.

We were at a seminar hosted by the Nixon Center. At the time I did not know that Joe had married the woman I knew as Valerie P. Although Joe knew that I worked at the CIA he did not take that opportunity to unburden himself of protecting his wife’s identity. In fact, he said nothing about his wife. Not even a wink and a nod.

Sadly, Paul Vallely and Tom McInerney have a track record of saying silly things on air and getting their facts flummoxed. Vallely, for example, appeared on the O’Reilly Factor on 8 May, 2003 and offered the following ludicrous claim:

It appears from reports that we are getting now that the mobile vehicles that they had, you know they found one up north that was sanitized. They found all the historic data of a weapons program but haven’t found the actual biological or chemical weapons.

It appears that a lot of those weapons were transited out of Baghdad through Syria and now are buried in the Bekaa Valley as deep as 30 to 40 meters. The Syrians are looking the other way. The only way this is going to be validated, Bill, we are going to have to take on that Bekaa Valley challenge some way or another to validate if this is true or not.

Sorry Paul. You were duped.

What is so pathetic is that both Vallely and McInerney present themselves as military experts on special operations when neither has held any position of any importance with those forces. In fact, neither has ever held compartmented clearances required to know about those special programs. Given their track record of getting military facts wrong there is no doubt they are wrong about Joe Wilson.
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Larry C. Johnson is CEO and co-founder of BERG Associates, LLC, an international business-consulting firm that helps corporations and governments manage threats posed by terrorism and money laundering. Mr. Johnson, who worked previously with the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism (as a Deputy Director), is a recognized expert in the fields of terrorism, aviation security, crisis and risk management. Mr. Johnson has analyzed terrorist incidents for a variety of media including the Jim Lehrer News Hour, National Public Radio, ABC’s Nightline, NBC’s Today Show, the New York Times, CNN, Fox News, and the BBC. Mr. Johnson has authored several articles for publications, including Security Management Magazine, the New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times. He has lectured on terrorism and aviation security around the world. Further bio details.