CSU, Chico News

Joseph Wilson, former ambassador to Iraq, will visit California State University, Chico on Wednesday, March 22, and present "The Three Great Debates over the War in Iraq." Wilson's lecture will be held at 7:30 pm in the Bell Memorial Union Auditorium.

Wilson was a United States foreign service diplomat between 1976 and 1998. He has achieved recent notoriety from an op-ed essay published in July 2003, in the New York Times, in which he revealed his 2002 trip investigating whether Iraq purchased or attempted to purchase Yellowcake uranium from Niger in the late 1990s. In his op-ed piece, published four months after the start of the war, Wilson accused the Bush administration of exaggerating the Iraqi threat in order to justify war.

Shortly thereafter, Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was revealed as a CIA agent, prompting a furious political storm in Washington. The affair resulted in a grand jury indictment of Lewis Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.

As acting ambassador to Iraq in 1991, right before the first Gulf War, Wilson publicly defied Saddam Hussein by giving refuge to more than 100 U.S. citizens at the embassy and in the homes of U.S. diplomats. Saddam Hussein was threatening to execute anyone who harbored foreigners.

Wilson addressed journalists wearing a hangman's noose instead of a necktie. He later told the Washington Post newspaper that the message to Saddam Hussein was, "If you want to execute me, I'll bring my own [expletive] rope."

The event is sponsored by A.S. Presents. General admission tickets for $15 are available at the University Box Office, 530-898-6333, and at the door for $17.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 21st, 2006 at 8:30 am and is filed under 2006 Spring.