Clearing The Cobwebs

A friend of mine asked me to give her a synopsis of Rovegate in easy to understand, non-insider language. Perhaps you will find it interesting too:

In his op-ed on July 6th,2003, Wilson gave a straighforward account of who he is and why he went on this fact-finding trip to Niger. He says “I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney’s office had questions about a particular intelligence report.” He does not say that Cheney had sent him personally on the mission. He reports that he found no evidence that Saddam had tried to buy uranium from Niger.

He says that he assumes from working in the government for many years that his report had been forwarded through channels. When he heard the president use the claim about African uranium in the SOTU, he became alarmed and asked the State department about it. He accepted that the excuse that the president might have been talking about a different African country than Niger until he later learned that Niger was specifically mentioned quite recently in official documents. He concludes at this time, based upon the fact that he had personally been involved in debunking this claim, that the administration had been “fixing” intelligence.

The administration was now for the first time explicitly and openly being accused of knowingly using false information to sell the war. And since Wilson had specifically named the Vice president as having been the one to request additional information that led to his trip, the White House was involved at a very high level. The administration claims that this was not true, that in spite of a series of mishaps, there was no concerted or conscious effort to mislead the country about the intelligence. And whatever mistakes were made were the result of shoddy intelligence work, not the “fixing” or “sexing up” of the evidence. When the Niger episode became public, they decided that it was time for George Tenet to admit that he had screwed this particular case up and they arranged for him to make a public statement to that effect.

The White House response to Wilson’s piece is that Cheney never asked for the information in the first place. And they said they had no idea about Wilson’s evidence because his trip was a low level nepotistic boondoggle arranged by his wife, a CIA “employee.” Karl Rove and others spoke to several reporters to that effect (They now claim, since Matthew Cooper’s e-mail was leaked that it was only in order to “warn them off” taking Wilson seriously.) Robert Novak — an extremely unlikely columnist for the white house to feel they had to warn off Wilson — was the first to put this into print on July 13th.

When it came out, exposing Valerie Plame as an undercover operative, Wilson believed that it was an act of retaliation and a signal to anyone else who might be thinking of coming forward. Novak was quoted shortly after the column ran saying: “I didn’t dig it out, it was given to me. They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it.” (He has since said that he used the term “operative” inappropriately, although he has used that word very precisely throughout his career to mean “undercover.”)In the days after the column appeared there were reports that the administration was actively pushing the column, claiming that Wilson’s wife was “fair game.”

I have no idea if Joe Wilson’s wife or the ghost of Ronald Reagan was involved in sending him on that trip and I don’t care. It’s irrelevant and it’s always been irrelevant and they were either incredibly malevolent or incredibly negligent in settling on using her as the best way to discredit Wilson. But as I wrote earlier, I think it was a P.R. decision, and it has the mark of Rove all over it. Thuggishness is his hallmark. Any chance they have to portray a male opponent as a milksop, they do it. I think the “wife” being involved in getting her husband a job was central to their calculations.

I don’t know if Cheney read his report but considering what we now know, I don’t find it credible that he didn’t. He has been proven to have been immersed in the pre-war intelligence, particularly the claim that Saddam was reconstituting his nuclear program. That was his baby. But Wilson didn’t claim in the op-ed that Cheney knew, only that he assumed his report had been circulated. And since he’d been told that the trip itself was a result of Cheney’s question he assumed that it had filtered up to Cheney.

That is what sent the administration into overdrive — Wilson merely mentioning Cheney in the context of fixing the intelligence. Quite a panicked reaction, don’t you think?

The White House response to Joe Wilson’s report was that it was something cooked up in the bowels of the CIA by his (gasp) wife and it was not very compelling and nobody paid any attention to it, even there, and they never sent the information back to the White House anyway.

If it weren’t for the fact that Wilson’s conclusions about the uranium were right, you might even believe their tale. If it weren’t for the fact that Dick Cheney was knee deep in the intelligence, even personally spending time at the CIA, leaning over the shoulders of desk officers, you might believe it. If it weren’t for the fact that the aluminum tubes “evidence” was shown to be false, the drone plane “evidence” was shown to be laughable and the mobile labs “evidence” was shown to be non-existent you might even believe it. If it weren’t for the fact that the meeting in Prague between Mohammed Atta and the Iraqis was proven false, that we had chances to take out Zarquawi and refused and that the inspectors were at the very moment of the SOTU reporting that they were not finding any stockpiles, we might even believe it. If it weren ‘t for the fact that the Downing Street Memos show definitively that the US knew its intelligence was weak and decided to “fix” it we might even believe it.

If we’d found even one scintilla of evidence that Saddam had the stockpiles, the programs or the means to make weapons of mass destruction, we might even believe it.

Unfortunately for the White House, there have been so many revelations now aside from the “16 words” that they no longer can claim credibility on this issue. It is quite clear to any sentient being that they manipulated, misled and outright lied about the intelligence. Joe Wilson knew back in 2003 that something was wrong. He had been involved in one particular part of the intelligence gathering and he knew the facts were being misrepresented. He spoke out. And the white house responded by portraying him as a partisan loser whose report was so low level that nobody ever saw it. In the course of that they also exposed his wife’s covert status, likely endangering national security.

If we knew then what we know now, would there be any question as to who should get the benefit of the doubt about this?

And knowing what we’ve always known about how the Rove operation works, is there really any question that they were smearing Wilson in the press and were thoroughly capable of outing an undercover operative in retaliation for attacking the white house? It occurs to me that all this talk about Valerie Plame these last few days — how she wasn’t “credible” as an NOC, how she was a “desk jockey,” how her cover was thin etc — I’m beginning to wonder if they weren’t retaliating against her as much as him. If she was involved in the meeting in which it was decided to send Joe Wilson to Niger I wouldn’t be surprised if they decided to teach her a little lesson too. It’s what Tony Soprano would do.

Remember. It doesn’t matter who sent Wilson on the trip. What matters is that his questions in that op-ed, the questions they didn’t want anyone asking — have been answered. As the drip, drip drip of new evidence comes to the fore, we become more sure, not less, that the administration took this country to war on false pretenses. That’s what they are trying to hide.

Here’s the conclusion of Wilson’s piece that started this whole thing:

I was convinced before the war that the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein required a vigorous and sustained international response to disarm him. Iraq possessed and had used chemical weapons; it had an active biological weapons program and quite possibly a nuclear research program — all of which were in violation of United Nations resolutions. Having encountered Mr. Hussein and his thugs in the run-up to the Persian Gulf war of 1991, I was only too aware of the dangers he posed.

But were these dangers the same ones the administration told us about? We have to find out. America’s foreign policy depends on the sanctity of its information. For this reason, questioning the selective use of intelligence to justify the war in Iraq is neither idle sniping nor “revisionist history,” as Mr. Bush has suggested. The act of war is the last option of a democracy, taken when there is a grave threat to our national security. More than 200 American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq already. We have a duty to ensure that their sacrifice came for the right reasons.

I have a little assignment for all my readers today. I think it’s important that you all re-read these two things:

Joe Wilson’s op-ed of July 6, 2003
Bob Novak’s column of July 13, 2003

I think you’ll find it amazingly bracing to see in stark relief the two columns at the heart of this. You’ll see why it’s so absurd that they tried to make these questions about Joe Wilson’s wife so central to the story. The story is about Dick Cheney. And they knew it.

If he hadn’t defaulted to his patented South Carolina smear tactics, Karl would be in a much safer place today.

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