Month: July 2005

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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No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

It was that rat bastard Cooper:

“By any definition, he burned Karl Rove,” Luskin said of Cooper. “If you read what Karl said to him and read how Cooper characterizes it in the article, he really spins it in a pretty ugly fashion to make it seem like people in the White House were affirmatively reaching out to reporters to try to get them to them to report negative information about Plame.”

Oooh. That’s dangerous stuff there. It may not be the smartest thing in the world for Karl Rove’s lawyer to be disparaging Matt Cooper on the day before he testifies, do you think? They only know what one e-mail says and they have no idea what Cooper is going to say. Bizarre.

There’s more:

According to Luskin, Cooper originally called Rove — not the other way around — and said he was working on a story on welfare reform. After some conversation about that issue, Luskin said, Cooper changed the subject to the weapons of mass destruction issue, and that was when the two had the brief talk that became the subject of so much legal wrangling. According to Luskin, the fact that Rove did not call Cooper; that the original purpose of the call, as Cooper told Rove, was welfare reform; that only after Cooper brought the WMD issue up did Rove discuss Wilson — all are “indications that this was not a calculated effort by the White House to get this story out.”

“Look at the Cooper e-mail,” Luskin continues. “Karl speaks to him on double super secret background…I don’t think that you can read that e-mail and conclude that what Karl was trying to do was to get Cooper to publish the name of Wilson’s wife.”

Nor, says Luskin, was Rove trying to “out” a covert CIA agent or “smear” her husband. “What Karl was trying to do, in a very short conversation initiated by Cooper on another subject, was to warn Time away from publishing things that were going to be established as false.” Luskin points out that on the evening of July 11, 2003, just hours after the Rove-Cooper conversation, then-CIA Director George Tenet released a statement that undermined some of Wilson’s public assertions about his report. “Karl knew that that [Tenet] statement was in gestation,” says Luskin. “I think a fair reading of the e-mail was that he was trying to warn Cooper off from going out on a limb on [Wilson’s] allegations.”

Gosh, is it ever too bad that whoever talked to Bob Novak didn’t make it just as clear in their conversation (after they were done answering questions about welfare reform or maybe the latest news on stem cell research, of course) that they were only giving him this information to keep him from “going out on a limb.”

Old Bob must be getting senile because he went right out and wrote a whole damned column about it, mentioning senior white house officials and everything. Man I’ll bet whoever spoke to Bob is in the doghouse now, huh?

Here they were just trying to make sure the old duffer didn’t embarrass himself by writing any supportive columns about Wilson (which you know he was planning to do) and look what happened. Now everybody thinks just because they had a few casual conversations on the run with a couple of reporters (only to to warn them off, of course) that this was a calculated effort to get the story out. What are the odds that two such different reporters would both get the story wrong in essentially the same way? Talk about bad luck. Do they all have egg on their faces or what?

Looks to me as if Bob Novak was a rat bastard too. Will he go down with the ship?

Update: Via &y in the comments, Murray Waas, who seems to have some good sources on this matter, has an update today on Novak:

Columnist Robert Novak provided detailed accounts to federal prosecutors of his conversations with Bush administration officials who were sources for his controversial July 11, 2003 column identifying Valerie Plame as a clandestine CIA officer, according to attorneys familiar with the matter.

[…]

Novak had claimed to the investigators that the Bush administration officials with whom he spoke did not identify Plame as a covert operative, and that use of the word “operative” was his formulation and not theirs, according to those familiar with Novak’s accounts to the investigators.

White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove and at least two other Bush administration officials have told federal investigators that they had spoken to reporters about Plame, but that they did not know at the time that she was a covert operative with the CIA, the same sources told me.

And, as has now been widely reported, an email turned over last week by Time magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper to investigators shows that Cooper spoke to Rove just prior to Novak’s column. The notes indicate that Rove told him that Plame worked for the CIA, and that Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, obtained an assignment from the CIA, on her recommendation, to go to the African nation of Niger to investigate allegations that the then-Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein was attempting to covertly purchase uranium to build a nuclear weapon.

When Wilson made known that the Niger allegations were untrue, but were still cited by President Bush to make the case to go to war with Iraq, Rove and other administration officials mounted a campaign to discredit Wilson by claiming that he obtained the assignment only because of his wife.

[…]

Federal investigators have been skeptical of Novak’s assertions that he referred to Plame as a CIA “operative” due to his own error, instead of having been explicitly told that was the case by his sources, according to attorneys familiar with the criminal probe.

That skepticism has been one of several reasons that the special prosecutor has pressed so hard for the testimony of Time magazine’s Cooper and New York Times reporter Judith Miller.

[…]

Also of interest to investigators have been a series of telephone contacts between Novak and Rove, and other White House officials, in the days just after press reports first disclosed the existence of a federal criminal investigation as to who leaked Plame’s identity. Investigators have been concerned that Novak and his sources might have conceived or co-ordinated a cover story to disguise the nature of their conversations. That concern was a reason– although only one of many– that led prosecutors to press for the testimony of Cooper and Miller, sources said.

Lending credence to those suspicions was that a U.S. government official questioned by investigators said Novak specifically asked him whether Plame had some covert status with the CIA. The official told investigators that Novak appeared uncertain whether she was undercover or not. That account, on one hand, might lend credence to the claims by Rove and other Bush administration officials that they did not know Plame was a covert CIA officer. Conversely, however, the fact that Novak asked the question in the first place appeared to indicate that he might have indeed been told Plame was a covert operative, and was seeking confirmation of that fact.

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Call Me Talk Radio

…only in print.

Atrios says that certain people remain concerned that corporate entities or politicans will infiltrate the web and pour big money into it to influence politics. As if the amount of money that MSNBC is flushing down the toilet each night on Tucker Carlson isn’t pouring big money into television to influence politics. What, is Tucker an unbiased “journalist?”

And what do they plan to do about guys like Sean Hannity, who appears regularly at campaign rallies speaking on behalf of big shot republicans. Is he an activist subject to regulation on his web site, but a member of the media on his radio show?

It’s awfully hard to know where to draw these lines, isn’t it? But let’s not let that stop us. It makes perfect sense to draw it by regulating the web, the one place where there is at least a small chance that a regular person, or a group of citizens, can compete with the huge money that already dominates the media — which is exempted from regulation. Awesome, awesome logic. I guess we can content ourselves with calling in to Rush and hoping he lets us on the air.

After all, someday some rich person might find a way to influence the political system by putting lots on money into a web site somewhere that will be so grand that all the other voices are drowned out by its incredible incredibleness. I can hardly wait. Will it dispense cash? Blow jobs? Because that’s what it’s going to take to make “production values” be the difference on the internet. God speed to the person who figures out how to make that work. I suspect he or she will not waste his or her time on political talk, however. There are much bigger fish to fry once you crack that nut.

Truly, this is an asinine debate.

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Beat Me Hurt Me

For all those who are still breathless with appreciation at the White House press corpses performance yesterday, a commenter reminded me of this incident as an illustration of how the White House and the Press Corps normally interact. I remember writing about it at the time:

The story not told was that the president of the United States was acting like a 15 year old trash talking punk in the above mentioned restaurant and refused repeatedly to answer any of the questions posed by reporters by throwing his weight around and making stupid, juvenile jokes for about 15 minutes.

Maybe he was drunk, I don’t know. But he was certainly an asshole to David Gregory and Terry Moran, the two most tenacious questioners yesterday. In that little show of manhood, he’s calling both reporters “Stretch,” which he apparently think is hilarious:

Remarks by the President to the Press Pool
Nothin’ Fancy Cafe
Roswell, New Mexico

11:25 A.M. MST

THE PRESIDENT: I need some ribs.

Q Mr. President, how are you?

THE PRESIDENT: I’m hungry and I’m going to order some ribs.

Q What would you like?

THE PRESIDENT: Whatever you think I’d like.

Q Sir, on homeland security, critics would say you simply haven’t spent enough to keep the country secure.

THE PRESIDENT: My job is to secure the homeland and that’s exactly what we’re going to do. But I’m here to take somebody’s order. That would be you, Stretch — what would you like? Put some of your high-priced money right here to try to help the local economy. You get paid a lot of money, you ought to be buying some food here. It’s part of how the economy grows. You’ve got plenty of money in your pocket, and when you spend it, it drives the economy forward. So what would you like to eat?

Q Right behind you, whatever you order.

THE PRESIDENT: I’m ordering ribs. David, do you need a rib?

Q But Mr. President —

THE PRESIDENT: Stretch, thank you, this is not a press conference. This is my chance to help this lady put some money in her pocket. Let me explain how the economy works. When you spend money to buy food it helps this lady’s business. It makes it more likely somebody is going to find work. So instead of asking questions, answer mine: are you going to buy some food?

Q Yes.

THE PRESIDENT: Okay, good. What would you like?

Q Ribs.

THE PRESIDENT: Ribs? Good. Let’s order up some ribs.

Q What do you think of the democratic field, sir?

THE PRESIDENT: See, his job is to ask questions, he thinks my job is to answer every question he asks. I’m here to help this restaurant by buying some food. Terry, would you like something?

Q An answer.

Q Can we buy some questions?

THE PRESIDENT: Obviously these people — they make a lot of money and they’re not going to spend much. I’m not saying they’re overpaid, they’re just not spending any money.

Q Do you think it’s all going to come down to national security, sir, this election?

THE PRESIDENT: One of the things David does, he asks a lot of questions, and they’re good, generally.

You should have seen the footage. It was unbelievable. Gregory and Moran looked like a couple of idiots. I’m sure they remember.

And then there was this one when Gregory addressed a question to Jacques Chirac in French:

NBC’s David Gregory, unwisely pushing Bush to explain “why it is you think there are such strong sentiments in Europe against you and your administration,” had the bad taste to ask President Chirac—in French, of all languages—if he also wanted to comment.

“Very good,” shot back a very petulant Bush, “The guy memorizes four words, and he plays like he’s intercontinental.”

When Gregory offered to go on in French, Bush was determined to squelch the bilingual upstart: “I’m impressed—que bueno. Now I’m literate in two languages.” At the end of the press conference, the President of the United States called to Gregory: “As soon as you get in front of a camera, you start showing off.”

Richard Reeves reported:

It turned out that what set him off was Gregory’s turning to the French leader. Later Bush told Chirac: “I’ll call on the Americans.”

What Gregory said later was: “Well, that’s it for my career.”

Bush owns all the Americans, you see. It’s the ownership society thing.

If these guys are turning on lil’ Scotty McClellan now that Rove is injured and bleeding that’s nice. But let’s not kid ourselves that they haven’t allowed themselves to be treated like freshmen frat pledges for the last four and half years. It hasn’t been pretty to watch.

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Focus

For the last couple of days I’ve been saying that the GOP’s new excuse is that Karl Rove was just setting the record straight about that lyin’ Joe Wilson. Deborah Orrin prattled about it last night on Hardball. Here are the official RNC talking points and my suggested answers::

Cooper’s Own Email Claims Rove Warned Of Potential Inaccuracies In Wilson Information:

“[Time Reporter Matt] Cooper Wrote That Rove Offered Him A ‘Big Warning’ Not To ‘Get Too Far Out On Wilson.’ Rove Told Cooper That Wilson’s Trip Had Not Been Authorized By ‘DCIA’ – CIA Director George Tenet – Or Vice President Dick Cheney.” (Michael Isikoff, “Matt Cooper’s Source,” Newsweek, 7/18/05)

Inaccuracies? You mean Bush’s 16 words in the SOTU were right after all? Wow.

Wilson Falsely Claimed That It Was Vice President Cheney Who Sent Him To Niger, But The Vice President Has Said He Never Met Him And Didn’t Know Who Sent Him:

Wilson Says He Traveled To Niger At CIA Request To Help Provide Response To Vice President’s Office. “In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney’s office had questions about a particular intelligence report. … The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president’s office.” (Joseph C. Wilson, Op-Ed, “What I Didn’t Find In Africa,” The New York Times, 7/6/03)

* Joe Wilson: “What They Did, What The Office Of The Vice President Did, And, In Fact, I Believe Now From Mr. Libby’s Statement, It Was Probably The Vice President Himself …” (CNN’s “Late Edition,” 8/3/03)

Vice President Cheney: “I Don’t Know Joe Wilson. I’ve Never Met Joe Wilson. … And Joe Wilson – I Don’t [Know] Who Sent Joe Wilson. He Never Submitted A Report That I Ever Saw When He Came Back.” (NBC’s “Meet The Press,” 9/14/03)

CIA Director George Tenet: “In An Effort To Inquire About Certain Reports Involving Niger, CIA’s Counter-Proliferation Experts, On Their Own Initiative, Asked An Individual With Ties To The Region To Make A Visit To See What He Could Learn.” (Central Intelligence Agency, “Statement By George J. Tenet, Director Of Central Intelligence,” Press Release, 7/11/03)

* Tenet: “Because This Report, In Our View, Did Not Resolve Whether Iraq Was Or Was Not Seeking Uranium From Abroad, It Was Given A Normal And Wide Distribution, But We Did Not Brief It To The President, Vice-President Or Other Senior Administration Officials.” (Central Intelligence Agency, “Statement By George J. Tenet, Director Of Central Intelligence,” Press Release, 7/11/03)

So, because Wilson says that he was told Cheney had requested a report and Cheney says he never met Wilson, that means that Joseph Wilson’s report was wrong?

Why did the White House keep saying that there were WMD in Iraq when there haven’t been any found? Was it Joe Wilson who got everything wrong or was it the administration?

Wilson Denied His Wife Suggested He Travel To Niger, But Documentation Showed She Proposed His Name:

Wilson Claims His Wife Did Not Suggest He Travel To Niger To Investigate Reports Of Uranium Deal; Instead, Wilson Claims It Came Out Of Meeting With CIA To Discuss Report. CNN’S WOLF BLITZER: “Among other things, you had always said, always maintained, still maintain your wife, Valerie Plame, a CIA officer, had nothing to do with the decision to send to you Niger to inspect reports that uranium might be sold from Niger to Iraq. … Did Valerie Plame, your wife, come up with the idea to send you to Niger?” JOE WILSON: “No. My wife served as a conduit, as I put in my book. When her supervisors asked her to contact me for the purposes of coming into the CIA to discuss all the issues surrounding this allegation of Niger selling uranium to Iraq.” (CNN’s “Lade Edition,” 7/18/04)

* But Senate Select Committee On Intelligence Received Not Only Testimony But Actual Documentation Indicating Wilson’s Wife Proposed Him For Trip. “Some [CIA Counterproliferation Division, or CPD,] officials could not recall how the office decided to contact the former ambassador, however, interviews and documents provided to the Committee indicate that his wife, a CPD employee, suggested his name for the trip. The CPD reports officer told Committee staff that the former ambassador’s wife ‘offered up his name’ and a memorandum to the Deputy Chief of the CPD on February 12, 2002, from the former ambassador’s wife says, ‘my husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.’” (Select Committee On Intelligence, “Report On The U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments On Iraq,” U.S. Senate, 7/7/04)

So the white house revealed that Valerie Plame was an undercover Cia agent working in the field of weapons of mass destruction because they thought she sent her husband on the trip. Was that really good judgment do you think? And, anyway, does this mean that Saddam did try to buy uranium after all? What did his wife sending him have to do with that anyway?

Wilson’s Report On Niger Had “Thin” Evidence And Did Not Change Conclusions Of Analysts And Other Reports:

Officials Said Evidence Was “Thin” And His “Homework Was Shoddy.” “In the days after Wilson’s essay appeared, government officials began to steer reporters away from Wilson’s conclusions, raising questions about his veracity and the agency’s reasons for sending him in the first place. They told reporters that Wilson’s evidence was thin, said his homework was shoddy and suggested that he had been sent to Niger by the CIA only because his wife had nominated him for the job.” (Michael Duffy, “Leaking With A Vengeance,” Time, 10/13/03)

Senate Select Committee On Intelligence Unanimous Report: “Conclusion 13. The Report On The Former Ambassador’s Trip To Niger, Disseminated In March 2002, Did Not Change Any Analysts’ Assessments Of The Iraq-Niger Uranium Deal.” (Senate Select Committee On Intelligence, “Report On The U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Assessments On Iraq, 7/7/04)

* “For Most Analysts, The Information In The Report Lent More Credibility To The Original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Report On The Uranium Deal, But State Department Bureau Of Intelligence And Research (IN) Analysts Believed That The Report Supported Their Assessments That Niger Was Unlikely To Be Willing Or Able To Sell Uranium.” (Senate Select Committee On Intelligence, “Report On The U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Assessments On Iraq, 7/7/04)

CIA Said Wilson’s Findings Did Not Resolve The Issue. “Because [Wilson’s] report, in our view, did not resolve whether Iraq was or was not seeking uranium from abroad, it was given a normal and wide distribution, but we did not brief it to the president, vice president or other senior administration officials. We also had to consider that the former Nigerien officials knew that what they were saying would reach the U.S. government and that this might have influenced what they said.” (Central Intelligence Agency, “Statement By George J. Tenet, Director Of Central Intelligence,” Press Release 7/11/03)

The Butler Report Claimed That The President’s State Of the Union Statement On Uranium From Africa, “Was Well-Founded.” “We conclude that, on the basis of the intelligence assessments at the time, covering both Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the statements on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa in the Government’s dossier, and by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons, were well-founded. By extension, we conclude also that the statement in President Bush’s State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003 that: ‘The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.’ was well-founded.” (The Rt. Hon. The Lord Butler Of Brockwell, “Review Of Intelligence, On Weapons Of Mass Destruction,” 7/14/04

)

Aha. So now we’re getting somewhere. So Saddam was trying to buy that uranium. Wasn’t he? For his nuclear program. That doesn’t exist.

Didn’t I hear something about the documents being forgeries and the administration admitting that they shouldn’t have included the “16 words” in the SOTU speech? Are you taking that all back now? Wilson’s report was wrong but it was right?

Sens. Pat Roberts (R-KS), Kit Bond (R-MO) And Orrin Hatch (R-UT) All Stated, “On At Least Two Occasions [Wilson] Admitted That He Had No Direct Knowledge To Support Some Of His Claims And That He Was Drawing On Either Unrelated Past Experiences Or No Information At All.” (Select Committee On Intelligence, “Additional Views Of Chairman Pat Roberts, Joined By Senator Christopher S. Bond And Senator Orrin G. Hatch; Report On The U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments On Iraq,” U.S. Senate, 7/7/04)

* “The Former Ambassador, Either By Design Or Through Ignorance, Gave The American People And, For That Matter, The World A Version Of Events That Was Inaccurate, Unsubstantiated, And Misleading.” (Select Committee On Intelligence, “Additional Views Of Chairman Pat Roberts, Joined By Senator Christopher S. Bond And Senator Orrin G. Hatch; Report On The U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments On Iraq,” U.S. Senate, 7/7/04)

* “[J]oe Wilson Told Anyone Who Would Listen That The President Had Lied To The American People, That The Vice President Had Lied And That He Had ‘Debunked’ The Claim That Iraq Was Seeking Uranium From Africa … Not Only Did He NOT ‘Debunk’ The Claim, He Actually Gave Some Intelligence Analysts Even More Reason To Believe That It May Be True.” (Select Committee On Intelligence, “Additional Views Of Chairman Pat Roberts, Joined By Senator Christopher S. Bond And Senator Orrin G. Hatch; Report On The U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments On Iraq,” U.S. Senate, 7/7/04)

Oh, That must be the bipartisan commission everybody’s quoting. When did Bond, Hatch or Roberts become a Democrat?

I’m actually only half kidding on this. If the talkers would think about it, the best thing they can do is constantly shift this back to the very salient fact that what Wilson said was true. Wilson said Saddam didn’t try to buy the uranium and that he (Wilson) told the CIA he didn’t try to buy the uranium. And he wasn’t the only one who disbelieved the story. So did George Tenet hiumself who insisted it be pulled from Bush’s first big speech in Cincinnatti. Then, months later, after even more evidence was available that it was bullshit, Bush went ahead said Saddam DID try to buy the uranium in the big State of the Union speech. He was forced to retract that statement a couple months later. Wilson was right.

All the rest of this is inside baseball mumbo jumbo designed to discredit Wilson after the fact because he criticized the administration.

Let’s not forget. What Wilson criticized the administration for was putting the Niger uranium business into the State of the Union speech when he knew they were aware that it was bullshit. And let’s not forget — it was bullshit.

And where are those WMD, anyway?

Here is an informative article on the commission in Wikipedia. It’s being challenged for neutrality by wingnuts because, as Rob Cordry says, “The facts are biased, Jon.”

Just in case anyone’s wondering about the status of this bipartisan commission’s look at whether the administration may have cooked the intelligence, there’s this:

At the time of the report’s release (July 9, 2004), Democratic members of the committee expressed the hope that “phase two” of the investigation, which was to include an assessment of how the Iraqi WMD intelligence was used by senior policymakers, would be completed quickly. Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-KS) said of phase two, “It is a priority. I made my commitment and it will get done.”

On March 10, 2005, during a question-and-answer session after a speech he had given at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Senator Roberts said of the failure to complete phase two, “[T]hat is basically on the back burner.” Senator John D. Rockefeller (D-WV), vice chairman of the Committee, made a statement later that day in which he said, “The Chairman agreed to this investigation and I fully expect him to fulfill his commitment… While the completion of phase two is long overdue, the committee has continued this important work, and I expect that we will finish the review in the very near future.”

In a statement regarding the release of the report of the presidential WMD commission on March 31, 2005, Senator Roberts wrote, “I don’t think there should be any doubt that we have now heard it all regarding prewar intelligence. I think that it would be a monumental waste of time to replow this ground any further.”

On April 10, 2005, Senators Roberts and Rockefeller appeared together on NBC’s Meet the Press program. In repsonse to a question about the completion of phase two of the investigation, Roberts said, “I’m perfectly willing to do it, and that’s what we agreed to do, and that door is still open. And I don’t want to quarrel with Jay, because we both agreed that we would get it done. But we do have–we have Ambassador Negroponte next week, we have General Mike Hayden next week. We have other hot-spot hearings or other things going on that are very important.”

Moderator Tim Russert then asked Senator Rockefeller if he believed phase two would be completed, and he replied, “I hope so. Pat and I have agreed to do it. We’ve shaken hands on it, and we agreed to do it after the elections so it wouldn’t be any sort of sense of a political attack. I mean that was my view; it shouldn’t be viewed that way.”

As of July, 2005, phase two of the Committee’s investigation had not yet been completed.

My Bad

Bob Somerby takes John Aravosis and me to task today for some good reasons. He says:

Liberals and Dems simply can’t afford to play the dim games of the kooky-con right. But all across the liberal web, we find the virus spreading—a virus in which every bit of reasoning, no matter how daft, is accepted as seminal brilliance as long as it “proves” King Karl’s guilt. Yesterday, we were amazed when the sagacious Digby praised this post from John Aravosis:

ARAVOSIS (7/11/05): Perhaps it’s legally relevant if Rove “knew” Plame was undercover or not, but it’s not relevant in terms of him keeping his job. Rove intentionally outed a CIA agent working on WMD, it is irrelevant whether he did or didn’t know if she was an undercover agent. First off, he knew she wasn’t THAT public about her identity or there’d have been no need to “out” here—everyone would have known her already.

Aravosis makes some excellent points in his longer post. But that paragraph, which Digby featured, makes almost no sense at all. The last sentence is completely absurd. The second sentence isn’t much better.

The point I was making, and that I think Aravosis was making, is really captured in the first sentence: “It doesn’t matter if Rove ‘knew’ Plame was undercover or not, it’s not relevant in terms of him keeping his job.” If I had it to do over again I would leave it at that.

The issue I was concerned with was that political and legal culpability aren’t the same thing, not so much that King Karl was guilty of outing Plame. The newsweak article proved that Rove disclosed to a reporter on deep backround that Joseph Wilson’s wife was with the CIA, working on weapons of mass destruction. That was a reckless thing for a top White House official to do if he did not know her status — and possibly illegal if he did. We don’t know if he committed a crime, but we do know that what he did was at least negligent. Valerie Plame WAS an undercover operative whose cover was blown when white house officials leaked the fact that she worked with the CIA to the press. He should resign for having done that, regardless of his motives or knowledge of her undercover status. It’s the act, not the intent, that should govern whether he remains in the White House with a top security clearance.

I admit that John’s paragraph was not the clearest thing he’s ever written, or that I ever endorsed. I suspect that we were both a little bit overexcited and mentally fatigued. (Aravosis at least has the excuse that he’d been crammed like a sardine on airplanes all week — I’m just overdosing on schaudenfreude.) The larger point, however, remains valid.

But Somerby’s not an ass for pointing this out. It’s what he does. If you can’t take the heat, y’know…

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“A” Game

In the same NY Times article refenced below, there’s this:

“Knowing Rove, he’s still having eight different policy meetings and sticking to his game plan,” said one veteran Republican strategist in Washington who often works with the White House. “But this issue now is looming, and as they peel away another layer of the onion, there’s a lot of consternation. Rove needs to be on his A game now, not huddled with lawyers and press people.”

A senior Congressional Republican aide said most members of Congress were still waiting to learn more about Mr. Rove’s involvement and to assess whether more disclosures about his role were likely.

“The only fear here is where does this go,” the aide said. “We can’t know.”

Getting Rove off his A game is almost worth as much as getting him out. He’s man known for his surly temperament in the best of times and this has been a bad second term so far for the GOP maestro. Social Security, his “legacy” project, is dead in the water. Iraq is a quagmire. Schiavo was a huge mistake and the SCOTUS battles ahead need his personal attention — the religious right is his very special constituency. Bush’s ratings are in the toilet. This, he did not need.

So, we will see whether The Magician is capable of handling the spotlight and all the pressure — at a time when you can be sure that his little Prince is very, very unhappy with his performance. Junior may remain loyal, but never think that it has to do with real personal loyalty. It has to do with never being willing to admit to a mistake. Bush will make Karl’s life a living hell. Do you think he really likes the guy who’s called “Bush’s Brain?” Does Karl strike anyone as a “W” kinda guy?

No, Karl is now under the worst kind of pressure imaginable. We’re not going to see his “A” game.

And as for “where does this go?” I think it’s time to start asking why George W. Bush, from the very beginning of this saga, has been saying things like “he’ll be taken care of” instead of “he’ll be fired.” His careful statements strong imply that he’s known from the start that someone important to him was the leaker.Otherwise, he would do his cowboy routine and issue a steely eyed threat (making Peggy Noonan moan in ecstacy.) If so, the question would be, did Rove confess after the fact or was Bush in on it from the beginning? WDTPKAWDHKI.

Michael Isikoff’s hinting yesterday about a classified file being the source of the leak is certainly tantalizing in that regard.

ISIKOFF: But the problem that people in the White House, Rove among them, may have is how did they know that Valerie Plame, or Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA? What we do know is there was a classified State Department report that said this, that was taken by Secretary of State Powell with him on the trip to Africa that President Bush was then on, and many senior White House aides were on.

That classified State Department report appears to have been — or may well have been the source for the information that Rove and others were then dishing out to reporters. And if that’s the case, there still may be — we don’t know yet, but there still may be an instance where classified information was provided to reporters.

The Grand Jury subpoenaed the phone records of Air Force One during that period. Who knows what they found? But if they found something, it’s come quite close to Colin Powell — and Bush himself. Air Force One isn’t that big.

Here’s the Newsweak story from last year about Powell’s grand jury appearance:

Powell’s appearance on July 16 is the latest sign the probe being conducted by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is highly active and broader than has been publicly known. Sources close to the case say prosecutors were interested in discussions Powell had while with President George W. Bush on a trip to Africa in July 2003, just before Plame’s identity was leaked to columnist Robert Novak. A senior State Department official confirmed that, while on the trip, Powell had a department intelligence report on whether Iraq had sought uranium from Niger—a claim Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson, discounted after a trip to Niger on behalf of the CIA. The report stated that Wilson’s wife had attended a meeting at the CIA where the decision was made to send Wilson to Niger, but it did not mention her last name or undercover status. At the time, White House officials were seeking to discredit Wilson, who had become a public critic of the Bush administration. There’s no indication Powell is a subject of the probe; the department official said the secretary never talked to Novak about the Plame matter.

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Dumb Defense #236

In today’s NY Times piece, there’s this, which I’ve heard bandied about quite a bit in the right blogosphere:

There has been some dispute, moreover, about just how secret a secret agent Ms. Wilson was.

“She had a desk job in Langley,” said Ms. Toensing, who also signed the supporting brief in the appeals court, referring to the C.I.A.’s headquarters. “When you want someone in deep cover, they don’t go back and forth to Langley.”

It is highly doubtful that the special prosecutor would convene a grand jury and investigate the White House for two years without first determining whether there was any potential crime to investigate since determining her status was the easiest element of the case — finding out who did it and whether they knew she was undercover, which is obviously what he’s been doing, is the difficult part. It’s hard to believe that he’d send a journalist to jail and interview the president only to come up later and admit she wasn’t actually an undercover agent after all, so fuggedaboudit. And it’s pretty clear that the judges who have reviewed the classified documents in the contempt cases agree, by the way. They all say the case concerns a breach of national security.

One might also assume that since the CIA sent the damn referral to the justice department that they considered her undercover too! Who else is going to make that determination — Highpockets?

By the way, has there ever been a scandal in which Republican shill Victoria Toensing is not a media ready expert on the underlying crime?

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Stonewall Twins

Scott:

I am well aware of what was said previously. I remember well what was said previously. And at some point I look forward to talking about it. But until the investigation is complete, I’m just not going to do that.

Bob:

And unfortunately, as somebody who likes to write, I’d like to say a lot about the case, but because of my attorney’s advice I can’t. But I will. And there might be some surprising things.

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Patsies

I am a big fan of Garance Franke-Ruta, but I think this is funny:

If there is one thing that reporters hate, it’s being played for patsies. McClellan has publicly humiliated some of the most prominent reporters in the country by persistently feeding them information that has now been revealed to be false, and I’m pretty darn sure that they are not going to grant him any favors and extend him the benefit of the doubt in the future.

I’m glad to know that they feel huniliated by being persistently fed information that has been revealed to be false, but it certainly isn’t unprecedented. It’s not unprecedented by a long shot. In fact, they have been just such patsies for years.

I suspect that the real reason they acted up today is they have been treated like shit by George W Bush’s administration and one of their own is sitting in jail. That’s not the same thing. But I’ll take it.

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