Finally, it’s not just honesty where Bush is taking a hit. Only 50 percent of those polled gave him high ratings for being easygoing and likeable, down from 57 in January; 43 percent gave him high ratings for being smart, down from 50; 40 percent gave him high ratings for being compassionate enough to understand average people, down from 47; and only 29 percent gave him high ratings for being willing to work with people whose viewpoints are different from his own, down from 33.
I’m not the greatest judge in the world because I’ve always thought he was a dominating, unlikeable, dumb, arrogant intolerant asshole. A bunch oif people thought he’d be fun to hang around with, though, and it’s a big reason why he got re-elected. Without his personal popularity, what has he really got?
The good news is that this should finally kill off the “enormously popular” president meme that refused to die. I’m sure Andrea Mitchell and Tim Russert are in mourning today.
It’s nice to be able to fit another piece into the Rovegate puzzle. This Kos diary by PollyUSA is an excellent rundown of the original source of the Plame information — a classified state department document from 2002 that was then circulated all over Washington after Novak’s column ran. Clearly, most people following the case closely already know this because it’s all in the public record. I hadn’t connected the dots even though I’ve written about this document in a couple of different contexts.
In a nutshell:
There is a leaked classified state department document from 2002 in play in this case. It is widely considered to be the likely source of the information that Plame worked for the CIA.
It says that Valerie Plame recommended her husband for the job.
It was leaked to a bunch of news organizations during 2003 and is a piece of evidence in the Senate commission report.
This is the same document that was on the Africa trip with Colin Powell and the president.
The CIA has publicly disputed the accuracy of the memo, saying that the author of the memo could not have been at the meeting and therefore didn’t know what he was talking about.
PollyUSA rounded up a number of newpaper articles that discussed this document but here are just a couple of them:
An internal government memo addresses some of the mysteries at the center of the White House leak investigation and could help investigators in the search for who disclosed the identity of a Central Intelligence Agency operative, according to two people familiar with the memo.
The memo, prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel, details a meeting in early 2002 where CIA officer Valerie Plame and other intelligence officials gathered to brainstorm about how to verify reports that Iraq had sought uranium yellowcake from Niger.
Sources said the CIA is angry about the circulation of a still-classified document to conservative news outlets suggesting Plame had a role in arranging her husband’s trip to Africa for the CIA. The document, written by a State Department official who works for its Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), describes a meeting at the CIA where the Niger trip by Wilson was discussed, said a senior administration official who has seen it.
It is a crime to leak classified information, so this may well be an element of Fitzgerald’s case. In an interesting sidenote, it was this document that JD Guckert referenced when he interviewed Wilson and it got him a visit from the FBI. (After preening about confidential sources for a while, Guckert eventually said that he’d read about the document in the Wall Street Journal.)His story confirms that the FBI was following up on this document and that means it probably was still classified when Guckert wrote about it in October 2003, however.
I have a couple of thoughts about this.
In order to stay out of legal and political trouble, members of Bush administration simply have to claim that they didn’t know Valerie Plame was undercover. So, if this classified report is the source of the leak and it only says “Wilson’s wife suggested he go on the mission” with no mention of her status, then it appears that not one person who saw that document — whether it was Colin Powell on Air Force One or whether it was Cheney and Libby with the entire Iraq Group holding their hand towels in the mens room —– not one bothered to raise a flag about this CIA “employee’s” status before Rove et al blabbed the story all over town. If they are innocent of purposefully outing a CIA Agent this is what we must believe.
I don’t have a top security clearance and I don’t work in Washington and I am as far out of the war planning for this country as you can get. Yet I know that I would have wondered whether it might be a matter of national security to tell the press that someone was a CIA employee. Anybody who watches “Alias” would know that for gawd’s sake. We are supposed to believe that top presidential advisors took the information from one state department document and ran with it without ever checking the details.
Could be. Nobody ever thought the president would personally authorize the break in of the Democratic National Committee, but he did.
Second, the CIA has disputed the characterization of Plame’s role in getting her husband the assignment. I don’t know or care whether she did or not — it’s a red herring. But nonetheless, it’s worth pointing out that is has been challenged by the CIA from the beginning. From Newsday July 22, 2003:
A senior intelligence official confirmed that Plame was a Directorate of Operations undercover officer who worked “alongside” the operations officers who asked her husband to travel to Niger.
But he said she did not recommend her husband to undertake the Niger assignment. “They [the officers who did ask Wilson to check the uranium story] were aware of who she was married to, which is not surprising,” he said. “There are people elsewhere in government who are trying to make her look like she was the one who was cooking this up, for some reason,” he said. “I can’t figure out what it could be.”
I think we’ve figured it out.
But what’s interesting about that is that this classified document that people consider the source of the leak was written in 2002. I’m assuming it was part of a report on what Wilson’s findings, although I have no proof of that. And I don’t know who wrote this memo (although it’s certain that some members of the press do, since they’ve seen it) but he or she has been described as an analyst at the INR — the state dept intelligence division. I have to wonder what was the purpose of putting in this little tid-bit about Plame in the first place?
It would be nice to know who wrote it if only to prove or disprove the speculation that Bolton’s cabal was involved. If he was, then this is a whole new ballgame. I would be very tempted to think that Bolton had spiked Wilson’s report from the get. On the other hand, Bolton and his minions apparently have not been called to the Grand Jury so perhaps that’s unlikely. If I had to guess, I’d say this tid-bit about Wilson’s wife was a throw away line that caught Rove and Libby’s attention as a possible way to feminize Wilson.
I’m speculating that when they got wind that Wilson was going to spill the beans they looked for dirt.(Wilson says he was told that when the yellowcake story was falling apart in March the VP’s office ordered a “work-up” on him.)This classified state department document contained the information that Wilson’s wife got him the job. The character assassins decided that this was their weapon — Wilson’s CIA employee wife got him the job for either nepotistic, partisan or treasonous reasons. Maybe something else. (Maybe all three if you ask John Gibson.) And the optics of it were that Wilson was an effeminate loser whose wife had to find work for him (“little wifey got it for him.”) It sure sounds like a Rove special.
And at the end of the day, the simple truth remains: they either knew she was undercover and outed her with malice aforethought or they were so stupid and sloppy that they never bothered to find out what her status was. Which explains why they are so intent upon making people believe that Plame wasn’t undercover. It’s their only decent defense.
I’m also reminded today of Murray Waas’ account of Roves testimony to the FBI:
But Rove also adamantly insisted to the FBI that he was not the administration official who leaked the information that Plame was a covert CIA operative to conservative columnist Robert Novak last July. Rather, Rove insisted, he had only circulated information about Plame after it had appeared in Novak’s column. He also told the FBI, the same sources said, that circulating the information was a legitimate means to counter what he claimed was politically motivated criticism of the Bush administration by Plame’s husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.
Rove and other White House officials described to the FBI what sources characterized as an aggressive campaign to discredit Wilson through the leaking and disseminating of derogatory information regarding him and his wife to the press, utilizing proxies such as conservative interest groups and the Republican National Committee to achieve those ends, and distributing talking points to allies of the administration on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. Rove is said to have named at least six other administration officials who were involved in the effort to discredit Wilson.
Everytime I read that I’m amazed. If that is true it is a truly damning confession of character assassination by the man who is the president’s most trusted advisor. Regardless of any actual crime being committed, I think that if the American people knew this a large majority would demand that Rove be dismissed. He basically admits that smearing opponents is something he does with the help of the entire Republican infrastructure. We know this stuff exists in politics, some on both sides. But to insist it’s “legitimate” and admit freely that you do it is something else.
But I mention it here because that passage contains something that may or may not be legally problematic for Rove. It depends upon his precise words, which we don’t have:
Rove insisted, he had only circulated information about Plame after it had appeared in Novak’s column.
I suppose it depends on what the definition of “circulate” is, if he even used that word at all. But, generally speaking, if he insisted that he hadn’t been talking about Plame before Novak’s column, he lied to the FBI. We know he spoke with Cooper.
And then there’s the classified document being passed around to every wingnut in town.
Rove is in an unpleasant box. He’s claimed that his aggressive smear campaign to to leak and disseminate derogatory information about Bush’s critics through partisan channels was completely legitimate — but that he didn’t know that Plame was undercover or that this document was classified. I hope for his sake that’s not actually his defense. I’ve long said he’s no genius, but nobody will believe he’s that stupid. I doubt Patrick Fitzgerald is that stupid either.
It will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog to find that I’m more than a little glad to finally see General Geoffrey Miller finally exposed for the sadistic incompetent that he is — even a little bit. Apparently, he might be “reprimanded” for his sadistic tactics at Gitmo. But maybe not. I sure hope it doesn’t go that far because I’m sure it would really, really hurt his feelings. Testimony today before the Senate Armed Services Committee says that practices condoned by Miller (and approved by the pentagon) at Gitmo went too far:
Investigators described their findings before the Senate Armed Services Commttee Wednesday. They were looking into allegations by FBI agents who say they witnessed abusive interrogation techniques at the Guantanamo prison for terrorist suspects.
The chief investigator, Air Force Lt. Gen. Randall M. Schmidt, described the interrogation techniques used on Mohamed al-Qahtani, a Saudi who was captured in December 2001 along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
It was learned later that he had tried to enter the U.S. in August 2001 but was turned away by an immigration agent at the Orlando, Fla., airport. Mohamed Atta, ringleader of the Sept. 11 hijackers, was in the airport at the same time, officials have said.
Schmidt said that to get him to talk, interrogators told him his mother and sisters were whores, forced him to wear a bra, forced him to wear a thong on his head, told him he was homosexual and said that other prisoners knew it. They also forced him to dance with a male interrogator, Schmidt added, and subjected him to strip searches with no security value, threatened him with dogs, forced him to stand naked in front of women and forced him onto a leash, to act like a dog.
Still, he said, “No torture occurred.”
He was kept in solitary confinement for 160 days. Interrogations went on for 18 to 20 hours a day, for 48 out of 54 days. Apparently, however, this wasn’t torture because “torture involves inflicting physical pain or withholding food, water or medical care, none of which took place.”
Well, sure. Being forcibly “strip-searched” is a walk in the park. I would imagine that anybody who is captured by the enemy ought to be mighty careful going forward. If this is true, guards putting their fingers in orifices to break them isn’t actually torture. In fact, under this definition, sexual assault may not be torture at all since it might not feature the appropriate level of physical pain.
There is one teensy little problem with this AP story, however:
Miller, a subject of criticism by human rights groups, took command of the prison camp at Guantanamo in late 2002 with a mandate to get more and better information from prisoners. He later went to Iraq to oversee detainee operations there. He is now stationed at the Pentagon in a position unrelated to prisoners.
True. Except he was the guy who was sent to Abu Ghraib with the express orders to use his fabulous Gitmo techniques on Iraqis, who at the time, nobody was considering terrorists. We know what happened after he got there. It’s a fairly significant part of this story, I would think. Expecially since at least half of the techniques described in this report were the exact same “abuses” perpetrated by the low life bad apples on the night shift at Abu Ghriab! We’ve got pictures, ferchristsakes, doesn’t anybody remember that? How in the hell did Lynde and her friends just happen to come up with exactly the same college hijinks that were used on a top level prisoner in Gitmo???
We’re told that these techniques eventually resulted in the “20th hijacker” offering “useful” information. Perhaps. But I have to reserve judgement since virtually everyone involved has been lying their asses off from the beginning. Especially that sadist Geoffrey D Ripper, the artillery officer turned interrogation expert, who will undoubtedly skate on this whole thing.
Too bad about America’s reputation, though. It sure does make it tough to see the moral clarity through all the whitewash.
For the last year or so, Matt has been a subpoenaed witness in a grand jury investigation.I advised him and he accepted the advice that he should not have private conversations with other people who may be witnesses in the grand jury proceeding. I was concerned about the perception. I was concerned about what Mr. Fitzgerald might think. And so it was on my advice that he did not personally contact his source.
For me to contact Mr. Rove’s lawyer at the time, prior to the time that Mr. Rove had been identified as Matt’s source, would have actually been a breach of confidentiality. My conversation with Mr. Rove was not privileged and would not have been privileged — with Mr. Rove’s attorney.
There was no indication that we had that Mr. Rove or his lawyer were interested in receiving such a request. And it was really only in the last few days, when Mr. Luskin started making some of his comments, especially the one that I just quoted to you that was in the Wall Street Journal that led us to feel that we were on firm footing picking up the phone and calling and saying, “Based on your public comments, we would ask for an express and personal…,” and that’s what we did.
Rove could have made it clear, though legal channels, during the solid year that Fitzgerald was litigating this, that he didn’t expect Cooper to keep his confidence, if that’s what he was doing. He obviously knew that there was a battle royale going on between Time magazine and the special prosecutor and he knew that he’d spoken to Cooper. He could have let it be known that if Cooper was going to all this trouble over him, he needn’t bother.
Rove’s lawyer has been bloviating all week — and the RNC shills are repeating it like a mantra — that Rove had waived the privilege long ago and had nothing to hide. But he was willing, apparently, to let Cooper go to jail without lifting a finger to clarify that fact. I wouldn’t call that “fully cooperating with the investigation,” which is what both Scotty and Junior have been emphasizing is the prime directive.
He let Fitzgerald spend millions of taxpayer dollars to get Cooper to testify. He certainly had no legal obligation to help. But his boss, the president, did say that he wanted his staff to fully cooperate. Rove knew very well that Cooper was way out on a limb, and it was probably because of him, and he said nothing. And now he’s acting like he was a big hero.
He should be fired for that too. And asked to pay back the money that was spent by the prosecutor getting Cooper and TIME to reveal their source when all Rove had to do was make it clear through his lawyer that if Cooper was holding out because of him, he didn’t need to.
I think the RNC has made a mistake in going back into the original Wilson smear. Chris Matthews just showed footage of Cheney on Press The Meat. He was talking about how he’d personally been interested in the Niger story. It seems to back up Wilson. And the last thing they want is to have Cheney’s mug all over this story.
They also are making a mistake by pounding the fact that the entire leadership of the Democratic party including Kerry and Clinton are calling for Rove to resign. Mehlman even seemed a little gobsmacked by it. The problem is that almost everybody in the country believes that Democrats are the last people on the planet to go out on a limb. Without realizing it, Mehlman is being hoist by his own petard. Somebody just turned to me and said, “Jesus, if they’re saying it, he must be toast.”
Calling Democrats wimps for 20 years has its effects. It means that when they actually do say something people automatically assume that they aren’t acting out of political courage. They assume that there is no risk involved.
Mehlman also said that everyone knows that Karl Rove has the highest ethical standards. Hahahahahaha. To quote the Clenis — that dog won’t hunt. Once again, they are hoist by their own petard. You can’t go around telling everyone who’ll listen that Karl Rove is a cross between Sun Tzu and Machiavelli for years on end and then suddenly portray him as a simple, straight shooting public servant. Only the most ardent neanderthals are going to buy this. Certainly not one member of the press will.
This was a very weak performance. They aren’t on their “A” game.
Oh and the new NBC Wall Street Journal Poll is out and it ain’t good news for Bush. Check this out:
Only 41 percent give Bush good marks for being “honest and straightforward” — his lowest ranking on this question since he became president. That’s a drop of nine percentage points since January, when a majority (50 percent to 36 percent) indicated that he was honest and straightforward. This finding comes at a time when the Bush administration is battling the perception that its rhetoric doesn’t match the realities in Iraq, and also allegations that chief political adviser Karl Rove leaked sensitive information about a CIA agent to a reporter. (The survey, however, was taken just before these allegations about Rove exploded into the current controversy.)
If anyone would like to see the full manifestation of the Rove smear against Plame and her pathetic, henpecked husband in all it’s glory, you only need to watch the video (via Crooks and Liars) of John Gibson’s insane rant yesterday.
Newshounds has the transcript. Here’s just a little taste:
You wouldn’t send a peacenik to see if we should go to war, if we need to go to war, now would you? That’s exactly what happened, as they say in the news biz, inquiring minds now want to know how the heck did this happen? Well, it turns out little wifey did it.
[…]
So why should Rove get a medal?
Let’s just assume that spy Valerie Plame knew her husband’s attitudes about the war in Iraq – she was married to him – and sending him off to Niger could be regarded as an attempt to influence national policies. Where I come from, we want to know who that is. We do not want secret spymasters pulling the puppet strings in the background. That is something that should be out in the open and the person doing it should be identified and should own up to it.
Yeah. Senior white house advisor and deputy chief of staff Karl Rove was an interepid whistleblower, putting himself on the line exposing government wrongdoing when he outed Plame. He is the Daniel Ellsberg of the Bush administration bravely risking all to let the people know what its government was doing.
My head hurts.
Newshounds came up with something else quite interesting about Gibson’s schizoid ramblings, however:
Notes: This is something I haven’t done before; I compared the transcript posted on FoxNews.com with what he actually said, reading along. The discrepancies are interesting:
website: conclusions from a Senate investigation actual: conclusions from a joint investigation of Congress
website: Well, turns out the wife did it. actual: Well, it turns out little wifey did it.
website: Let’s just assume that spy Valerie Plame knew her husband’s attitudes about the war in Iraq and George W. Bush’s policies. Sending him off to Niger could be regarded as an attempt to influence national policies. actual: Let’s just assume that spy Valerie Plame knew her husband’s attitudes about the war in Iraq – she was married to him – and sending him off to Niger could be regarded as an attempt to influence national policies.
website: That is something that should be out in the open and the person doing it should own up to it. actual: That is something that should be out in the open and the person doing it should be identified and should own up to it.
website: Rove should get a medal if he did what he says he didn’t. actual: Rove should get a medal even if he did do what he says he didn’t do.
Somebody didn’t think Gibson’s statement was quite the thing so they doctored it. But hey, they never said they told the truth, only that they were fair and balanced. Which isn’t true either.
Oh, and be sure to check out this extension of that theme from today’s Wall Street Journal: Karl Rove, Whistleblower.
Does anyone find it at all ironic that Rick Santorum is blaming Boston for the priest molestation scandal? Has he ever heard the phrase “banned in Boston?” Does he know where it comes from?
From the late 19th century until the mid-20th century, the phrase “Banned in Boston” was used to describe a literary work, motion picture, play, or other work prohibited from distribution or exhibition. During this time, Boston city officials took it upon themselves to “ban” anything that they found to be salacious, immoral, or offensive: theatrical shows were run out of town, books confiscated, and motion pictures were prevented from being shown—sometimes stopped in mid-showing after an official had “seen enough”. This movement had several effects. One was that Boston, arguably the cultural center of the United States since its founding, now came across as less sophisticated than many lesser cities without such stringent censorship practices. Another is that the phrase “banned in Boston” began to be associated in the popular mind with something sexy and lurid; many distributors of such works were happy when they were banned in Boston, as it gave them more appeal elsewhere; many distributors also advertised that their products had been banned in Boston when in fact they had not to increase their appeal.
It hasn’t actually changed all that much. I love Boston, but a free-wheeling sexual libertine town it ain’t.
In fact, if we were to accept Rick Santorum’s silly cause and effect it would probably make more sense to say that it was the repressive sexual attitudes of Boston combined with the unnatural state of celibacy that “caused” the priests to molest countless children.
This is, of course, completely ridiculous. But it actually makes more sense than Santorum’s armchair sociology, which isn’t saying much. It would also make more sense to say that the priests’ bodies had been taken over by demons. Which I’m sure Santorum also believes. Liberal demons, naturally. Is there any other kind?
Gene Lyons writes in to point out this little tid-bit about our good friend Judith Miller. One of the things missed in all the paeans to Judy’s martyrdom to the confidential source is that the Jeanne D’arc of the Gray Lady had been known to burn her sources without a second thought if it suits her. Seems Judy has some shifting standards when it comes to betraying the reporter’s privilege:
In April, Miller interviewed an expert from the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington on background, then made up a quote and attributed it to the person, who she then named.
It infuriated colleagues and a senior editor, but it only merited a small editors’ note on April 9: “An article on Saturday about the search by United States forces for chemical, biological and radiation weapons in Iraq included a comment attributed to Amy Smithson, a chemical weapons expert at the [Stimson] Center, a research institute in Washington. Ms. Smithson was depicted as suggesting that Bush administration officials might be less certain of finding such weapons now than before the war. She was quoted as saying that ‘they may be trying to dampen expectations because they are worried they won’t find anything significant.’ In fact the comments were paraphrases of a remark Ms. Smithson made in an e-mail exchange for the Times’s background information, on the condition that she would not be quoted by name. Attempts to reach her before publication were unsuccessful. Thus the comments should not have been treated as quotations or attributed to her.”
This is actually what Miller did: the interview was conducted by e-mail, Miller added that “if I don’t hear back from you I’ll assume it’s OK to use.” Not hearing back, she used it. But the scientist didn’t check her e-mail further that day.
In fairness, it may be that this confidential source didn’t explicitly say she wanted to be on “super-double-secret-deep” backround and Karl Rove evidently did. So it was probably her own fault for thinking she could rely on “backround” alone to keep Judy from making up quotes and spilling her name all over the New York Times. She should have known better. And, after all, this source was questioning the evidence for WMD and Judy couldn’t really sanction that. Indeed, one might even wonder if she burned this source on purpose.
So, before we get all gooey about Judy’s great sacrifice in fighting for the reporter’s privilege, maybe we need to ask whether or not she believes in it in the first place. The evidence suggests that she doesn’t.
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 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.