RE: [Futurework] Bigger Than Watergate!

[Karen Watters Cole]

There was an earlier attempt to scapegoat the CIA.  Yesterday and today we are blaming the British, our staunchest allies.  And so the trail begins to descend into finger pointing and denials and eventually, an effort by one party or the other to cover up something done wrong.  We have read from other reporting that the CIA did express misgivings on the “inactionable” intelligence.  This is Friday.  How much spin will this require over the weekend or whose resignation is necessary to cleanse the king?  Or will Wm Safire be prophetic, that the American public can be deceived through the election?  KWC   Rice: CIA approved Bush remark Posted: Friday, July 11, 7:20am EDT, in the Christian Science Monitor President Bush's national security adviser said Friday the CIA cleared Bush's State of the Union speech in its entirety, including a sentence alleging that Iraq was seeking to buy nuclear material from Africa. If CIA Director George Tenet had any misgivings about that sentence in the president's speech, "he did not make them known" to Bush or his staff, said national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. Her comments to reporters aboard Air Force One came as the administration presented a full-press defense of Bush's use of that allegation against Saddam Hussein, which the White House subsequently acknowledged was based on false information. http://www.csmonitor.com/newsinbrief/brieflies.html#USA7:20:0     So it all comes back to the public demanding to have questions answered, to exercise the system of checks and balances the Constitution provides to us.  The ghosts of Watergate linger.  - KWC   Here’s the link to a similar editorial piece in the Atlanta Journal, not a bastion of liberalism, by deputy editor Jay Bookman: If One War Fact on Iraq is False, What of Others? http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/bookman/index.html  (some of these may require registration)   Or the one in the Chicago Tribune, Questioning the Case for War, also today @ http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0307100087jul10,1,3573196.story?coll=chi-newsopinion-hed   or in Bush country, the Dallas Morning News editorial: Bush Needs to Address the Uranium Question @ http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/editorials/stories/071003dnedihowaboutthis.76124.html “President Bush has always prided himself as a straight shooter. It's one of the traits that first endeared him to fellow Texans down in Austin and later impressed other Americans when he ran for president. And that plain-spoken candor can serve him well again as he confronts nagging questions about how forthright the administration was in making the case for war with Iraq. ...“Now, everyone admits the intelligence was wrong. The only question is whether Mr. Bush was misled himself or whether he actually misled others. No one doubts the president's convictions about the nature of the Iraqi regime. But doubts are mounting about the nature and quality of the intelligence in this case and the administration's handling of it. It's time for more Bush straight talk.   Likewise, LA Times columnist R.  Scheer points the finger at Cheney and introduces the d�j� vu of Watergate, chastising Wm. Safire for invoking Nixon and quoting former diplomat JC Wilson on weekend news shows: June 8, 2003 A Diplomat’s Undiplomatic Truth: They Lied @ http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-scheer8jul08,1,4994582.column?coll=la-util-op-ed (excerpt) “In media interviews, Wilson said it was the vice president's questioning that pushed the CIA to try to find a credible Iraqi nuclear threat after that agency had determined there wasn't one. "I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat," Wilson wrote in an Op-Ed article in Sunday's New York Times. "A legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses." In a Washington Post interview, Wilson added, "It really comes down to the administration misrepresenting the facts on an issue that was a fundamental justification for going to war. It begs the question, what else are they lying about?" Those are the carefully chosen words of a 23-year career diplomat who, as the top U.S. official in Baghdad in 1990, was praised by then-President George H.W. Bush for his role as the last American to confront Hussein face to face after the dictator invaded Kuwait.   … "There is no greater threat that we face as a nation," Wilson told NBC, "than the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of nonstate actors or international terrorists. And if we've prosecuted a war for reasons other than that, using weapons of mass destruction as cover for that, then I think we've done a great disservice to the weapons-of-mass-destruction threat." The world is outraged at this pattern of lies used to justify the Iraq invasion, but the U.S. public still seems numb to the dangers of government by deceit. Indeed, Nixon speechwriter William Safire this week in his column channeled the voice of his former boss to reassure Republicans that the public easily could be conned through the next election. Perhaps, and far be it for me to lecture either Safire or a reincarnated Nixon as to the ease of deceiving the electorate, but as we learned from the Nixon disgrace, lies have a way of unraveling, and the truth will out, even if it's after the next election.   Or back in March 2003, Seymour Hersch wrote Who Lied to Whom? in the New Yorker , asking WHY did the administration endorse a forgery? excerpts: “The Bush Administration’s reliance on the Niger documents may, however, have stemmed from more than bureaucratic carelessness or political overreaching. Forged documents and false accusations have been an element in U.S. and British policy toward Iraq at least since the fall of 1997, after an impasse over U.N. inspections. Then as now, the Security Council was divided, with the French, the Russians, and the Chinese telling the United States and the United Kingdom that they were being too tough on the Iraqis. President Bill Clinton, weakened by the impeachment proceedings, hinted of renewed bombing, but, then as now, the British and the Americans were losing the battle for international public opinion. A former Clinton Administration official told me that London had resorted to, among other things, spreading false information about Iraq. The British propaganda program—part of its Information Operations, or I/Ops—was known to a few senior officials in Washington. “I knew that was going on,” the former Clinton Administration official said of the British efforts. “We were getting ready for action in Iraq, and we wanted the Brits to prepare.” Over the next year, a former American intelligence officer told me, at least one member of the U.N. inspection team who supported the American and British position arranged for dozens of unverified and unverifiable intelligence reports and tips—data known as inactionable intelligence—to be funnelled to MI6 operatives and quietly passed along to newspapers in London and elsewhere. “It was intelligence that was crap, and that we couldn’t move on, but the Brits wanted to plant stories in England and around the world,” the former officer said. There was a series of clandestine meetings with MI6, at which documents were provided, as well as quiet meetings, usually at safe houses in the Washington area. The British propaganda scheme eventually became known to some members of the U.N. inspection team. “I knew a bit,” one official still on duty at U.N. headquarters acknowledged last week, “but I was never officially told about it.” …Washington’s case that the Iraqi regime had failed to meet its obligation to give up weapons of mass destruction was, of course, based on much more than a few documents of questionable provenance from a small African nation.  But George W. Bush’s war against Iraq has created enormous anxiety throughout the world—in part because one side is a superpower and the other is not.  It can’t help the President’s case, or his international standing, when his advisers brief him with falsehoods, whether by design or by mistake.”  (end of excerpt. Contact me if you want this 40 KB file if it doesn’t clear FW) arthur wrote: Something is up.  The op-ed of the WSJ is raising some Bush questions The Fog of Deceit By Albert R. Hunt, 10 July 2003 The Wall Street Journal Preparing for his State of the Union in January, President Bush faced a challenge: American troops were amassed to overthrow Saddam Hussein, but public support for war was slipping. Iraq surely possessed dangerous weapons but an "imminent threat" meant a nuclear capacity. The president played that card. "Our intelligence sources," Mr. Bush intoned, showed Iraq was seeking aluminum tubes to be used for nuclear weapons. And he declared: "The British government learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." These stories were wrong. At the time, most intelligence sources doubted the tubes were suitable for nuclear weapons, and the alleged uranium purchase -- from Niger -- was bogus. Moreover, the president either knew the uranium story was dubious or he was kept in the dark, and allowed to deceive the public, by someone high in the administration. The phony Iraq-Niger deal may be the smoking gun in what was a pervasive pattern of exaggeration and distortion to justify the war against the Iraqi dictator. Some of these claims -- the alleged Baghdad-al Qaeda ties, the extent of his biological and chemical weapons or even his nuclear designs -- reflected selective use of conflicting intelligence. The false Niger connection was much more. Yet Congress, under pressure from the White House, is abdicating its responsibility to investigate why the public was misled on such a momentous matter. The Niger issue, widely reported the past few days, has a revealing evolution. It starts with the CIA, in early 2002, asking former African ambassador Joseph Wilson to check out reports of a Saddam effort to purchase uranium from Niger; this, the agency explained, was in response to a query from Vice President Cheney's office. Ambassador Wilson spent eight days in Niger. He never was shown the alleged documentation of any deal but interviewed top officials, analyzed the possibilities and concluded -- as did the Bush ambassador to Niger -- that there was little chance that any such transaction transpired. He reported this back to the CIA and the State Department. What happened then? It's inconceivable that the CIA, having sent a high-level emissary at the request of the vice president, didn't report his findings back to Mr. Cheney's office. Yet the British aired this charge in September and in December the State Department published a fact sheet asserting Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger. That prompted the International Atomic Energy Agency to request documentation. But, as Rep. Henry Waxman's office revealed this week, the Bush administration waited more than six weeks -- until one week after the president's State of the Union speech with the uranium charge -- to respond to the IAEA and then privately acknowledged there were doubts about the validity. In quick order, that agency concluded the charge was fake, that the documentation was clearly forged. The revelations about a diplomat's trip to Niger didn't begin surfacing until several months ago, and Mr. Wilson finally outed himself in a New York Times column last Sunday. But in January, when President Bush gave the State of the Union, notes Democratic Sen. Bob Graham, a former chairman of the Intelligence Committee, it was widely known inside that the uranium report "appeared to be a fabrication." Did the president know that on January 28? If not, who failed to tell him? Why did he cite the Brits rather than our own government? Did Dick Cheney know about Mr. Wilson's findings? If not, what staffer kept them from him? Why did National Security Chief Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld make the same baseless charges on a Saddam-Niger connection? In contrast, why did Secretary of State Colin Powell omit any such reference in his key United Nations presentation in early February? The White House reluctantly acknowledged the presidential mistake this week but produces no details of what happened or who knew this was a phony rumor based on a forged document. Recently, Ms. Rice, in response to a question on NBC's Meet the Press, suggested "maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency, but no one our circle knew there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery." Ambassador Wilson, who also served as a National Security Council top aide on Africa, dismisses that explanation, having no doubt his conclusions reached the vice president's office. But this administration, whether it's stonewalling the commission investigating Sept. 11, or the facts leading up to the Iraqi war, is contemptuous of the public's right to know. "This is the most secretive administration at least since Richard Nixon," charges Sen. Graham. The tragedy here is that there was a case to take out Saddam without exaggerating or lying. He was a brutal despot, who aggressively destabilized the region and was in clear violation of United Nations resolutions on his weapons of mass destruction. (No other threat meets those particulars.) But the ends-justifies-the-means duplicity employed to rally political support was more than a disservice. If Bill Clinton could be impeached for lying about sex, or Al Gore discredited for exaggerating his relationship with James Lee Witt, then lying about the reasons for going to war -- whether it was the president or one of his subordinates -- ought to command an inquiry from the people's representatives.