Connect some recent media 'dots' to a few forgotten ones

[G_j]

http://www.alternet.org/story/23790 /

The Media's Roving Eye

By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com. Posted July 29, 2005.

Connect some recent media 'dots' to a few forgotten ones and you have framework for understanding the Plame case.

Oh what a tangled web we weave
When we first practice to deceive

<snip>
What an action-packed week for the White House and its operatives. The Pincus/VandeHei piece in the Post focused on the fact that Plame was identified by name in the secret State Department memo Powell had with him on Air Force One. They wrote that the memo "contained information about CIA officer Valerie Plame in a paragraph marked ?(S)' for secret, a clear indication that any Bush administration official who read it should have been aware the information was classified, according to current and former government officials." The rest of the piece went on to discuss who knew what about Plame -- with the exception of a single paragraph which indicated that Plame was the least of what the memo was about:

"Almost all of the memo is devoted to describing why State Department intelligence experts did not believe claims that Saddam Hussein had in the recent past sought to purchase uranium from Niger. Only two sentences in the seven-sentence paragraph mention Wilson's wife."

"Why State Department intelligence experts did not believe the claims"? So on Air Force One that July 7 was clear and present evidence not just about Valerie Plame's identity, but that one set of government intelligence experts was ready and willing to debunk the President's sixteen-word claim of the previous January (and so implicitly undermine the administration's whole case for a Saddamist nuclear arsenal in the making). It's worth reminding ourselves that they were hardly the first experts to do so. In the pre-war months, when the documents which supposedly supported the Niger uranium claim first surfaced, they proved so crudely and poorly forged that it took experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency only an afternoon, and nothing more complicated than Google.com, to utterly discredit them. The Director-General of the IAEA, Mohamed El Baradei, would inform the UN on March 7, 2003 that they were frauds (though being a foreigner, representing an international agency that seemed to stand in the administration's path to a much-wanted war, he was thoroughly disparaged and ignored).

Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman, the ranking minority member of the Committee on Government Reform, denounced the crude forgeries in an open letter to the President on that March 17, just days before the invasion of Iraq was launched, though his letter was totally ignored by the administration and the media. ("In the last ten days, however, it has become incontrovertibly clear," he wrote, "that a key piece of evidence you and other Administration officials have cited regarding Iraq's efforts to obtain nuclear weapons is a hoax. What's more, the Central Intelligence Agency questioned the veracity of the evidence at the same time you and other Administration officials were citing it in public statements. This is a breach of the highest order, and the American people are entitled to know how it happened.")

To back up even further, Vice President Cheney started the administration's atomic drumbeat to war in Iraq with a series of speeches on Saddam's supposed nuclear capabilities and desires beginning in August of 2002. (The crucial role of Cheney, whose eye was first caught by a Defense Intelligence Agency report on the Niger uranium documents back in February 2002, in the events that would become the Plame case, has been poorly covered. The exception to this being the work of former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who returned to the subject in a piece, Iraq-Niger: Cheney and the Forgery, just this week.) In October, the men and woman around the President tried to slip Saddam's supposed search for uranium in Niger into a speech George was planning to give in Cincinnati and CIA Director Tenet -- as reported at the time by Walter Pincus of the Washington Post (who did fine pre-war work on the subject) -- went to the mat with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice's deputy Stephen Hadley (a hardliner, known to be close to the Vice President, and now National Security Adviser himself) and managed to have the passage cut out of the speech.

..more..

[Octafish]

1. Great article! Thanks G_j!

The article makes clear that the central focus of the who-did-what-when-to-whom is the missing evidence that "justified" the illegal Iraq invasion. More and more of the US Government's own are on to the sorry traitors occupying the Monkey House.

From same:

Now, add in one more dot: If Rove and Libby were, in the end, unsuccessful in maneuvering Tenet off a gangplank into shark-infested seas, if Tenet took the fall (but only onto the gangplank itself), later retiring from his disastrous CIA tenure with a Medal of Freedom from the President, it may be that he later leveled his own challenge at the President's men. After all, the Plame case would not be threatening anyone if, when evidently approached by angry CIA officials over Novak's outing of Plame (based on information from those "two senior administration officials"), Tenet hadn't sent a memo in September 2003 to the Justice Department "raising a series of questions about whether a leaker had broken federal law by disclosing the identity of an undercover officer" and requesting an investigation. At that time, Mike Allen and Dana Priest of the Washington Post reported that, "fter an ensuing rush of leaks over White House handling of intelligence, Bush's aides said they believed in retrospect it had been a political mistake to blame Tenet." Indeed. It was Tenet who officially started in motion the Plame case we live with today. (However, it is possible, as others have suggested, that his hand was forced by CIA insiders, that he essentially had no choice but to write such a memo once one of his agents had been outed in such a fashion.)

SOURCE:

http://www.alternet.org/story/23790

Hey, Bush! America is on to your gangster ass!

[Karenina]

2. Kick!

:kick:

[RONSTOO]

3. once Administration people involved start...

...getting nervous about protecting their own ass, shit will hit the fan and then comes the domino effect. This will be fun. Cant wait for Fitzgerald to get the ball rolling. To add to that in the UK, Blair is up to his eyes in similar bullshit. Add those revelations to the ones here and you have ONE BIG MESS


:toast:

[G_j]

4. it seems to me

the odds are that if you continually, smear, destroy, threaten and bully people, you are going make life long enemies and not every one of them will be cowed into submission through fear.
A few chickens do come home to roost.