Timing the Cheney Nuclear Drumbeat

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Timing the Cheney Nuclear Drumbeat
by Tom Engelhardt and Jim Lobe


In a recent piece, The Media's Roving Eye, trying to establish a timeline that would offer context for the Plame case, I wrote the following:


"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...)"

As I soon found out, I did not stand apart from most others in poor coverage of Cheney's role. Jim Lobe, whose pieces for Inter Press Service I've quoted from, linked to, and recommended endlessly over the last years, sent a few lines my way to tell me that I, too, was off in my Cheney timeline, that the Vice President had started in on the subject of Saddam Hussein's supposed nuclear program significantly earlier than I realized, and that this mattered greatly in understanding the nature of the events to follow. I asked him for a bit of clarification and the next thing I knew I had a piece in hand – Lobe's first appearance at Tomdispatch – an exercise, as he put it, in the sorts of connections that begin to appear when you pull a single string in the tangled ball of yarn that is the history of the Plame case. It's a reminder, as he points out below, of how a powerful web of neocon insiders and outsiders (and their allies) set the U.S. on the path to war in Iraq.

What follows then, from the man who has, in my opinion, done better reportorial work on the neoconservatives and the Bush administration than any other reporter around, is a disquisition on timing – on Vice President Cheney's behaviour immediately before and after former ambassador Joseph Wilson's report on Saddam's supposed search for Niger yellowcake. ~ Tom


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Dating Cheney's Nuclear Drumbeat:
Framing the Plame Case

By Jim Lobe


In the wake of the release of the Downing Street Memo, there has been much talk about how the Bush administration "fixed" its intelligence to create a war fever in the U.S. in the many months leading up to the invasion of Iraq. What still remains to be fully grasped, however, is the wider pattern of propaganda that underlay the administration's war effort – in particular, the overlapping networks of relationships that tied together so many key figures in the administration, the neoconservatives and their allies on the outside, and parts of the media in what became a seamless, boundary-less operation to persuade the American people that Saddam Hussein represented an intolerable threat to their national security.

Vice President Cheney, for instance, is widely credited with having launched the administration's nuclear drumbeat to war in Iraq via a series of speeches he gave, beginning in August 2002, vividly accusing Saddam of having an active nuclear weapons program. As it happens though, he started beating the nuclear drum with vigor significantly earlier than most remember; indeed at a time that was particularly curious given its proximity to the famous mission former Ambassador Joseph Wilson took on behalf of the CIA.

Cheney's initial public attempts to raise the nuclear nightmare did not in fact begin with his August 2002 barrage of nuclear speeches, but rather five months before that, just after his return from a tour of Arab capitals where he had tried in vain to gin up local support for military action against Iraq. Indeed, the specific date on which his campaign was launched was March 24, 2002, when, on return from the Middle East, he appeared on three major Sunday public-affairs television programs bearing similar messages on each. On CNN's "Late Edition," he offered the following comment on Saddam:


"This is a man of great evil, as the President said. And he is actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time."

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http://www.lewrockwell.com/engelhardt/engelhardt101.html