Foster resignation/Uranium claim/Blair (ex-CIA guy's comment on Dem. Now) [View All]

[AP]

Democracy Now did a long segment today on Rove's potential serious felony if he outed Wislon's wife (the law he might have violated was passed by Bush, pere after Bush suggested Agee was responsible for an agent's death in Greece).

One of the things Democracy Now talked about was the significance of the resignation of a CIA guy named Foster in the last couple of days. Apparently, this guy was responsible for keeping the Niger uranium claim out of a bunch of Bush speeches because, on its face, it was cleary untrue (they thought, perhaps, Mossad had forged the documents, and made them intentionally sloppy so that they wouldn't take the
blame). One of the reasons they knew it was a lie was because Hussein already had tons of yellow cake uranium, which is under lock and key of some international atomic energy commission in Iraq. (I don't get that logic, because, if it was under lock and key and he wanted it for weapons, then SH might go to the black market, no?)

So this Foster guy kept objecting, and then his supervisor at the CIA said don't worry, we're going to put it into the SOU address, and if there's blow back, "we're going to blame the British." So Foster withdrew his objections. However, he was shocked by the presentation of this information by Bush. He expected Bush to say something like "the British have received reports that..." Instead, Bush said "the British have learned..." Foster thought that there was such a qualitative difference between these two characterizations -- the latter presumes the information is true -- that he quit the CIA. Presumably, he couldn't, in good conscience, keep working for an administration that would lie to him and to the public.

To me, this raises another issue that Democracy Now didn't address. It has been my feeling that Blair didn't have a choice about going into Iraq. To look after the interests of Europe and Britain, he had to. If he didn't, Britains economy would have been sabotaged by the US, and the media would have been relentless in its criticism of Blair (they would have said that he has diminished Britain's authority in the world). Blair would have been gone, and Labour destroyed for 15 years. That's what I think, anyway.

Now, I think it's very revealing that Foster was told that the British were going to be blamed. I think you can draw a straight line through that data point, and right on through Gilligan's crappy reporting, and David Kelly's phone calls to the NY Times reporter (what's her name/Maureen Dowd?) and through the spin on the Hutton investigation, and you see the same pattern. The US is trying to destroy Blair and the Labour Party with this Iraq stuff.

Furthermore, I would bet that the Niger document was intentionally sloppy so that it would be easier for Blair to take the fall. The forger would have known that either Blair was going to keep Britian out, and fall, or would go in, and they'd need to discredit him for going in.

One of the more interesting things that have happened in the last couple months since the invasion, in this respect, was that meeting the British (Jack Straw, specifically) had arranged to negotiate a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. The British were going to convert some of the authority they leveraged by going into Iraq into negotiating a peace settlement. Israel denied visas for all the Palestinians invited at the last minute. Straw was pissed. Is this one of the reasons Mossad doesn't like Labor?