What It All Means

I swear Patrick Fitzgerald held off on any announcements until Friday because he knew I would be going to Alaska, and I wouldn't be able to get the news. The waiting truly is the hardest part, Tom Petty, you beholder of the truth.

So my Fitzmas will have to be delayed. Nevertheless, on the eve of the announcements, I think it's important to understand what this whole thing is about. We're going to hear a lot of spin, and a lot of denial of objective reality.
It's important to explain this whole thing.

The rationale for the war in Iraq was based entirely on the fact that Saddam had WMD. I know 2 years is an awful long time to remember back, especially in this day and age, but that was the entire rationale. If you don't believe me, ask Paul Wolfowitz:

"For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on," Mr Wolfowitz tells the magazine.

Well, everyone at the White House could agree on it, but not everyone in the intelligence community. There simply wasn't enough evidence that the WMD programs were ongoing, that the inspections weren't working, all of it. Bush demanded that inspectors return to the county, expecting Saddam to defy him and start the fight. Saddam let the inspectors back in. If WMD was the rationale, then by George the White House had to come up with some WMD intelligence or they weren't going to be able to sell the war to the public.

Clearly this intelligence was altered, misleadingly highlighted, or in some cases just made up out of whole cloth. We know that the Secretary of Defense set up his own off-the-books intelligence shop independent of the national security apparatus to come up with their own analysis. We know that Dick Cheney visited CIA Headquarters over and over and over again, browbeating senior intelligence analysts to give him the answers he wanted. We know that, well before any of this intelligence was validated or even gathered, the goal was to have "the intelligence fixed around the policy.". We know that the infamous 16 words were taken out of one speech in Cincinnati, then put back into the State of the Union address, despite the fact that it was based entirely on obvious forgeries. In fact, this business with the phony Niger documents was symptomatic of the whole thing, and I'm not surprised Fitzgerald is studying it. It's now coming out in the Italian media that the Italian government, and possibly even uber-neocon Michael Ledeen, may have had a hand in those forgeries. Current National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley met with the Italian intelligence chief just a few weeks BEFORE the forgeries were revealed. The Niger Embassy in Italy was burlgarized and the robbers only took letterhead. Something real fishy going on over there.

Now, the Vice President wanted to know about this whole Saddam-buying-uranium-from-Niger story. If true, it would legitimate claims that Iraq was reconstituting their nuclear program, allowing phrases like "we can't let the smoking gun be a mushroom cloud" to be seen as more ominous, etc. The CIA dutifully gets someone on the job to look into the claims. Joe Wilson is selected. Is it ever said by the Right that Wilson was unqualified for the job? He had worked in Africa, he was the charge d'affaires in Iraq during the first Gulf War, he spoke the language of Niger, and he had contacts there. Does it matter how he was selected for the task? I don't think so, but more on that later.

Wilson goes over and says the whole thing is bunk. Nevertheless, the charge makes its way into the SOTU address, in a very parsed way: it says "British intelligence has learned" that Saddam recently sought uranium from Africa. It basically puts the burden of proof on British intelligence. Josh Marshall explains, and it's fascinating, so here's a large excerpt:

Some White House defenders still hang their hat on this point, arguing that nothing the president said was in fact false. Anybody who got the wrong impression just didn't read the fine print.

That argument (let's call it 'the con-man defense') speaks for itself, I think.

But all of this brings us back to the question: What did the British know? They said they had good intel. The CIA didn't buy it. So what did they know?

To date the British have refused to concede that they too may have been relying on flawed or phony evidence. They stand by their claim, but refuse to disclose the source or the nature of their evidence.

Last year's Butler Report (a rough analogue to last year's Senate intelligence committee report) went to great lengths to insulate the British finding from the taint of the forgeries. In a pretty telling illustration of how tied the Butler Report was to the needs of US politics, the authors went so far as to provide the president with a specific exoneration ...

We conclude that, on the basis of the intelligence assessments at the time, covering both Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the statements on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa in the Government’s dossier, and by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons, were well-founded. By extension, we conclude also that the statement in President Bush’s State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003 that:
The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa... was well-founded.

I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions about how such a passage could have found its way into a British government inquiry. But let's review the story. The Brits say that they had multiple pieces of evidence upon which they based their claim. And the forged documents -- which they only found out about much later -- were not one of them. So the discreditation of the forgeries is irrelevant to their finding. The taint, shall we say, does not attach.

My assumption, and that of many others, is that the Brits are, to put it bluntly, full of it on this one. My best guess is that they are holding on to some de minimis 'other' evidence as a placeholder to get out of taking their own lumps in the Niger skullduggery.

With the claims of an intelligence agency especially, proving a negative is near impossible. So I can't prove to you that the Brits have nothing else. But I think I can make a pretty strong argument that the Butler Report was intentionally misleading on this key question.

The Butler Report wasn't the only British government inquiry into the faulty intelligence question. There was also a parliamentary committee report published in September 2003, before the question of the forgeries and Wilson and the rest of it became so intensely politicized. And a close look at this earlier report, chaired by Labour MP Ann Taylor, shows pretty clearly, I think, that the Butler Report was willfully misleading about the Brits' reliance on the forgeries.

Josh has an even more in-depth post about this from last year which asserts that The Butler Report's "other" intelligence was simply the same forgery from a different source.

Here's the point: if it got out into the public that Saddam's nuclear threat was willfully ginned up, the whole WMD house of cards would come tumbling down. In July of 2003 it was still very possible that there were WMD; in public statements the White House was counting on it. The long road downhill to understanding the doctoring of intelligence, a road we're now going down, was at risk. Joe Wilson had the power and the knowledge to take the Administration down that road. They didn't want to go. So they smeared him.

They smeared him with a smear that doesn't even really make sense: they said his wife works for the CIA and she sent him there. Is a trip to Niger such a plum assignment that anyone would want to pull strings to get it? Are Wilson's previously discussed qualifications put in jeapordy by this fact? No. Of course not.

Two things: 1) Plame's name was leaked because it feminized Joe Wilson as a guy whose wife has his balls in her purse. Digby has been very good on pushing this point, and I totally agree. The whole notion was that a guy pushed around by his wife has no credibility. 2) The leak also sent a message to anyone else in the intelligence community, and there were hundreds, who wanted to come forward and rebut the Administration's spin: do it and we'll get you. We'll go after you and your whole family. We don't care. Don't you dare tell the public about our lies.

That worked, by the way. Very few other people have publicly come forward. But the way they went about "playing hardball" with Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame was reckless and stupid. If you're going to say someone's wife works at the CIA, how's this, ASK THE CIA if that would disable any of their intelligence interests at home or abroad. Yesterday on CNN, David Ensor revealed that the CIA did do an after-action report on whether or not the Plame link compromised them, and the answer was it did "damage". Need it be said that the benign statement of "damage" means murder? If spies around the globe were compromised as a result of contact with Plame, or using Brewster-Jennings (her front company, which Novak put in a second article, because the first one wasn't damaging enough) as a cover, they're either in jail or dead in a foreign country, all of whom have laws against spying.

Ray McGovern on the Randi Rhodes show confirmed this today, by saying that in the CIA after-action "post-mortem" on the case, "mortem was the operative word." The CIA simply can't come out and say this publicly. They can't even admit whoever was killed worked for the CIA to begin with. That's part of the deal. But you can bet that "damage" is a euphemism for what actually happened as a result of "playing politics."

This is why people are perjuring themselves, obstructing justice, and all the rest. What they did was treasonous, putting politics ahead of national security. My guess is they were so dead-set on keeping the lies that brought us to war under wraps that they didn't care who they injured in the process. And that has to be remembered as this investigation moves forward (and it will move forward; apparently Fitzgerald just rented DC office space). This is about Iraq, and how this country ended up in a war that has cost 2,000 American lives so far. That's what it all means.