Tip Of The Iceberg

It's been a while since I've fired up the old Plame-o-meter and taken a look at the Fitzgerald investigation, but this week we've had a couple juicy revelations. There's the bit about Karl Rove playing footsie with the prosecutor and helping him find a bunch of emails that were incredibly damning to Scooter Libby's case (emails that were claimed to be "lost" by the Office of the Vice President). The guy wants to save his ample skin and is clearly giving Fitz whatever he wants.

But today's story is even more revelatory. Because it shows that the Plame affair was really just a part, a small part, of a much larger coverup. Murray Waas writes in the National Journal that:

Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political adviser, cautioned other White House aides in the summer of 2003 that Bush's 2004 re-election prospects would be severely damaged if it was publicly disclosed that he had been personally warned that a key rationale for going to war had been challenged within the administration. Rove expressed his concerns shortly after an informal review of classified government records by then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley determined that Bush had been specifically advised that claims he later made in his 2003 State of the Union address -- that Iraq was procuring high-strength aluminum tubes to build a nuclear weapon -- might not be true, according to government records and interviews.

Hadley was particularly concerned that the public might learn of a classified one-page summary of a National Intelligence Estimate, specifically written for Bush in October 2002. The summary said that although "most agencies judge" that the aluminum tubes were "related to a uranium enrichment effort," the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Energy Department's intelligence branch "believe that the tubes more likely are intended for conventional weapons."

Three months after receiving that assessment, the president stated without qualification in his January 28, 2003, State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production."

For some reason people forget about the aluminum tubes claim. It was a key part of the rationale for war, more important than the yellowcake even, and it was completely without merit. This story suggests that the Administration already knew the evidence on aluminum tubes was weak, but they went ahead and used it to hype the threat anyway. I know the word "treason" has become the exclusive privilege of the right in talking about Democrats, but that's exactly what the scenario described here is.

At the time that Wilson came out with his op-ed and Tenet decided to take the fall, you could definitely sense an effort to wrap the whole thing up, put a bow on it, and very quickly and quietly send it out the door. Because if word got out that Bush was continually briefed that the aluminum tubes were probably not used for WMD, that really would have been it. It was a very sensitive time, and people were cracking under the strain of the eventual futility of the WMD snipe hunt. The Administration was right to try and cover the whole thing up, for the purposes of self-preservation. But of course, that's also a crime. A crime of the highest order. One which demands accountability. Here's the whole thing in a nutshell:

"Presidential knowledge was the ball game," says a former senior government official outside the White House who was personally familiar with the damage-control effort. "The mission was to insulate the president. It was about making it appear that he wasn't in the know. You could do that on Niger. You couldn't do that with the tubes." A Republican political appointee involved in the process, who thought the Bush administration had a constitutional obligation to be more open with Congress, said: "This was about getting past the election."

Booman has a great timeline of events that shows how the aluminum tubes information was used at the time. Bush was using the info in speeches as early as October of 2002, despite being briefed on their shaky basis at least two weeks prior.

All I know is that we need to see that October 2002 President's Summary. That's the primary evidence in Waas' story. What we now know is that the decision to out Valerie Plame was but one of a series of coverups designed to make sure that this information never reach the eyes and ears of the public. Everything flowed from this. It's a major revelation and it's not going away anytime soon.

P.S. Somebody call Dick Durbin:

Durbin concluded, "In determining what the president was told about the contents of the NIE dealing with Iraq's weapons of mass destruction -- qualifiers and all -- there is nothing clearer than this single page."

Tell him to fight for release.