Hint: The motive is supplied by the PNAC.
[This was originally posted at Corrente, but Kossak Cubist was kind enough to call it "huge", so I thought I would repost it here.]
The crime: A covert domestic disinformation campaign to support invading Iraq with planted stories in the press. When Joseph Wilson wrote his editorial about yellowcake, one such planted story, his wife, Valerie Plame was outed to retaliate against Wilson. (At least. See Note at end.)
The means: The
White House Iraq Group, which fixed the intelligence and facts around the policy, by planting the stories, at least through Judy Miller (
here) and almost certainly through others. (Note that Fitzgerland subpoenaed the WHIG's records.)
The opportunity: 9/11, which was hijacked into planning to attack Iraq within two days.
To which Froomkin adds this:
The motive: The PNAC's plans for a New American Century, which included invading Iraq. Let's set the context:
Yesterday, we drew your attention ("When in the course of human events") to a speech by Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's deputy, who said—among other things that it's amazing this insider's insider would say—that the Bush administration was performing so badly that if they kept it up, a second American Revolution was likely. No kidding.
Oddly, or not, there's been nothing on this story in our free press from anyone other than The Amazin' Froomkin, who follows up on a (to me, less interesting than a second American Revolution) Wilkerson bombshell:
There's virtually no follow-up whatsoever in today's papers to the assertion by Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, that a secret cabal led by the vice president [that is, WHIG] has hijacked U.S. foreign policy [by invading Iraq], inveigled the president [not so] , condoned torture and crippled the ability of the government to respond to emergencies [Exhibit A: Katrina]. (See yesterday's column.)
Several readers wrote me to ask: What would motivate Cheney et al. to do such a thing?
Here's a sort of primer: The Project for the New American Century's Statement of Principles, and its pre-2000 writings about Iraq.
Crime, means, opportunity and now motive: Froomkin ties it up with a nice bow.
Gosh, it does feel like Christmas, doesn't it?
Oh, the criminals? You can vote for them here.
NOTE Outing Plame could also have been a Rovian bankshot, a two-fer, since the WMD-intel networks of which she was a part were certainly also trashed, and these networks might have dissented from WHIG orthodoxy on Iraqi WMDs, particularly with regard to the "crude forgery" on yellowcake acquired by the Italian intelligence service and then cherrypicked by WHIG member Hatley.