This has been MurkyGate from the beginning. At last/least Scotty's losing chunks of flesh and the water is bloody. And today more "leaks" on/from/via/about Rove, or something like that. But I don't want to lose track of a few things.
First, we know enough now to know Rove deserves to be fired. To do less is a further betrayal. And we know enough to think this goes higher. This is more than who did Rove talk to, it's also who talked to Rove. And if he got caught holding the hot potato of the WH. Let's review what Wilson has to say, and keep MARCH 2003 in mind.
Amazing how much of the last few frenzied might not matter too much after all.
I want to pull back and look at some of the original statements Wilson made,
before the op-ed for the NYT was written. He has argued that
Cheney's office made a decision to go after him and his wife in March 2003, before the July op ed piece. This is important to keep in mind, all of this is before Air Force 1, which I called the implementation phase on another diary. Briefly, and not wanting to get burdened with details on these points in this thread, we start in January 2003. Wilson has been to Niger, come back, and reported.
In a Frontline interview Wilson says he heard the yellowcake claim in the State of the Union department and then contacted the government to clarify the issue.
It was only after the president's State of the Union address that I called the State Department Bureau of African Affairs and spoke with somebody over there, and just asked the questions. ...
What do you say exactly?
I just basically said that if the president was speaking about Niger in the State of the Union address, then the State Department needed to be comfortable that he was accurately reflecting the facts, since my own trip out there, as well as the ambassador's own reports on the subject, as well as the senior military officer's report on the subject, said that there was nothing to that particular story.
The response I got was that perhaps the president was speaking about another African country, which is totally conceivable.
Indeed, in a February 28, 2003 interview with Moyers Wilson never ever mentions Niger or uranium. This interview is very interesting. Wilson is critical of the administration, but certainly checking his words after a fashion. The key point is he doesn't assess the validity of any intelligence publicly. I've edited all the blocks I wanted to put here, but only with difficulty. I recommend this interview highly, it's quite instructive.
Well, ok, just one--on Colin Powell's UN testimony.
MOYERS: What is the trip wire in your opinion for the use of force? What is your trip wire?
WILSON: Well, I've always said it's the first time he poses an obstacle to your conducting an inspection then you go in and you use force against that particular site. But you keep the use of force focused on disarmament. Let me give you an example.
When Colin Powell was up at the United Nations, he showed a couple of pictures of the site. He said, "This is a chemical weapons site and this is the trucks going out of that site just before the inspectors arrive at the front door. The trucks are going out the back door." That becomes a legitimate target for additional action on the part of the United Nations and the US. For example, that truck convoy leaving the site, as far as I'm concerned, becomes a legitimate target as does the site itself.
So what happened after February 28th?
On March 7, 2003 Dr. ElBaradei, the Director General of the IAEA, spoke to the UN Security Council. His statement specifically about the yellowcake documents was:
Based on thorough analysis, the IAEA has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents - which formed the basis for the reports of recent uranium transactions between Iraq and Niger - are in fact not authentic. We have therefore concluded that these specific allegations are unfounded.
Joe Wilson said this was the point he became concerned. From Frontline:
It becomes a concern to me when the IAEA chief, Dr. el-Baradi, in response to their analysis of documents provided to them by the State Department, says that these documents, which are a memorandum of agreement from Niger to Iraq, are obvious forgeries, and anybody who had done a two-hour search on Google would have come to that same conclusion.
In response to that statement, the State Department spokesman says, "We were fooled by these documents." Now, when the State Department spokesman said that, I was moved to say on a news program that I thought that if the U.S. government looked into its files, it would find that it had far more information on this particular subject than the State Department spokesman was letting on.
And, from WaPo,
After IAEA Director Mohamed ElBaradei announced they were bogus,
Wilson read a March 8 front-page story in The Washington Post that quoted an unidentified U.S. official as saying, "We fell for it."
The quote provided "a wake-up call . . . that somebody was not being candid about this Niger business,"
he said. Interviewed that day on CNN, Wilson said:
"I think it's safe to say that the U.S. government should have or did know that this report was a fake before Dr. ElBaradei mentioned it in his report at the U.N. yesterday."
That quote on CNN is documented in various places , but I haven't been able to find the transcript. this list of Showdown:Iraq transcripts shows one transcript online for [March 8, 2003 http://premium.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0303/08/sdi.00.html ].
Gratuitous quote on another lie from this transcript on March 17, 2003:
SAVIDGE: Dana, is the president still saying that he has not yet made a decision whether to go to war with Iraq or not?
BASH: That's correct. They're being very careful here at the White House to say, really, at every chance they get that the president has not made the decision. He has not signaled to the Pentagon that he is ready to do it. They are careful not to do it.
I couldn't resist. But if anyone has a transcript for this statement of his, I would appreciate the link.
I did find Wilson on CNN on [March 17, 2003 http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0303/17/bn.13.html
], when he said:
The United States didn't want this draft resolution from the very beginning. They supported it only because Tony Blair needed it for some political cover in the U.K. When the president came out last week and provided Tony Blair the other fig leaf, which was a commitment to the Middle East peace process, that was done clearly because the resolution was dead in the water.
Wilson argues the discussion on retribution took place in the VP's office in March, after his CNN appearance on March 8, 2003. From his book
:
After my appearance on CNN in early March 2003,
when I first asserted that the U.S. government knew more about the Niger uranium matter than it was letting on, I am told by a source close to the House Judiciary Committee that the
Office of the Vice President -- either the vice president himself or, more likely, his chief of staff, Lewis ("Scooter") Libby -- chaired a meeting at which a decision was made to do a "workup" on me. As I understand it, this meant they were going to take a close look at who I was and what my agenda might be.
The meeting did not include discussion of how the president or his senior staff might address the indisputable, if inconvenient, fact that the allegation I had made was true. In other words, from the very beginning, the strategy of the White House was to confront the issue as a "Wilson" problem rather than as an issue of the lie that was in the State of the Union address. That time frame, from my CNN appearance in early March, after the administration claimed they "fell for" the forged documents, to the first week in July, makes sense, as it allows time for all the necessary sleuthing to have been done on us, including the discovery of Valerie's name and employment.
The immediate effect of the workup, I am told by a member of the press, citing White House sources, was a long harangue against the two of us within the White House walls. Over a period of several months, Libby evidently seized opportunities to rail openly against me as an "asshole playboy" who went on a boondoggle "arranged by his CIA wife" -- and was a Democratic Gore supporter to boot.
And also:
And in "The Administration Went After Me and My Wife"
Just days before the war, I said in a TV interview with CNN that I believed the administration knew more about the Niger allegations than it was saying.
According to numerous journalists who have looked into the case, shortly after I made that statement on CNN, senior administration officials in the vice president's office ordered a ''workup'' on me, to collect information that could be used in a smear campaign when and if it became necessary. Those and other sources tell me the person who likely directed that campaign is I. Lewis ''Scooter'' Libby, the vice president's chief of staff and a leading neoconservative. I believe he is also quite possibly the person responsible for exposing my wife's identity.
[On Friday, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said that Libby, White House political advisor Karl Rove and National Security Council staff member Elliot Abrams -- all three named by Wilson in his book as having played a role in the leak -- have denied responsibility.
[''Mr. Wilson himself has said that his primary objective is a political agenda to defeat the president of the United States,'' McClellan told reporters. ``I don't plan on doing any book review of someone who has clearly stated that his main objective is a political agenda.'']
And the information was shared with Rove. Wilson
fingers Libby and Abrams on the work-up, and that the results were shared with Rove between March and July 2003.
According to my sources, between March 2003 and the appearance of my article in July, the workup on me that turned up the information on Valerie was shared with Karl Rove, who then circulated it in administration and neoconservative circles. That would explain the assertion later advanced by Clifford May, the neocon fellow traveler, who wrote that Valerie's employment was supposedly widely known. Oh, really? I am not reassured by his statement. Indeed, if what May wrote was accurate, it is a damning admission, because it could have been widely known only by virtue of leaks among his own crowd.
And it does seem as if there are beginning to be oh-too-many casual mentions and well-her-name-just-kinda-sorta-came-up between lots of people for completely unrelated reasons. Rove is kind of like Medusa, if we stare at him too long we'll turn to stone. I believe we should push for him to be fired, no doubt he is involved, but there are bigger targets, bigger problems this touches on.
So I think it is worth paying more attention to this sire of the story. Remember Seymour Hersh talking about the stovepiping of intelligence. And I think Justin Raimondo's analysis
deserves thought.
Wilson agrees. (again via Salon book excerpt .
It was through these special offices that so many of the rumors, gossip, and unsubstantiated intelligence about Iraq were passed directly to senior White House officials, notably Vice President Cheney, and were accepted without first being subjected to the rigorous analysis of the $30-billion-a-year intelligence community. American intelligence, which routinely sees and sifts thousands of bits of information daily, has had years of experience developing an analytical capability that can assess precisely whether the information we are receiving is fact or fiction. Short-circuiting this process -- or, in the vivid term Hersh adopted for the title of his disturbing article, "stovepiping" information directly into policy-makers' hands -- is dangerous. Addressing his investigation directly to Luti's enterprise, Hersh added: "This office, which circumvented the usual procedures of vetting and transparency, stovepiped many of its findings to the highest-ranking officials" in the administration.
President Bush could fundamentally change the direction of his administration by firing fewer than fifteen senior officials, beginning with those signatories of the Project for the New American Century and those currently holding government posts who signed a 1998 letter that urged President Clinton to wage war on Iraq. They are clustered at the National Security Council (NSC), in the Defense and State Departments, and within Vice President Cheney's own parallel national security office. That particular little-known organization -- not accountable to Congress and virtually unknown to the American people -- should be completely dismantled. Never in the history of our democracy has there been established such an influential and pervasive center of power with the ability to circumvent longstanding and accepted reporting structures and to skew decisionmaking practices. It has been described to me chillingly by a former senior government official as a coup d'etat within the State. That's all it would take -- firing fewer than fifteen officials, and the scuttling of Cheney's questionable office -- to alter this administration's radical course.
I think that means we need to keep our eyes on the CIA angle as much discussed lately. Ari, Tenet, Scooter, ALL of the people who left the CIA abruptly after this time. Wilson and then Plame could have been symbols for the greater power struggle.
Wilson also mentions tensions in the WH over this.
Apparently, according to two journalist sources of mine, when Rove learned that he might have violated the law, he turned on Cheney and Libby and made it clear that he held them responsible for the problem they had created for the administration. The protracted silence on this topic from the White House masks considerable tension between the Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President.
As posted here in Armando's diary,
I'm therefore suspicious of any kind of paper trail that is created, leaked, discovered 3-4 months later. This is Rove's game. Maybe these are his rules. Maybe he's tripping himself up. I just won't forget that first meeting or set any opinions in stone about who did what and when at this stage.
I'm also intrigued by the thought of tension between Cheney and Rove, as believed by Wilson and discussed by Raimondo lately. Last night I checked Woodward's Bush at War and found the following:
1. Rove's unhappiness at being excluded from war planning (Ch. 15, p. 205) re: Afghanistan, 2001
"The morning of Sunday, October 7, Karl Rove was at his home in Northwest Washington. The days since the terrorist attacks had not been Rove's happiest. Though he had known Bush for 28 years and been his strategic adviser, Rove had been excluded from the war cabinet and NSC meetings. Bush and Cheney had deemed it impossible to have the controversial political guy in on the war discussions. It would send the wrong message.
Rove could see their point, but at the same time, politics was a continuing element of the presidency even during war, not to be ignored."
2. Rove's thoughts on the power of emotions during war (re: 30 Oct 01, in NYC during Game 3 of World Series when Bush threw first pitch, p. 277)
"The president emerged wearing a New York Fire Department windbreaker. He raised his arm and gave a thumbs-up to the crowd on the third base side of the field. Probably 15,000 fans threw their arms in the air imitating the motion.
He then threw a strike from the rubber, and the stadium erupted.
Watching from owner George Steinbrenner's box, Karl Rove thought, It's like being at a Nazi rally."
3. Rove was not involved with war planning, yet saw the political power coming from 9/11 and Iraq
(re: how to swing tax cuts in time of war, preparation for State of Union speech, 2003, Woodward, Plan of Attack, p. 90)
"Karl Rove, Bush's senior adviser and political strategist, took no direct part in the decision process for war planning, but he sat in on the speech preparation sessions with the president. He thought that "axis of evil" was a signature phrase, a declaration that U.S. foreign policy had changed, that the country now would have a great mission. It was big, new and different, Rove believed. The war on terror was going to be extended to rogue nations, and the list would be the dominant foreign policy issue for as long as Bush was president. Self-assured, even cocky, Rove, 52, figured that the Axis would be one legacy Bush turned over to his successor. That successor was not known, but Rove was confident the date Bush would be leaving was January 20, 2009, after serving two terms.
Politically, all this was going to complicate the president's life--and Rove's. The first question was, We're in a war, okay, why do you want to cut taxes again? In every other war, the president and Congress had raised taxes. Eventually Bush would want a robust prescription drug benefit in Medicare for the elderly. How could that--and the pursuit of politics as usual--continue in a war? Rove's answer was: with great difficulty. His other answer was that 9/11 had given Bush the leverage he needed in the political system."
Circles of power are inherently vulnerable to in-fighting, stepping on toes. These guys particularly, so I like to try and keep a broad view of the backdrop in mind.
Wilson quotes several sources, who were afraid to talk. Maybe they have by now, maybe they will. Via excerpts from his book on Salon .
In recent months I have tried to piece together the truth about the attacks on myself and the disclosure of Valerie's employment by carefully studying all the coverage and by speaking confidentially with members of the press who have been following the story. ~A number of them have been candid with me in our private conversations but unwilling to speak publicly with the same candor.* When I have asked why the reporting on the story has not been more aggressive, I have received responses that are very disturbing. A reporter told me that one of the six newspeople who had received the leak stated flatly that the pressure he had come under from the administration in the past several months to remain silent made him fear that if he did his job and reported on the leak story, he would "end up in Guantanamo" -- a dark metaphor for the career isolation he would suffer at the hands of the administration. Another confided that she had heard from reporters that "with kids in private school and a mortgage on the house," they were unwilling to cross the administration.
He wrote the NYT op/ed in response to the political threat he felt from the administration.
More from Frontline:
Your decision to write an op-ed in The New York Times is a political decision, is it not?
I didn't really think of it as a political decision in the sense of a partisan decision. I thought of it much more as a response to what appeared to me to be a series of misstatements on the part of senior administration officials.
But you could have privately gone to the administration.
I gave the administration lots of opportunity, and this story had been kicking around for a couple of months. The administration had every opportunity to step out and say, "We were wrong on this. We should have corrected it."
And lastly, I get the feeling from the following quote from Bush in Wilson's book that the WH never thought story would get this far.
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2004/05/03/accuse/index.html
Bush capped off his comments that day with a statement that infuriated me, and many people whom I later heard from: "This is a large administration and there's a lot of senior officials ... I have no idea whether we'll find out who the leaker is, partially because, in all due respect to your profession, you do a very good job of protecting the leakers."
Thanks for your patience, I know it's long. I'm just a stickler for original sources and context.
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2004/05/03/accuse/index3.html
http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0303/17/bn.13.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/truth/interviews/wilson.html
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=6677
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0502-06.htm
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/6/19/204617/845