In yet another pathetic display of right-wing desperation as their unholy "cabal" unravels, neocon Max Boot shamelessly tries to defend his buddies in the Bush administration in an op-ed in Wednesday's LA Times titled "Plamegate's real liar" by claiming that Joe Wilson was the real liar and villain in the Plame outing scandal.
Here's a link to the op-ed:
http://www.latimes.com/...
As with most of the the lies and distortions disseminated by these knee-jerk Kool Aid-chugging robocons in obviously coordinated talking points, it's becoming increasingly easier to see through them and tear them apart. And with their neocon agenda increasingly being seen as dishonest, disasterous and unpopular, it's important that every time they put out one of these inane screeds, they be called on the carpet for it. This is clearly a Howard Beale moment (well, at least before he too drank the Kool Aid!).
Right off the bat he starts playing with the truth:
But with his investigation all but over, prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has found no criminal conspiracy and no violations of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which makes it a crime in some circumstances to disclose the names of undercover CIA operatives. Among other problems, Plame doesn't seem to fit the act's definition of a "covert agent" -- someone who "has within the last five years served outside the United States." By 2003, Plame had apparently been working in Langley, Va., for at least six years, which means that, mystery of mysteries, the vice president's chief of staff was indicted for covering up something that wasn't a crime.
Well, given that the investigation is not yet over and that Fitzgerald has indicated that he might make use of another grand jury, it's disengenuous to suggest that he "has found no criminal conspiracy and no violations of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act". All we know is that he hasn't of yet announced one way or another, definitively, what he's found along these lines. Until the investigation is formally concluded, it's dishonest to suggest that it has vindicated those under investigation on ANY counts.
Secondly, he's making a very thin technical argument here that, because Plame hadn't lived outside the country for the past five years, that she doesn't fall under the ISPA's narrow (and according to many legal experts very poorly worded) definition of covert agent, even though she clearly worked for the division within the CIA that was specifically engaged in covert operations. Plus, it's completely irrelevant whether a CIA agent lives in the US or abroad in terms of their covert status. I'm no legal expert but I understand that the Espionage Act and other federal laws have much broader definitions of "covert" and "undercover".
Perhaps Plame had once lived and worked abroad as a covert agent, then moved back to the states for whatever reasons (she does have several young children, so perhaps it was in order to start a family), but continued to be directly engaged in covert operations. By blowing her cover, any operations she was working on or had worked on was immediately threatened, as foreign governments would have had no problem connecting her with agents and operations that were still operating within their countries.
And finally, even if Fitzgerald doesn't charge anyone with the crime of outing Plame, it doesn't necessarily mean that there wasn't a crime, just that he was unable to prove it definitively--which anyone listening to last week's indictment could easily read between the lines. So calling this a non-crime is, at best, legal smoke and mirrors, and not very effective at that.
Here's another whopper:
The least consequential of these fibs was his denial that it was his wife who got him sent to Niger in February 2002 to check out claims that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence later stated, in a bipartisan report, that evidence indicated it was Mrs. Wilson who "had suggested his name for the trip." By leaking this fact to the news media, Libby and other White House officials were merely setting the record straight -- not, as Wilson would have it, punishing his Mata Hari wife.
How does one go from "suggested" that he be sent on this trip to "got him sent" on it? Even if Plame really did recommend her husband for this trip--which in any case made perfect sense given his diplomatic experience with Niger and the region--she was not the one who got him sent on this trip. Her bosses made that decision, in response to Cheney's request that the CIA look into the matter. She just played a supportive role. It's like saying that I got Harry Reid to make his stand in the Senate on Tuesday by sending him an encouraging letter several months ago. GMAFB. Plus, the Mata Hari (a notorious German spy during WWI) reference was just plain in poor taste and totally immaterial to the matter at hand. Does he really want to invite Benedict Arnold and Aldrich Ames comparisons to Libby, Rove, Cheney at al?
Yet more nonsense:
Much more egregious were the ways in which Wilson misrepresented his findings. In his famous New York Times Op-Ed article (July 6, 2003), Wilson gave the impression that his eight-day jaunt proved that Iraq was not trying to acquire uranium in Africa. Therefore, when administration officials nevertheless cited concerns about Hussein's nuclear ambitions, Wilson claimed that they had "twisted" evidence "to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." The Senate Intelligence Committee was not kind to this claim either.
I have no idea what Boot is talking about here. As best I can tell, he's saying that because the administration refuted Wilson's claim that Iraq had not tried to purchase yellowcake from Niger, based on the investigating he had done into this during his trip to Niger, this automatically discredits his claim. I.e. saying so makes it true, when it's the administration that's doing the saying. Circular reasoning, anyone?
Plus, Pat Roberts' (R-KS) Senate Intelligence Committee, the cause of Reid's Rule 21 stunt in the Senate on Tuesday, has been stonewalling Democrats for several years now, repeatedly frustrating their attempts to get to the bottom of who knew what and when about the pre-war WMD intelligence. So we're supposed to take their word against Joe Wilson's on this? He may or may not be more credible than Roberts' committee, but they certainly are not more credible than him.
And yet more nonsense:
The panel's report found that, far from discrediting the Iraq-Niger uranium link, Wilson actually provided fresh details about a 1999 meeting between Niger's prime minister and an Iraqi delegation. Beyond that, he had not supplied new information. According to the panel, intelligence analysts "did not think" that his findings "clarified the story on the reported Iraq-Niger uranium deal." In other words, Wilson had hardly exposed as fraudulent the "16 words" included in the 2003 State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." In fact, the British government, in its own post-invasion review of intelligence, found that this claim was "well founded."
What "fresh details" is Boot talking about? Without being specific, this hardly disproves Wilson. It's like saying that because the head of Iraqi intelligence met Atta in Prague (which has never been proven in any case) several years before 9/11, Iraq was therefore in cahoots with Al Qaida and behind 9/11. He cites unnamed intelligence analysts from unnamed agencies as proof that Wilson didn't shed new light on the Niger story. As for trusting Roberts' panel or the British government about this matter, well, that speaks for itself, as both had vested interests in squelching Wilson's claims.
And finally, the most idiotic nonsense of all:
This is not an isolated example. Pretty much all of the claims that the administration doctored evidence about Iraq have been euthanized, not only by the Senate committee but also by the equally bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission. The latest proof that intelligence was not "politicized" comes from an unlikely source -- Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, who has been denouncing the hawkish "cabal" supposedly leading us toward "disaster." Yet, in between bouts of trashing the administration, Wilkerson said on Oct. 19 that "the consensus of the intelligence community was overwhelming" that Hussein was building illicit weapons. This view was endorsed by "the French, the Germans, the Brits." The French, of all people, even offered "proof positive" that Hussein was buying aluminum tubes "for centrifuges." Wilkerson also recalled seeing satellite photos "that would lead me to believe that Saddam Hussein, at least on occasion, was ... giving us disinformation."
Huh? "Euthenized"? What the hell is Boot talking about? We're only now starting to just barely get to the truth about the pre-war intelligence, and it'll be years and many FOIA rulings before we know what really happened. If Boot knows something that Senate Democrats and the rest of us don't, he needs to be more forthcoming. Wilkerson's statement about "the consensus of the intelligence community" obviously referred to its pre-war consensus based on what we're now learning may well have been doctored and falsified, not to its current, evolving consensus. It doesn't matter what everyone (including the French, whom he conveniently mentions here) thought before the war, whether it was about yellowcake or aluminum tubes. Even Democrats believed Iraq had WMD and was continuing to develop or seek to develop them, based on the "evidence" presented. The question is what everyone believes now, now that it's emerging that this evidence may have been falsified.
He closes with this pearl of wisdom:
So much for the lies that led to war. What we're left with is the lies that led to the antiwar movement. Good thing for Wilson and his pals that deceiving the press and the public isn't a crime.
Yeah. You really sold me there, Max. Bush Rules! Down with protest!