Whitewash for the White House

Bu$hie's whitewash commission absolves him of all intelligence manipulation in the Iraqi WMD farce.

Will Pitt remembers otherwise:
" Bush's hand-picked crew of whitewashers has put out a report blaming the entire Iraq debacle on the intelligence community. The report is a farce, a fraud, evidence that the White House has managed to win its little war with CIA by sticking Goss in there and silencing whistleblowers by way of Plame-like intimidation. The corporate news media, of course, has helped.

My immediate thought: If the intelligence was so bad, so wrong, why are we still there?

Beyond that, let's remember a few things here.

Bush: U.S. had 'darn good intelligence' on Iraq

'When I gave the speech, the line was relevant'

From Dana Bash
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, July 15, 2003

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush said Monday he had "darn good intelligence" on Iraq despite his disputed State of the Union claim that Baghdad sought to purchase uranium from Africa...

The report skipped that. It also failed to mention The Office of Special Plans, the Chalabi-affiliated group that circumvented and intimidated the intelligence community to deliver skewed Iraq threat data to the public.

It also failed to mention Colin Powell's catastrophically embarrassing UN appearance in February 2003, when he stood before that world body and used a report plagiarized from a grad student essay to prove the existence of WMD in Iraq.

Likewise, no mention is made of the page on the White House website which still claims that Hussein had 26,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons (which equals 1,000,000 lbs.) of sarin, mustard and VX, along with nearly 30,000 munitions to deliver the stuf, mobile biological weapons labs and uranium from Niger for use in their robust nuclear weapons program. All this data comes from Bush's remarks in the 2003 State of the Union address. If the intelligence was so bad, why is this page still on the White House servers?

And then there was this:

"How the United States should react if Iraq acquired WMD. The first line of defense...should be a clear and classical statement of deterrence--if they do acquire WMD, their weapons will be unusable because any attempt to use them will bring national obliteration."

- Condoleeza Rice, US National Security Advisor
January/February 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs
2/1/2000

"We are greatly concerned about any possible linkup between terrorists and regimes that have or seek weapons of mass destruction...In the case of Saddam Hussein, we've got a dictator who is clearly pursuing and already possesses some of these weapons. A regime that hates America and everything we stand for must never be permitted to threaten America with weapons of mass destruction."

- Dick Cheney, Vice President
Detroit Fund-Raiser
6/20/20002..." and about 3 dozen other quotes.

Go read it.

Anybody else remember Valerie Plame?

Melanie Sloan does:
"Remember Valerie Plame? Ms. Plame was the CIA undercover operative who was outed by the White House in effort to punish her husband former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had publicly stated in a July 6, 2003 op-ed in the New York Times, that despite President Bush’s statements to the contrary, Iraq had not attempted to purchase yellow cake uranium from Niger. The existence of that uranium, you may recall, was presented to the public as "evidence" that Iraq had nuclear weapons which, in turn, was used to justify our unilateral attack on Iraq.

Ms. Plame, however, had nothing to do with any of that. Ms. Plame was an operative under deep cover -- the CIA had created an entire company just so that Ms. Plame could claim that she worked there. Yet once Joseph Wilson broke his silence and announced that the White House was lying, Karl Rove decided that Wilson needed to be punished and that his wife was "fair game." Two top government officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson’s wife. But only the ever-ready apologist for the Republican Party, Robert Novak, took the bait. On July 14, 2003, Novak wrote a piece outing Ms. Plame as an operative.

Neither Karl Rove -- or whomever among the Bush senior staff leaked it -- nor Novak gave a moment’s consideration to the lives that they may have jeopardized by outing Ms. Plame. Never mind that anyone in another country who had so much as met Ms. Plame might now be suspected of spying. No thought was given to the fact that others, who were in fact spies, might be outed through their connection to Ms. Plame, and no thought was given to the fact that actual lives could be lost as a result of this odious act. Never mind that outing an undercover CIA operative is a federal crime.

A very serious matter, yet you would never know that from the White House’s response. When the revelation first hit the press in July, the White House first refused to comment and later, had White House press secretary Scott McClellan claim -- without so much as a question asked of White House staff -- "that is not the way this White House operates," and that "no one was certainly given any authority to do any of that nature, and I’ve seen no evidence to suggest there’s any truth to it." It’s hard to find evidence you are doing your very best to ignore..."