Fucking Bush White House Picks fight with the (RIGHT) Couple!

White House picked fight with wrong couple

Gene Lyons

Posted on Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Because journalists are almost as prone to flatter their audiences as politicians, the staggering ignorance of the American public about matters crucial to democratic self-governance is discreetly ignored. Get this: According to a Zogby poll conducted early this month, almost half (46 percent ) of respondents agreed that “there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 terror attacks.” Among Republicans, fully 65 percent believe that Iraq played a role in al-Qa’ida atrocities. Almost two-thirds! Sometimes it’s tempting to wonder if contemporary Republicanism hasn’t turned into a cult. The poll was taken days after President Bush, during a televised news conference, peevishly confessed that Saddam had “nothing” to do with the 2001 attack. He then denied that anybody in his administration “ever suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq.” But why pick on deluded Bush cultists? When it comes to anything touching even remotely on their own prerogatives, there’s scant evidence that the courtiers of the Washington press are capable of consecutive thought. Consider conventional wisdom about the revelation in David Corn and Michael Isikoff’s book, “Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War,” that columnist Robert Novak’s initial source in the betrayal of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s covert identity was State Department insider Richard Armitage.

Because Armitage is a confidant of Colin Powell’s rather than a White
House operative, pundits pretended that prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation is overblown. The Washington Post editorialized, “It follows that one of the most sensational charges leveled against the Bush White House—that it orchestrated the leak of Ms. Plame’s identity—is untrue.”

Exactly how it follows is a puzzler. According to the Post’s own reporting, Fitzgerald has said the “grand jury has collected so much testimony and so many documents that ‘it is hard to conceive of what evidence there could be that would disprove the existence of White House efforts to “punish” Wilson.’ ”

Armitage knew about Plame (although reportedly not anything about her covert status ) only because of a State Department report created at the behest of Dick Cheney’s office and dated more than a month before her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, went public with his revelations about Bush’s claims regarding Iraq’s mythical nukes.

The Post even blamed the destruction of Plame’s 20-year CIA career on her husband. Before challenging the president, see, Wilson “ought to have expected that both those [Bush administration ] officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission [i. e., to determine if Iraq had sought uranium ore in Africa] and that the answer would point to his wife.”

Translation: Laws be damned. Challenge the Godfather, expect the shiv.
The Post’s take was a faithful paraphrase of Cheney’s angry notes on a copy of Wilson’s offending New York Times column,“Have they [CIA officials ] done this sort of thing before? Send an Amb[assador ] to answer a question?” Cheney scrawled. “Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?”

One expects The Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard to parrot the party line. For The Washington Post to follow is a recent, and shameful, development
But here’s the real news in Corn and Isikoff’s book. The biggest mystery in the Plame-Wilson affair has always been why the White House panicked over a newspaper column by a relatively unknown figure like Joe Wilson. And the answer appears to be that, far from being the low-level munchkin GOP propagandists have depicted, Plame headed the agency’s Joint Task Force on Iraq, or JTFI, which was charged with finding Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.

Under terrific pressure from the White House, including visits to CIA headquarters by Cheney himself, the task force failed to produce the hard evidence demanded. “Valerie Wilson and other JTFI officers were almost too overwhelmed,” Corn writes, “to consider the possibility that [they were]... coming up with the correct answer: There was no intelligence to find on Saddam’s WMDs because the weapons did not exist.” Is that how Cheney knew Plame’s identity, and is that why the White House reacted so rashly to her husband’s exposing just one of the Bush administration’s pre-war propaganda stratagems? Both sides were playing a game with much higher stakes than anybody outside the intelligence establishment realized. In a White House eager to blame its own catastrophic bungling on bad intelligence, discrediting Wilson while intimidating Plame’s CIA colleagues into silence may have seemed a clever ploy. Unfortunately, it picked a fight with the wrong couple.

(If you ask me (AJ) they picked a fight with the RIGHT couple, fortunately…the fucking bastards)