Live broadcast of his little press briefing. He has the nerve to talk about “senior government officials” being truthful – I guess that doesn’t apply to ambassadors?
I don’t give a damn about Karl Rove. If President Bush fires him, I won’t notice (except when I see/hear all the posturing in the media, of course).
But this whole story stinks so badly… politically driven ambassador gets the proverbial reach-around from his wife to vacation in Niger, ostensibly to check out the British claim that Saddam Hussein had gone there shopping for uranium (actually, Wilson claims he spent his time “drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people”). Meanwhile, said ambassador, an ardent backer of presidential hopeful John Heinz-Kerry, has his own agenda: to discredit President Bush’s stated reasons for kicking Saddam’s ass out of Iraq.
Wilson goes public with statements that contradict his own findings in Niger, and in a conversation with the reporter writing the story, Karl Rove suggests the story is a lie, and tosses a few pieces of “rumor control” type information to back that statement. (VP didn’t send Wilson to Niger, CIA did, at the suggestion of the wife who happens to work at the CIA). Reporter ignores the warning, and instead digs into the wife’s background, revealing to the public that she’s a CIA underling. CIA freaks out, wife freaks out, government up-in-arms over the revelation that some blonde bimbo is a covert agent for the CIA. [sidenote: Given the ethnic makeup of the current typical terrorist/enemy, is there anyone more conspicuous the CIA could have hired to work as a “covert agent”?]
“Heads must roll!”, is the cry of everyone concerned. Justifiably, if this in fact is an intentional act to expose the aforementioned bimbo as a covert CIA agent. Nothing has been shown to indicate that as the intention… in fact, the only thing we’ve seen is an email from reporter to reporter’s boss indicating that Karl Rove suggested they not print the story, since the basic facts are wrong.
Does it appear that Karl Rove did something wrong? Sure, he talked to a reporter without considering the way a seasoned veteran of the “fourth estate” could take the most insignificant piece of information and turn it into a politically motivated scandal. He didn’t consider that a newsman more interested in boosting the flagging image of his rag than in reporting actual news might not consider that a comment about someone “apparently employed by the agency” would be dug into and become the story. He didn’t consider that said reporter and/or said rag didn’t give a damn about reporting the truth – political aspirations are infinitely more important than something so mundane as “the truth”.
This whole story is nonsense.
Wilson should never have used his position as a US ambassador to forward his political agenda. He should never have used his wife’s position as an employee of the CIA to attempt to discredit the President. His wife should have been (should be) fired for using her position to get her husband assigned to perform a fact-finding mission concerning matters in which he had no experience or expertise. Wilson should be condemned for lying to the public regarding what was actually learned in Niger.
If there is a story here, it is the utter failure of the CIA to provide reliable intelligence to the President of the United States to support or discredit the idea of an evil dictator trying to gain nuclear capabilities. The CIA is not a political body – and any indication that they are participating in partisan politics is as good a reason to start firing their leaders as is the obvious lack of intelligence in the “intelligence” community.
Now that’s a story.
Links:
http://www.factcheck.org/article222.html Bush’s “16 Words” on Iraq & Uranium: He May Have Been Wrong But He Wasn’t Lying
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0706-02.htm What I Didn’t Find in Africa
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/7/18/125916.shtml Iraq Uranium Claim Gets Some Support
http://www.gop.com/News/Read.aspx?ID=5630 Joe Wilson’s Top Ten Worst Inaccuracies And Misstatements
http://www.thehill.com/thehill/export/TheHill/Comment/ByronYork/071405.html There’s a lot we don’t know yet about the CIA flap
http://www.coxandforkum.com/archives/000622.html Plame Game
The British inquiry said it was generally accepted that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999, and there was intelligence from several sources that the visit was to acquire uranium. “Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger’s exports, the intelligence was credible,” the report said.
The Senate committee also described various reports about Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from French, British and unidentified foreign governments.
But how much credibility these reports had was not clear. The Senate committee criticized the CIA for “inconsistent and at times contradictory” reports to policy-makers on the uranium issue.
An internal CIA memo from June 17, 2003, said, “We no longer believe there is sufficient other reporting to conclude that Iraq pursued uranium from abroad.”
But beyond internal correspondence, “to date, the intelligence community has not published an assessment to clarify or correct its position on whether or not Iraq was trying to purchase uranium from Africa,” the Senate committee said.