The real story of Plamegate is told in these 3 paragraphs from a hard-hitting Knight Ridder story:
CIA officer Valerie Plame was outed in an apparent attempt to discredit her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, after he challenged President Bush’s allegation in his 2003 State of the Union speech that Iraq had tried to buy uranium for nuclear weapons from the African nation of Niger.
A Knight Ridder review of the administration’s arguments, its own reporting at the time and the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2004 report shows that the White House followed a pattern of using questionable intelligence, even documents that turned out to be forgeries, to support its case – often leaking classified information to receptive journalists – and dismissing information that undermined the case for war.
The State of the Union speech was one of a number of instances in which Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and their aides ignored the qualms of intelligence professionals and instead relied on the claims of Iraqi defectors and other suspect sources or, in the case of Niger, the crudely forged documents.
It’s nice that Knight Ridder is finally looking into this, but the bottom line is this: Only an idiot, someone in great denial or someone who didn’t follow the news would of missed what Bush was up to as he sent America into his war of choice. That this includes over 80% of Americans at the time is troubling. But more troubling is all the “smart” people who write for big newspapers, run network news stations and are elected as Democrats to speak up on important matters. These people had to know what was (and is) so painfully obvious: Bush was lying through his teeth to get us to go to war. I don’t know what got into the Washington establishment, but they sure got scared of Bush and his gang, and they sure fucked up big time.
That Bush (of all people) pulled this off, and that the establishment kept playing along during the election, speaks to something very wrong about the state of our political and media elites.
Cross posted: Political Porn
