Sometimes an article comes along that is so good and so comprehensive and so…well…perfect…that there is no way for a blogger to whittle it down and pull out the salient points and provide commentary.

Murray Waas has just published the magnum opus on the Plame Affair. It’s long, but everyone should read it.

Waas reveals the basic outlines of a much larger conspiracy. A conspiracy within which Valerie Plame played a relatively minor part.

And it all goes back to the those dreaded aluminum tubes. Let’s get in our time machines and go back in time to September of 2002. The decision to invade in Iraq was probably made in April of 2002, but it was in August that the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) was formed. And they formulated the public relations strategy that would set the nation on a course for preemptive war. The media campaign began immediately after Labor Day. When Matt Miller, of the New York Times, asked chief-of-staff Andrew Card why they had waited until after Labor Day, Card responded with his infamous:

“From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”
























Things got rolling on September 8, 2002, when Michael Gordon and Judith Miller published “U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts”. That same day Rice, Powell, and Rumsfeld went on television and cited Gordon and Miller’s article as justification for taking a tough line on Iraq. The article stated:

In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium…The diameter, thickness and other technical specifications of the aluminum tubes had persuaded American intelligence experts that they were meant for Iraq’s nuclear program, officials said, and that the latest attempt to ship the material had taken place in recent months. The attempted purchases are not the only signs of a renewed Iraqi interest in acquiring nuclear arms. President Hussein has met repeatedly in recent months with Iraq’s top nuclear scientists and, according to American intelligence, praised their efforts as part of his campaign against the West.

Yet, according to Waas’s article, Bush was informed that there were severe doubts about the nuclear purpose for the tubes within days of this article’s appearance:

In mid-September 2002…Tenet informed him that both State and Energy had doubts about the aluminum tubes and that even some within the CIA weren’t certain that the tubes were meant for nuclear weapons, according to government records and interviews with two former senior officials.

Official records and interviews with current and former officials also reveal that the president was told that even then-Secretary of State Colin Powell had doubts that the tubes might be used for nuclear weapons.

Then, in early October something happened that would become very significant once no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. The President received a one-page National Intelligence summary that explictly informed him:

“…that the Energy Department and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research believed that the tubes were “intended for conventional weapons…”

So, by early October, the President had been informed by George Tenet about the doubts from Energy and State, and the lack of unanimity at the CIA. He had heard that Powell was dubious. Still, on October 7th, Bush said in a speech:

…Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.”

Further confirmation of internal dissent arrived on January 10, 2003, when a highly classified memo entitled “Questions on Why Iraq Is Procuring Aluminum Tubes and What the IAEA Has Found to Date” was circulated to Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, and others. Within it, the INR strongly disputed any conclusion that the tubes were suitable for uranium enrichment. Nevertheless, the President went on to state in his January 28th, 2003 State of the Union address:

Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production. Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide.

The President was clearly cherry-picking his facts. But it wasn’t until no weapons of mass destruction were found and, especially, no traces of a nuclear program were detected, that these prior statements became problematic. And it was in the context of intragovernmental finger-pointing that Valerie Plame’s identity was revealed.

Libby’s attorneys said in court papers:

Plame’s identity was disclosed during “a period of increasing bureaucratic infighting, when certain officials at the CIA, the White House, and the State Department each sought to avoid or assign blame for intelligence failures relating to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capability,” the attorneys said. “The White House and the CIA were widely regarded to be at war.”

The White House was aware of and concerned about the fact that Ambassador Wilson was making allegations about the Niger aspects of the case for war. But, according to Waas, they were actually much more concerned about the aluminum tube angle. The reason? There was documented evidence that the President knew about the fierce internal debate about their suitability for uranium enrichment.

Most troublesome to those leading the damage-control effort was documentary evidence — albeit in highly classified government records that they might be able to keep secret — that the president had been advised that many in the intelligence community believed that the tubes were meant for conventional weapons…

“Presidential knowledge was the ball game,” says a former senior government official outside the White House who was personally familiar with the damage-control effort. “The mission was to insulate the president. It was about making it appear that he wasn’t in the know. You could do that on Niger. You couldn’t do that with the tubes.”

And so, the White House began to lie. After Wilson’s article appeared on July 6, 2003:

Aboard Air Force One, en route to Entebbe, Uganda, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice gave a background briefing for reporters. A reporter pointed out that when Secretary Powell had addressed the United Nations on February 5, 2003, he — unlike others in the Bush administration — had noted that some in the U.S. government did not believe that Iraq’s procurement of high-strength aluminum tubes was for nuclear weapons.

Responding, Rice said: “I’m saying that when we put [Powell’s speech] together … the secretary decided that he would caveat the aluminum tubes, which he did…. The secretary also has an intelligence arm that happened to hold that view.” Rice added, “Now, if there were any doubts about the underlying intelligence to that NIE, those doubts were not communicated to the president, to the vice president, or me.”

That statement from Rice is now known to have been a blatant lie. And it just got worse.

After Air Force One landed in Entebbe, the president placed the blame squarely on the CIA for the Niger information in the State of the Union: “I gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intelligence services.” Within hours, Tenet accepted full responsibility.

As it turns out, Rove and Hadley worked closely with Tenet to help craft his statement. But they carefully sidestepped the issue of the aluminum tubes and kept the focus on the Niger issue.

This was part of their overall strategy. And it worked.

In the end, the White House’s damage control was largely successful, because the public did not learn until after the 2004 elections the full extent of the president’s knowledge that the assessment linking the aluminum tubes to a nuclear weapons program might not be true. The most crucial information was kept under wraps until long after Bush’s re-election.

Waas also reports that Cheney, Libby, and David Addington overruled other White House advisors and refused to turn over these sensitive documents (that would have exposed their lies) to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

A Republican political appointee involved in the process, who thought the Bush administration had a constitutional obligation to be more open with Congress, said: “This was about getting past the election.”

And they did get past the election.