Wingers whitewashing intel scandal

Smears of Joseph Wilson, misrepresentation of 2004 SSCI report par for the course

A quick perusal of Media Matters for America reveals that right wing attack dogs have been unleashed to counter the now very obvious truth that the United States has attacked, invaded, conquered, occupied, dominated, and ravaged Iraq based upon false notions about weapons of mass destruction.

Try this from an oped by the jingoist foreign policy writer Max Boot in the November 2 edition of the LA Times, and discussed on Media Matters:

Pretty much all of the claims that the administration doctored evidence about Iraq have been euthanized, not only by the Senate committee but also by the equally bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission.

Or this exchange involving Fox's kind-hearted rightist radio host Tony Snow, heard on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher last Friday (October 28):

SNOW: Yeah, that's right. [laughter] [applause] The wife is the one who arranged for Joe Wilson to go over to Niger. What's interesting is that the people that really smeared Joe Wilson were the people who looked into his charges, the Senate Intelligence Committee, who said, ``You know what, Joe? All that stuff you said in the New York Times, was lies. You're wrong!''

CONNOLLY: No, let me tell you something—

SNOW: No, whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa. Wait a minute.

CONNOLLY: When you guys – when you—

SNOW: [to audience] Read the Senate Intelligence Committee Report. I know it's uncomfortable, because it's a view you don't want to hear. But if you're going to call ``bullshit,'' at least read it, and then get back to me. Sorry, go ahead.

MAHER: Wait a second. I'm sorry, what bullshit are we reading? [laughter]

SNOW: No, they're screaming “bullshit” for me.

MAHER: I know. [to audience] And you shouldn't. And please don't.

SNOW: Yeah, I'm talking about the Senate Intelligence Committee Report—

MAHER: But, but – said what?

SNOW: What they said is that Joe Wilson's account in the New York Times of his trip to Niger, sipping spiced tea and trying to investigate charges of yellow-cake uranium sales on the part of Niger—

MAHER: Yes.

SNOW: --that, basically, his account was misleading. That he did, in fact, find evidence, that the report that he filed with the CIA, later forwarded to the White House, indicated that such sales exist.

MAHER: Well, that I don't know to be true, and I would doubt it is.

SNOW: [overlapping] Well, but-but-but—

MAHER: [overlapping] But also, Valerie—

SNOW: [overlapping] Just read it. I'll send it to you.

Let's see, this whole thing is about the truthfulness of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson? Keeps the eye off of the document forgeries that undergirded the president's January 2003 State of the Union Message.

But what no one seems to call to the attention of Snow, Boot, and others peddling this tripe is that what they are waving comes from a highly partisan addendum of the July 7, 2004 ``Phase I'' Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report tacked onto to the end by committee Chairman Pat Roberts, and fellow Republican whitewashers Orrin Hatch and Kit Bond. On page 452 of the report, the whitewashers write,

Despite our hard and successful work to deliver a unanimous report, however, there were two issues on which the Republicans and Democrats could not agree: 1) whether the Committee should conclude that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's public statements were not based on knowledge he actually possessed, and 2) whether the Committee should conclude that it was the former ambassador's wife who recommended him for his trip to Niger.

Go ahead and take up Snow's challenge to read the Republican ``bullshit'' that follows. Hardly seems like a solid conclusion of the committee that Wilson lied in his NY Times piece of July 2003. Unfortunately neither Maher nor his other guests were prepared to point this out.

Wilson himself addressed these matters in great detail in a letter available here. This link points to one entry in a series of smashing deconstructions of the Republican attacks by Larry Johnson at TPM Cafe. (Johnson is a former CIA and State Department official.)

And the case against the Whitehouse for lying us into war is hardly ``euthanized'', considering that neither the SSCI Phase I report nor the Silbermann-Robb whitewash examine the questions of Whitehouse use of intelligence at all, as Media Matters points out.

The right itself is so full of bullshit on prewar use of the Iraq WMD concept. They just can't get their heads around the fact they were used to push a phony weapons case to falsely anoint an illegal, and predictably failed policy with legality and public acquiescence in late 2002 and early 2003. They can't even say the words, ``Office of Special Plans'' (as did neither SSCI nor Silbermann-Robb).

But if Mr. Snow actually did look into the meat of that SSC report, by the way, he might find plenty of evidence that administration fitted up its case, as explained in a July 2004 piece by former CIA briefer, Ray McGovern:

Although it was clear to us that much of the intelligence on Iraq had been cooked to the recipe of policy, not until the Senate report did we know that the skewing included outright lies. We had heard of "Joe," the nuclear weapons analyst in CIA's Center for Weapons Intelligence and Arms Control, and it was abundantly clear that his agenda was to "prove" that the infamous aluminum tubes sought by Iraq were to be used for developing a nuclear weapon. We did not know that he and his CIA associates falsified the data-including rotor testing ironically called "spin tests."

The Senate committee determined that "Joe" deliberately skewed data to fit preconceptions regarding an Iraqi nuclear threat. "Who could have believed that about our intelligence community, that the system could be so dishonest?" wondered the normally soft-spoken David Albright, a widely respected veteran expert on Iraq's work toward developing a nuclear weapon.

Gosh, Tony, you just ought to read that report you're waving around.

And we haven't even begun to discuss the Downing Street memos, that famously report from the bowels of officialdom, that ``intelligence was being fixed around policy.''

To further see why Boot, Snow, and the rest of the Republican flack machine is dealing in little more than childish slurs, check out an excellent span of postings at Talking Points Memo. Go here, and here for many postings giving a very detailed examination of the Republican frauds and chicanery that preceded the war. TPM makes these Republican flacksters look like sophomores whose dogs ate their homework.