Treason-Based Intelligence
...and there's another kind.
I've been watching the Bush presidency for the last 5 years and I can say that nothing in my experience matches the desperate, systematic, and pre-emptive obfuscation the Bush administration has applied to the yellowcake brouhaha..
...except the Bush TANG issue of his evasion of military service.
It makes me think that there must be some existential, administration-threatening danger hidden in the Niger story that the Bush White House has marshalled its full intellectual, legal, political, and PR energies to overcome.
Something like:
The Bush administration knowingly and intentionally recruited Berlusconi's help to generate fraudulent intelligence in Italy about Iraq's nuclear activities that could be laundered through British intelligence, thereby rendering it untraceable and unexaminable — and legitimized by MI6. Then it was stovepiped to the White House national security apparatus, and cynically purveyed to the American public by Bush and his foreign policy team as high quality, actionable intelligence justifying pre-emptive attack on Iraq.
Quite a mouthful, I know. But it is the only scenario I can think of that explains the almost unimaginable scope, multi-level tendentiousness, and attention to detail of the administration's efforts to discredit Joe Wilson.
It wouldn't have seemed to be necessary, let alone difficult, to raise questions in the public mind about Joe Wilson. Just the other day Wonkette was snarking about his showboating ways.
But not only reliable tools such as Max Boot, in the exercise of their normal duties as White House waterboys, are going to enormous lengths to twist Wilson's statements in an attempt to build the case that he is a discreditable liar. Senator Pat Roberts' intelligence committee whitewash also labored mightily the same end. And so did Karl. And Scooter. The British even pitched in with a whitewash of their own, the Butler report. In what appears to be a rolling clusterfuck, the Italians also seem to be building a shaky edifice of assertion, denial, retraction, and confusion to deflect blame and obscure the true story of their role in the yellowcake affair.
Plamegate. It's not just about abject GOP toadies. The White House decision makers and agenda setters — policy guys, not just pathetic flacks like Fleischer and McClellan — are involved. And within the heart of the White House, the highest-ranking, most powerful staffers — Rove and Libby — are obsessively compiling thick binders on Wilson, composing convoluted, multi-level anti-Wilson talking points, carefully and systematically leaking, creating alibis, and generating complex cover stories (and in the end, perjuring themselves before grand juries) to conceal their interest and involvement. And not only our government. Other governments are recruited into the cover-up.
And for what?
After all, Joe was right. There was nothing to the Niger allegations. Big whoop.
If the story was simply that the White House had drunk deeply and gullibly from the sewers of unreliable intelligence, why waste time on Joe Wilson? Just say oops, we erred on the side of caution, embraced the worst-case scenario out of concern for the safety of the whole fucking planet, Joe Wilson came up a little bit of non-corroborating intel that didn't make it up to the top of the chain of command, Joe can have his 15 minutes of fame, now get outta here...
But if the real story is that the White House crapped in the Italian sewer itself, then hurried downstream for an energizing drink, then sliming Joe Wilson is a desperate attempt to prevent piecemeal exposure of a truly egregious, politically unforgivable crime.
And if it turned out the CIA was never brought into the Niger plot, the pattern of action, circumvention, omission, and duplicity by the White House with relation to the CIA and the yellowcake story might reveal a web of conspiracy.
I don't believe that Cheney was ever interested in having somebody go to Niger. He goes to great lengths to say he didn't send Wilson and didn't read the report on his trip. Cheney never says, as far as I've read, that he ever asked the CIA to send somebody or thought it would be a good idea to check out a story firsthand that, if true, might portend nuclear annihilation for the United States.
I think the CIA sent Wilson on its own initiative. Some CIA apparatchik who wasn't with the program — who didn't understand that Cheney was coming to Langley just to lean on the analysts to provide an ass-covering endorsement of the yellowcake allegations (like "Based on an analysis of Iraqi intentions and activities in Africa, it can be assumed that blah blah blah") - took the dumbass, career-ending risk of trying to acquire actual, objective intelligence on Iraq's WMDs by sending some guy to Niger to talk to someone.
When Cheney found out that the CIA sent someone to Niger — not a reliable member of the neocon team who would be clearly tasked on what was expected and come back with useful misinformation and innuendo to support the yellowcake story, but an informed skeptic with a certain amount of public credibility and reputation — he went ballistic and became convinced that the manufactured story was under threat, not only from Wilson's story but from the CIA. Scooter and Rove were tasked with destroying Wilson's credibility — and viability as a vehicle for further CIA revelations and an alternate narrative for what happened with the yellowcake fiasco.
In other words, the Wilson revelations could not be allowed to become a bolthole from which the CIA version of events emerged.
To deny the CIA the use of Wilson as a credible channel for protecting itself as an institution from being scapegoated for intelligence failures — and to keep attention from being drawn to an alternate scenario in which the administration not only cherry-picked but manufactured and laundered false intelligence — Wilson was attacked comprehensively and intensively and the CIA was thereby discredited by its association with Wilson.
So Wilson is just another "intelligence failure", another example of the sloppiness bordering on dishonesty, incompetence, nepotism, and inbred culture of the CIA.
What should be a CIA triumph — or at least, a legitimate talking point (as in "at least we gathered some real intel through Joe Wilson's trip that pointed to the truth about yellowcake") - instead becomes an enormous political imbroglio in which backing Wilson becomes inextricably and fatally linked to disloyalty to the Bush administration.
As a result, I don't think disgruntled CIA officers are lining up to cry on Porter Goss's shoulder, whistle-blow to Pat Roberts, or blab to the papers about what they know when they know that Dick Cheney and his proxies are ready to drop the same 500-pound shithammer on their heads that Joe Wilson got. (And, I might add, the same kind of hammer that David Kelly and the BBC got in the UK. Government pushbacks against Wilson and Kelly — and the CIA and MI6 - occurred at the same time, in July 2003. I wouldn't be surprised if this was a piece of Bush and Blair coordinated strategy to make sure their spooks kept their lips zipped about their governments' use of fraudulent intel.)
Again, somehow this all-out campaign against the CIA doesn't seem necessary if the issue is simply faith-based Cheney reading of intelligence vs. CIA reality-based intel. The CIA has been slimed so effectively by the neo-cons and by the rollover of its senior staff during the prelude to the Iraq war that it doesn't seem necessary to go to engage in an intensive pre-emptive assault to forestall what could easily be dismissed as self-serving CIA carping. Being right on one little piece of Iraq isn't going to help the CIA when the world is happy to believe it got the rest wrong.
Unless, as I posited before, that the insignificant crack in the dam represented by Joe Wilson's little trip and op-ed must be repaired, before further revelations spurt out and people start looking at the overall handling of the yellowcake allegations within the intelligence and national security apparatus, connections between the White House and Berlusconi's political and media empire as well as CIA and SISMI, MI6, NSC, WHIG...and VPOTUS, a.k.a. Dick Cheney.
Especially if we're talking about a conspiracy to forge documents that excluded the usual suspects — the CIA — that possess the experience and ability to efficiently, effectively, and clandestinely create and propagate them, and instead was being handled off the books by a high-risk, off-the-books gang of enthusiasts, incompetents, and criminals, supervised by overworked, high-level staffers slumming uncomfortably and amateurishly in a dangerous, unfamiliar environment.
Timelines get assembled, people connect dots, evidence accumulates, somebody blabs...
...and then the White House might face the politically unacceptable suspicion that there is plenty of circumstantial evidence and motive and evidence of predisposition — but no convincing refutation — of the allegation that the White House, through proxies in the US, Italy, and the UK, planted and exploited a yellowcake allegation that it knew was false, for the purpose of stampeding the US people and government into war with Iraq.
That's as close as you can get to treason without betraying this country to its enemies.
If this is the case, the fact that Plamegate is resolving itself in the public eye as simply a story of near pathological vindictiveness, deception, abuse of power, and disregard for national security
...instead of simple treason...
must be source of intense relief to the White House.
copyright 2005 Peter Lee
Peter Lee is the creator of the anti-war satire and commentary website Halcyon Days. He can be reached at peter@halcyondays.info.
