Bush Dunnit

[dweller]

by Juan Cole

George Stephanopolous dropped a bombshell on his show on Sunday. Toward the end, as Judd notes, he said,


' Definitely a political problem but I wonder, George Will, do you think it’s a manageable one for the White House
especially if we don’t know whether Fitzgerald is going to write a report or have indictments but if he is able to show as
a source close to this told me this week, that President Bush and Vice President Cheney were actually involved in
some of these discussions. '

The implication is that Bush and Cheney took part in discussions with Karl Rove, Lewis Libby and other administration spinmeisters
about what to do about that pesky Joseph Wilson IV, former acting ambassador to Iraq who had stood up to Saddam in fall of 1990.
Wilson had gone to Niger in spring of 2002 to check out the stories circulating in intelligence circles that Saddam had bought
uranium there recently. Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney (when people are in legal trouble the tradition is to drop the
nicknames) had asked the CIA about the stories. Wilson had found that the structure of the uranium industry in Niger (which frankly
was in French hands) made the purchases implausible. What Wilson did not know at the time was that the stories were generated
by actual documents, a set of clumsily forged letters generated by Italian military intelligence officer Rocco Martini (who claimed he
was the tool of "higher powers.")

Wilson wrote his report and assumed it was passed by then CIA direct George Tenet and thence went to Cheney, who had initiated
the inquiry. Wilson watched with amazement and outrage as the Bush administration went on relentlessly to hype Iraq's alleged
nuclear program as a basis for the Iraq War that they got up. By May of 2003, Wilson had had enough, and he went public with an
editorial in the New York Times, in which he told his story.

The whole point of Bushism is to punish dissidence within the ranks immediately and ruthlessly. Wilson, a former State Department
official, had to be destroyed for having stepped out of line. Everyone should remember that when former Secretary of the Treasury
Paul O'Neill decided to come out with a tell-all memoir about being in the Bush cabinet for a year, he proclaimed, "I'm old, I'm rich,
and there is nothing they can do to me" (or words to that effect). Then all of a sudden the Bush administration was finding signs of
classified documents in O'Neill's book, implicitly threatening him with spending the rest of his life in jail for having revealed
government secrets. O'Neill feebly protested that he had not had access to classified documents. But all of a sudden he
disappeared from the airwaves. He had discovered that there were, too, things that could be done to him. He must have been
astonished that the Bushes of Kennebunkport would behave like Vladimir Putin. Everyone always underestimates the malevolence
of the Bushes of Connecticut.

So the Bush team ordered an investigation into Wilson. It quickly emerged that he was married to Valerie Plame Wilson (though the
government documents the White House could get hold of just called her Valerie Plame), and it transpired that Plame worked on
preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction at the CIA.


http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1003-29.htm

nice synopsis, thank you Professor!

dp