Wednesday, October 26, 2005

The state of the CheneyGate scandal

Today looks like it's going to be Fitzmas Eve rather than the big day itself.  I've been thinking that once indictments are handed up, a lot of people will start to focus on this case and be bewildered by it for a while.

Political junkies and Plame case devotees are already speaking routinely about the significance of "the June 23 meeting" and "the SSCI report" and the "16 words in the SOTU".  Some of this is bound to sound near-occult to people just beginning to tune into this drama.

And I'm sure that the good people at FOX News and the myriad other by-ways of the Republican Noise Machine will do everything they can to make the prosecutor's case sound bewildering.  I mean, how can anyone expect people like corporate CEO's and good all-American Christian Right churchgoers to understand anything this convoluted?  And, golly Pete, you can't really expect people to criticize the Preznit based on some hopelessly confusing accusation, can you?

So, here are a few points I'm trying to keep in mind at this point.

The basics

The Plame case involves the exposure of Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA agent.  And the motive for the exposure was to cover up the evidence of the frauds used to justify the Iraq War.

Or, in bullet points:

* An undercover CIA agent was publicly exposed

* The motive was to hide frauds used to justify the Iraq War.

Now, that's really not so hard to grasp.  Yes, we've got the SSCI report and the Butler report and the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and something to do with Niger and the Italians and uranium.

But, outside those whose brains have not been pickled in OxyContin, the basics of the thing just aren't that complicated.

One of several recent summaries of "PlameGate" is Plamegate may seem arcane, but we all have a stake in the outcome by Jonathan Freedland Guardian (UK) 10/26/05.

Is Joe Wilson a liar?

I don't pretend to understand the mysteries of the loyal Republican view of the world.  I know they don't think much of how we in the "reality-based" community process things.

But I don't see why it still is such a fad in Wingnuttia to keep saying that Joe Wilson is a liar, liar, pants on fire.  Part of it probably is just learned behavior.  I mean, lots of today's Republicans literally grew up saying, "Liberals are liars, liberals are liars," and that may just be the default reaction to any criticism of their side.  Not that Joe Wilson has been known as a liberal, but he must be, because he criticized Bush the Magnificent, right?

At this point, though, it seems to me that not a great deal is riding on Wilson's personal credibility.  He was apparently not a direct witness to the outing of his wife, and has not claimed to be.  And the related stories about the forged Niger documents and the use that was made of them is not likely to require any additional information based exclusively on his accounts of his now-legendary visit to Niger.

It seems to me that his credibility has held up well.  In fact, the main slip of which I'm aware in that regard is that he admitted to overstating one aspect of the result of his Niger trip.  Bob Somerby, who as I've  mentioned in earlier posts has been surprisingly receptive to the Republican spinmeisters on this point, discussed it in his 10/25/05 post, in which he was still trying to keep this argument on life-support.

He provides a helpful reference to: Husband Is Conspicuous in Leak Case: Wilson's Credibility Debated as Charges In Probe Considered by Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus Washington Post 10/25/05.  In this article, Milbank and Pincus report that Wilson admitted that, when he was a source for a Post article on the Niger trip in 2003, he erroneously stated that his investigation had determined that the documents were fraudulent because the names and dates on them were wrong.  (Public reports earlier that year had aired the information that problems with the names and dates on the documents exposed them as inauthentic.)

But so far as I'm aware, Wilson has been consistent in saying that he concluded from his trip that the documents which had generated Dick Cheney's request to the  CIA for further  information were fraudulent.  It certainly seems to be a plausible conclusion, since if the transaction the documents alleged to have taken place didn't happen, then something must have been wrong with the documents.

As Milbank and Pincus observe:

Wilson's central assertion - disputing President Bush's 2003 State of the Union claim that Iraq was seeking nuclear material in Niger - has been validated by postwar weapons inspections. And his charge that the administration exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq has proved potent.

In deference to Bob Somerby's scruples, the 2003 SOTU did not, as I said, mention Niger.  But since the information publicly available strongly indicates that the Niger forgeries were the source of the SOTU claim, I find it hard to fault the Post writers for specifying Niger in that connection.

[10/29/05 - The Post article now carries a correction note: "An Oct. 25 article incorrectly said President Bush asserted during his January 2003 State of the Union message that Iraq was seeking nuclear material in Niger. The president said that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa."]

Sought vs. bought, aka, the "con-man defense"

This is one of those things that sounds like it's near-impossible to untangle, or even grasp.  But it's been part of the Wilson critics' arsenal since a few days after his 2003 op-ed about his Niger investigation.

Bush in his 2003 State of the Union (SOTU) address used his "16 words" to refer to a British report that Iraq had "sought" to get "uranium from Africa."  He didn't mention Niger specifically.  And Joe Wilson's report on Niger concluded that it was highly unlikely that Iraq had acquired uranium from that country.  Therefore, the argument goes, Wilson's report didn't contradict Bush's SOTU address at all.

I discussed in my post of 10/22/05 the deficiencies of this line of argument.  The Left Coaster's eriposte has dealt with this in detail, most recently in Treasongate: Desperately Seeking (or Buying) Uranium 10/25/05.   Josh Marshall revisited this sought/bought business this week in a 10/25/05 post.

Hischaracterization of this argument is apt:

So the president wasn't saying Saddam had bought uranium. He wasn't even saying he'd tried. He said the Brits had "learned" that he tried.

Some White House defenders still hang their hat on this point, arguing that nothing the president said was in fact false. Anybody who got the wrong impression just didn't read the fine print.

That argument (let's call it 'the con-man defense') speaks for itself, I think.

The Niger documents and the British report

Without wading into the particular arguments, one of the more important outstanding questions about the forged document purporting to show an Iraqi purchase of uranium is, were these documents the main basis, or even the exclusive basis, for the British report cited in the "16 words" claiming Iraq "sought" uranium?  This is important, because the claim about seeking uranium was the single most vivid piece of evidence out of all the prewar WMD claims.  If the Niger documents were the real basis of that British intelligence claim, it looks worse for the honesty of the Bush administration.

Another unanswered question is the origin of the Niger forgeries.  SISMI (another buzzword for aficionados), which is Italian military intelligence, played some role in passing those documents to the United States.  It's entirely possible that American war advocates, Rummy's Pentagon, and/or Israeli intelligence played some role in producing them in the first place.  No definitive answers yet.

Laura Rozen summarizes recent developments in Laura Rozen, "La Repubblica's Scoop, Confirmed", The American Prospect Online, Oct 25, 2005.

WHIPing up a war and Cheney vs. the CIA

The White House Iraq Group, a group of Bush administration officials which was formed in 2002 to market the Iraq War, has also been a focus of prosecutor Fitzgerald's inquiry.  But WHIP was only one of several informal (in the sense of non-statutory) groups that the Pentagon (Rummy) and Dick Cheney's office used to gin up a phony case for war against Iraq.  Part of what these groups did was to take raw intelligence that either had not been vetted by the regular intelligence agencies, or had been vetted and rejected, and used the information to promote war.  The stories that talk about Cheney vs. the CIA have to do with these groups.

See The Lie Factory by Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest Mother Jones Jan/Feb 2004 to get a glimpse at how it worked.

Scapegoats

A lot is being written right now about how Cheney's office was central to the WMD fraud.  And there's no reason to dispute that.  But watch for Republican attempts to dump the blame on Cheney in order to shield Bush from criticism.  Based on the circumstantial evidence, I (along with every other sentient Democrat) am convinced that both Bush and Cheney were in on the Plame outing.  Joe Conason reminds us (Bush's aides scramble as inquiry winds down WorkingforChange.com 10/26/05).

Back in September 2003, before the appointment of the special counsel, the President reportedly said, "I want to get to the bottom of this." His press secretary, Scott McClellan, told the country that Mr. Bush considered the leak of Ms. Wilson's identity "a very serious matter." Speaking for the President, Mr. McClellan said: "If anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration." But while specifically exonerating Mr. Rove, the press secretary also offered a broad, categorical denial. "There's been nothing -- absolutely nothing -- brought to our attention to suggest any White House involvement," he said.

That statement, to quote another press secretary [Ron Ziegler from the Watergate days], is no longer operative. Months ago, we learned that Mr. Rove had spoken with reporters about Ms. Wilson's employment by the C.I.A. The Presidential aide had hoped to discredit Ms. Wilson's husband by suggesting nepotism in his C.I.A.-sponsored trip to Niger to gather information about alleged uranium trading with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. (Actually, the former ambassador undertook that arduous trip without pay as a public service -- the kind of act that Mr. Rove may find difficult to understand.) ...

It  has become crystal clear, in fact, that the highest officials in the Bush White House were deeply involved in the campaign to discredit Mr. Wilson in retaliation for his dissent from the Iraq war policy and the fabricated "weapons of mass destruction" argument for invasion.

Still, Cheney's snarling face looms very large in the Shrub Bush administration.  Joan Walsh writes in The real meaning of the Plame scandal Salon 10/25/05:

The mind shrinks from taking in the outlines of the truth, but every day it becomes clearer that a cabal of White House insiders sold a disastrous war based on faulty intelligence that they invented or suborned, and that they engaged in a highly organized and vicious campaign to smear, discredit and sideline those who dared to raise questions about it all. The Fitzgerald investigation just examines some of the laws they may have broken to do it.

It has always been clear that Cheney was at the center of the story, but the Times revelation Tuesday about his role in the campaign against Wilson reveals the strange mixture of  pettiness, fear and arrogance that prevailed in the White House as its lovely little war, and the rationale for it, came crashing down. It's easy to say now that the White House overreacted to Wilson; it's unlikely he'd have gained the stature he has if the White House hadn't become obsessed with his Niger trip. Certainly his July New York Times Op-Ed piece boldly and directly challenged the underpinnings of the war, but we now know the White House was absorbed with discrediting Wilson even before that. The Los Angeles Times reported how Libby was personally driven to distraction by Wilson, monitoring his every utterance and urging a crusade to counter him.

During the 2000 campaign and even early in the current administration, lots of Democrats actually looked to Cheney to be a mature, sensible and moderating influence in this crowd.  As misguided as it seems now, it was a widespread view.  And, yes, I confess that I was of that sadly deluded belief myself.  Josh Marshall made one of the early reality-based  examinations of that assumption: Vice Grip: Dick Cheney is a man of principles. Disastrous principles Washington Monthly Jan/Feb 2003.

Week after week, one need only read the front page of The Washington Post to find similar Cheney lapses. Indeed, just a few days after Cheney hand-picked [Treasury Secretary John] Snow, Newsweek magazine featured a glowing profile of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice that began with an anecdote detailing her deft efforts to clean up another Cheney mess. In a July speech, the vice president had argued that weapons inspections in Iraq were useless and shouldn't even be tried. That speech nearly upended the administration's careful late-summer repositioning in favor of a new United Nations-backed inspections program. As the article explained, Rice--the relatively junior member of the president's inner circle of foreign policy advisers--had to take the vice president aside and walk him through how to repair the damage he'd done, with a new statement implicitly retracting his earlier gaffe. Such mistakes--on energy policy, homeland security, corporate reform--abound. Indeed, on almost any issue, it's usually a sure bet that if Cheney has lined up on one side, the opposite course will turn out to be the wiser.

Yet somehow, in Washington's collective mind, Cheney's numerous stumbles and missteps have not displaced the reputation he enjoys as a sober, reliable, skilled inside player.Even the Newsweek article, so eager to convey Rice's competence, seemed never to explicitly note the obvious subtext: Cheney's evident incompetence. If there were any justice or logic in this administration as to who should or shouldn't keep their job, there'd be another high-ranking official in line for one of those awkward conversations: Dick Cheney.

Homeland security, foreign policy, corporate scandals: Marshall noted how prominent Cheney was in all these problems of this administration.  And this was before Halliburton started raking in the Iraq contracts, although I believe at that time it had received the job of building jail cells on Guantanamo.  And he analyzed Cheney's decision-making style:

Cheney is conservative, of course, but beneath his conservatism is something more important: a mindset rooted in his peculiar corporate-Washington-insider class. It is a world of men--veryfew women--who have been at the apex of both business and government, and who feel that they are unique in their mastery of both. Consequently, they have an extreme assurance in their own judgment about what is best for the country and how to achieve it. They see themselves as men of action. But their style of action is shaped by the government bureaucracies and cartel-like industries in which they have operated. In these institutions,a handful of top officials make the plans, and then the plans are carried out. Ba-da-bing. Ba-da-boom.

In such a framework all information is controlled tightly by the principals, who have "maximum flexibility" to carry out the plan. Because success is measured by securing the deal rather than by, say, pleasing millions of customers, there's no need to open up the decision-making process. To do so, in fact, is seen as governing by committee. If there are other groups (shareholders, voters, congressional committees) who agree with you, fine, you use them. But anyone who doesn't agree gets ignored or, if need be, crushed. Muscle it through and when the results are in, people will realize we were right is the underlying attitude.

So, in that sense, the blooger Billmon may right in calling this "the Cheney administration."  And maybe "CheneyGate" is the best name for the scandal.

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