WMDgate Locomotive Chugging Along
Bush & Co. appear to be struggling really hard to shift the coverage away from the Niger yellowcake comments in the SOTU, but so far they’ve had only marginal success. Lots of stories this morning.
First up, from CBS News, which is doing a pretty good Washington-Post-on-watergate impression, two stories, one from yesterday and one from today: Bush knew Iraq info was dubious and Furor over CIA role in WMD claim.
There’s some nice commentary from Kos (Bush knew Iraq info was false) and from Steve Gilliard (Have you no sense of decency, sir? and Let the fingerpointing begin).
There’s also an interesting rant from Justin Raimondo (Mosaic of lies), who seems quite convinced that the original source of the forged Niger documents was none other than Ariel Sharon, whom he charges with running his own off-the-books intellegence operation to bypass those integrity-tainted professionals in Mossad and feed bogus data to Rumsfeld’s and Wolfowitz’s boys in the Office of Special Plans. I’m not that paranoid yet, myself, but I wouldn’t be shocked if turned out to be true; they certainly had motive and opportunity.
So, what does it all mean? It boils down to this: As with Clinton and Monica, where the defense ultimately centered around the assertion that standing immobile while someone gives you a blowjob does not constitute “touching” that person, Bush is seeking cover from the following assertion: Saying “Saddam tried to buy uranium from Niger” when your own intelligence service had told you the story was probably untrue would be a lie. But saying “the British government has learned that Saddam tried to buy uranium from Niger” would be true, because you weren’t saying Saddam had actually tried to do that; you were just saying that Tony Blair believed Saddam had tried to do that.
It doesn’t work for me. Bush didn’t actually say, “the British government believes…” He said “the British government has learned that…” The clear implication is that the British government has learned something that is true. For Bush to say that about information the CIA had already told him was false still lands squarely in the category of “lie”, in my book.
Rice asserts that the change in language was made to soften the assertion from a bald lie to a truthful statement about our (unfortunately misguided) friends the British. As delivered, though, the statement doesn’t come off that way at all. It doesn’t sound like Bush is saying, “Well, the British believe so and so; we can’t confirm it from our end, so take it with a grain of salt.” What it sounds like is, “Hey; it’s not just us talking this way. Even the British know he’s doing this.”
And now they’ve been caught. Those damn spooks at the CIA have too much documentation about the doubts they expressed and when and to whom they expressed them. So make the admission in the form of a written statement from Ari’s office as the president is already winging his way to Africa, then do your best to get the story done and over while filling as many headline inches as you can with jolly stuff about Bush and Laura and daughter Barbara blushing at the sight of mating elephants.
That’s my dubya.
