Why Cheney Lost It When Joe Wilson Spoke Out (RAY McGOVERN)

Why Cheney Lost It When Joe Wilson Spoke Out
By Ray McGovern
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor

Wednesday 07 March 2007

Testimony at the Libby trial showed a vice president obsessed with retaliating against former ambassador Joseph Wilson for writing, in the New York Times op-ed section on July 6, 2003, that intelligence had been "twisted" to justify attacking Iraq. How to explain why the normally stoic, phlegmatic Cheney went off the deep end?

Vice President Dick Cheney can be forgiven for feeling provoked. The Times, having been led by Cheney and others down a garden path littered with weapons of mass destruction that were not really there, did some retaliation of its own with the snide title it gave Wilson's op-ed: "What I Did Not Find in Africa." Adding insult to injury, Wilson chose to tell Washington Post reporters, also on July 6, in language that rarely escapes an ambassador's lips, the bogus report regarding Iraq obtaining uranium from Niger "begs the question regarding what else they are lying about." That threw down the gauntlet, and Cheney had to worry that others who knew about the lies might feel it safe to go to the press and spill the beans. Retaliation had to be swift and as unambiguous as possible.

Having successfully browbeat then-CIA director George Tenet and other malleable managers of intelligence into doing his bidding, Cheney immediately tried to get the CIA to support the cockamamie story about Iraq getting uranium from Niger. He was no doubt surprised to be stiff-armed by Tenet, who had been warning senior officials about that bogus report for almost ten months. On July 7, the administration publicly conceded that the Iraq-Niger fable should not have been included in the State of the Union address.

On July 8, Cheney mounted his counteroffensive. Libby was sent to Bush administration darling Judith Miller of the New York Times to prove Wilson's charges wrong: the White House did not "twist" intelligence; the CIA made us do it. To prove that, Libby was given permission to release a passage buried on page 24 of the 90-page National Intelligence Estimate (NIR) of October 1, 2002, claiming that Iraq was "vigorously trying to procure uranium ore and yellowcake.... A foreign government service reported that as of early 2001, Niger planned to send several tons of 'pure uranium' (probably yellowcake) to Iraq."

Cheney intended this revelation to hoist Tenet on his own petard. Under great pressure from Cheney, Tenet and his timorous team had acquiesced in allowing the Iraq-Niger fable into the NIE Tenet signed on October 1. It had already become the centerpiece of the administration's cynical but successful effort to get Congressional approval, culminating in the October 10/11 vote for war.

In the midst of all this, Tenet was successful in getting the Iraq-Niger story out of President George W. Bush's key speech on Iraq on October 7. Yes, you read that right. Tenet signed the NIE on October 1, and a few days later successfully insisted that this dubious intelligence be taken out of the president's speech on October 7.

This piece of "intelligence" smelled so bad that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, who threw everything but the kitchen sink into his (in)famous UN speech of February 5, 2003, deemed it below his very low threshold...

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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030707R.shtml

It's great analysis by Ray McGovern.

And he was and is guilty as hell.