Consortium News: Finally, Congress Looks at Plame-gate

Finally, Congress Looks at Plame-gate

By Jason Leopold (A Special Report)
June 16, 2008


Five years ago this month, an extraordinary battle was taking shape in the shadows of official Washington: a former U.S. ambassador was preparing to go public to challenge a central deception used by the White House to justify invading Iraq – and the Bush administration was readying a fierce counterattack against him.

Now, after many nasty clashes – which led to the exposure of a covert CIA officer, a criminal White House cover-up, a special prosecutor investigation, the conviction of a senior aide to Vice President Dick Cheney and a subsequent presidential commutation – one key administration insider finally has agreed to testify before Congress.

Ex-White House press secretary Scott McClellan is scheduled to appear before the House Judiciary Committee on June 20 to answer questions about President George W. Bush’s false claim that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq bought 500 tons of yellowcake uranium from Niger -- and about the later cover-up of this deception.

McClellan will be asked, too, what he knows about the administration’s role in blowing the cover of CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson, whose husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, was the one who blew the whistle on the false Niger claim.

The back-drop for the hearings also will include the unrelenting assaults that Bush’s political and media allies have directed against Wilson, an example of what McClellan has called Washington’s slash-and-burn culture of the “permanent campaign.”

Although it’s long been established that Wilson was right about the inaccuracy of Bush’s Niger claim – and indeed the administration has admitted that it never should have been inserted into Bush’s 2003 State of the Union Address – the coordinated Republican attacks on Wilson’s credibility have not abated even to this day.

Indeed, one of the most striking features of this long-running saga may be that instead of thanking Wilson for his original investigation into the Niger issue in 2002 and recognizing his courage in exposing the use of false intelligence in 2003, Republicans have continued to recite talking points that disparage Wilson and his wife. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/061608a.html