forgery allegation, I came across this article by John Dean, of July 18, 2003 (the day Kelly's dead body was found near his home) about the totality of the lies in Bush's 2003 State of the Union address. It's breathtaking.
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20030718.html And it reminds me of my feeling about Colin Powell's UN speech at the time. I just had this overwhelming gut feeling, listening to him on the radio (as I did) that it was a 100% pack of lies; that every word was false. With Bush, lying is a foregone conclusion; his personal stance in the world is so false that he is not capable of uttering the truth, ever. Not so with Powell. He suffers conflict about lying, or, at the very least, does not want to get caught; whereas Bush doesn't even know what lying is. So, my perception about Powell--that it was ALL lies--was surprising to me, and I distrusted the feeling, and went looking for the truth on WMDs, and came across the UN reports, Scott Ritter and other sources. (I may even have read this John Dean article during that period.)
Yup, Powell was full of it--every word was B.S. But, quite interestingly, he got fussy over the Niger claim--because, as John Dean politely puts its--he didn't think it was reliably sourced (not a shred of evidence to base the lie upon--and, now that I think of it, may have been wary of the Niger forgeries, or even cognizant of who had created them (Bushite skulldugs)).
The arc of the Iraq nuke lie was political, as I see it. It was a political plan to convict Iraq, in the realm of public opinion, of possessing and intending to use nukes, and (part 2 of the plot) to then produce the "evidence" in Iraq--with Judith Miller all set up to "get the scoop" (her reward for services rendered at the NYT)--and with the public all set up to expect such a "find" and to then, in retrospect, quell any doubts they may have had about this allegation, because, well, 'here's the yellowcake,' or 'here are the parts of an enrichment plant,' or, 'here are the detonators,' or whatever they were shipping into Iraq.
Can you imagine the war profiteering news monopoly circus that we would have had to endure at such a "find"? At that time, they were jumping at the least bit of suspicious looking dust in a barn, that Judith Miller or CenCom was pointing them at!
My point is that the Iraq nuke lie was not strategic or diplomatic, or even legal (as to convicting Saddam). It had nothing to do with the reality of the situation. It was Rovian, in that sense. It was just bullshit perpetrated on the American people. All of the allegations against Iraq were the same--total B.S.--but THIS ONE had been SET UP to be CONFIRMED.
THAT's why it had to go into the State of the Union address--despite Wilson's report and all the other potentially public evidence that it was a false claim. It had to be set up as a self-fulfilling prophecy, because plans were in motion to FULFILL it.
Powell is more of a strategic or diplomatic thinker. He discarded it because he didn't think it would wash in diplomatic circles, and/or didn't think it was that important to getting Saddam out and getting control of the Mideast oil fields. But the POLITICAL thinkers--the manipulators, the brainwashers of the media--knew how important it WOULD BE, when the planted nuke evidence was "found."
So that was the arc of this lie: from Italy and the forged documents to Judith Miller and the "found" nukes in Iraq.
The forgeries were so poor that I was thinking, at one point, that it was a plot to catch the CIA out somehow. You produce forgeries. You strongarm the CIA to defend the forgeries. When their fakeness is easily proven, you blame the CIA for incompetence and destroy their credibility. (???)
Another possibility: You get Wilson (or allow Wilson) to go check the allegation out. He comes back and says it's B.S. And you thus create a division within the CIA, between those committed to the truth and those committed to the Bush Cartel, and flush out the truthtellers, to be purged. (???)
Or, more subtle: You create a public dispute between the truthtellers in the CIA, who know that Iraq does not have nukes, and the Bushites who do scary soundbites about "mushroom clouds," and then produce the "evidence" that the scary soundbites are the truth--because you've got the TV cameras on the "found" yellowcake (or whatever)--and all the protestations, and doubts, and suspicions, and cautiousness of the CIA on the Iraq war looks lame, by comparison. They're ballless libs over there; won't even believe this 'hard evidence' before their very eyes that Saddam was 'a bad man' with 'evil plans,' and that killing 100,000 of his people, to stop this "mushroom cloud" over America, was 'fully' justified.
The CIA would have had to skulk away into its ballless lib cave. They could not have won that argument, forgeries or no forgeries.
I think this was probably the plan--the one that David Kelly threw a monkey wrench into, by stumbling upon (and perhaps helping to foil) part 2: the planting of the weapons.
Another thing Dean reminded me of, was that Bush relied on "British intelligence" for the nuke claim. (This confused Wilson for a while--he wasn't sure they were talking about the same Niger allegation that he had investigated and had found to be false.) And it was the nuke claims in the "sexed up" British intel that had particularly concerned David Kelly. He had tried (internally) to get their docs to be more accurate; had failed and was dissatisfied (and so were other scientists), but went along with it--didn't go public about it--until AFTER the invasion, during the period when the phony nukes (or other WMDs) would have been in route to Iraq, when covert agents (Plame's network?) may have detected them, and when their arrival on Iraqi soil and "discovery" (by Miller?) was foiled. Spring 2003.
By the end of May, Kelly had had it. He began whistleblowing to the BBC, saying that the Brits' claims about Iraq WMDs had been exaggerated. Why would he do this? Why would he seek to undermine political support for a military action that he had previously favored? (He wanted Saddam ousted.) It could have been the bloodiness of it all. That could have gotten to anyone. (He had friends in Iraq.) But it feels more like something happened; like he discovered something that turned him around. And a violation of his profession, his ethics as a scientists--PLANTING nukes (or other WMDS) in Iraq, the very thing that he had spent his life trying to eliminate--seems very plausible as the motive of his whistleblowing.
There is evidence that he tried to assure his bosses that he did not intend to reveal the worst. (He even partially recanted before a Parliamentary committee--under duress.) And he most certainly was forward-looking (not suicidal) at the time of his death; he thought the whole thing would blow over in a week or so. He may have felt that he had done his duty as a citizen and a scientist by alerting the public to the falsehoods, and didn't need to sacrifice his career (or put his life or family in danger) by telling all. But he was most certainly aware of the danger of what he knew (the "dark actors" email), and that knowledge was not what he HAD said (exaggerated intel--a controversy over words), but what he COULD say--the "uncomfortable things" that Blair was apprised of, a week before the Plame outing. He knew something MORE than he had already told the public.
One of the things they threatened him with was violation of the Official Secrets Act. Revealing that they had "sexed up" the intel, to make Saddam look as guilty as possible, just doesn't seem like much of a crime; it was widely suspected anyway, and is common in war. A plot to plant WMDs in Iraq for a phony "find," however, would fall into the category of a truly threatening state secret that must be covered up at any cost.
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Re: Hadley falling on his sword. The date is interesting:
July 7, 2003: Blair calls the Bushites on AF-1 to warn them about Kelly (inspiring a flurry of activity to out Plame). (Presumed by me.)
July 14, 2003: Plame outed (and put at risk).
July 18, 2003: Kelly found dead; his office and computers searched.
July 22, 2003: Brewster Jennings outed, all projects disabled, all agents put at risk.
July 23, 2003: Hadley falls on his sword over the Niger allegation, which everybody admits was false at this point.
So, if they had it covered, as a clerical error, why did they out Plame, kill Kelly, and likely get some of Plame's covert agents killed by outing BJ?
They could just as well have THANKED Joseph Wilson (in some phony show of interest in the truth), and/or punished him in some less risky way. And if all Kelly knew about was "sexed up" intel, they could say, "Well, yeah, we weren't 100% sure, but we had to take the precautionary approach, given what was at risk--nukes over London, or New York--blah, blah, blah....".
Nope. Panic reigned. Something more here--something they risked their entire regime to cover up.
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Yes, I think everybody on AF-1 over Africa, in mid-July 2003, including Bush, set eyes upon the Plame memo, and are indictable because of it--along with the operatives back in the U.S. who were carrying out the orders to "get her outed NOW!" (Libby, for instance.) I suspect that Cheney may be the only one who has the goods on Bush, though, and used it to blackmail Bush on Katrina (all that stuff about getting total WH control of LA and martial law, and withholding aid to extort that power from Blanco--was Bush trying to buy Cheney off). I also suspect that Rove was blackmailing Bush in another way--withholding his PR services during Katrina to get his presidential pardon signed. (Rove was AWOL during Katrina, and I'd bet money that his later story of being in the hospital with kidney stones during Katrina was a lie, to cover his rather obvious absence and the reason for it).
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As for the Democratic Party leadership, I'm still waiting for those S.O.B.s to fess up about Diebold and ES&S, and purge their ranks of the corruption wrought by the $4 billion electronic voting boondoggle--which caused them to remain silent while Bushite corporations took over the tabulation of our votes with SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code. I mean, come on. Was ever there a more absurd, or egregiously non-transparent, election SYSTEM? It was a fraud going in. And you had Democratic election officials all over the country who had signed contracts with these far rightwing Bushite corporations giving them "trade secret" rights over their formulae for recording and counting votes--code so secret that not even our secretaries of state are permitted to review it. (This is NOT the case in other countries. It's ridiculous!)
I also think they (much of our Dem Party leadership) DIDN'T WANT a president who was beholden to the vast antiwar grass roots movement that actually ousted the Bush Cartel in 2004. So they didn't raise a word of objection to the fraudulent election system, or to its patently fraudulent result.
Looking back over all this, I think they knew damn well that the Iraq war was a fraud, and the election was a fraud. Some of our representatives might have been confused, ill informed, fooled or afraid, on the war as well as on the election system. Others are living a lie.
And the ones who sold out our right to vote--for lavish lobbying junkets at the Beverly Hilton, or future job offers in the electronic voting industry, or for the heady power of controlling the big business deals that our voting systems have become, or for the heady power of lording it over the voters with all the "professional" gobble-de-gook of electronic voting, ought to be horsewhipped out of the Democratic Party.
The War Democrats are another problem. They've been with us for decades, and we probably can't do anything about it--short of a major revolution (or disaster)--so steeped is this economy in the business of war. They CAN'T generate jobs, at this point, WITHOUT a huge military budget, and thus the temptation to fascists is always there, to use that military capability to destroy any country whose oil they want to steal, and make a lot of money doing it. Democrats are very corrupted by this, and also by the support they receive for backing rightwing Israeli policies (another sad story--Israel as a medieval military fortress), and I don't see any easy way out of it.
Those who say the country is being run by "the War Party" are essentially correct. And now, with Diebold and ES&S calling the shots, you can be sure that whoever they choose for our leaders will be beholden to THAT party, and not to the "voters."
My advice: Throw Diebold and ES&S election theft machines into 'Boston Harbor,' and start over!
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