The Plame Blame Game

(Yet more boring political stuff)

I’m sick of the current hysterical media and liberal attack on President Bush’s adviser Karl Rove.

Those of us that read and closely follow the news every day have known about this developing story for a couple of years now, but some of my blog idols like Powerline and Captains Quarters predicted that this story would hit a fevered pitch this week.

It did.

Rather than telling you that Rove did or didn’t do anything wrong, I’m going to give you a brief synopsis of the story and then show you where you can read the details for yourself.

The players in this story are President Bush, his Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove; Vice President Dick Cheney; former US Ambassador Joe Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame; columnist Robert Novak, and The NY Times and their reporters Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper.

The outline of the story amounts to this:

In his January 2003 State of the Union Address, President Bush uttered the now infamous 16 words:

“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

In the year after the president made this statement, updated intelligence indicated that, while the Iraqis in fact tried to buy slightly refined ”yellowcake” uranium, they probably weren’t successful.

Reporters and Democrats, many of which apparently lack the ability to read, and many of those same groups that can read lacking the ability to understand the meaning of what it is that they have read, took the words “sought significant quantities” to mean “bought significant quantities.”

I’d like to point out that the significant underlying issue here wasn’t the possession of yellow cake, it was Sadam’s ATTEMPT to acquire yellow cake that was the problem. You don’t buy yellow cake uranium to season your steak on the grill or to patch holes in your driveway, you buy yellow cake uranium as feed stock to further refine into fissionable material for use in ATOMIC BOMBS.

That Iraq “bought significant quantities” is in fact NOT TRUE, but that is not what the President said.

No matter, a firestorm erupted as a result. “Bush LIED!” screamed the media headlines and the Democrats.

“Bush lied, Bush lied, BUSH MUST HAVE LIED (his staff couldn’t have simply been mistaken), we need to do something. What to do?????

WE, KNOW, WE NEED AN……I N V E S T I G A T I O N!!!”

And so they did…

A US Senate investigation, a special independent council, a grand jury, and every single left wing barking-moonbat reporter in the world has jumped on the case—and when they couldn’t prove that Bush lied about the yellow cake, they tried to do the next best thing...

Get Karl Rove, the architect of Bush’s election in 2000. Liberals hate Karl Rove more than George Bush--some claim that he actually runs the country.

They claimed that Karl Rove retaliated against Joe Wilson’s outspoken criticism of the war in Iraq by “outing” his wife’s identity as a CIA agent.

You see, some low level people at the CIA had previously sent former US ambassador Joe Wilson to Niger to check into things. I just so happened that Joe had married former undercover agent Valerie Plame, who subsequently moved to a desk job with the CIA in Langley, Virginia in 1997.

Then Mr. Wilson wrote an Op Ed piece on July 6, 2003 in the NY Times titled “What I didn’t find In Niger. In this writing, Wilson claims to have been sent to Niger by Vice President Dick Cheney. He also claimed to find no evidence that Iraq and Niger had any contact about yellow cake.

Cheney has since that time stated that he never heard of Joseph C. Wilson, IV until this current story hit the airwaves and newsprint. Further, it turns out that his wife, the now infamous Miss Plame, had in fact recommended that he be sent on the trip. Wilson has publically and in writing denied this FACT. It seems that it is Mr. Wilson, not the President or Mr. Rove that has a problem discerning the TRUTH.

In doing my own independent research (instead of taking the news reports words as fact,) I’ve just got through reading parts of the results of the Senate investigations’ efforts: the Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq produced by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

By the way, this committee included some very vocal Democrats like Carl Levin, Dianne Feinstein, Richard Durbin, and John Edwards. What bothers me today is that, in spite of their intimate knowledge that the current uproar is based on complete crap, these Senators have chosen to remain silent or even speak out in support of the controversy in total disregard of their personal knowledge to the contrary.

Imagine that?

Here are some excerpts from Pages 71-75 of the report:

“(U) On June 17,2003, nearly five months after the President delivered the State of the Union address, the CIA produced a memorandum for the DCI which said, “since learning that the Iraq-Niger uranium deal was based on false documents earlier this spring, we no longer believe that there is sufficient other reporting to conclude that Iraq pursued Uranium from abroad.” This memorandum was not distributed outside the CIA and the Committee has not been provided with any intelligence products in which the CIA published its corrected assessment on Iraq’s pursuit of uranium from Niger outside of the agency.”

“Paragraph K. Niger Conclusions:

(U) Conclusion 12. Until October 2002 when the Intelligence Community obtained the forged foreign language documents on the Iraq-Niger uranium deal, it was reasonable for analysts to assess that Iraq may have been seeking uranium from Africa based on Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reporting and other available intelligence.

(U) Conclusion 13. The report on the former ambassador’s (Joe Wilson’s) trip to Niger, disseminated in March 2002, did not change any analysts’ assessments of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal. For most analysts, the information in the report lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence (CIA) reports on the uranium deal, but the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) analysts believed that the report support their assessment that Niger was unlikely to be willing or able to sell uranium to Iraq.

(U) Conclusion 14. The Central Intelligence Agency should have told the Vice President and other senior policymakers that it had sent someone to Niger to look into the alleged Iraq-Niger uranium deal and should have briefed the Vice President on the former ambassador’s findings.”

With the yellow cake controversy put to rest, the emphasis shifted to Rove, the special prosecutor, and the grand jury investigation.

All of the noise is currently about whether Rove “outed” Plame while she was an active covert CIA agent, which is against the law. Yesterday the idiot Democrats in the Senate even tried to relieve Karl Rove of his security clearance, even before the results of the investigation are available.

The Washington Times reported that Plame’s supervisor states that Valerie had not been deployed undercover since 1997. And now the media reports that columnist Robert Novak actually placed a phone call to Karl Rove and told him (Rove) that Plame was a CIA Agent, not the other way around.

I SAY THE CASE IS CLOSED.

Yet there continues to be tons of air and millions of square feet of newsprint wasted (you can read more commentary and details here, here , and here,) but in my considered opinion, that’s all the Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame/Karl Rove story is…

A TOTAL NON-STORY