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For those tracking the long train of abuses and usurpations of a modern-day George who would be King and his eminence grise behind the throne, July 14 has a resonance far beyond the fireworks of Bastille Day. Four loosely related events on that same day four years ago throw revealing light on key ingredients of the debacle in Iraq.First, on July 14, 2003 the Washington Post and other papers carried a column by Robert Novak titled “Mission to Niger,” in which he set out to do the White House’s bidding by disparaging former ambassador Joseph Wilson and punishing him by making it impossible for his wife, Valerie Plame, to continue working in her chosen (covert) profession. The White House offensive against Wilson had been in the planning stage for several months. Novak’s column was, in effect, the first shot in a sustained, rapid-fire volley aimed at neutralizing Wilson and deterring other potential truth-tellers who might be tempted to follow his example.
The former ambassador had spent several days in the African country of Niger at the CIA’s behest to investigate a dubious report in which Vice President Dick Cheney had taken inordinate interest—a strange story that Iraq was seeking to acquire yellowcake uranium from Niger. For substantive reasons, serious intelligence analysts had judged the report false on its face, well before they learned it was based on forged documents.
After confirming that Bush was using the same dubious “evidence” and after attempting in vain to get the White House to correct the record, Wilson went public on July 6, 2002 with an op-ed in The New York Times titled “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.” This brought White House wrath down on him. Cheney and his then-chief of staff, Irv Lewis “Scooter” Libby, went on the offensive, throwing friendly journalists like Novak into the fray. Novak’s July 14 column reflected Cheney’s neuralgic reaction not only to Wilson’s New York Times piece, but also to his July 6 remark to the Washington Post that the administration’s use of that bogus report “begs the question regarding what else they are lying about.” So un-ambassadorial. But Wilson was angry—and with good reason.
Lying the Country Into War
Reflecting the concern driving the White House counteroffensive, Novak wrote that the administration’s “mistake” in using the Iraq-Niger report “led the Democrats ever closer to saying the president lied the country into war.” That concern, coupled with the priority need to protect the vice president, showed through in the defensive tone of Novak’s protestation that it was “not just Vice President Dick Cheney” who had asked the CIA to look into the report.
Wilson’s op-ed forced the White House to acknowledge that the spurious Iraq-Niger report should have found no place in Bush’s state-of-the-union address. Then-White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, while packing his bags to leave that post, took time to memorize the main talking point for use with reporters. Without even being asked about Cheney’s role, Fleischer was quick to offer instant, gratuitous insistence that the vice president was not guilty of anything. At the same time, then-CIA director George Tenet did his awkward best to absolve Cheney of any responsibility for giving the Iraq-Niger story more legs and credence than, by any objective measure, it deserved.
That this was a matter of protesting too much can be seen in Libby’s Herculean effort earlier in the year to crank the Iraq-Niger story—as well as a host of other far-fetched charges against Iraq—into then-secretary of state Colin Powell’s embarrassing speech at the UN on February 5, 2003. While Powell let himself be browbeaten into using much of the spurious material urged on him by Libby, the Iraq-Niger fairy tale had long since taken on an acrid smell. Besides, Powell’s own intelligence analysts had branded the report “highly dubious” and, for once, he listened.
In the end, Powell decided to throw virtually everything but the kitchen sink into his UN speech condemning Saddam Hussein. The kitchen sink was the Iraq-Niger report. When asked why he did not include that story, when President Bush had featured it with such solemnity just a week before in his state-of-the-union address, Powell damned it with faint praise, publicly describing the report as “not totally outrageous.”
White House officials calculated correctly that a four-star Marine general, even a retired one, could be counted on to keep his mouth shut rather than expose his former commander-in-chief in a bald-faced lie. But they “misunderestimated” Joseph Wilson, who turned out to be a man of substantial integrity and courage. Wilson saw the Iraq-Niger report as a consequential lie—a monstrous one, in that it greased the skids for launching a war of aggression, condemned at the post-WWII Nuremberg Tribunal as the “supreme international crime.” And rather than grouse about it with knowing smirk, cigar, and sherry in Georgetown drawing rooms, as is the more familiar practice among retired ambassadors, Wilson went public.
Swords Drawn
And so on July 14, 2003, Robert Novak slipped into his familiar role as “conservative” pundit and launched the White House counteroffensive. As for friends Cheney and Libby, the best idea they could come up with to divert the focus from themselves was to spread the word that Wilson’s wife, a CIA employee, had sent him to Niger on some kind of boondoggle. (I know; I know. Please stop laughing, those of you who have been in Niger. And Wilson performed his investigation gratis).
House pundits and other co-travelers then eked almost four years of mileage out of the next White House diversion; namely, the claim that Valerie Plame was not really under cover. Under strong White House pressure to delay, top CIA functionaries were in no hurry to set that record straight and avoided doing so until March 14, 2007, when the patience of Henry Waxman (D-California), Chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, ran out. CIA Director Michael Hayden confirmed to Waxman that Plame had been under cover until Robert Novak blew that cover; that Plame had been a covert employee, whose status with the CIA was classified information. Waxman has made that public. But (surprise, surprise) this has not stopped “neo-conservative” drummers from continuing to beat drums of doubt.
The Vice President’s Man
Cheney’s chief of staff, “Scooter” Libby, agreed to take the hit and was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice. In his closing argument, special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald made it clear that the role of Vice President Dick Cheney in blowing Valerie Plame’s cover remains the key mystery, and that Libby’s lies ensured that Cheney’s role would remain a mystery. Fitzgerald could hardly have made this key finding clearer:
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