Sunday, October 16, 2005

Where is the Plame leak investigation going?

Frank Rich of the New York Times has a long article on the subject. Essentially his conclusion is that the investigation into the Plame leak has revealed the machinations of the White House Iraq Group in its lies and selling of the invasion of Iraq no matter what. His conclusion? It's Bush-Cheney, Not Rove-Libby!!!!

Unfortunately the New York Times has put Frank Rich behind the subscription wall, but large sections of his article can be read at After Downing Street. Here is a sample:
Very little has been written about the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG. Its inception in August 2002, seven months before the invasion of Iraq, was never announced. Only much later would a newspaper article or two mention it in passing, reporting that it had been set up by Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff. Its eight members included Mr. Rove, Mr. Libby, Condoleezza Rice and the spinmeisters Karen Hughes and Mary Matalin. Its mission: to market a war in Iraq.

Of course, the official Bush history would have us believe that in August 2002 no decision had yet been made on that war. Dates bracketing the formation of WHIG tell us otherwise. On July 23, 2002 - a week or two before WHIG first convened in earnest - a British official told his peers, as recorded in the now famous Downing Street memo, that the Bush administration was ensuring that "the intelligence and facts" about Iraq's W.M.D.'s "were being fixed around the policy" of going to war. And on Sept. 6, 2002 - just a few weeks after WHIG first convened - Mr. Card alluded to his group's existence by telling Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times that there was a plan afoot to sell a war against Saddam Hussein: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."
The layers of the onion are being peeled back, and we are soon to see how the war in Iraq was desired by Bush and Cheney, and how the members of the WHIG implemented that desire. Joe Wilson was a major threat to their plans, so he had to be dealt with. Thus, his wife's covert status as a CIA officer was pushed to the news outlets.

We're just going to have to wait and see what Fitzgerald has made and is making of all this. It appears to me that this situation has the potential to make Watergate look like a minor incident in comparison.

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