The Source beyond Rove: Condoleezza Rice at the Center of the Plame Scanda

[rodeodance]

periodically I read of Condi's involment, but this article is convincing to me.


http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0728-25.htm

> The Source beyond Rove:
> Condoleezza Rice at the Center of the Plame Scandal
> By Roger Morris
> Commondreams.com
>
> Thursday 28 July 2005
>
> We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." It was September 2002, and then-National Security Advisor, now-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was fastening on CNN perhaps the most memorable and frightening single link in the Bush regime's chain of lies propagandizing the war on Iraq. Behind her carefully planted one-liner with its grim imagery was the whole larger hoax about Saddam Hussein possessing or about to acquire weapons of mass destruction, a deception as blatant and inflammatory as claims of the Iraqi dictator's ties to Al Qaeda.
>
> Rice's demagogic scare tactic was also very much part of the tangled history of alleged Iraqi purchases of uranium from Niger, the fabrication leading to ex-Ambassador Joseph Wilson's now famous exposé of the fraud, the administration's immediate retaliatory "outing" of Wilson's wife Valerie Plame as a CIA operative, and now the revelation that the President's supreme political strategist Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff Lewis Libby were involved in that potentially criminal leak - altogether the most serious political crisis Bush has faced. In fact, though her pivotal role has been missed entirely - or deliberately ignored - in both the media feeding frenzy and the rising political clamor, now-Secretary of State Rice was also deeply embroiled in the Niger uranium-Plame scandal, arguably as much as or more so than either Rove or Libby.


......And in line with an administration that joins eagles claw to religious cloak, Rice looks to the same sense of divine guidance that fortifies her patron. "When I'm concerned about something, I figure out a plan of action, and then I give it to God. I just ask to be carried through it," she said in a 2002 interview with Essence magazine. "God's never failed me yet." It is an opinion, of course, that history will not share. *

The evidence of Rice's complicity is increasingly damning as it gathers over a six-year twisting chronology of the Nigerien uranium-Wilson-Plame affair, particularly when set beside what we also know very well about the inside operations of the NSC and Rice's unique closeness to Bush, her tight grip on her staff, and the power and reach that went with it all. What follows isn't simple. These machinations in government never are, especially in foreign policy. But follow the bouncing ball of Rice's deceptions, folly, fraud and culpability. Slowly, relentlessly, despite the evidence, the hoax of the Iraq-Niger uranium emerges as a central thread in the fabricated justification for war, and thus in the President's, Rice's, and the regime's inseparable credibility. The discrediting of Wilson, in which the outing his CIA wife is irresistible, becomes as imperative for Rice as for Rove and Libby, Bush and Cheney. And when that moment comes, she has the unique authority, and is in a position, to do the deed. Motive, means, opportunity - in the classic terms of prosecution, Rice had them all.......

[whistle]

1. If Condi Rice is at the center of the Plame leak, then Condi must....

...have believed that Valarie Plame was giving shrub BJs in the oval office.

[Luminous Animal]

2. A word of caution...

Were the late 1990s so long ago that everybody's forgotten who Roger Morris is? Judging from the recommended diary on his Condi Rice article, I guess they have.

For those who don't know, Morris wrote a smear book called Partners in Power in 1996 that accused Bill Clinton of not just being a cocaine addict but being involved in a coke-smuggling ring ... not to mention every other recycled wingnut claim Morris could find.

If you read his Plame timeline, basically he's taking published reports and adding "with Rice's approval" or "Rice was briefed on this" at every opportunity. It smells in a big way, and I think Kossacks will be sorry if they put too much stock in it. I have a detailed post at Needlenose with excerpts of Gene Lyons' debunking of Partners in Power, plus a listing of dubious items in the Morris timeline. The short version, though, is that we should stay far away from anything Morris writes.

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