What Waas scoop may really tell us about Bush’s pre-war deception

[laststeamtrain]

Thanks to Waas, for the first time, we may now know for a fact that Rove and other Bush advisers viewed the truth about the run-up to war as something that could destroy his re-election prospects. It is entirely plausible that Bush advisers calculated that if it came out that they’d outed Plame, Congress would have been forced by the resulting firestorm to run a far more aggressive investigation of Bush’s pre-war deceptions – and possibly uncover the smoking gun Waas reports on, among other things. Remember, Libby and Rove testified in early 2004, during the heat of a presidential campaign which Rove himself had apparently concluded was at risk if existing hard evidence of Bush’s deceptions surfaced.

So it seems plausible that Libby and Rove sought to minimize the chance of the aggressive congressional oversight that might have resulted if it became known that they’d outed Plame. In short, misleading the grand jury about Plame may simply have been a key piece of a broader effort to get past the election before the truth about the run-up to the war surfaced to sink his campaign.

White House officials, including Bush himself, withheld critical information it had about doubts over supposed evidence of Saddam's nuke ambitions in order to better make the case for war. Then they subsequently discovered that hard evidence existed of that duplicity. Then, anxious that this evidence might surface before the 2004 reelection, they engaged in a relentless campaign to cover up what really happened during the Iraq run-up and to prevent an aggressive congressional investigation until after the election. They relied on Pat Roberts to run a pseudo-investigation; they withheld the daily briefs; they leaned on Hill allies not to talk to the press. And they obscured their role in the outing of Plame to prevent an outcry that would have certainly forced Congress and the press to probe far more aggressively than they did. And they succeeded: If Congress and the press had been more aggressive -- and this may be the real significance of Waas's story -- it's perfectly possible that John Kerry would now be president.

<snip>


That interpretation is consistent with what was going on at the time. The Senate Intelligence Committee, headed by Bush ally Pat Roberts, was investigating pre-war intelligence -- and as would subsequently be learned, managed to sidestep the central question of how the White House used that information to build the case for war, a maneuver that made it clear that Roberts was trying to postpone that line of inquiry until after the election. What’s more, the White House was throughout refusing to release presidential daily briefs that may have revealed what Bush knew and when.

<snip>

http://www.prospect.org/web/printfriendly-view.ww?id=11370

[boobooday]

1. But he told us he wanted to get to the bottom of it!

And fire the dirty leakers . . . :sarcasm:

[EST]

2. I keep saying--expect martial law and the declaration of

the fourth riech--within two years or less. They cannot allow anyore else to have subpoena power. They cannot afford to give up power.