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The motive in this crime was to discredit Wilson after he demonstrated how the White House either ignored or dissembled his work in Niger. This was just one instance of how it was done; if we had no reason to believe there were others, the mishandling of Wilson's report and the inclusion of the infamous sixteen words in the 2003 SOTU would have been written off as human error and this story would have blown over long ago.
Unfortunately for the Bushies, all of their supposed facts about Iraq were wrong. All of them. Not just wrong, but wildly wrong. Saddam had neither weapons of mass destruction nor working ties to Islamist terror groups, as they claimed. There is no evidence that Saddam was "reconstituting" (Mr. Cheney's word) his nuclear program.
When one takes a multiple choice examination where each item has four possible answers, even marking random answers without reading the question should get one a score of about 25%; if he scores a perfect zero, he must have been trying to flunk. On an essay exam, if the student is asked to explain Darwin's theory of evolution and gives an expose on intelligent design, he will fail because he did not follow the directions.
That is what the neocons were doing. Their instructions, standing from the founding of the republic as a matter of public trust, were to look at reality and then decide whether or not they needed to involve the US in a war against Iraq. Instead, they made a decision to go to war -- they had long desired a war with Iraq as a device to further their wet dream of empire in a New American Century -- and then looked for reasons to justify it. If one has any confidence in the argument being made or evidence to support it, one wouldn't even think of setting up a monstrosity like the OSP in the Pentagon. The case was "thin" (according to the Downing Street document) so they fixed intelligence and facts around the policy, that is to say, fabricated facts and dissembled intelligence.
Wilson simply found himself caught up in this messy business. It was his work that got twisted and he wasn't going to take it laying down. There are no doubt many intelligence analysts who are just as offended as Wilson who have jobs to lose and are not speaking out.
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