Eight Days in July - FRANK RICH NYT *TRAITORGATE*

[rndmprsn]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/24/opinion/24rich.html?hp

...Most fertile - and apparently ground zero for Mr. Fitzgerald's investigation - is the period at the very outset when those plotting against Mr. Wilson felt safest of all: those eight days in July 2003 between the Wilson Op-Ed, which so infuriated the administration, and the retaliatory Novak column. It was during that long week, on a presidential trip to Africa, that Colin Powell was seen on Air Force One brandishing the classified State Department memo mentioning Valerie Plame, as first reported by The New York Times...

...THE second narrative to be unearthed in the scandal's early timeline is the motive for this reckless vindictiveness against anyone questioning the war. On May 1, 2003, Mr. Bush celebrated "Mission Accomplished." On May 29, Mr. Bush announced that "we found the weapons of mass destruction." On July 2, as attacks increased on American troops, Mr. Bush dared the insurgents to "bring 'em on." But the mission was not accomplished, the weapons were not found and the enemy kept bringing 'em on. It was against this backdrop of mounting desperation on July 6 that Mr. Wilson went public with his incriminating claim that the most potent argument for the war in the first place, the administration's repeated intimations of nuclear Armageddon, involved twisted intelligence.

Mr. Wilson's charge had such force that just three days after its publication, Mr. Bush radically revised his language about W.M.D.'s. Saddam no longer had W.M.D.'s; he had a W.M.D. "program." Right after that George Tenet suddenly decided to release a Friday-evening statement saying that the 16 errant words about African uranium "should never have been included" in the January 2003 State of the Union address - even though those 16 words could and should have been retracted months earlier. By the next State of the Union, in January 2004, Mr. Bush would retreat completely, talking not about finding W.M.D.'s or even W.M.D. programs, but about "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities."...

...The real crime here remains the sending of American men and women to Iraq on fictitious grounds. Without it, there wouldn't have been a third-rate smear campaign against an obscure diplomat, a bungled cover-up and a scandal that - like the war itself - has no exit strategy that will not inflict pain.

[Kahuna]

1. Bravo, Frank Rich!!!!

:yourock:

[Wetzelbill]

2. I'll have to read it later but...

Frank is always good. Usually great.

[DoYouEverWonder]

3. Sounds like we have the making for a new movie

Eight Days of the Jackel.

[rndmprsn]

4. the plot is certainly thick and there are many twists and turns...

hitchcock would love this sordid tale.

this is another line i love...

When a conspiracy is unraveling, and it's every liar and his lawyer for themselves, the story takes on a momentum of its own. When the conspiracy is, at its heart, about the White House's twisting of the intelligence used to sell the American people a war - and its desperate efforts to cover up that flimflam once the W.M.D. cupboard proved bare and the war went south - the story will not end until the war really is in its "last throes."

[Lecky]

5. Frank Rich sounds as pissed off as all of us.

Excellent!

[radfringe]

6. at the heart of Treason-Gate.....

"...The real crime here remains the sending of American men and women to Iraq on fictitious grounds. Without it, there wouldn't have been a third-rate smear campaign against an obscure diplomat, a bungled cover-up and a scandal that - like the war itself - has no exit strategy that will not inflict pain."

finally someone in the media is addressing this --

not to diminish the seriousness of exposing a CIA agent - but the exposure issue is just a small piece of the BIG LIE!

[Kber]

7. Thanks Frank!

Well crafted overview of where we are and how we got there.

[Skittles]

8. no wonder Fleischer, Powell, Ashcroft, Hughes quit

F***ING COWARDS

[jazzjunkysue]

9. And Tenet's midnight escape

they're happy, now, that they got out, then.

[rndmprsn]

11. i always wondered if that medal of freedom would be enough to shut him up

tenet has to know alot...his hands are dirty too tho.

[jazzjunkysue]

14. That's what subpoenas are for....

Sorry, I don't spell well....

[EFerrari]

10. Frank Rich makes me love

the English language. :)

[Eric J in MN]

12. The 12 hour gap

This part is good:

"As White House counsel, (Alberto Gonzales) was the one first notified that the Justice Department, at the request of the C.I.A., had opened an investigation into the outing of Joseph Wilson's wife. That notification came at 8:30 p.m. on Sept. 29, 2003, but it took Mr. Gonzales 12 more hours to inform the White House staff that it must "preserve all materials" relevant to the investigation.

This 12-hour delay, he has said, was sanctioned by the Justice Department, but since the department was then run by John Ashcroft, a Bush loyalist who refused to recuse himself from the Plame case, inquiring Senate Democrats would examine this 12-hour delay as closely as an 18½-minute tape gap.

"Every good prosecutor knows that any delay could give a culprit time to destroy the evidence," said Senator Charles Schumer, correctly, back when the missing 12 hours was first revealed almost two years ago. A new Gonzales confirmation process now would have quickly devolved into a neo-Watergate hearing."

[Coexist]

13. wow.