Uranium from Africa: Patrick Fitzgerald's correction

[ProSense]

Tuesday :: Apr 11, 2006

Uranium from Africa: Patrick Fitzgerald's correction

by eriposte

Snip...

Let me first say that based on this acknowledged error by Fitzgerald, I hereby retract my earlier criticism of Libby, Bush and Cheney for allegedly portraying the uranium claim as having been part of the key judgements.

That said, this revelation is strange and actually worse for Libby's case. Why?

(1) If Libby merely told Miller some of the "key judgements" in support of the Bush administration's claims, then he would have only been revealing what was already in the unclassified White Paper. After all, the unclassified White Paper was nothing but the Key Judgements of the classified NIE with all the IC caveats and challenges deleted - deliberately. Which means that if Libby was not actually declassifying the Key Judgements of the classified NIE (or leaking the entire contents of the unclassified Key Judgements of the NIE), then the portions highlighted in bold (below) in the classified NIE key judgements are the key pieces of information that would have remained hidden from reporters in the context of any discussion on Saddam's alleged nuclear capabilities:

Snip...

So, if Libby, Cheney and Bush were leaking or declassifying the entirety of the NIE Key Judgements, then the truth about the major challenges to Bush's SOTU claim on nuclear reconstitution would have been revealed. If they were not declassifying or leaking the entirety of the NIE Key Judgements, then that would be proof that they were trying to hide all the information that showed the Bush administration in poor light.

2) The Key Judgements did not have the uranium claim anyway - so if Libby was out there to discuss the uranium claim with Miller - why would he be reinforcing some of the key judgements when those did not mention the uranium claim? Perhaps, he was trying to change the topic to talk about the "other" evidence for "nuclear constitution"...but in this case, just using the key judgements of his liking without revealing the State/INR dissent that was very much embedded inside the classified key judgements would have been a deliberate attempt to continue to mislead the public and the press.

3) Further, if Libby was peddling the uranium claim from the body of the NIE without mentioning that INR rebutted that claim in another portion of the NIE, then that would have also been an attempt to mislead.

more...

http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/007343.php

[ProSense]

1. DEFENDING THE INDEFENSIBLE

By Kevin Drum
April 12, 2006
DEFENDING THE INDEFENSIBLE....Captain Ed defends the honor of the Bush adminstration in re The Case of the Dubious Mobile Bioweapons Labs:

What the Post neglects to mention in its sensationalist zeal is that this was one of several teams that investigated the trailers, and the totality of their evaluations came to a different conclusion than that of the leakers who supplied this story.

....To put it in advertising terms, two out of three inspectors agreed that the trailers were part of Saddam's WMD effort. The Pentagon relied on that majority opinion, as did the administration, and no one can argue that doing so constituted either an intent to deceive or even an unreasonable decision at the time.

Nice try, but cutesy advertising jingles to the contrary, this episode fits the usual MO of the Bush administration perfectly: a flat statement of fact from the administration about intelligence matters that's made with great fanfare even though they know there's significant dissent within the intelligence community. I haven't been keeping my list of examples up to date, but here are seven cases of the exact same thing, and what they demonstrate beyond question is that you simply can't trust the Bush administration's public statements about intelligence issues. The bioweapons story is #8.

So: Intent to deceive? Check. Unreasonable decision? Check. Deliberate lie? Check.

more...

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_04/008609.php