Do you realize how much coordination the following represents:
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The pre-election damage-control effort in response to Wilson's allegations and the broader issue of whether the Bush administration might have misrepresented intelligence information to make the case for war had three major components,
according to government records and interviews with current and former officials: 1. blame the CIA for the use of the Niger information in the president's State of the Union address;
2. discredit and undermine Wilson;
3. and make sure that the public did not learn that the president had been personally warned that the intelligence assessments he was citing about the aluminum tubes might be wrong.
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Link:
http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/0330nj1.htmSeveral folk have posted links to Murray Waas latest report in the
National Journal, but I think this particular paragraph is such a refined statement, of how coordinated and concurrent the cover-up efforts were (are), that it deserves highlighting.
How tragic it is that what Senator Durbin cogently stated in July, 2004, is still not understood by many Americans:<clip>
As
National Journal first disclosed on its Web site on October 27, 2005, Cheney, Libby, and Cheney's current chief of staff, David Addington,
rejected advice given to them by other White House officials and decided to withhold from the committee crucial documents that might have shown that administration claims about Saddam's capabilities often went beyond information provided by the CIA and other intelligence agencies.
Among those documents was the President's Summary of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate. In July 2004, when the Intelligence Committee released a 511-page report on its investigation of prewar intelligence by the CIA and other agencies,
Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said in his own "Additional Views" to the report, "Concurrent with the production of a National Intelligence Estimate is the production of a one-page President's Summary of the NIE. A one-page President's Summary was completed and disseminated for the October 2002 NIE ... though there is no mention of this fact in
report. These one-page NIE summaries are ... written exclusively for the president and senior policy makers and are therefore tailored for that audience."
Durbin concluded, "In determining what the president was told about the contents of the NIE dealing with Iraq's weapons of mass destruction -- qualifiers and all -- there is nothing clearer than this single page."
Link:
http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/0330nj1.htmConspiracy - Yes. Nothing theoretic about it.
Charge'um and book'um.
Peace.