The Cheney media manipulation story

[pepperbear]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070127/ap_on_go_pr_wh/cheney_under_fire

For example, when Dick Cheney really needed friends in the news media, his staff was short of phone numbers

Shouldn't that be "...NEVER short of phone numbers"?


*snip*

Cheney was accused of suppressing intelligence and allowing President Bush to present false information about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Plame's husband, ex-ambassador Joseph Wilson, started the attack. Her unit at the CIA had sent him to Niger in 2002 to check a report Iraq was buying uranium for nuclear weapons. Cheney and the departments of State and Defense wanted to verify that.

Wilson thought he had debunked the report, but Bush mentioned it anyway in his State of the Union address in 2003. The story helped justify war with Iraq.

Wilson claimed Cheney's questions prompted his trip and Cheney should have received his report long before Bush spoke.

Wilson's charges first surfaced, attributed to an unnamed ex-ambassador, in Nicholas Kristof's New York Times column. But Martin testified she felt no urgency to set him straight because Kristof "attacked us, our administration fairly regularly."

But by July 6, 2003, Wilson wrote his own account in the Times and appeared on "Meet the Press" on NBC.

After that much exposure, Cheney, Libby and Martin spent the next week trying get out word that Cheney did not know Wilson, did not ask for the mission to Niger, never got Wilson's report and only learned about the trip from news stories in 2003.

*snip*

OK, I will grant that the WH media manipulation is nothing new and spin control is hardly a "Republicans only" maneuver, but am I wrong to say that the VP and staff may have done far more than simply leak identities? Can it FINALLY come to light that this whole debacle
was about inventing intelligence when the desired intelligence did not come forthwith?

How could these guys have been in office after pulling this off? Man, we are a LONG way from Watergate.

Despicable.

:rant: