Ray McGovern (Tom Paine): Why Plame Matters

[Jack Rabbit]

From TimPaine.com
Dated Monday July 18

Why Plame Matters
By Ray McGovern

The significance of the Plame affair is not about former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson; or his wife, Valerie Plame; or Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby; or even President George W. Bush's alter ego, Karl Rove. White House v. Wilsons is about Iraq, where our sons and daughters—and many others—are daily meeting violent death. And it's about manipulation.

It's about how our elected representatives were deceived into voting for an unprovoked war and what happened when one man stood up and called the administration's bluff. And it's about the perfect storm now gathering, as more lies are exposed (whether in journalists' e-mails or in the minutes of high-level meetings at 10 Downing Street), as guerrilla war escalates in Iraq, and as more and more American citizens find themselves agreeing with Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., that administration leaders seem to be "making it up as they go along."

It wasn't envisaged this way by the naïve "neoconservative" ideologues that got us into the quagmire in Iraq. They may still believe that all will be well if the Iraqi people can only get it into their heads that we are liberators, not occupiers.

So much smoke is being blown over White House v. Wilsons that it is becoming almost impossible to see the forest for the trees. Bewildered houseguests from outside the Beltway throw up their hands: "It's all just politics...and character assassination." And that may well be precisely the impression the media wish to leave with us. Otherwise, left to our own devices, we might conclude they served us poorly with the indiscriminate, hyper-patriotic cheerleading that helped slide us into the worst foreign policy debacle in our nation's history.

Read more.

[Starfury]

1. Good article - recommended! n/t

[Karenina]

2. And kicked!

:kick:

[Jack Rabbit]

3. A follow up by McGovern is posted on Tom Paine today (Tuesday)

For discussion, please click here.

[Burried News]

4. DSM says the intel would be fixed. Plamegate explains HOW.

"The Niger lie was thus both the cornerstone of the Bush agenda and the key to unraveling how the "fixing" worked. "
From the above article.

[Jack Rabbit]

5. Plamegate is a 'gate' to the planned deception and other crimes

EDITED for typing

The DSM and the attempt to discredit Wilson are related in that respect.

Actually, what Wilson discredited should have been a very small and insignificant part of the case for invasion. He was asked to check out a reported deal by Niger to sell yellowcake to Iraq, found there was no such deal and so reported. That the document on which the reports of the deal were based is a forgery a red herring (unless, it turns out, that document was forged by the same people who said it supported a case for war). Wilson did not come forward immediately after the 2003 SOTU because he assumed that Mr. Bush's now infamous sixteen words concerned a yellowcake deal that had actually taken place. It was only after Wilson found out that Bush was talking about the same deal he investigated that Wilson went public; by that time, US troops were in Baghdad.

If the Bush regime's case for war had turned out to have been mostly right, few people would be too concerned that sixteen words about a yellowcake deal that had been previously discredited erroneously found their way into Bush's speech. That would have been written off to human error. However, nothing about the case for war panned out. They were wrong about everything. That is even more incredible than had they been right about everything. If they were really looking for facts, they surely would have found some.

What the DSM tells us is that the policymakers were not looking for facts on which to make a decision whether or not to go to war; they made a decision independent of facts and then looked for talking points. The Niger caper is just one instance of facts being discarded because the fiction better served the regime's objective: convince the American public and their elected representatives and, if possible, the foreign public, their governments and their diplomats at the United Nations that war against Iraq was necessary when it was not.

Just as the Watergate break in was the gate to a whole array of crimes and abuses of power in the Nixon White House, so the unmasking of Valerie Plame is a gate to uncovering the crimes of the Bush regime. All Nixon faced was conviction for obstruction of justice and some prison time. Bush and his neoconservative aides have launched an unnecessary and unprovoked war of aggression against a sovereign state. That is one of the major crimes of modern times.

[Martin Eden]

6. "one of the major crimes of modern times"

Let's hope that verdict comes soon as a product of our Congress and our courts -- and not merely as a conclusion of historians long after the perpetrators have passed from the scene.