Condoleezza Rice at the Center of the Plame Scandal?

[G_j]

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m14128&l=i&size=1&hd=0

Condoleezza Rice at the Center of the Plame Scandal
The Source Beyond Rove
ROGER MORRIS, Former NSC staffer


July 27, 2005

"We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

It was September 2002, and then-National Security Advisor, now-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was fastening on CNN perhaps the most memorable and frightening single link in the Bush regime's chain of lies propagandizing the war on Iraq. Behind her carefully planted one-liner with its grim imagery was the whole larger hoax about Saddam Hussein possessing or about to acquire weapons of mass destruction, a deception as blatant and inflammatory as claims of the Iraqi dictator's ties to Al Qaeda.

Rice's demagogic scare tactic was also very much part of the tangled history of alleged Iraqi purchases of uranium from Niger, the fabrication leading to ex-Ambassador Joseph Wilson's now famous exposé of the fraud, the administration's immediate retaliatory "outing" of Wilson's wife Valerie Plame as a CIA operative, and now the revelation that the President's supreme political strategist Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff Lewis Libby were involved in that potentially criminal leak-altogether the most serious political crisis Bush has faced. In fact, though her pivotal role has been missed entirely ­or deliberately ignored-in both the media feeding frenzy and the rising political clamor, Condoleezza Rice was also deeply embroiled in the Niger uranium-Plame scandal, arguably as much as or more so than either Rove or Libby.

For those who know the invariably central role of the NSC Advisor in sensitive political subjects in foreign policy and in White House leaks to the media as well as tending of policy, especially in George W. Bush's rigidly disciplined, relentlessly political regime, Rice by both commission and omission was integral in perpetrating the original fraud of Niger, and then inevitably in the vengeful betrayal of Plame's identity. None of that spilling of secrets for crass political retribution could have gone on without her knowledge and approval, and thus complicity. Little of it could have happened without her participation, if not as a leaker herself, at least with her direction and with her scripting.

* * *
The evidence of Rice's complicity is increasingly damning as it gathers over a six-year twisting chronology of the Nigerien uranium-Wilson-Plame affair, particularly when set beside what we also know very well about the inside operations of the NSC and Rice's unique closeness to Bush, her tight grip on her staff, and the power and reach that went with it all. What follows isn't simple. These machinations in government never are, especially in foreign policy. But follow the bouncing ball of Rice's deceptions, folly, fraud and culpability. Slowly, relentlessly, despite the evidence, the hoax of the Iraq-Niger uranium emerges as a central thread in the fabricated justification for war, and thus in the President's, Rice's, and the regime's inseparable credibility. The discrediting of Wilson, in which the outing his CIA wife is irresistible, becomes as imperative for Rice as for Rove and Libby, Bush and Cheney. And when that moment comes, she has the unique authority, and is in a position, to do the deed. Motive, means, opportunity-in the classic terms of prosecution, Rice had them all.

..more..

[dogday]

1. Poor old Condiliesalot

it would be just like those bastards to tag her with all this mess...

[Tim4319]

2. As a Black man in the United States of America

I hate seeing a Black Women go down! But, like the old saying goes, "if you lay down with dogs, you will get flees!"

[Jack Rabbit]

3. This doesn't show Condi was 'central' to the unmasking

She may have been complicit, but not central. We'll see what Mr. Fitzgerald says. Frankly, it would probably be difficult, even if she's guilty in fact, to pin anything on her.

I am among those who views the Plame unmasking as an attempt to keep under wraps the way "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" of war. Moreover, I regard those things that were done to that end as a serious series of acts that rise to the level of war crimes. However, the crime being investigated by Patrick Fitzgerald is the unmasking of an undercover CIA operative after the invasion, not the fabrication of facts and dissembling of intelligence prior to it in order to gain public support and Congressional approval for what was in fact an unjustified war of aggression.

Dr. Rice certainly is one of the central players in the larger crime, which might properly be tried before an international tribunal. On the other hand, the smaller crime is strictly a federal affair. Unless Mr. Fitzgerald has something we don't know about, it seems the best case that Mr. Fitzgerald will be able take to court will be to say it was the work of Lewis Libby and Karl Rove.