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Now, if the junta really just wanted to discredit him and he really could have been discredited, they simply would have declassified the relevant documents and sent Scott McClellan out to set the record straight. No sane person, simply wishing to set the record straight, would have concocted the cloak and dagger scheme that involved the outing of a secret agent.
Unfortunately, Mr. Wilson had his facts in line and his piece in The New York Times outlined a microcosm of the junta's disinformation campaign prior to the invasion. A further problem the junta had with Wilson's piece is that no one would have thought anything of it if the attempt by Saddam to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger was the only thing they got wrong; but they got everything wrong and that by itself should raise a red flag about whether they were really looking for facts or just talking points.
The false charge that Wilson's trip to Niger was a junket set up by his wife was hatched in Cheney's office with Cheney present. We've got the newspaper clipping with Cheney's handwritten notes which the right wing blogosphere has yet to explain away. They can repeat the charge a thousand times, it still isn't true.
What was happening is that there really were no intelligence failures before the invasion of Iraq, simply the junta cherry picking what facts they wanted presented, what analysis they wanted framing those fact, and what facts and analysis they wanted discarded. That's how we got Doug Feith's silly little paper "connecting" Saddam's regime with al-Qaida. Part of the analysis includes facts that were shown to be erroneous long before the ink was dry, such as the supposed meeting in Prague between Mohammad Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent. Cheney still praises Feith's work as good intelligence.
The conclusion to which one comes after examining Wilson's expose of how the Niger "intelligence" was handled juxtaposed with the other intelligence "failures" is that the junta was putting forward all facts and analysis, no matter how dubious, that supported a case for invasion and suppressing all facts and analysis, no matter how firmly based, that contradicted it. Where I come from that falls under the category of lying.
As the Blue Fairy told Pinocchio, "a lie simply grows and grows until it is as obvious as the nose on your face." Like Pinocchio, the junta had told a pack of lies about the treat posed by Iraq, and now had to tell more to discredit the whistle blower. Thus, the OVP concocted the story that Wilson's trip to Niger was a junket arranged by his wife, who worked for the CIA. They knew they could get some people to believe this, since Wilson's wife was in fact a covert agent. Of course, getting that story out involved blowing her cover.
It would not have suited their purpose to go through proper channels. The fact they knew they were making this stuff up was only one reason not to go through proper channels. Even if the lie Cheney and Company invented were true, proper channels meant talking to the DCI, not the press. Whatever disciplinary action the CIA might have taken against Mrs. Wilson would have been handled behind the opaque walls of Langley in order to keep secret the overall operations of the CIA's counterproliferation efforts, of which Mrs. Wilson was a key part. What Cheney and Company needed was a loud splash that everybody would hear. Thus, they had to plot to talk to the press, not to the DCI. And, since blowing Mrs. Wilson's cover is a serious crime, they had to be "anonymous sources." Thus the cloak and dagger approach was necessary to their purpose.
Some of the same people who conspired to lie this country into war blew Valerie Plame Wilson's cover in order to tell the lie that her husband's mission to Niger was a junket and an act of nepotism. That is as plane as the nose on Dick Cheney's face.
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