Joe Wilson’s column in the New York Times disputing President Bush’s claim that Saddam Hussein had purchased uranium from Niger was published on Sunday, July 6, 2003.

Over the next 72 hours, the White House senior staff went into high gear deploying a well-orchestrated smear campaign against the Wilsons via the Washington press corps. The details of this whispering spinmeistering are just now leaking out.

Over this past weekend, we learned that the State Dept. drafted a memo about Wilson, which was circulated within the administration the next day, July 7.

Now we learn more about the activities of Ari Fleischer, who served as White House Press Secretary at the time:

On the same day the memo was prepared, White House phone logs show Novak placed a call to White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, according to lawyers familiar with the case and a witness who has testified before the grand jury. Those people say it is not clear whether Fleischer returned the call, and Fleischer has refused to comment.

The Novak call may loom large in the investigation because Fleischer was among a group of administration officials who left Washington later that day on a presidential trip to Africa. On the flight to Africa, Fleischer was seen perusing the State Department memo on Wilson and his wife, according to a former administration official who was also on the trip…

In addition, on July 8, 2003, the day after the memo was sent, Novak discussed Wilson and his wife with Rove, who had remained in Washington, according to the New York Times…

A key question will be which officials received the report and when. The special prosecutor has subpoenaed telephone and fax records from Air Force One and the White House.

Fleischer, who saw the July 7 memo, wasn’t part of Bush’s inner circle during his tenure as press secretary, while Rove was at the heart of it. Given those facts, it seems highly doubtful that Fleischer would have acted on the information in the memo without the knowledge or approval of Rove and other top-level White House officials.

The July 7 memo was largely a reproduction of an earlier State Department report prepared around June 12. Another key question that Fitzgerald is interested in, according to the grand jury witness and the lawyers familiar with the case, is whether Rove or Libby learned of this earlier report and, if so, shared its content with reporters.

Amid the spin from the other side, let’s remember that later that week in July 2003, while they were touring Africa, Bush and Condoleezza Rice, his National Security Adviser at the time, both retracted the claim that Niger had sold uranium to Saddam.

Eric Alan Rudolph was sentenced for one of this crimes today:

U.S. District Judge Lynwood Smith sentenced Rudolph to two life terms in connection with the January 1998 bombing that killed off-duty police officer Robert Sanderson and maimed a nurse, Emily Lyons.

Rudolph has said the Birmingham bombing and three other attacks, including the blast at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia, were part of a guerrilla campaign against abortion, “the homosexual agenda” and the U.S. government.

“We have a serious ongoing investigation here. (Laughter.) And it’s being played out in the press. And I think it’s best that people wait until the investigation is complete before you jump to conclusions. And I will do so, as well. I don’t know all the facts. I want to know all the facts. The best place for the facts to be done is by somebody who’s spending time investigating it. I would like this to end as quickly as possible so we know the facts, and if someone committed a crime, they will no longer work in my administration.”

— President Bush, speaking at the White House, July 18, 2005

President Bush says he doesn’t know all the facts. Well, this begs a question: Why the hell not? It’s been two years. Why hasn’t he gotten to the bottom of it by now?

He’s been busy, I’ll grant that. But really how long could it take for him to round up his senior staff and get a confession? An afternoon – tops.

The President could have saved himself from the criticism and the scandal that’s coming by ordering the guilty parties to fall on their swords early on. He richly deserves any blowback his own inaction may cause.

Consider for a moment that President Bush is being honest, and he really doesn’t know which of his flying monkeys ratted out Mrs. Joe Wilson. In that case, his senior staff is seriously out of control – and George Bush is even more out of touch with deeds done in his name than Ronald Reagan (said he) was during Iran-Contra.

But that’s ridiculous. Even George Bush isn’t that out of touch. He knows exactly who said what to whom, and for what reason, about the Wilsons in July 2003.

He’s lying, and it was caught on tape at the news conference today.

Brewster Jennings & Associates was the cover organization to which CIA spy Valerie Plame Wilson was assigned. Its mission was deadly serious: tracking human intelligence on black market transfers of weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear materials.

There is no way to know the depth and the seriousness of what was lost when senior White House operatives chose to reveal the secret mission of Brewster Jennings and Associates in order to punish a political enemy.

One likely scenario is that the revelation tipped black marketers in nuclear materials that they were being monitored, thus helping them to escape scrutiny.

As a result, for all we know, a nuclear “dirty bomb” is being built right now – and its builders are thanking President Bush and his henchman for helping them escape detection.

So remember, when you hear the GOP trying to change the topic of this scandal to Joe Wilson, what they don’t want you to think about is the fact that by uncovering Brewster Jennings & Associates, Karl Rove, Ari Fleischer, Scooter Libbey or others aided and abetted the very terrorists the Bush Administration says it is fighting in its bogus “war”on terror.

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