Month: August 2005

If you’re among those who are having trouble getting your arms around the Bush CIA Scandal, a very good place to start is the break-out of major players from Think Progress. Here’s the opener for the section on President Bush:

WAS BUSH INVOLVED IN THE LEAK? In July 2005, the New York Times raised the possibility that Bush could be involved in the leak. “It is still not clear what the investigation into the leak of a C.I.A. operative’s identity will mean for President Bush. So far the disclosures about the involvement of Karl Rove, among others, have not exacted any substantial political price from the administration. And nobody has suggested that the investigation directly implicates the president. Yet Mr. Bush has yet to address some uncomfortable questions that he may not be able to evade indefinitely There is the broader issue of whether Mr. Bush was aware of any effort by his aides to use the C.I.A. officer’s identity to undermine the standing of her husband, a former diplomat who had publicly accused the administration of twisting its prewar intelligence about Iraq’s nuclear program.” [NYT, 7/24/05]

We have added the document into our Bush CIA Leak News Watch under the link, “The Players.”

Rep. Katherine Harris is looking like a born entertainer, able to charm crowds with her malapropisms and general battiness.

On his blog, St. Petersburg Times political reporter Adam Smith quotes Harris on the campaign trail in Sarasota, Florida:

“Bob Novak, my good friend and defender, I sure do wish he were here. But I think he’s still locked in a blue room somewhere,” she quipped, apparently referring to the green rooms where TV guests cool their heels before going on the air.

I got one word for you, Katherine, and it’s straight from Bob Novak: “Bullshit.”

Back when Saddam Hussein was our friend and the Ayatola Khomeni the only bad guy, the United States looked upon weapons of mass destruction more fondly. In fact, the Times of London reports, the United States actually supplied Iraq with biological weapons of mass destruction back in those halcyon days.

A British cow that died in an Oxfordshire field in 1937 has emerged as the source of Saddam Hussain’s “weapons of mass destruction” programme that led to the Iraq war.

An ear from the cow was sent to an English laboratory, where scientists discovered anthrax spores that were later used in secret biological warfare tests by Winston Churchill.

The culture was sent to the United States, which exported samples to Iraq during Saddam’s war against Iran in the 1980s. Inspectors have found that this batch of anthrax was the dictator’s choice in his attempts to create biological weapons.

Well, what do you know? We were certain Saddam had WMDs because we gave them to him. It all starts to come together.

The odyssey of the Iraqi anthrax was unravelled by Geoffrey Holland, a politics student and antiwar campaigner at the University of Sussex. The exact batch chosen by Saddam was disclosed in the CIA report by Charles Duelfer, the former UN weapons inspector, last autumn.

“Iraq declared researching different strains of B. anthracis, but settled on the American Type Culture Collection strain 14578 as the exclusive strain for use as a BW,” Mr Duelfer said.

A congressional investigation into Gulf War syndrome by Don Riegle had already uncovered invoices showing that this batch was shipped from the United States between 1986 and 1988.

The English, our only real ally in the current Iraq mess, are a little hot under the collar about all this.

The discovery has angered some British politicians. Austin Mitchell, the Labour MP for Great Grimsby, has renewed his call, supported by 126 MPs in the last Parliament, for a UN investigation into whether Washington broke a weapons control agreement. “It just makes them look more hypocritical than ever,” he said.