Month: April 2006

Seymour Hersh:

The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.

The forgeries were blatantly obvious. For one thing, the Nigerian official whose signature was forged had been out of power for a decade. Their source has been uncovered. It reads like a treatment for a 1970s spy spoof, including a double-spy known as “La Signora.”

You have to wonder why President Bush believed he could base his false statement in 2003 that Saddam Hussein had acquired uranium from Niger on such dubious sourcing. He must think that all Americans are as dim-witted as his supporters:

Two employees of the Niger embassy in Rome were responsible for the forgery of a notorious set of documents used to help justify the Iraq war, an official investigation has allegedly found.

According to Nato sources, the investigation has evidence that Niger’s consul and its ambassador’s personal assistant faked a contract to show Saddam Hussein had bought uranium ore from the impoverished west African country.

The documents, which emerged in 2002, were used in a US State Department fact sheet on Iraq’s weapons programme to build the case for war. They were denounced as forgeries by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) shortly before the 2003 invasion.

The revelation spawned a series of conspiracy theories, most alleging that the British, Italians, or even Dick Cheney, the American vice-president, had had a hand in forging them to back the case for war…

According to the sources, an official investigation believes Adam Maiga Zakariaou, the consul, and Laura Montini, the ambassador’s assistant, known as La Signora, forged the papers for money.

Here are some odds and ends about Harry Taylor:

• First, Harry is president of the Charlotte Folk Society.
• Harry was interviewed by Soledad O’Brien on CNN. See the video at this link.
• On Friday, MSNBC’s “Countdown” played the entire exchange between Harry Taylor and President Bush in Charlotte on Thursday. There was no additional coverage of the story, however.
• Except we did learn there is a website dedicated to thanking Harry: Thank You Harry Taylor .com
• And another site planning a “Thank Harry” nationwide event on April 15, 2006: http://thankyouharrytaylor.blogspot.com/
• One of our readers says he knows Harry Taylor:
  

  I know Harry Taylor, and in a way, I’m surprised he confronted the President of the United States with a statement such as that. But in another way, I can absolutely see him doing that; I can see him not being able to do differently. He is a soft spoken, truthful, straight-forward good hearted human being and I guess I’ll now have to add “courageous” to any description of him. If you heard his entire comment on CNN or NPR yesterday, then you see him for what he is. He voiced his strong objection to Bush’s tinkering with our civil liberties, Bush’s sneeking around with the illegal Domestic Wiretapping, asking if Bush is capable of feeling shame for his actions, and at the end, ironically being thankful to (still) be able to address such a thought to the President. I say ironical in that last bit because I feel Bush would really rather see that sort of thing quietly ended ASAP, along with other of our liberties. If good people like Harry don’t stand up and say “you must stop” to this administration, the outrages will not end.

Our earlier coverage of Harry Taylor:

• Charlotte Man Lets Bush Have It — To His Face: ‘I Have Never Felt More Ashamed’
• Harry Taylor Is the Real Deal

The White House knew in advance that the revelation was coming that President Bush had authorized Scooter Libby to leak government documents to a reporter, and they had a disinformation narrative in place and ready to go when the story broke earlier this week:

“The president did not do anything illegal.”

These were just about the first words out of the mouths of every reporter who broke the story on Wednesday. No one explained how this information came to be reported as fact.

Moving the narrative to the legalities sounds preventative — like the White House was getting out ahead of critics who might accuse the president of breaking the law.

In fact, the White House prefers public debate on the legalities of the leak over a discussion of an aspect that is a lot less savory: their motives.

Why were they so determined to discredit Joe Wilson, the former ambassador who in a recent New York Times op-ed piece had challenged the president’s claim in the State of the Union speech that Iraq had access to uranium?

We know that Vice President Cheney, Scooter Libby and Karl Rove were so agitated — threatened — by Wilson’s rebuke that they conspired on a campaign to defame him that was so reckless that it resulted in the unmasking of Wilson’s wife’s secret status as a CIA agent — and eventually to the conspirators’ own undoing.

But what was it that had the Bush team so worried?

Murray Waas has uncovered new information about motivations of the president’s men:

Karl Rove, President Bush’s chief political adviser, cautioned other White House aides in the summer of 2003 that Bush’s 2004 re-election prospects would be severely damaged if it was publicly disclosed that he had been personally warned that a key rationale for going to war had been challenged within the administration. Rove expressed his concerns shortly after an informal review of classified government records by then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley determined that Bush had been specifically advised that claims he later made in his 2003 State of the Union address — that Iraq was procuring high-strength aluminum tubes to build a nuclear weapon — might not be true, according to government records and interviews.

Hadley was particularly concerned that the public might learn of a classified one-page summary of a National Intelligence Estimate, specifically written for Bush in October 2002. The summary said that although “most agencies judge” that the aluminum tubes were “related to a uranium enrichment effort,” the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Energy Department’s intelligence branch “believe that the tubes more likely are intended for conventional weapons.”

This test is not a joke, and the site has an agenda, but it nailed me, dead on.

• World’s Smallest Political Quiz.

So what’s your label? Can you guess mine? Here are my answers:

Whether President Bush broke the law or not when he authorized Scooter Libby to show part of a secret intelligence document to a reporter, in his public statements about the Plame CIA leak, Bush made his feelings about leaking very clear:

September 30, 2003:

THE PRESIDENT: Let me just say something about leaks in Washington. There are too many leaks of classified information in Washington. There’s leaks at the executive branch; there’s leaks in the legislative branch. There’s just too many leaks. And if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of.

October 7, 2003:

THE PRESIDENT: This is a town of — where a lot of people leak. And I’ve constantly expressed my displeasure with leaks, particularly leaks of classified information.

June 10, 2004:

REPORTER Given — given recent developments in the CIA leak case, particularly Vice President Cheney’s discussions with the investigators, do you still stand by what you said several months ago, a suggestion that it might be difficult to identify anybody who leaked the agent’s name?

BUSH: That’s up to —

REPORTER And, and, do you stand by your pledge to fire anyone found to have done so?

BUSH: Yes.

In the new AP-Ipsos Poll, President Bush’s job approval drops to 36 percent, another new low.

The president is lucky — 36 percent is incredibly high considering he is the Worst President Ever. The reason for this anomaly, of course, is the fact that 73 percent of Republicans are still in the sway of their Dear Leader.

We’ll know that reality has sunk in for them, when the president’s apprvoval looks more like the unscientific MSNBC poll (above) on the question, “Do you believe President Bush misled the nation in order to go to war with Iraq? ”