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September 01, 2006
The Plame Affair... An Outrage...
For the last three years, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson has been loudly claiming that the Bush administration is composed of criminals who delibrately leaked secret information about his wife (a C.I.A. agent) to the writer Bob Novak. Why? Because they were attempting to punish him for his op-ed (published in the New York Times in July of 2003). His essay stated that the Bush White House statff knew that Iraq had never attempted to obtain uranium from Niger but went ahead and claimed it was true in the president's 2003 State of the Union address.
Now (as of September 1, 2006) we know that everything Wilson claimed to be true was, in fact, false.
We know that Iraq did try to buy uranium (either that or cattle) from Niger in the mid-1990s. Oddly, Wilson knew this was true because he talked to the government minister of Niger who had talked with the Iraqi official. So the entire idea behind his op-ed essay in the New York Times was false. The Bush White House speech writers had good reason for putting the text in the speech. It was false for him to assert that they knew it was a lie at the time they wrote the speech.
And now we know that it was not Bush White House officials (such as Karl Rove or Vice President Richard Cheney) who revealed his wife's secret. It was the Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage, who revealed the information to Bob Novak.
For years Wilson has been going around the country making speeches in which he attacked the Bush White House staff for illegal and immoral behavior and all the time he was wrong.
The behavior of Mr. Armitage now seems both illegal and immoral. He could have come forward any time and revealed the truth. He could have privately told Mr. Wilson that his story was actually all wrong. But instead he stayed silent, while the country was divided and bitter accusations were thrown at the President, the Vice President, and his staff.
Thanks so much Mr. Armitage. You really have helped the country with your years of silent denial of responsibility.
Let me finish with a quote from the September 1 editorial of the Washington Post:
- It now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush's closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It's unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.
Yes, it is sad. Its sad that people are willing to say things that that they know aren't true because it happens to fit their world view. Its sad that people who did know the truth didn't feel there was any good reason for them to step forward and set the record straight.
In a better world we would have a lot of people appologizing to the Bush White House staff for their false accusations on this matter, but I'm not holding my breath.
Posted by rakhier at September 1, 2006 01:33 PM