The strange saga of Cheney and the "nuclear threat" (Plamegate & more...)

[Lorien]

The strange saga of Cheney and the "nuclear threat"

Why did the veep suddenly lose interest in the evidence?

By Jim Lobe

Oct. 26, 2005 | In the wake of the release of the Downing Street Memo, there has been much talk about how the Bush administration "fixed" its intelligence to create a war fever in the U.S. in the many months leading up to the invasion of Iraq. What still remains to be fully grasped, however, is the wider pattern of propaganda that underlay the administration's war effort -- in particular, the overlapping networks of relationships that tied together so many key figures in the administration, the neoconservatives and their allies on the outside, and parts of the media in what became a seamless, boundary-less operation to persuade the American people that Saddam Hussein represented an intolerable threat to their national security.

(snip)

That Cheney did indeed make the initial request to follow up on the Niger yellowcake report appears now to be beyond dispute, and it also draws attention to another little-noted curiosity of the Plame case -- the knowledge and role of Clifford May, ex-New York Timesman, recent head of communications for the Republican National Committee (1997-2001), and president of the ultra-neo-conservative Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD). In an article at National Review Online (NRO) on September 29, 2003 (as pressure was building on John Ashcroft to appoint a special prosecutor in the case), he boasted that he had been informed by an unnamed former government official of Wilson's wife's identity long before her outing as a CIA operative by Robert Novak, on July 14, 2003, and so had assumed that her identity (and relationship to Wilson) had been an "open secret" among the Washington cognoscenti. He has subsequently told the Nation magazine's David Corn among others that he was interviewed by the FBI but has never been asked to testify on the subject before Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury.

In that NRO article, he also noted that he "was the first to publicly question the credibility of Mr. Wilson" following the ambassador's Times op-ed. Indeed, only five days after that op-ed appeared, on July 11, 2003, NRO published May's first attack on Wilson -- many more would follow right up to the present -- depicting the ambassador as a "pro-Saudi, leftist partisan with an axe to grind." The article -- and this is the curious part -- included the following passage: "Mr. Wilson was sent to Niger by the CIA to verify a U.S. intelligence report about the sale of yellowcake -- because Vice President Dick Cheney requested it, because Cheney had doubts about the validity of the intelligence report." This phrasing is fascinating because it purports to know Cheney's subjective motivation, and the motivation ascribed to him -- that he had "doubts" about the Niger story -- conflicts with everything we've otherwise come to understand about why he asked for the Niger story to be investigated. It hints, certainly, at how consciously Cheney would indeed fix the facts when it came to Saddam's nuclear doings.


More: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/10/26/cheney_timing/

[notadmblnd]

1. I'm glad someone was paying attention

we were talking about that here just last week. Clifford May was on CSPANS WJ. He had us so angry with his lies. The article he wrote was talked about in the thread, but no one could get through to CSPAN to bring it up.