Pincus Lit the Fuse on the Plamegate Bomb - By Larry Johnson

[kpete]

Pincus Lit the Fuse on the Plamegate Bomb
Submitted by davidswanson on Tue, 2007-02-06 01:45. Criminal Prosecution
By Larry C. Johnson

Until the start of the Libby trial, most folks and chroniclers assumed that the Nick Kristof piece in May of 2003 spurred the White House to go after Joe and Valerie Wilson. But based on the timeline emerging from the Libby trial the real culprit is Walter Pincus, the legendary warhorse reporter at the Washington Post, whose work on an article that appeared on June 12, 2003 set in motion the events that eventually produced the "outing" of Valerie Plame, the wife of Ambassdor Joe Wilson and an undercover CIA officer.

The Nick Kristof piece was the first major shot across the bow of the Administration on its fabricated case for going to war, but did not generate the reaction that the Pincus piece garnered. Kristoff--whose piece only devoted two paragraphs to Joe Wilson's story--wrote:

I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged.

The envoy reported, for example, that a Niger minister whose signature was on one of the documents had in fact been out of office for more than a decade. In addition, the Niger mining program was structured so that the uranium diversion had been impossible. The envoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted — except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway. "It's disingenuous for the State Department people to say they were bamboozled because they knew about this for a year," one insider said.

more at:
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/18192

[sam sarrha]

1. actually the CIA was double checking the NIGER accusations by * , and sent Plame/hubby, they had

told * not to use the uranium thing in his SOTU speech several times.. amoung other lies and false construnctions