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Now that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has released it’s report, hailstones as big as bowling balls
have been falling throughout Washington DC. The most striking devastation, to many people’s chagrin, hasn’t taken
place in the White House, but everywhere else in the belt way.
Many of the people who have vilified the president and
made millions of dollars attacking him through the media in books, movies, and news reports have now been soundly discredited by the very investigative committees they claimed would vindicate
their assertions.
Which begs the question, how could these individuals have been so misguided? Was their visceral hatred
for the president and his administration so blinding that they would intentionally misrepresent collected data, skewing the
facts just so they could attack him? Or was it that the supposed iron clad evidence they boasted was really just flawed or
assumed information?
The report filed by the Senate committee did find that some of the evidence on which the attackers
were basing their assaults was confirmed to be either faulty or non-existent, but that doesn’t help people like Richard
Clarke or Joe Wilson who were made super stars by the main stream media as they attacked the president with their mendacious
bluster and have been proven to be libelous.
Richard Clarke was complacent when he stated emphatically on 60 Minutes,
“There’s absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda. Ever.” Yet there are sixty-six pages
in the report listed under the title ‘Iraq’s Links to Terrorism’ which cites many sources where Iraq worked
with al Qaeda in areas such as combat, bomb-making capabilities, and different training methods in the use of chemical, biological,
radiological, and nuclear materials. It also refers to clandestine sources who reported that, “direct meetings between
senior Iraqi representatives and top al Qaeda operatives took place from early 1990’s to the present,” which would
have been January 2003.
Is Clarke culpable of lying or was he just out of the loop of information as was originally
suggested when he generated his whirlwind in the media? Either way, the self-proclaimed unbiased media sharpened their knives
on the whetstone of his attacks on the president without ever giving credence to the possibility that he was grinding his
own ax.
Then there is Ambassador Joe Wilson. This story of ‘yellowcake’ uranium is so radioactive it’s
turned into a full blown mushroom cloud. The headlines that spontaneously erupted across the nation spurred by his fallacious
editorial in the New York Times shouted, ‘The President Lied’. They ran with his story even though you could smell
the rotten fish through the newspaper it was wrapped in.
After President Bush made reference in his State of the Union
address to British intelligence that Iraq had sought to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger, Wilson wrote in the Times and repeated
on every news show with a camera that he had investigated the claim in Niger and that the event never happened, therefore
the president was a liar. He also told a Washington Post reporter that documents presented at the time by the administration
showing discussions of trade with Niger for uranium and that one of the traders was in fact Iraq, were forged.
The
Senate Select Committee berated Wilson when they discovered this, because not only was it not true, Wilson had never even
seen the CIA documents he said were forgeries! He then claimed he may have misspoken. Maybe it just depends on what the meaning
of the word is..is!
A British investigative report that detailed an investigation of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s
intelligence apparatus has since been released. It was conducted by a committee headed by Lord Butler; cool name, who is a
retired civil servant confirmed that the British intelligence surrounding the yellowcake incident was in fact credible and
accurate.
But we didn’t need a British report to tell us that, because Wilson himself wrote in his book that
a covert agent had told him about an incident involving Iraq and the possible transaction of a uranium deal with Niger. The
man who approached the African official was non other than Iraq’s Information Minister, ‘Baghdad Bob’.
The
president didn’t lie as Joe Wilson had charged and even that was proven at the time because the president’s statement
was based on British intelligence, which we now know to have been factually accurate. Wilson finally claimed that the intelligence
he had garnered while in Niger was not ‘credible’, so he dismissed it. That doesn’t rectify his equivocation
that nothing ever happened and don’t expect the main stream media to print a retraction about this issue either. They
can smell what’s cookin’ and it ain’t grilled tuna!
The Bush administration; especially Karl Rove,
was vehemently attacked in the press over the issue of Wilson’s wife. She was a CIA official who was reportedly ‘outed’
as she was identified by name in a column by Robert Novak who reported she had used her position to get Wilson appointed to
the Niger investigation.
Wilson asserted that his wife was 'undercover' and that someone in the administration had
given her name to Novak as retaliation over his attacks of the president's veracity and he repeatedly alleged that she had
never recommended him for the Niger investigation.
During the investigation the intelligence committee presented Wilson
with a memo from his wife in which she 'offered up his name' for assignment to Niger. Faced with this damaging evidence, he
once again changed his story by saying she didn't make the decision to actually send him. Wilson is now an advisor to the
Kerry campaign.
If the media isn't biased towards President Bush, then why were the mendacious accusations of these
people amplified when they were attacking him, but when their charges are proven wrong that same media simply ignores the
information exists?
Lee P Butler
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