The Howler gets one wrong

I read Bob Somerby’s Daily Howler religiously. Somerby—relentless and counterproductive snark aside—is probably the best media critic in the business. But on the Yellowcake issue, he’s just plain wrong.

In Somerby’s view, the press is failing in its responsibilities by conflating Africa (in general) with Niger (in specific); they don’t see that evidence against the Niger claim is not evidence that the President or his staff intended the “16 words” to mislead, or even that the claim is substantively wrong. A typical example is found in today’s Howler, where Somerby quotes, then dismisses, a paragraph from Dana Milbank’s CIA memos story from today’s Washington Post. Here’s the dismissal:

At any rate, the memo, as described by Milbank, has little to do with what Bush said in his January State of the Union address. First objection: “The amount was in dispute.” This suggests that this memo referred to the specific allegation that (we quote the October 2 National Intelligence Estimate) “Niger planned to send several tons of pure uranium (probably yellowcake) to Iraq.” It has long been known that the CIA warned against crediting that shaky report, the one that turned out to be based on forged documents—but Bush did not allege that this transaction occurred when he gave his SOTU. In fact, he didn’t allege any transaction. Second objection: It wasn’t clear that uranium could be purchased “from the source.” Presumably, this refers to Joe Wilson’s judgment that it wouldn’t be possible to buy uranium in Niger. But again, Bush didn’t claim in his SOTU that any such purchase had occurred. Third objection: Iraq already had lots of yellowcake. Presumably, this is meant to suggest that Saddam would have no need to acquire more. On its face, this is the only objection that is even relevant to Bush’s SOTU statement, but this objection seems to be highly speculative.

When Somerby argues that the words in the State of the Union aren’t put into question by the newfound memos, or any of the other revelations or contradictions of the past few weeks, he is missing the point. The “16 words” themselves aren’t the story. The story, and the deception, are in how and why those 16 specific words were chosen.

As is clear from Hadley’s statement, and past reporting such as Josh Marshall’s June 25th column from the Hill, the sequence of events was something like this:

1. The White House wanted to include the Niger uranium claim—specifically—in the State of the Union.
2. The CIA objected, saying that the evidence was that the claim was bogus.
3. The White House came back with a more general claim—“sought uranium from Africa”.
4. CIA objected again, saying, again, that there was no reliable evidence to support even the more general claim.
5. Finally, the White House based their claim on the publicly-available British dossier.
6. CIA objected to this as well, saying that they didn’t think the British intelligence was trustworthy.
7. The White House put the line in the speech anyway, defending it as ‘technically true’, because they were only saying that the British had said it.

So: the “16 words” were intended to deceive. The White House knew that the best evidence was that the Niger-uranium story was substantively false. They wanted to convince us all that it was true nonetheless. So they twisted and tweaked and sourced it, to give it the sheen of truth. But a well-polished wormy apple still has worms.

What the press gets—whether through laziness or, one hopes, the application of logic—is that the ‘he-said-Africa-not-Niger’ defense is no defense at all. The evidence on which Bush’s substantive claim was based was the Niger evidence, evidence his NSC knew was dubious; the memos reveal that the CIA told them it was dubious, even in its ‘Africa-not-Niger’ formulation. But when they were told that the claim they wanted to make was unsupportable, instead of choosing not to make it, Bush and company chose to disguise its origin and its dubiousness. When they say that the 16 words were ‘technically true’, they are admitting this; they are admitting that the only truth in their sentence of 16 words resides in the construction of the sentence itself, that they know this, but that they wanted to deceive people into believing its substance anyway. That’s not as direct a lie as Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”, but it is still a lie, and a far, far more serious one. Somerby is giving too much credence to the Bush spin; the press corps, to their credit, are not.

Filed under: politics/war