Tenet and the Yellow cake

If you aren’t reading Josh Marshall’s excellent coverage of the unfolding Yellowcake debacle, you should be.

His latest post goes about halfway towards the conclusions that I think are inescapable after today’s swirl of revelations.

But all of this begs the obvious and singularly important question: the charge is that CIA didn’t push hard enough to keep bogus information out of the president’s speech. Who was pushing on the other side? Who was pushing to keep the bogus information in? And why?

Marshall is being cute, because obviously, it was the White House—as personified by Bush, Rove, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and so on. (I leave out Powell because he clearly, like Tenet, knew the Niger claim was false; he refused to use it himself only 8 days later.) Ultimately, the pressure must have come from Bush’s inner circle—there’s simply no-one else who could have applied it.

So, that leaves us with the Bush board of directors pushing to include the Niger claim in the State of the Union address, even after being told that it was not supported by any actual evidence. They knew it was at best dubious. They wanted to include it anyway—so they played ventriloquist, putting the words into the mouths of British. To make the claim “technically true”. And what could that possibly mean, aside from “substantially false”?

This is the key point; the fact that they changed the wording of the claim demonstrates that they did not believe it. If they believed that the Yellowcake story was true, why use weasel words? Why not say straight up that Iraq sought Yellowcake in Niger? Because they couldn’t—because the CIA told them that it wasn’t so.

Which all means: Bush, or someone very close to him, willfully and consciously misled the country and the world. They wanted us all to believe that Saddam was pursuing nukes, whether or not the evidence was there—whether or not it was true.

Now tell me, please, how is that not a lie?

UPDATE: Looks like the grey lady agrees. And may I say, interim executive editor Lelyveld, may you please devote the same energy to this story as you did to Whitewater and to who was or was not the model for some character or other in “Love Story”.

Filed under: politics/war