A respectable polity would long since have conducted a thorough examination of the shameful manner in which intelligence was suppressed, twisted and exaggerated, in order for Cheney and the Neo-Cons to carry out their nation-grab of Iraq.

Instead, the GOP have exploited their dominance of Congress to make a travesty of the democratic process. We have not had a proper investigation of the politicizing of WMD-evidence in the pre-war period, in spite of Congress and the White House professing this would happen, though after last year's elections.

 Nor has Congress taken seriously David Kay's request that Congress investigate the politicizing of WMD-intelligence, which led him to resign as head of the ISG.

Fortunately, it appears as if it is all coming to light now, albeit in no manner that will bring credit to either the administration or its too willing GOP lackeys. 

Daniel, I don't think it's possible to have that conversation without distinguishing between different types of WMD -- particularly nuclear and everything else. 

An interesting detail in the WashPo article is its sources:

Prosecutors attempting to determine whether senior government officials knowingly leaked Plame's identity as a covert CIA operative to the media are investigating whether White House officials gained access to information about her from the memo, according to two sources familiar with the investigation.

I think the quote makes clear that this information is coming from the prosecutors, i.e., from Fitzgerald's people.  Yesterday's WSJ article also appeared to be based on a Special Prosecutor leak.  

This new leakiness is surprising given that when Fitzgerald was going after Cooper and Miller, no one could get wind of his game.  He was airtight.  Now, suddenly, leaking like a sieve.

So what do folks think?  Is this just a discipline problem?  Or is it deliberate?  Is Fitzgerald perhaps engaging in some PR pushback against Rove et al.'s recent bamboozlement attempts, i.e. dispelling the "Plame wasn't covert" line?  Could he be racheting up the pressure to see if he can get Rove to change his story a third time, i.e., more evidence that Rove's been lying to authorities?  

In any event, as each day goes by, Fitzgerald looks more and more effective.

I am sure that is true. I just remember Clinton being on CSPAN saying he would not criticize Bush for being wrong about WMD because he too was told Iraq had them. Pollack has all but apologized for his role in the run-up to the Iraqi War.

Something was woefully wrong with the intelligence about WMD. If they should be distiguished nuclear from biological and chemical I don't disagree. I have no doubt that it wac Condi's "mushroom cloud" that drove American support for Bush's follies in Iraq.

You wrote ... "The Post reports that only two sentences of the memo were devoted to the Wilson issue. "

This is true of Valerie Wilson only, according to the Post. We don't know how much, if any, of the three-page memo was devoted to Joe Wilson and his trip to Niger. Obviously something was included, to which the "Valerie works at CIA and recommended her husband" footnote was referenced. Keep in mind that discrediting Joe Wilson's Op-Ed proposition was the main thrust of the leak. Outing Valerie was just a slip up in the process of doing so. 

I would just add to the other responses you rec'vd on this -- remember the RDX? That was "WMD" (at least in the sense of the word that BushCo used it). The inspectors knew Saddam had it and knew exactly where it was. And they told BushCo to guard it.

Oops.

All the Republican diversions cannot take away the fact that this Rove affair is all about the 16 Words. Fixing the facts around the policy.

Those 16 Words should never have been in the SOTU. Neither should the aluminum tubes.

In my book, cherrypicking intel is lying. How Republicans can somehow twist this Iraq debacle into something honorable and worthy of our nation is beyond me.

It's interesting that this leak investigation is creating a paper trail story of the thought process within the administration in the lead-up to war. One of the most nefarious GOP memes after it all want to crap was the fact that everyone in the world thought Saddam had WMD, so we can't blame the Administration for getting it wrong. And yet this memo and other details that have come out tell a different story.

Most of the international community, and the previous Administration, had suspicions, but were smart and diligent enough to decide that there was ambiguity there, and it needed to be explored. Bush, Cheney and company didn't just passively take that same info and go to war with it, they twisted it, teased out the nuggets they wanted, and kept the CIA, Feith, Bolton and others back over the skimpy intel again and again until it could be beaten into sufficiently damning shape. At the same time, anyone telling a different story, such as the UN's growing case that the WMDs were phantoms, was demonized and outcast.

And then after the fact, all of this hard work and twisting and cajoling was swept under the rug with a blanket, "Hey, we were just acting on what everyone thought was the case." Well, nobody outside the administration (nd many inside it who had the raw intel at their fingertips) was itching for war, nor were they so sure about the evidence. These documents aren't just highlighting the lies of Rove and others about this particular case, they are finally poking holes in the Big Lie that Bush and Cheney simply made honest mistakes that anyone in the world would have.

Just a quick add to other responses to your question.

Iraq itself led others to believe it had WMDs for political reasons.    

I read your material, and thanks.  But I couldn't find what you meant by "the ORIGINAL "Niger" memo". It was probably right there in front of me, but I missed it.  Could you spell it out for me?

 Thanks,

Really good point, one that I forgot all about. Saddam was not declaring anything destroyed because he was bluffing about the strength of his country so he didn't look weak to the Iranians. It was Iran he was worried about, not us.

I remember talking to right wingers clinging to the believe that Iraq had WMD, and the piece that they were missing, which I think came out in the Senate report on Iraq, the piece they couldn't figure out was, if Saddam didn't have WMD, why would he lie about it?

It's the bluff, stupid.

Right, but the timeline of the Africa trip was obviously when damage control set in...We have the WH derived article casting a shadow on Powell being given the memo via Armitage and the new Pincus article shedding more light on the secret status of the info.....Then we also have the fact that Condi was faxed info "the briefing book" while in Africa and the phone calls that proceeded from this as well as the gaggles you mention......I think the Powell info is a red herring....and that it was the info Condi received that set the ball rolling to cover-up the Wilson story. I think Powell or possibly Armitage anonymously told the press of phone calls to reporters.

Two things.....Condi's people were responsible for the SOTU speech and all the mistakes related to that intentionally or otherwise.

and Powell/Armitage people believed in the State Dept Intel.

This also sheds some light on Rove's conversation with Cooper; lets grant Rove full benefit of the doubt that he is basically telling the truth, he was warning Cooper away from the Wilson story.  Well the obvious reason to do that was to stop Cooper from digging further and finding that State had, previous to his trip, reached the same conclusions as Wilson.  The 16 words become even less defensible as error and more obviously the deliberate act they were.

State got it right, and Colin Power let us know it in the Press Gaggle, July 10, 2003, on the trip to Africa.  (I saw somewhere this gaggle had been removed from the WH website – don’t know if its true.)  Powell’s remarks explicitly opened the question of whose judgment was relied upon to include the 16 words in the SOTUA, and he implied that his presentation at the UN was more credible than Bush’s SOTUA. 
This is what Powell said:
 
And at the time of the President's State of the Union address, a judgment was made that that was an appropriate statement for the President to make. ……

when I made my presentation to the United Nations and we really went through every single thing we knew about all of the various issues with respect to weapons of mass destruction, we did not believe that it was appropriate to use that example anymore.
 
The definitive presentation of our intelligence case, frankly, was the presentation I made on the 5th of February.
 
And the case I put down on the 5th of February -- we stand behind. And the credibility of the United States was at stake when that presentation was put forward.
 
 
Rice tried to counter that impression the next day when she placed the responsibility for clearing the line in the speech solely on the CIA.  It’s really remarkable – by my count she says at least nine times that the CIA cleared the line in the speech.
 
The CIA cleared the speech. We have a clearance process that sends speeches out to relevant agencies …. The CIA cleared the speech in its entirety.
 
That was relied on to, like many other things in the National Intelligence Estimate, relied on to write the President's speech. The CIA cleared on it. There was even some discussion on that specific sentence, so that it reflected better what the CIA thought. And the speech was cleared.
 
So the underlying documentation here is the NIE. The Agency cleared the speech and cleared it in its entirety.
And with the change in that sentence, the speech was cleared. Now, again, if the Agency had wanted that sentence out, it would have been gone. And the Agency did not say that they wanted that speech out -- that sentence out of the speech. They cleared the speech.
 
But again, David, we do have a clearance process and the Agency cleared it.
 
And she specifically said the DCI was responsible for delivering the judgment to leave the line in.
 
But the DCI is responsible for delivering a judgment, a consensus judgment of the intelligence community, which is called the National Intelligence Estimate.
 
Just in case the reporters don’t get it, she says at least four times that if DCI had wanted the line out, it would have been removed.
 
Now, I can tell you, if the CIA, the Director of Central Intelligence, had said, take this out of the speech, it would have been gone, without question.
 
And had we heard from the DCI or the Agency that they didn't want that sentence in the speech, it would not have been in the speech.
 
Now, again, if the Agency had wanted that sentence out, it would have been gone. And the Agency did not say that they wanted that speech out -- that sentence out of the speech.
 
But I can just assure you that if -- and I think -- maybe you want to ask this question of the DCI, but we've talked about it. If the DCI had said, there's a problem with this, we would have said it's out of the speech.
 
 
What is particularly interesting about this gaggle, is that one of the reporters actually asked why it was being held on the record and not on background, which apparently was the usual procedure.
 
So, does anyone know if this is the first time the administration publicly pointed the finger at the CIA? 
 
 

I may be wrong on this, but I don’t think Saddam misled the U.S. about having weapons that he didn’t have. That was how apologists for the war framed it later. The book-size report that Iraq provided to the U.N. lacked an account of a WMD stockpile that had been cataloged after the Gulf War. This stockpile had likely been destroyed back then, but there was no paperwork on it. This was proof to the Hawks that he was hiding WMD.