1 Boring Old Man

When I read back over the things I’ve written about this over the last 6 months, I see that I’ve gone over and over the same things: A.E.I., P.N.A.C., Bush’s graduation speech at West Point, the Downing Street Memos, the Niger Forgeries, Powell’s U.N. speech, the Plame Affair. It’s like I keep having to write about it because I have trouble believing it myself. When I read the blogs now on a daily basis, I’m worried that I’m just joining in on some partisan delusion like I see on the right wing blogs, that this whole thing might be some paranoid fabrication like the McCarthy Commie hunt in the early 50’s.

But then along comes something solid – something like the Downing Street Memos, or Matt Cooper’s testimony that his sources really were Karl Rove and Scooter Libby. The Niger Forgeries are, indeed, the most tawdry piece of the story. Some two bit Italian guy puts together a scam to sell to the French, which they quickly figure out is a fake. Then it gets exhumed by some really shady avenue in the Italian Intelligence Agency and is passed to our government where it isn’t even thought about for a while. Then it comes to the attention of Vice President Cheney who asks the C.I.A. to investigate. They send Joseph Wilson to Niger and he comes back having found no evidence that there’s anything to it. The State Department’s agrees that there’s nothing to it [in this recently released document].

The Intelligence Agencies of the French Government, the Italian Government, our C.I.A., and  our State Department think it’s a forgery, and yet it makes it into the President’s State of the Union speech and it’s a key piece of our justification to go to war with Iraq. When it’s questioned by Joseph Wilson, within days, the C.I.A. takes responsibility and then Wilson’s wife is ‘outed’ by high level Administration officials. It’s not a paranoid delusion, or a partisan smear campaign, it was an active deception by our Executive Branch of government. It’s just what happened.

So there’s a Special Prosecutor chasing down the ‘outing’ of Valerie Plame. And there are legal suits and plans for Congressional Investigations of President Bush’s authorization of domestic spying on Americans without warrants. And there’s a lobbying scandal that staggers the imagination. But the investigation into the Niger Forgery is nowhere to be found. Congress looked into the prewar intelligence and found it flawed at many levels. That’s clearly not the truth. The more we learn, the more obvious it becomes that we had the right intelligence, analyzed correctly, if someone had listened to it with unbiased ears. But the Phase II part of that investigation, the investigation into the Administration’s distortion of the intelligence, just isn’t being done.

So, I guess I’ll just keep writing about it over and over, as will many others. Frankly, everything else feels like a smokescreen. Maybe someday, someone will find a way to have the truth out in plain day for us all to see. This wasn’t an "honest mistake" as it has been portrayed. It was a very "dishonest" mistake…