So much to say on Niger-gate, I’m not sure where to begin. It’s starting to reach that point where the media sharks smell blood in the water…<\/p>\n
First off, the White House seems to have finally settled on a strategy — everything is the CIA’s fault<\/a>. <\/p>\n National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice has made this approach brutally clear. “The CIA cleared the speech. The CIA cleared the speech in its entirety,” Rice said today. “If the CIA — the director of central intelligence — had said, ‘Take this out of the speech,’ it would have been gone,” Rice said. Bush reiterated<\/a> this take on the scandal today, saying, “I gave a speech that was cleared by the intelligence services.”<\/p>\n Is this a good strategy? It may buy a little time until they think of something else, but the approach won’t withstand much scrutiny. The CIA knew the Niger documents were fraudulent, and according to multiple media reports, said so — repeatedly — long before Bush’s “misstatement” in the State of the Union. It’s tough to make CIA Director George Tenet a patsy when the agency is on record as having notified White House officials and the British government<\/a> that the Niger story wasn’t true.<\/p>\n Then there’s Colin Powell. Remember his devastating presentation<\/a> to the United Nations in February about the imminent threat posed by Saddam Hussein? It was a detailed report in which Powell laid it all on the line — telling the world every non-classified detail the U.S. government had on Iraq, its WMD, nuclear ambition, stonewalling weapons inspectors, etc.<\/p>\n Powell’s presentation, however, didn’t mention one thing — Bush’s claim about Iraq buying uranium from Niger. Bush had just made the claim one week prior in the State of the Union. Why didn’t Powell want to mention this key piece of evidence? Maybe because he knew it was a lie?<\/p>\n Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo<\/a> notes that Powell said<\/a> he didn’t repeat Bush’s claim because “it was not standing the test of time.”<\/p>\n That’s a curious response, to say the least. I mean, how much time are we talking about here? Bush’s Niger claim was in the State of the Union and Powell began reviewing all known intelligence on Iraq for his U.N. presentation three days later. As Marshall put it, “This would seem to show that the ‘test of time’ that the Niger evidence failed to stand stretched from January 29th, 2003 to February 1st, 2003.”<\/p>\n And lastly there’s good ol’ Donald Rumsfeld, who claimed yesterday<\/a> at a Senate hearing that he learned that the Niger story was false “within recent days, since the information started becoming available.”<\/p>\n This is worse than just a regular lie, it’s an off-message lie. The administration, at various levels, has acknowledged that the Niger story wasn’t true for months. It was on the front page of the Washington Post in March<\/a>. Condoleezza Rice admitted this was a “mistake” over a month ago<\/a> on Meet the Press.<\/p>\n Rumsfeld didn’t learn until “recent days”? He’s either lying, woefully uninformed, or has a bizarre sense of what “recent days” means.<\/p>\n So, to review, we’ve got demonstrably false comments this week from Bush, Ari Fleischer, Condi Rice, Colin Powell, and Don Rumsfeld. All from the administration that promised to restore “honor and dignity to the White House.”<\/p>\n What was that George Costanza line about getting caught in a “web of lies”?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So much to say on Niger-gate, I’m not sure where to begin. It’s starting to reach that point where the media sharks smell blood in the water… First off, the White House seems to have finally settled on a strategy — everything is the CIA’s fault. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice has made this approach […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nCBS News<\/a>, for example, reported yesterday, “CIA officials warned members of the President\u2019s National Security Council staff the intelligence was not good enough to make the flat statement Iraq tried to buy uranium from Africa.” The report added, “[T]he bottom line is the White House knowingly included in a presidential address information its own CIA had explicitly warned might not be true.”<\/p>\n