{"id":211,"date":"2007-01-28T09:41:03","date_gmt":"2007-01-28T16:41:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=211"},"modified":"2007-07-08T12:18:48","modified_gmt":"2007-07-08T19:18:48","slug":"getting-at-the-truth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=211","title":{"rendered":"Getting at the Truth"},"content":{"rendered":"

I thought I was reasonably on top of the Scooter Libby trial<\/a> story.\u00a0 But Nicholas Lemann of The New Yorker<\/a> threw me with this, in his most recent Talk of the Town commentary<\/a>:<\/p>\n

What’s ultimately behind Libby’s trial is the Administration’s obsession with finding hard evidence for what it already believes. President Bush is often said to have misled the country into war in Iraq. But it’s equally true – and more illuminating of how the White House thinks and works – that the Administration misled itself into war. Since it was convinced that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear weapons, the absence of proof showed only that the wrong people (the C.I.A. and the United Nations) had been looking in the wrong places. So, during the run-up to the war, the search had to be conducted with a little more creativity.<\/p>\n

In that spirit, the White House dispatched former Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger, in February of 2002, to find proof that the country had shipped yellowcake uranium to Iraq.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The White House sent Joe Wilson to Niger?\u00a0 Really?\u00a0 I did not know that.\u00a0 I thought the CIA sent him, possibly because Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, recommended he make the trip.\u00a0 But no, this article says the White House sent him.<\/p>\n

I don’t know about you, but when I think “White House,” I think of President Bush and Vice President Cheney and their immediate staffs.\u00a0 But didn’t I read somewhere that Dick Cheney’s first reaction to Joe Wilson’s report from Niger<\/a> was this<\/a>: “Have they done this sort of thing before? Send an Amb[assador] to answer a question. Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?”<\/p>\n

Everything I’ve read supports the notion that Wilson’s fact-finding trip was sponsored by the Counterproliferation Division\u00a0of the Central Intelligence Agency’s\u00a0Operations Directorate.\u00a0 But then I found this paragraph in a Washington Post article<\/a> about the origins of Joe Wilson’s Niger trip:<\/p>\n

The . . . mission grew out of a request by Vice President Cheney on Feb. 12 for more information about a Defense Intelligence Agency report he had received that day, according to a 2004 report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. An aide to Cheney would later say he did not realize at the time that this request would generate such a trip.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So the White House did<\/em> direct the trip, and for exactly the reasons Nicholas Lemann stated: to find hard evidence for what it already believed.\u00a0 The embarrassment that ensued was entirely self-inflicted.<\/p>\n

God, that’s hilarious!\u00a0 A powerful man asks a question, people start jumping through hoops, and look what happens!<\/p>\n

You know, there’s still a free press in this country.\u00a0 It’s hard to get at, though . . . you don’t find it all in one place.\u00a0 You have to consult many sources, and you have to read a lot.\u00a0 But if you’re willing to make the effort, you can still piece together a coherent and true story.\u00a0 As coherent and true a story as humans can tell, that is.<\/p>\n

Now let’s see if the jury can figure it out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I thought I was reasonably on top of the Scooter Libby trial story.\u00a0 But Nicholas Lemann of The New Yorker threw me with this, in his most recent Talk of the Town commentary: What’s ultimately behind Libby’s trial is the Administration’s obsession with finding hard evidence for what it already believes. President Bush is often […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,16,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-media","category-politics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}