The good intention of discussing Tutankhamen’s CT scan, as expressed in last month’s installment, ran temporarily aground and it will require time for the tide to lift it off. Contrary to Tom Friedman’s opinion, walls are not coming down, instead new ones are created every day and although the Internet allows instant letter sending this does not translate into timely replies nor does it guarantee any reply at all. This pertains even to the scientific arena where one might have expected that what was once regarded as “common courtesy” would prevail. Since I am still waiting for some key answers a continuation of the Saga will be postponed until they have either arrived or it has become obvious that further waiting is fruitless.  

While this pertains to private individuals it is, of course, worse when it comes to politicians. Some examples of how our elected officials shield themselves from their constituents have been presented earlier on this site especially in the “October Surprise?” issue (August 1, 2002). I know by now that it is hopeless to try to see one of our Congressional Representatives or Senators in person but we are encouraged, as good citizens, to write to them. Here is an example of what happens if you do so.

Orrin Hatch is the senior Senator from Utah and the country as well as the world  might soon hear more about him because he may be in line for the Supreme Court Chief Justice position once the ailing Justice Rehnquist relinquishes his job. If I were the President I would surely nominate Mr. Hatch because you can’t have a more conservative person than a life-long devout Mormon, and it would be very difficult for the Democrats to filibuster one of their peers who has been in his job longer than most can remember. But be that as it may. The question arose how to send him some of my views which he is free to disregard thereafter. When one visits his website one is overwhelmed with news about all the good he is doing for our state but there is also contact information and “mail policy.” It starts out that “we love to hear from you” but if you are not from Utah don’t expect an answer. You do get an answer on “Email Me” after you have dutifully filled out an identification form, chosen from a list of topics the one you are concerned about and compressed your message to less than 10,000 characters. I don’t object to any of that but the exercise is futile because you get back a form letter. It thanks you for your effort, appreciates your support and goes on with the Senator’s accomplishments in the area you have listed as being of concern to you. All of this comes straight out of a can that gets periodically updated and has very little to do with what you wanted to achieve. I am not singling out the esteemed Senator it’s just typical for how the leadership of our country insulates itself from the common people and their concerns.

 This applies especially to the current occupants of the White House and it is small wonder that many people don’t trust them any more. Mr. Bush has isolated himself to an extent where only a small coterie of devotees has access to him, they feed him the information he likes to hear and reading is not his forte. When outsiders attempt to find out what happened in the inner sanctum they are stonewalled with “executive privilege,” “national security” and similar words which in plain language mean “leave me alone, you bother me!” If that happens to become impossible because the media have created a stir that cannot be ignored the fallback strategy is to “shoot the messenger.” With other words the person who has made a nuisance of himself has to be discredited even when the message he wanted to get across was correct. A typical example that started to bubble during the last month was the Valerie Plame leak. Let me explain, especially for my non-American readers, what happened and what is at stake.

In February of 2002 rumors had reached the White House that Iraq either had been or was in the process of buying uranium from Niger. The Vice President’s office then contacted the CIA to find out what that was all about. The CIA didn’t know but Valerie Plame, one of their undercover operatives, had a desk job at Langley as one of the experts on WMDs. As such she had a secret identity and her name was not to be divulged. Neither the neighbors nor her kids knew what mommy was really doing. It just so happened that her husband was Joseph Wilson who had been an ambassador to various African countries, had previously been in Niger for the National Security Council, and had contacts with current as well as former Niger government officials, When Ms. Plame was told by her bosses about the Niger question it was natural that she would point out to her superiors that her husband was familiar with the country and its politicians and they might want to talk to him about it.

Talk they did and a few days later they sent him to Niger to get a first hand look at what’s what. His expenses were paid but he received no other remuneration. In Niger he met with the American ambassador who told him that she had also heard about that rumor but in the embassy’s opinion there was no substance to it. First there is an International Consortium that has control over the mines, which in turn reports to the International Atomic Energy Agency, rather than the Niger government. Secondly Niger government officials, even if they could lay their hands on  the quantities that were alleged to have been sold to Iraq, would not be so stupid as to endanger American aid with such a foolish venture. Wilson then interviewed the former officials under whose tenure that transfer was supposed to have been carried out and they all denied that anything of that sort had happened. Wilson told the ambassador, went back to Washington where he was debriefed by the CIA and expected that they would inform the White House and especially the Vice President, who had started that whole thing, on what the facts were.

This should theoretically have been the end of it but it wasn’t. The White House, especially the Vice President and Condi Rice as national security advisor, kept hyping the nuclear threat from Iraq in spite of the fact that those yellow cake documents had in the meantime been exposed as forgeries. In spite of the CIA having known that there was no nuclear threat from Iraq the President was given the famous 16 words to utter in his 2003 State of the Union speech. Mushroom clouds were just too tempting to frighten the American people with and thereby create war fever.

When Mr. Wilson heard this he became an activist because it was obvious to him from personal experience in February of 2002 and from what he had learned subsequently that the charge was false and that the country was being deceived to condone an unnecessary as well as dangerous military adventure. First he did so in private with government officials he knew but when that did no good and it was clear that at least some Iraqis had not agreed with our President’s May 1, 2003  “Mission Accomplished” assessment, the ex-ambassador went into overdrive. He wrote an article for the New York Times: “What I Didn’t Find in Africa” which was published on July 6, 2003. The article is worth while to read. I will quote only the second paragraph which has relevance to what Michael Barone wrote in a recent U.S. News and World Report article to which I shall return later.

“Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.”

This bomb shell could not be ignored. Reporters immediately contacted the White House for clarification and the “outing” of Ms. Plame began. As of now we don’t know who the “high level source” was who leaked her name although Karl Rove and the Vice President’s Chief of Staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, have been mentioned. The immediate response by the White House was in line with Mr. Rove’s previous tactics whenever Mr. Bush found himself in some kind of trouble either as candidate for Governor or the Presidency. The best defense is offense; and when the facts are undisputable the bearer of bad news has to be discredited. This was done by suggesting that the Niger trip was instigated by Wilson’s wife implying that there was some sinister motive behind it. The problem was that the wife, as mentioned above, was working undercover for the CIA and to knowingly reveal the name of one of these agents is a criminal offense. This is what the ongoing Grand Jury investigation by the Special Prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, is all about. Who was the person, or persons, who leaked Ms Plame’s name to the press and was he/she aware that she was still an undercover agent?

Now back to Mr. Barone’s article from August 1, 2005. U.S. News and World Report lists itself as “Rated the Nation’s Most Credible Print News Source” and in small print “by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.”  I have not yet investigated how the Pew Research Center obtains its facts but that is not important right now. Mr. Barone, and what he wrote under the title: “Bush Bashing Fizzles,” is:

“Now the unsupported charges that ’Bush lied’ about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq have been rekindled via criticism of Karl Rove. A key witness for the Democrats and mainstream media was former diplomat Joseph Wilson. Unfortunately for his advocates, he turned out to be a liar. A year after his famous article appeared in the New York Times in July 2003 accusing Bush of ‘twisting’ intelligence, the Senate Intelligence Committee, in a bipartisan report, concluded that Wilson lied when he said his wife had nothing to do with his dispatch to Niger and Chairman Pat Roberts said that his report bolstered rather than refuted the case that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq sought to buy uranium in Africa.”

This sent me to the Internet and MSNBC from July 9, 2004 has the full text of the Conclusions of the “Report on the prewar intelligence assessments” by the Senate Intelligence Committee. It starts with:

“Overall Conclusions Weapons of Mass Destruction

(U) Conclusion 1. Most of the major key judgments in the Intelligence Community’s October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction, either overstated, or were not supported by the intelligence reporting. A series of failures, particularly in the analytic trade craft, led to the mischaracterization of the intelligence.”

If one were to take the liberty to exchange the polite word “mischaracterization” for the more commonly used falsification or as Wilson said twisting, one would not be far off the mark. Some people deliberately duped the country and the real question is who did so rather than who sent Mr. Wilson to Niger. This problem is deftly side-stepped by Mr. Barone as well as the rest of the media and the political establishment. The Commission’s Conclusions also go on to say that there was disagreement between some analysts in the CIA versus those from the State Department:

“(U) Conclusion 13. The report on the former ambassador’s [the official reference to Mr. Wilson] trip, disseminated in March 2002, did not change any analyst’s assessment of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal. For most analysts, the information in the report lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal, but State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) believed that the report supported their assessment that Niger was unlikely to be willing or able to sell uranium to Iraq.

(U) Conclusion 14. The Central Intelligence Agency should have told the Vice President and other senior policy makers that it had sent someone to Niger to look into the alleged Iraq-Niger deal and should have briefed the Vice President on the former ambassador’s findings.”

Conclusion 13 implies that there were no facts and it was up for grabs whom you wanted to believe which strikes me as political whitewash. The blame was put on the CIA rather than where it actually belonged; the Neocons in the Pentagon. Conclusion 14 stretches our faith in the truthfulness of government. Is it really credible that the CIA sends somebody to Niger on the request of the Vice President’s office and does not tell that office what the result was?

Michael Barone would like us to believe that his assertion that “Wilson lied” came from the bipartisan report. It did not. Instead it was contained in an addendum of 2 conclusions that the Democrats had not put their signature to. The addendum as presented by the Republican Chairman Pat Roberts is quite explicit:

“Despite of our hard and successful work to deliver a unanimous report, however, there were two issues on which the Republicans and Democrats could not agree: 1) whether the Committee should agree that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s public statements were not based on knowledge he actually possessed, and 2) whether the Committee should conclude that it was the former ambassador’s wife who recommended him for his trip to Niger.”

Ergo, they did not agree. These Conclusions are not in the bipartisan report but represent a political statement by the Republicans and the American public is again being deceived by statements in Mr. Barone’s article. Furthermore, Mr. Barone fails to let us know that ex –Ambassador Wilson took exception to this formulation and wrote a letter to that effect to Senators Roberts and Rockefeller. One may now feel that this is much ado about nothing, because who cares who had sent the former ambassador to Niger. But the foregoing represents only the tip of the iceberg and the bipartisan Committee report to the public is heavily censored as shown by repeated fat black stripes through key words or portions of sentences. One may, therefore, legitimately ask: Who is being shielded by this censorship? It can’t be the CIA because that agency is obviously made the scapegoat; it can’t be the State Department because its dissent is listed. It can’t be the Brits either because in his State of the Union Address the President publicly cited them as part of the source for that disavowed statement. So who is the real source for the forged documents that sent Joe Wilson on his trip? Whatever is being written now about that trip and the “outing” of Wilson’s wife seems to be an attempt to avoid this crucial question from being aired in public. 

That these documents were indeed forgeries and that the State of the Union sentence, which was based on them, should not have been uttered is now agreed to by the bipartisan Commission and the White House. One would have expected that the Commission would have addressed the crucial question as to the authorship of the forgeries, but they did not. In the “Niger Conclusions” one can read:

“(U) Conclusion 12. Until October 2002 when the Intelligence Community obtained the forged foreign language documents on the Iraq-Niger uranium deal, it was reasonable for analysts to assess that Iraq may have been seeking uranium from Africa based on Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reporting and other available intelligence. (BLACKED OUT) In March 2003, the Vice Chairman of the Committee, Senator Rockefeller, requested that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigate the source of the documents, BLACKED OUT the motivation of those responsible for the forgeries, and the extent to which the forgeries were part of a disinformation campaign. Because of the FBI’s current investigation into this matter, the Committee did not examine these issues.”

 There is a proverb in the German language which when translated says: God’s mills grind slowly but inexorably. Two years ago in the August 1, 2003 Hot Issues installment I discussed “The Niger Forgery” which had just reached public awareness and I would recommend that the reader consult this document for details because I shall only summarize it here. I regarded these forgeries as a crime and whenever a crime is committed we are informed from TV shows that the detective looks at: motive, means and opportunity. When one puts these three aspects together a logical mind is led to the conclusion that there seems to be only one Intelligence Service in the world that fits the bill. This is the Mossad whose maxim is: “By way of deception thou shalt do war.” Israel was at war with Iraq ever since 1948 and its government had the most to gain by removing Saddam Hussein. In order to live up to its mentioned motto the Mossad does have among its various divisions one that is specifically devoted to: psychological warfare, propaganda and deception operations. Thus, all of the mentioned three requirements coalesce. As documented in the previously mentioned article the statements about the Mossad come from Israeli sources.

 One can’t blame the Israelis because, right or wrong, they see themselves in a life and death struggle with the Arab world and “all is fair in love and war.” I do wonder, however, why our media and politicians so obediently trot the Israeli line which is not in our best interest, as has been pointed out repeatedly in these pages. Israel is not part of the Union; it is a foreign country which deserves the same respect but also the same caution that we exhibit in dealing with other countries with which we have friendly relations. Let me ask, therefore, again: Who is being protected by the blacked out portions of the Commission’s report? I don’t expect to hear an answer or even public mention of this question in the near future; but the question needs to be raised. More than two years have passed since Senator Jay Rockefeller had officially asked for the FBI investigation but if it is going on at all then it’s at a snail’s pace and the media don’t seem to be interested.  

Although the Committee stated that the CIA obtained the forgeries only in October of 2002 somebody is likely to have been aware of them earlier because Mr. Wilson would not have been sent by the CIA to Africa in February of that year. This suggests the following scenario which is, however, strictly my personal opinion without support of publicly available reliable information. There seems to be hardly any doubt that the Vice President was heavily invested in gaining access to Iraq’s oil reserves which, when in our hands, would significantly reduce our energy problem. When his office heard about the possible uranium sale from Niger to Iraq it was obvious that this could be the looked for casus belli if it panned out. This is why the Vice President’s office was ultimately the reason for Mr. Wilson’s trip to Africa. The problem was that he didn’t find what the Vice President had hoped for. This is why the trip was disregarded and the Vice President now states that he had never heard of Mr. Wilson or his wife. Although this may well be technically correct it is not likely that mere underlings had acted on their own account to initiate the contact with the CIA that had set the whole affair in motion. But the Vice President as well as Karl Rove are the main driving forces of the current administration, with Condi Rice only an affable policy administrator rather than an independent voice. As such they have to be protected at all costs. Regardless how diligent the Special Prosecutor and his Grand Jury are the full truth is not likely to come out in the foreseeable future because it would bring this entire White House down. To take the country to war under false pretenses is obviously an impeachable offense.

There are some Internet sites that try to re-enact a Nixon scenario and advocate impeachment of the President. There are, of course, some similarities to 1974. We are engaged in a fruitless war that is becoming increasingly unpopular and what brought Nixon down was not the Watergate burglary but the cover-up of White House involvement. It was Nixon’s loyalty to his subordinates, who had acted on some general directives, which led him to deny White House complicity and got him branded as a liar in the media. That there is currently a cover-up going on in the Bush administration, only the most ardent Bush supporters are likely to deny. Furthermore, it is well known that the President not only demands loyalty from his subordinates but also extends this courtesy to them,

But 2005 is not quite 1974 and here are the reasons why I believe that serious efforts to remove Mr. Bush from office will either not be undertaken at all or fail. Nixon had a Democratic Congress while Bush has a Republican majority in both houses, although this may change in November of 2006. Furthermore we have to keep in mind that an impeachment of the President would elevate Mr. Cheney to the Presidency, which is every Democrat’s worst nightmare. In Nixon’s case the Vice President, Spiro Agnew, who was loathed by the media, had to resign on bribery charges in October of 1973 and Nixon had appointed the good natured Gerald Ford, a person Democrats could readily live with. Thus, Dick Cheney would have to be indicted for malfeasance first which, considering his record, might actually not be too difficult to do. But under these circumstances there is no way of knowing whom George W might appoint as Vice President and the Democrats might be even worse off than they are today. Since all of this has nothing to do with justice but everything with politics I believe that the Democrats will abstain from an impeachment effort.   

What can we reasonably expect now from the White House and the Special Prosecutor? Last week the President made a surprise announcement nominating Judge John Roberts for the Supreme Court vacancy created by the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. This was a shrewd move because it keeps the media busy. In addition the Senate, before adjourning for August vacation, passed an energy bill on July 28, the merits of which can also be expected to be debated endlessly. How the senators could have read and digested all of the more than 1700 pages of this bill within a couple of days is a mystery. But this is how the country is being governed and we the tax payers will now be saddled with billions of subsidies for the oil and gas industry without seeing any return on our investment in regard to energy prices. But this wasn’t the purpose anyway, the media have to be kept occupied and their energies deflected from Iraq and the White House’s problems.

The Special Prosecutor’s conclusions are also not likely to yield any fundamental surprises. We know that it was syndicated columnist Robert Novak who was the first to mention Valerie Plame’s name. We also know that he is a faithful defender of the current administration’s policies and has apparently struck some kind of a deal with the Special Prosecutor that keeps him out of jail. The New York Times reporter Judith Miller was not so lucky. She stuck to journalistic ethics, did not divulge the name of the source for her article and now sits in jail on a contempt of court charge. These two morsels of information tell us where this investigation is likely to go. First of all, if this were a serious effort to get at the truth of the matter and if the President had indeed fully cooperated, as he had promised he would do, it wouldn’t have needed two years and a Grand Jury. Any CEO in private business, worth his salary, would have called the key players together and told them: “’Fess up, or you’re out of here.” Eisenhower had promised an administration “clean as a hound’s tooth” and when the press found out that his Chief of Staff and personal friend, Sherman Adams, had accepted a Vicuna coat as a gift he asked him to resign. Mr. Bush apparently chose not to go this route but may have followed that of Nixon and, as mentioned above, will probably get away it. The outcome of the investigation is, therefore, likely to follow the Abu Ghraib model. Some expendable pawns may be sacrificed but people who set the policy will remain unscathed.

Where does this leave us with our most pressing problem Iraq - that swallows numerous lives on a daily and billions of dollars on a monthly basis? Since there is no solution in sight every effort will be made to “show progress” although everybody knows that sooner or later we will be forced to leave because the effort is unsustainable. We should take our example from the British who knew what to do when the Empire had become a drain rather than a benefit. First they ditched Churchill immediately after he had won the war for them because a war time leader is not necessarily the best one to deal with post-war problems. Then they relinquished their Palestine mandate to the UN in 1947. It had become amply apparent that the conflict between Arabs and Jews was irreconcilable; the Balfour declaration had become “inoperative” and they were now caught in the middle of a fight without being able to effect any positive changes. Thereafter they dismantled the empire bit by bit because it had simply become unaffordable and concentrated on making their islands as prosperous as possible. They showed us that this worked although Tony Blair’s unstinting support of the Bush policies, against the wishes of his people, has now contributed to the recent London tragedies. Nevertheless the Brits demonstrated again how to deal with disasters. The stiff upper lip prevailed and so did efficient police and secret service work. If our administration had done this after 9-11-2001 the country and the world would have been infinitely better off. The British cousins have only a couple of islands and they prospered by giving up their major oversea assets. We have a continent and think that we still need military bases all around the world and especially in that most volatile region of all the Middle East. This type of policy is not based on reason. Pride, ignorance and greed rule at this time. Until these fundamental human flaws are corrected in our government and the media we will not see peace.