Loads o’ bogosity

Last updated on July 26th, 2017 at 04:10 pm

Jon Henke emails:

I assume you’ve heard about former Powell aide Lawrence Wilkerson, who recently gave a speech in which he said—inter alia—that decisions in the Bush administration were often made by a secretive “cabal” that included Cheney and Rumsfeld. Our friends on the left have been salivating over that story for a few days.

Of course, there’s a lot of other stuff from that speech that they … um … didn’t mention. One particular treat: you know those aluminum tubes the administration got so much crap for calling a part of Iraq’s nuclear program? Guess who told us they could only be meant for a nuclear program? France.

Hit that link for more details. In other devious foreigner news:

The Italian businessman at the centre of a furious row between France and Italy over whose intelligence service was to blame for bogus documents suggesting Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy material for nuclear bombs has admitted that he was in the pay of France …

His admission to investigating magistrates in Rome on Friday apparently confirms suggestions that—by commissioning “Giacomo” to procure and circulate documents—France was responsible for some of the information later used by Britain and the United States to promote the case for war with Iraq.

Italian diplomats have claimed that, by disseminating bogus documents stating that Iraq was trying to buy low-grade “yellowcake” uranium from Niger, France was trying to “set up” Britain and America in the hope that when the mistake was revealed it would undermine the case for war, which it wanted to prevent.

Via American Thinker. Yet more bogus information news, from Stephen Hayes:

On June 12, 2003, when he first published a story about the matter, Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus became the second journalist to have been used by Ambassador Joseph Wilson to peddle bogus information about his February 2002 trip to Niger.

Wilson told Pincus that he had debunked Bush administration claims that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger. He was specific and apparently seemed credible. And Pincus bought it all.

And many—including some of the paper’s staff—are buying the story that the New York Times was led astray on Iraq’s WMD solely by wicked Judith Miller. Not so, points out Robert Kagan:

[T]he Times, along with The Post and other news organizations, ran many alarming stories about Iraq’s weapons programs before the election of George W. Bush. A quick search through the Times archives before 2001 produces such headlines as “Iraq Has Network of Outside Help on Arms, Experts Say”(November 1998), “U.S. Says Iraq Aided Production of Chemical Weapons in Sudan”(August 1998), “Iraq Suspected of Secret Germ War Effort” (February 2000), “Signs of Iraqi Arms Buildup Bedevil U.S. Administration” (February 2000), “Flight Tests Show Iraq Has Resumed a Missile Program” (July 2000). (A somewhat shorter list can be compiled from The Post’s archives, including a September 1998 headline: “Iraqi Work Toward A-Bomb Reported.”) The Times stories were written by Barbara Crossette, Tim Weiner and Steven Lee Myers; Miller shared a byline on one …

As we wage what the Times now calls “the continuing battle over the Bush administration’s justification for the war in Iraq,” we will have to grapple with the stubborn fact that the underlying rationale for the war was already in place when this administration arrived.

As with all the above-linked pieces, read the whole thing.

UPDATE. Perhaps you’re a simpleton, in which case this summary of Plame events may be useful.