Word: wilsone
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...Eventually, the White House was forced to retract the Niger claim. There had been no uranium deal. But there was collateral damage: in the course of trying to "knock down" Wilson's story, White House sources implied that the ambassador had been sent to Niger by his wife, a CIA operative. In fact, Valerie Plame had worked undercover--and it is a crime to knowingly reveal the name of a covert officer...
...Karl Rove, who was one of the sources, was running the President's re-election campaign at the time. Clearly, he was trying to deflect attention from a very real political problem--the absence of weapons of mass destruction--to the question of whether Wilson, a supporter of John Kerry's campaign (and a distressingly flamboyant fellow), could be trusted. This is a standard political tactic and, arguably, fair game in matters of electoral politics--but perhaps not in matters of war and peace. No doubt, the battle against Kerry seemed more immediate to Rove, who was immersed...
...election is long over, but the campaign-style spinning persists. Last week, after Rove's name was divulged, the Republican National Committee engaged in a freestyle vitriol spew, attempting once again to discredit Wilson and suggest that Rove was merely trying to "knock down" a bum story. This was so much smoke and baloney--and all too typical of the persistent fecklessness on the part of the Administration and its allies when it comes to Iraq. Cheney continues to spin dross from the hard currency of military intelligence: he recently said that the insurgency was in its "last throes...
...week of July 6, 2003. I was new to covering the Bush White House, having been the deputy Washington bureau chief for TIME. As it happens, that week was a big one at the White House. On that Sunday, the New York Times had published former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's now infamous Op-Ed describing his mission to Niger to investigate whether Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium to make nuclear weapons. Wilson said he had found no evidence of that and was confounded as to why the President would claim otherwise in his 2003 State of the Union address...
...grand jurors wanted to know what was on my mind, and I told them. The White House had done something it hardly ever does: it admitted a mistake. Shortly after Wilson's piece appeared, the White House said that the African uranium claim, while probably still true, should not have been in the President's State of the Union address because it hadn't been proved well enough. That was big news as the media flocked to find out who had vetted the President's speech. But at the same time, I was interested in an ancillary question about...