Joe Wilson with wife Valerie Plame, the government spy whose cover was blown when Dick Cheney allegedly had her identity leaked to the media in move that endangered US security, probably resulted in dozens of other US agents in the field being killed, exposed or compromised, and undercut the nuclear non-proliferation goals Hitch claims are so close to his heart.
With Dick Cheney calling for the release of classified memos — wonders will never cease! — the man Hitch daubed "clueless", Joseph C. Wilson IV is reviewing the Plamegate story and casting his gaze over America's tangled web of torture, while getting a few choice kicks into the former Vice President along the way. It's all here at The Daily Beast.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s reemergence on the political stage after his ignominious departure on Inauguration Day, eschewing the traditional handshake with his successor and the new president, is nothing if not ironic. The most secretive individual in American politics is now calling for the selective release of documents that remain classified in one of his own files marked “Detainees.” We have also learned that a principal reason for having tortured senior al Qaeda detainees was not, in fact, to defend the Homeland, but rather to build the case for war with Iraq based on alleged ties between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Despite literally hundreds of waterboarding sessions, there was no evidence developed that such a link existed. But that did not stop Cheney. He and others in the Bush administration simply asserted a link even though they knew one did not exist.
I know something about Cheney’s disinformation. When I, and a number of others, including a four-star Marine Corps general, Carleton Fulford, and the then-U.S. Ambassador to the West African nation of Niger, reported to the CIA that there was no evidence to support the assertion that Iraq had entered into a contract to purchase 500 tons of uranium yellowcake, our conclusions were ignored by the Bush administration. Instead, the president, in his State of the Union address in 2003, proclaimed a falsehood: “Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was trotted out to assert that we could not afford to “wait for the smoking gun to come in the form of a mushroom cloud,” and Cheney himself asserted that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program.
There is no longer any question that we were misled by an administration that had already made the decision to invade, conquer, and occupy Iraq, and did everything it could to force the facts to justify their action. Cheney, the architect of the Bush administration’s disastrous national security and foreign policies, now wants to declassify certain classified documents that he believes will vindicate his advocacy of a war of choice in the Middle East and his support of torture. Cheney asserts that the ends justify the means whatever the insult to international law, the conscience of the world, and damage to the long-term U.S. national-security interests.
Cheney’s request for the declassification of material is a welcome development, but it should not be limited to his narrow request. Our country’s understanding of what was done in our name by the Bush administration depends on the release, not just of the documents Cheney has designated, but of all documents related to the efforts of the Bush administration and Cheney himself to defend the indefensible—the decision to invade Iraq despite the knowledge at the time that Iraq did not have a nuclear program, had no ties to al Qaeda, and posed no existential threat to the United States or to its friends and allies in the region.
Christopher Hitchens has never ever, to my knowledge, come out in defence of torture, but apart from that saving grace he has been a vocal defender of the Bushies as part of the disinformation campaign that sold their highly lucrative war on an ill-defined six-letter abstract noun. According to Wilson:
The disinformation campaign to manipulate public opinion in favor of the invasion, the torture program, and the illegal exposure of a clandestine CIA agent—my wife, Valerie Plame Wilson—were linked events. In their desperate effort to gather material to whip up public support, Cheney and others resorted to torture, well known in the intelligence craft to elicit inherently unreliable information. Cheney & Co. then pressured the CIA to put its stamp of approval on a series of falsehoods—26 of which were inserted into Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech before the United Nations Security Council. At the same time, Cheney was furiously attempting to suppress the true information that Saddam Hussein was not seeking yellowcake uranium in Niger. After I published the facts in an article in The New York Times in July 2003, Cheney tried to punish me and discredit the truth by directing the outing of a CIA operative who happened to be my wife.
Several people defended Cheney in the comments, including one who had the termerity to bring up Hitch's Slate ramblings on Plamegate as if they had somehow debunked Wilson's testimony. This gave an opportunity for someone named Blissfulight to set the record straight with as good a summing up of the case against the contrarian's view as I've yet read. So I'll leave you with that:
Clearly, maxpower1013, you have no clue what you are talking about. After researching your claims, including rereading Hitch's fantastic and well-written (but fictional) tale, and following up with a timeline of events and reports following the yellowcake story, I have to conclude that you aren't cut out for the intelligence analysis business. You obviously didn't take the time to read Ambassador Wilson's story in the NYT, which I would suggest you start with first, nor did you investigate any of the claims Hitch made misconstruing Wilson's visit (funny, how Hitch never actually visited Niger to follow up on his wild and unsubstantiated claims). The evidence is clear, if you had actually bothered to read it: The documents in question, purporting to show that Niger had sold yellowcake uranium to Iraq, were forgeries, passed on by an Italian information broker and con-man to British intelligence, which based their less-than-substantive report on those forgeries, and the testimony of the man who produced them. (The British, in their embarrassment at being had by a con-man, repudiated the forged documents and stood by their original analysis, which was based exclusively on the testimony of the individual who forged the documents, and who spun the tale behind the them; in other words, they are standing by nothing). Despite the fact that U.S. intelligence threw some cold water on the original idea (and the documents themselves), Ambassador Wilson was sent to investigate the claims in question, to verify whether or not Iraq had purchased yellowcake uranium. He found no evidence of Iraqi perfidy, or Niger complicity in the sale of yellowcake uranium (the mines in question are tightly controlled by French consortiums). The intelligence in support of the Bush administration's claims was stovepiped past the rigorous analysis that normally challenged raw information, in the hope that if they (the neo-cons) believe it, it will become. The end result was a long, expensive, and bloody war, and despite scouring the deserts of Iraq and interviewing hundreds of participants in Saddam's weapons programs, NO WMD's WERE FOUND. (This is a nice way of saying that they lied to us, and of course themselves. Which would make Cheney the Vice Chief of Lying. Bush can be forgiven for just being a rube.) Of course, since you are a Feith-based believer, no amount of evidence can allay your suspicions that "something was going on". (There most certainly was something going on: The "market" demanded proof, and for a nice bit of change, a certain Italian fellow found, or rather made the smoking gun to fit the crime.) In the interim, I would suggest that you chew your yellowcake a little more carefully before you swallow it; I don't won't you to choke on the lies.
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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