Right Wing Nut House

THE GOOD

Jeff Goldstein has a few words of wisdom for the left: Specifically, Atrios and his constant poison pen posts against conservatives. In this case, Atrios is blaming the right and George Bush for the accidental killing of the young Brazilian at the Underground in London by police who mistook him for a terrorist.

As I noted in the comments at Cole’s place, if, as one of his supporters insists he is doing, Atrios is simply saying that “the Right fosters an atmosphere that makes it difficult to evaluate these situations because the very act of questioning what happened is portrayed as disloyalty,” then the easy rejoinder is that when your “evaluation” consistently begins from the premise that “BUSH LIED! ROVE MANIPULATED! CHENEY EATS BABIES WITH SHARON AND PISSES OIL!”, it signals to your interlocutor that the “questioning” you’re interesting in engaging in springs from a well already so polluted by partisan hyperbole that any subsequent discussion is bound to be rancid.
So Atrios’ contention that it is the “Right” that is fostering the poisonous atmosphere is at best dubious, and at worst willfully blind.

And Goldstein expands on that thought in a comment published by Glenn Reynolds:

I am not blaming ‘the Left’ en masse. But I am blaming those who are actively out to make political hay out of whatever the latest manufactured, ginned up outrage. And I think it’s time we started to forcefully push back against a political and media culture that is at least tangentially responsible for creating terrorists and their sympathizers based on false premises.”

I would say more than “tangentially responsible” for creating terrorists. It brings to mind the opposition Lincoln faced during the Civil War.

As Bruce Catton put it, the Democrats were proceeding with politics as usual, using the standard “grips and handholds” of political warfare. The problem arises when opposition in war time goes beyond the political and enters the realm of the strategic. As the war ground on, Lincoln was forced to fall back on the most radical elements of his party for support because the logical result of the Democrats policies would have bee separation! They could bleat till the ram came home about supporting the troops but when it came right down to it, the only alternative they could offer was peace.

We have something similar today. Democrats say constantly that they want us to succeed in Iraq and that they support the troops. But the logical conclusion to be reached regarding “timetables” for withdrawals and the various side shows with detention centers is that they oppose the war in Iraq. So here’s Bush, forced to fall back on the support of the hard core 45% of the country that will probably stick this thing out till the end. The Democrats are playing the game but the rules have changed and they don’t realize it.

Great stuff from Goldstein lately. Go here and here also. Get educated.

THE BAD

Maybe I’m just imagining it but has anyone else been thinking that Jeff Jarvis has been smirking a lot lately when he’s be on TV?

In fact, he’s becoming downright insufferable at times. Case in point, his ambush of Bernie Goldberg on Ronnie Deutsch’s show on CNBC. Mr. Goldberg has written a book entitled 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America : (and Al Franken Is #37). After the obligatory back and forth between Goldberg and Duetsch, the producer of the show asked Goldberg to stick around for a discussion on “culture.”

What he stuck around for was a mugging by 5 panelists, including Mr. Jarvis, who, according to those watching the show, hardly let Mr. Goldberg get a word in edgewise. I’m not surprised. With 5 camera hogs along with Duetsch, you’d need a 57″ screen just to get all their mugs on at once.

At any rate, Bernie got mad. Jarvis got dismissive. And in the end, everything worked out fine. Bernie got publicity for his book and Jarvis cemented his reputation as a new media wizard, the Gandolph of the blogosphere.

All this wouldn’t have gotten me upset except Mr. Jarvis has a post on his new look blog in which he tries to tell conservatives that we should stop whining now, we’ve got all the power we need:

Bernie — and Bill and Rush — still try to play the victims, the underdogs, the little guys fighting them big, bad ol’ liberals. What’s amazing is that they can still pull it off. Look at Bernie’s own list and you see a bunch of losers: Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky haven’t gotten us out of Iraq; Al Franken and Janeane Garolao are nowhere next to Rush and Bill; Dan Rather’s all but unemployed (and Mary Mapes is); Howard Stern has been forced off the air; Phil Donahue defines has-been…. The conservatives are in power, solidly in power, and yet they still hold to the M.O. that got them into power: playing outsider, victim, paranoid.

But it still works. It sells books.

Michael Moore a loser? Moore has done worse than try to get us out of Iraq. In fact, I’d say that his agitation against the war is the least of his sins. Michael Moore makes films seen by millions of people that are passed off as documentaries but in reality are so full of lies and distortions that it does a disservice to even call them “propaganda” films.

As for conservatives being “solidly in power” perhaps if Mr. Jarvis believes the government is the end all and be all of American society he is correct. But the rest of America is still firmly in control of the left.

Consider the entire educational system. From top to bottom, from the primary grades to post graduate studies, the entire rotten structure of education is under the direct control not of the left, but of the hard, far left. This post is too short to cite chapter and verse but if you’re interested see David Horwitz here. Even if you are a centrist or a center left ideologue like Mr. Jarvis, that book will open your eyes as to not only what is being taught, but the theory and practice of the way it’s taught and why.

As for the rest of America society, anyone who thinks the press has suddenly morphed into some kind of bastion of conservatism should have their head examined.

THE UGLY

Catherine Baker Knoll is the Leiutenant Governor of Pennyslvania. She’s also a moonbat of the first magnitude:

The family of a Marine who was killed in Iraq is furious with Lt. Gov. Catherine Baker Knoll for showing up uninvited at his funeral this week, handing out her business card and then saying “our government” is against the war.

Rhonda Goodrich of Indiana, Pa., said yesterday that a funeral was held Tuesday at a church in Carnegie for her brother-in-law, Staff Sgt. Joseph Goodrich, 32.

She said he “died bravely and courageously in Iraq on July 10, serving his country.”

In a phone interview, Goodrich said the funeral service was packed with people “who wanted to tell his family how Joe had impacted their lives.”

Then, suddenly, “one uninvited guest made an appearance, Catherine Baker Knoll.”

She sat down next to a Goodrich family member and, during the distribution of communion, said, “Who are you?” Then she handed the family member one of her business cards, which Goodrich said she still has.

“Our family deserves an apology,” Rhonda Goodrich said. “Here you have a soldier who was killed—dying for his country—in a church full of grieving family members and she shows up uninvited. It made a mockery of Joey’s death.”

What really upset the family, Goodrich said, is that Knoll said, ‘I want you to know our government is against this war,’ ” Goodrich said.

Looks like the People’s Republic of Pennsylvania needs to either secede from the Union or get itself a foreign policy more in line with like, you know, Washington, D.C.

Considering Ed Rendell, I’m not optimistic about either.

Calling all bloggers!

You have until Monday night at 10:00 PM to get your entries in for this week’s Carnival of the Clueless.

Last week’s Carnival was the best yet with 26 entries from both the right and left side of the political spectrum hammering those individuals and groups among us who are truly clueless.

Here’s what we’re looking for:

Each week, I’ll be calling for posts that highlight the total stupidity of a public figure or organization – either left or right – that demonstrates that special kind of cluelessness that only someone’s mother could defend…and maybe not even their mothers!

Everyone knows what I’m talking about. Whether it’s the latest from Bill Maher or the Reverend Dobson, it doesn’t matter. I will post ALL ENTRIES REGARDLESS OF WHETHER I AGREE WITH THE SENTIMENTS EXPRESSED OR NOT..

You can enter by emailing me, leaving a link in the comments section, or by using the handy, easy to use form at Conservative Cat.

This is just too weird. John Cole calls it “mind numbing.” Any which way you look at it, this represents the strangest turn yet in the Rove-Wilson-Plame affair.

The story starts at a hearing held by soon-to-be-once-again-former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney whose defeat in 2002 was a direct result of her nutty conspiracy theories about Bush and 9/11. Not content to leave well enough alone, on Friday McKinney put on a show for C-Span by holding forth with dozens of witnesses for 8 hours on 9/11 conspiracy theories. These include the theories that no plane hit the Pentagon, that the Twin Towers came down as a result of a “controlled demolition,” and that Flight 93 was shot down by F-16’s over the fields of Pennsylvania.

The hearing featured loons from every corner of the conspiracy spectrum including a former CIA agent Melvin Goodman who was quoted as saying that McKinney’s wacky views on the attack would some day become “conventional wisdom.”

How is this relevant to the Rovian kerfluffle? Mr. Goodman signed this letter along with several ex-CIA agents who were upset about the outing of Valerie Plame. The letter has been widely publicized and passed off as indicative of the way CIA operatives view the publication of Mrs. Wilson’s name.

Okay…so we have a genuine barking moonbat who thinks Cynthia McKinney is a prophet signing a letter criticizing the Bush administration for revealing the name of a covert operative. But dig a little deeper and you find this about the other signatories of that letter:

Ray McGovern, for instance, contributed an article to the ultra-left truthout.org arguing that the Downing Street Memo conclusively proves that Bush deliberately forged intelligence to get us into war in Iraq. Now, are we to believe that he just innocently and in a non-partisan manner became concerned about what happened to poor old Valerie Plame? If you’re still unconvinced, read his hysterical rant at DemocracyNow about what a right-wing rag the WaPo is.

And here’s a quote David MacMichael, another signer of this “non-partisan” letter:

Those were 1981-1983 under Reagan and under William Casey. In fact I embarked on that job the day Casey came in. I can assure you that the way in which the National Intelligence Council and the National Intelligence officers, the directing officers in there were stacked during the Casey years, meant that intelligence was designed, and I focused principally on Central America, the whole Iran Contra thing later, truthful analysis was not the highest priority there. The determination was to produce analyses that would support the previously decided upon policy so for me, getting back involved with Ray McGovern here and VIPS dealing with this current situation, its kind of like déjà vu all over again. It’s a familiar process.

You might recall during the Reagan years that the CIA was at war with the White House over a wide variety of issues, not the least of which was Russian military capabilities which were consistently overstated as was the strength of the Russian economy.

Leon of Red State highlights another signatory to the letter:

Additionally, several of the other signatories had been outspoken critics of the administration’s decision to go to war before the incident with Plame erupted, including Col. Patrick Lang. Vince Cannistraro was part of the group of CIA officials who suspiciously began speaking critically about the Bush administration in the month before the general election, rather than at a time when it might have been practically useful (such as, before the war).

This letter becomes less credible by the minute. We are still looking for a signatory that didn’t have an axe to grind with Bush BEFORE the outing of Plame.

Keep looking Leon but I don’t think you’ll find one.

If Rove or anyone else deliberately or otherwise outed a covert CIA agent he should be fired, even if he didn’t break the law. This should be a given. Hell, I’ve been calling for Rove to leave since the story heated up earlier this month.

But there’s something else I’ve been calling for:

I WANT AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE ACTIVITIES OF THESE FORMER CIA AGENTS AND THEIR CONNECTION TO CURRENT INTELLIGENCE PERSONNEL WHO ARE SELECTIVELY LEAKING CLASSIFIED INFORMATION TO DISCREDIT THE ADMINISTRATION AND DELIBERATELY HARM THE WAR EFFORT.

This is what the Rove-Plame-Wilson affair is all about; push back by the White House in their war with the CIA. They may have gone too far. They may have harmed national security. But that doesn’t change the fact that unelected bureacrats in the CIA have opposed the Administration from the start and sought to sway an election last year by leaking cherry picked intel reports that showed the CIA in the best possible light with regards to WMD.

Some of the signatories to that letter may be in the thick of this scandal. Some of them may be conduits for classified information that journalists like Walter Pincus, Bob Novak, and Judith Miller received prior to the election last year. And the whole sordid mess is being ignored by the press in their effort to get Rove.

Fine…get Rove. But when is the MSM going to turn their attention to this clandestine conflict that Mrs. Wilson and her cohorts have been fighting for more than 2 years? This, not the Rovian affair, is the real threat to our country.

The anti-American left has for the time being, at least, been denied a brand new dog and pony show featuring close up pictures and graphic videos of detainees being abused at Abu Ghraib. In a move sure to bring wails of anguish from the moonbats, the Pentagon has refused to turn over the materials to the plaintiffs in the FOIA case on the Abu Ghraib investigation. Plaintiffs in the suit include the ACLU, Veterans for Peace, Veterans for Common Sense, and Physicians for Human Rights - you know, organizations whose job it is to keep the American public “informed.” Curiously, the organizations who really do have the responsibility to keep Americans informed - the press - did not join in the ACLU suit.

Also participating in the suit are international entities that just have to know every single detail of abuse so they can incorporate the information in their anti-American propaganda. These International organizations include:

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights

International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

UN Human Rights Committee

Convention Against Torture

Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War

It’s nice to know so many of our friends overseas are eager to see the American people “informed” of something they already know -bad things happened at Abu Ghraib. This begs the question; why then release more pictures and videos?

The government has turned over more than 60,000 pages of documents on the treatment of detainees, some containing graphic descriptions of mistreatment. But the material that the judge ordered released - the A.C.L.U. says there are 87 photographs and 4 videos - would be the first images released in the suit. The judge said they would be the “best evidence” in the debate about the treatment of Abu Ghraib prisoners.

“There is another dimension to a picture that is of much greater moment and immediacy” than a document, Judge Hellerstein said in court.

“Best evidence in the debate?” What debate? Why a political debate of course! In other words, the judge in this case has decided that its up to the courts to help out the anti-American left in their efforts to score points in the political debate over the war in Iraq.

Anyone who doesn’t think that the ACLU hasn’t morphed into a highly partisan, far left advocacy group should examine some of the recent cases the ACLU has taken on. For that, I recommend you go here and browse through some of the eye opening issues the ACLU has decided to advocate recently. It’s very sad to see an organization I once admired for its championing of human liberty degenerate into partisan hackery of the worst kind.

The Pentagon was supposed to turn those pictures and tapes over to the moonbats yesterday. The fact that they filed a “secret brief” detailing the reasons why they haven’t complied will probably not sit well with the judge in this case. Judge Alvin Hellerstein is the same judge that ruled back in 2003 that since the attack on America was “forseeable,” plaintiffs had a right to sue the government. He also ruled that the plaintiffs had the right to sue the Trade Center owners for negligence because they had an inadequate evacuation plan (for a plane flying into the building?) as well as opening the door to sue Boeing, the manufacturer of the airplanes for - get this - negligence due to the inadequate locks on the door to the cockpit.

My guess is that the judge will deny the Pentagon’s motion and once again order them to turn over the graphic material on abuse at Abu Ghraib. At which point, we’ll be treated to a full blown press conference with the ACLU gleefully smacking the Administration around and calling for an “independent” investigation of abuse at all US detention facilities that would include an international component. In other words, representatives from countries where torture is endemic will be sitting in judgment on Americans. The fact that the military itself and the Pentagon has now carried out three separate investigations on abuse of prisoners, including the independent Schlessinger Commission that faulted both the Administration and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld for unclear policies on interrogation as well as a lack of responsibility in the chain of command, will be ignored.

The FOIA suit was politics pure and simple. Evidently, the release of 60,000 documents isn’t enough for the moonbats. In order to really skewer the Administration, we absolutely have to be treated to more pictures of activities at Abu Ghraib. I would guess that the reason the ACLU et. al. want the graphical material above anything else is that nothing will put America in a worse light than videos of the abuse. Still pictures are one thing. Videos will really hammer their points home.

Their points are political ones. It doesn’t have anything to do with our “right to know.” It will do nothing to advance the real debate over Iraq. The only thing it will do is inflame the passions of people worldwide against America and lower the morale of the American people.

All in a day’s work for the ACLU.

There was a moment following the 7/7 attacks on London’s subway system where I actually thought that the left’s eyes had been opened to the danger we faced. There were encouraging condemnations of the act from sources such as London Mayor “Red” Ken Livingstone whose notorious coddling of Islamic extremists pegged him as the #2 terrorist apologist right behind the unrepentant and even more noxious George Galloway. There were even liberals in this country who unequivacably condemned the acts as barbaric and unwarranted.

Sadly, the moment passed. Reverting to form, the western left has indulged in an orgy of Bush hating to the exclusion of any kind of rational response to the threat from Islamic extremists. This was made crystal clear yesterday when, following the failed bombing in London, a British reporter asked an accusatory question of Australia’s hard nosed Prime Minister John Howard who was visiting Tony Blair at the time of the attack. The reporter practically blamed Howard and Blair for the attack because of their support for the United States in Iraq. Here is part of Howard’s brilliant response:

Can I just say very directly, Paul, on the issue of the policies of my government and indeed the policies of the British and American governments on Iraq, that the first point of reference is that once a country allows its foreign policy to be determined by terrorism, it’s given the game away, to use the vernacular. And no Australian government that I lead will ever have policies determined by terrorism or terrorist threats, and no self-respecting government of any political stripe in Australia would allow that to happen.

Can I remind you that the murder of 88 Australians in Bali took place before the operation in Iraq.

And I remind you that the 11th of September occurred before the operation in Iraq.

Can I also remind you that the very first occasion that bin Laden specifically referred to Australia was in the context of Australia’s involvement in liberating the people of East Timor. Are people by implication suggesting we shouldn’t have done that?

When a group claimed responsibility on the website for the attacks on the 7th of July, they talked about British policy not just in Iraq, but in Afghanistan. Are people suggesting we shouldn’t be in Afghanistan?

(HT: The New Editor. The inspiring video available at Jackson’s Junction)

I’m afraid the courageous Aussie should have saved his breath. The problem isn’t that the British reporter and western left have forgotten any of the litany of Islamist attacks over the past few years. The problem is, they remember but have failed to draw the necessary lessons both from the current scourge of Islamist thuggery and from history.

For I have come to the conclusion that most of the opposition to the Anglosphere policies of pre-emptive war, democractization of the middle east, and securing the home front comes not as a result of any treasonous tendencies on the part of liberals but rather the failed intellecual fallacies of a bygone era; the appeasement initiatives of England and France of the 1930’s.

It may be well to recall that at that time, appeasement was looked on as the only rational response to aggression. It was the perfect marraige of high minded ideals with hard headed reality (or so it was thought). The idea was that the aggressive confrontation with Hitler proceeded from real grievances - in this case the Versailles Treaty - and that in order to avoid war it was necessary to settle those grievances by giving Hitler what he wanted.

Looking at it from our perspective, it seems like folly. But from the perspective of the overwhelming majority of voters and the leadership class in France and England, anything was preferable to reliving the slaughter in the trenches that occurred during WW I.

This rationale seems to have taken control of the left as they desperately thrash about looking for a way - any way - to avoid confrontation with the terrorists. And like their ideological ancestors from the 1930’s, they are seeking to dismiss this agression in favor of what they see as a reasonable justification for it. Ted Lapkin’s article in NRO is instructive in that he shows how this logic has consumed the liberals:

The far Left has similarly proved unable to liberate itself from the web of rose-tinted delusions that it has spun about the nature of Islamic extremism. After each al Qaeda outrage, leftist ideologues are quick to castigate their own countrymen for a catalogue of sins, both real and imagined. With a perverse combination of self-loathing and adoration of the enemy, the radical Leftist mantra preaches that if only we were nicer, the jihadists could not fail to love us. It’s our own fault if Osama bin Laden doesn’t realize what good people we are.

And all the while, these “progressive” academics, pundits, and politicians engage in ridiculous intellectual contortions designed to mitigate the guilt of the terrorist perpetrators. When push comes to shove, some intellectuals believe that Islamism is simply an understandable reaction to what they describe as “Western imperialism.”

Self loathing aside, there are other powerful emotions at work here. The question “Why do they hate us” resonates much more with them than it does with the right or with realists. Writing in the New York Times, Oliver Roy reminds us of the answer to that question; we’re in the way:

Another motivating factor, we are told, was the presence of “infidel” troops in Islam’s holy lands. Yes, Osama Bin Laden was reported to be upset when the Saudi royal family allowed Western troops into the kingdom before the Persian Gulf war. But Mr. bin Laden was by that time a veteran fighter committed to global jihad.

He and the other members of the first generation of Al Qaeda left the Middle East to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980’s. Except for the smallish Egyptian faction led by Ayman al-Zawahiri, now Mr. bin Laden’s chief deputy, these militants were not involved in Middle Eastern politics. Abdullah Azzam, Mr. bin Laden’s mentor, gave up supporting the Palestinian Liberation Organization long before his death in 1989 because he felt that to fight for a localized political cause was to forsake the real jihad, which he felt should be international and religious in character.

From the beginning, Al Qaeda’s fighters were global jihadists, and their favored battlegrounds have been outside the Middle East: Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya and Kashmir. For them, every conflict is simply a part of the Western encroachment on the Muslim ummah, the worldwide community of believers.

For the left however, the reason they want to kill us does not include the re-establishment of an Islamic Caliphate as a result of global jihad. In fact, the goals of our enemies can be safely ignored because they seem so unreal. So rather than deal with the universiality of Islamic terrorism, the left takes a much narrower view. As each new outrage occurs, they seek to “understand” the announced motivations of the terrorists rather than deal with the overarching objectives of our enemies.

A diariest on Daily Kos recently put up a poll on how to “solve” terrorism. Here are the revealing responses:

How should we solve terrorism?

Try to get Israel to act like a better neighbor in middle east. 8 votes - 11 %
Try to get moderate Muslims to discourage terrorism strongly 8 votes - 11 %
We need to work for economic justice for disenfranchised Muslims 23 votes - 34 %
We need a worldwide dialogue on Islam’s association w/ world 11 votes - 16 %
War, war, kill, kill, bomb, bomb, destroy, destroy 1 vote - 1 %
None of the above–you idiot! 16 votes - 23 %

(HT: Museum of Left Wing Lunacy)

Fully 61% of the respondents believe in some kind of dialogue or “economic justice” as if either were in our power to achieve. But it illustrates a way of thinking that seeks to placate our enemies rather than defeat them.

Ace has some serious thoughts about this appeasement impulse on the left:

Note to the left: Osama bin Ladin, Al Zarqawi, and the rest of the Islamofascist killers aren’t even offering you an armistice. Quite the opposite. They have said, multiple times, that they intend to kill you or subjugate you and you cannot buy their peace simply by giving into their demands.

But that makes those on the left worse than Chamberlain

When Chamberlain came back from Munich waving the agreement in which England and Germany agreed to always resolve their differences in “The Spirit of Munich,” little did the deluded British Prime Minister realize the irony in his betrayal of the Czechs. For within two years, the Nazis would overrun most of Europe and his tiny island nation would be left on its own to face the German onslaught.

It remains to be seen if the western left will have the scales fall from their eyes in time to help to save our common civilization from the ravages and hatred of our enemies.

UPDATE

Jeff Goldstein links to the Oliver Roy piece in the Times I highlighted above and then goes deeper by quoting extensively from an extraordinary article by Reuel Marc Gerecht in The Weekly Standard (which I intend to use as a basis for an article that will appear in The American Thinker next week).

Gerecht’s learned thesis is a blueprint for both tactical and strategic moves we should be making in the WoT. Goldstien sums up nicely:

Fortunately, many of us have already reached the conclusion that the spread of democracy in the mideast is the single greatest threat to radicalized Islam—if only as a way, in the Roy / Gerecht paradigm of a radicalized Western Islamism leading the charge of holy war, to disabuse Westernized jihadists of a number of ready made excuses for their fight—something the American people made clear when they reelected President Bush in November.

Now if we can only convince the rest of the world of the need to sign on.

Easier said than done but something we have to keep plugging away at. A good chance may come in September as it appears that Gehard Schoeder will lose bigtime in elections to Angela Merkel’s Christain Democrats. And while Merkel appears to be no Iron Lady in that she has already promised not to help us out very much in Iraq, she may prove easier to work with on combating Muslim extremism than the insufferably anti-American Schroeder.

It’s been said elsewhere; I don’t think it’s an accident that the three strongest proponents of confronting the Islamists - Bush, Blair, and Howard - all won resounding victories in the last year while the political fortunes of their tormentors - Chirac and Schoeder - are in the toilet.

Ah! Sweet irony!

From our “This is News?” department comes the revelation that, in response to Joe Wilson’s attack on the President’s credibility, Bush’s top aide Karl Rove and VP Cheney’s top aide Scooter Libby collaborated on a response to Wilson’s charges of shaping intelligence on the Iraq-Niger uranium connection.

The NY Times story is interesting in that it says absolutely nothing. They don’t have one iota of news to impart to their readers. They do, however, have plenty of juicy speculation that they can disguise as news which for the New York Times, is pretty much the same thing.

The response they were working on was given by CIA Director George Tenet on July 12, 2003 in which Tenet insisted that the shaky Niger uranium story was the fault of bad analysis at the CIA. Rove and Libby were drawing up a statement in response to a request by Tenet himself who wanted to set the record straight.

A former government official, though, added another element to how the statement was prepared, saying that no one directed Mr. Tenet to issue it and that Mr. Tenet himself felt it was needed. The statement said that the “C.I.A.’s counterproliferation experts, on their own initiative, asked an individual with ties to the region to make a visit to see what he could learn.”

According to the Times, there may have been other more sinister reasons for the Rove-Libby collaboration:

It is not clear what information Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby might have collected about Ms. Wilson as they worked on the Tenet statement. Mr. Rove has said he learned her name from Mr. Novak. Mr. Libby has declined to discuss the matter.

The effort was striking because to an unusual degree, the circle of officials involved included those from the White House’s political and national security operations, which are often separately run. Both arms were drawn into the effort to defend the administration during the period.

“It is not clear what information Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby might have collected…”

What an extraordinarily biased statement! The reason it’s “not clear” what the two “might” have collected could very well be that they weren’t collecting anything! ABP makes the same point:

And what did they say between themselves about Valerie Plame. Nothing at all. But that doesn’t stop this “news” article from wondering, stating that It is not clear what information Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby might have collected about Ms. Wilson as they worked on the Tenet statement. Why not just say “There is nothing to suggest Rove and Libby ever discussed Valerie Plame”. Because it’s The New York Times of course.

The Times is a master at this form of attack. This not very subtle indictment uses pure speculation without any evidence to back it up. They’re just throwing crap against the wall to see if anything sticks.

It’s disgusting.

UPDATE

Tom Maguire links to the Times piece and highlights the possible role of Ari Fleisher in the scandal pointing out a discrepancy in Fleisher’s reported grand jury testimony about not seeing the State Department memo and an eyewitness who claims he did:

Well. I am sure he is a great American, but this is not good. And, as with Karl, since Ari was involved with the Wilson push-back, why would he *not* have seen the memo, or been apprised of it?

And yes, if Ari is The One, since he left the Administration on July 14, 2003, we are back to an Incredible Shrinking Scandal.

Possibly…but then there are still all of those statements by the White House denying Rove’s involvement which is, of course, a political not a legal problem. And by listening to the WH press corps, I doubt whether those questions are going to stop anytime soon.

Think Progress has Bloomberg piece by Richard Keil (not available as of 5:00 AM Central) which states that both Lewis Libby and Karl Rove’s claims to have been informed of Valerie Wilson’s status as a CIA employee from reporters is at odds with the testimony given by the journalists in question before the grand jury.

Rove claims to have first heard of Wilson’s agency job from Bob Novak. Libby is reported to have testified that he heard the story first from NBC’s Tim Russert. According to the Bloomberg piece, both reporters tell a different story:

Two top White House aides have given accounts to the special prosecutor about how reporters told them the identity of a CIA agent that are at odds with what the reporters have said, according to persons familiar with the case.

Lewis “Scooter’’ Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, told special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald that he first learned from NBC News reporter Tim Russert of the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame, the wife of former ambassador and Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson. Russert has testified before a federal grand jury that he didn’t tell Libby of Plame’s identity.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove told Fitzgerald that he first learned the identity of the CIA agent from syndicated columnist Robert Novak, who was first to report Plame’s name and connection to Wilson. Novak, according to a source familiar with the matter, has given a somewhat different version to the special prosecutor.

These discrepancies may be important because one issue Fitzgerald is investigating is whether Libby, Rove, or other administration officials made false statements during the course of the investigation. The Plame case has its genesis in whether any administration officials violated a 1982 law making it illegal to knowingly reveal the name of a CIA agent.

We already know of this “different version” given by Novak. Where Rove testfified that “I heard that too” when Novak told him of Mr.s Wilson’s employment at CIA Novak reportedly testified that Rove said something slightly different, but a similar gist.

Kos says:

What will the children think? It’s not the blowjob endangering national security by outing an undercover CIA agent, but the lies about it!

Actually, it is the national security thing. The lies are just the icinig on the cake.

Not so fast my boorish lickspittle. Before you hyperventilate yourself into a paroxysm of orgasmic ecstacy, perhaps you should have a look at Tom Maguire today:

Decison ‘08 sends me to this Bloomberg account of a discrepancy in Tim Russert’s story:

None of this came up when Russert chatted with Matt Cooper on his “Meet The Pravda” show last weekend.

Mr. Maguire is “steaming” over what he sees as a cover-up by the press. Perhaps not so much a coverup as a “CYA” exercise. It would appear that Mr. Fitzgerald is casting a wide net and, as demonstrated inumerable times in the past, special prosecutors feel duty bound to charge someone with something for all the time and money spent. No one wants to get caught up in the dragnet and that includes many members of the press who may or may not have known that Mrs. Wilson worked for the CIA.

It’s pretty clear that the Bloomberg article covers precious little new ground. But since notorious leftist Al Hunt took over as editor, Bloomberg has been agressively liberal in it’s slant of the news. A careful reading of Mr. Keil’s piece would seem to place it in the category of wishful thinking rather than good reporting. And as Mr. Keil reminds us at the end of his article:

Some Bush allies were hopeful that the Fitzgerald investigation, which dominated the news in Washington for the first part of July, would subside as the focus now is on Bush’s nomination of Judge John Roberts to fill the first vacancy on the Supreme Court in 11 years.

Yet special prosecutor Fitzgerald, not media coverage, will determine the outcome of this investigation.

Thankfully, that observation cuts both ways.

UPDATE

The Keil article is now up on Bloomberg’s website and differs slightly from the advance copy that Think Progress received.

One discrepancy I hadn’t noticed in the article was this ommission regarding Time Magazine’s Matt Cooper’s reported testimony before the grandy jury:

There also is a discrepancy between accounts given by Rove and Time magazine reporter Mat Cooper. The White House aide mentioned Wilson’s wife — though not by name — in a July 11, 2003, conversation with Cooper, the reporter said. Rove, 55, says that Cooper called him to talk about welfare reform and the Wilson connection was mentioned later, in passing.

Cooper wrote in Time magazine last week that he told the grand jury he never discussed welfare reform with Rove in that call

That’s true…up to a point. Cooper also wrote (and testified) that he originally called Rove to discuss welfare reform and left a message with Rove to that effect. When Rove returned the call, Cooper started by asking Rove about Wilson.

Gee…you don’t think the reason Mr. Keil left that little tidbit out of the story was because he’s like, ya know, biased or anything now, do you?

Kevin Alyward cuts to the heart of the matter:

If either Libby or Rove can be tied to the memo it’s game over for them. I’m still wholly underwhelmed by the story, but given the details that have emerged (and are likely to emerge), it’s just about time that both Rove and Libby take one for the team and step down.

I’ve been saying that for two weeks.

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation into the Plame leak has now gone off on so many different tangents that if you’re trying to follow his line of inquiry, you probably need a scorecard to keep track of the players. Does this activity, as Donald Lambro suggests in today’s WA Times, mean that Fitzgerald is desperately casting about for someone’s scalp to hang on his wall for any transgression?

Possibilities include lying to the FBI, lying to him, lying to the grand jury, trying to cover up the lying, or trying to cover up something else of which at present, we’re unaware.

One thing is almost certain; even if Plame was on covert status as the Walter Pincus piece in today’s Washington Post suggests, Fitzgerald will still have a very hard time charging someone with violating the Intelligence Identities act.

Today’s controversy centers around a State Department memo written on June 10, 2003 almost a month before Wilson’s Op-Ed appeared in the New York Times after which Wilson’s wife was identified by Bob Novak in a subsequent column. Since Pincus doesn’t have the memo, there is no way to judge in what context Mrs. Wilson’s name came up. What’s important, according to Pincus, is that the paragraph that names her is preceded by the letter “S” - an indication that what’s contained in the paragraph is “secret.”

A classified State Department memorandum central to a federal leak investigation contained information about CIA officer Valerie Plame in a paragraph marked “(S)” for secret, a clear indication that any Bush administration official who read it should have been aware the information was classified, according to current and former government officials.

Plame — who is referred to by her married name, Valerie Wilson, in the memo — is mentioned in the second paragraph of the three-page document, which was written on June 10, 2003, by an analyst in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), according to a source who described the memo to The Washington Post.

The paragraph identifying her as the wife of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV was clearly marked to show that it contained classified material at the “secret” level, two sources said. The CIA classifies as “secret” the names of officers whose identities are covert, according to former senior agency officials.

After raising the specter of a violation of the law, Pincus adds this:

Anyone reading that paragraph should have been aware that it contained secret information, though that designation was not specifically attached to Plame’s name and did not describe her status as covert, the sources said. It is a federal crime, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, for a federal official to knowingly disclose the identity of a covert CIA official if the person knows the government is trying to keep it secret

In other words, in what would have to be described as a sensitive document dealing with the Iraq-Niger uranium issue, Mrs. Wilson’s name (not her maiden name) was used in connection with…what? Pincus doesn’t know but that doesn’t stop him from using “former government officials” (the same “officials” who have been leaking information damaging to the Administration?) to tell us how anyone who read this memo and used any information contained in the paragraph marked “S” for “secret” is in trouble.

Rove has denied seeing the memo although according to Pincus, Colin Powell brought the memo aboard Air Force I for the President’s trip to Africa. Others who may have seen it include Ari Fleisher, the President’s former Press Secretary who some have been speculating was primarily responsible for shopping the Wilson-Plame connection to reporters around town in the days following Wilson’s Times Op-Ed. Fleisher has remained unavailable for comment on the issue which may in fact indicate that he is a target of Fitzgerald’s investigation.

What continues to bother me about the reporting of this story is the failure of the mainstream press to highlight the all out war going on at the time (and still going on to this day) between the White House and a faction at the CIA who were trying to shift blame for the failure to find WMD’s from the agency to the warhawks in the Administration. For the life of me, I can’t see how you can give this story any context at all if you pretend this conflict didn’t exist or ignore it as Pincus has done since he talked to Wilson back in June of 2003 about his Niger mission.

Joe Wilson’s attempt to cover-up his wife’s role in getting him the Niger assignment has to be seen as an effort by Wilson to cover his tracks. He would have us believe that the reason he got the CIA assignment was because of his “extensive contacts” in the area. More basic than that, he would have us believe the entire Niger adventure was in response to a question from the Vice President’s office. To believe that, you would have to acknowledge that the CIA didn’t have any assets in Niger to carry out what on its face was a routine investigation. If Joe Wilson could sit by a pool sipping mint tea and talk with a few officials, why couldn’t such an inquiry be handled by agency personnel already in country? Why a “special mission?”

The answer is that the CIA wanted to make sure they got the right answers from the “investigation.” So they send glory boy Wilson on a made up errand to insure that the intelligence is “fixed” to absolve the Niger government of colluding with the Iraqis in what two separate inquiries have concluded was a real attempt to circumvent sanctions to purchase uranium. And to obscure that fact, Wilson has to make it appear that his talent and contacts alone were the reason he was sent to Niger not that his wife was part of a faction out to discredit the Administration’s WMD claims prior to going to war with Iraq.

This may in fact be the real cover-up. What started as a policy dispute between WMD experts at CIA and the “Neocons” in the Bush Administration may have escalated to include the CIA selective leaking of classified information in order to swing an election. And right in the middle of this cover up may be the Wilson-Plame connection regarding the Niger mission.

UPDATE

John Cole shamelessly steals the title to one of my previous posts on the Rovian mess (”Drip…Drip…Drip) while linking to the Pincus piece in WAPO. The alliteration in the title of his post is sublime as is his observation that ” Things will be fast and furious tomorrow, though, as the spinning goes into high gear.” My spin, of course, is that the spooks are guilty of trying to sway an election while selectively leaking a heap of classified documents to show how clever they were.

If they were so clever, why’d they send such a clown as Wilson on such an “important” mission?

UPDATE II

The definitive word comes, of course, via Tom Maguire who believes a case is building against Rove. He also points to Ari Fleisher’s name being bandied about more as well as Steve Hadley.

Here’s Tom’s take on possible Rove exposure:

A quick summing up - it is getting easier to make the case that Rove knew, or should have know, that the info he passed to Cooper was sensitive. In other words (his words, actually), Rove had said too much. But the IIPA looks like the wrong statute.

Sidebar - Ari Fleischer’s name is appearing in more articles. He and Steve Hadley are the forgotten men here.

In other words, Rove’s trouble may hinge on when he told authorities he knew of the Wilson-Plame connection. If he heard about it from the memo, he may be cooked. If he heard about it from another journalist, he may be guilty of nothing more than confirming gossip.

Either way, I don’t think he can survive. The press will not let go of this. And Fitzgerald may not indict him but will certainly single him out for some stinging criticism. In short, he’s now damaged goods and needs to go.

James Joyner makes some interesting observations about the State Department memo:

It’s rather unlikely that Rove or Libby saw a memo for the eyes of an Undersecretary of State, let alone read the footnotes. It’s also unclear to me why her name would be classified “Secret,” given that she had not worked in a covert capacity or overseas for years. It’s rather odd for the fact that someone who works at CIA headquarters under their own name to be classified.

Of course, that won’t stop the conspiracy theorists. Kos and John of AmericaBlog think this thwarts the administration’s plan to divert attention from the Rove affair by rushing the appointment of John Roberts to the Supreme Court. Because, goodness knows, trying to get a new Justice to replace Sandra Day O’Connor, who is often the deciding vote against their interests, in place by October would not be something the Administration was interested in.

James makes an excellent point. The way the left is spinning this, it’s like Bush’s inner circle sat around passing a secret document back and forth trying to figure out how to smear Joe Wilson. I doubt if Powell let the darn thing out of his possesion however, he may have shared the tidbit about Mrs. Wilson with a few key people.

Tom Bowler agrees with my conclusion that the CIA may be undermining policies they disagree with by leaking classified material. Whether or not it would be within the scope of Fitzgerald’s mandate to investigate is another question.

UPDATE III

Ace’s post on this warrants its own update. First, he educates us about classifications:

I should note that “secret” is just about the lowest, if not the lowest, level of classified information. Not sure, but I think only “confidential” is lower on the scale. And the three classic categories — Confidential, Secret, Top Secret — don’t even cover real secrets. Those are bullshit classifications. Real secret stuff is protected by codeword-clearance, where only a limited number of folks are allowed to see the information, and you have to be cleared specifically to view information designated by a particular codeword.

Then he gives the most logical explanation for Plame’s continued “covert” classification:

But… there is the possibility that, while she was known by her neighbors as being a CIA officer (and of course known to every foreign intelligence service worth a damn, since she drove to Langely every day for the last five years), her identinty was still technically classified, owing to bureaucratic inertia and incompetence, and so it’s possible that someone is technically guilty of revealing classified information.

Assuming they read the memo at all, and did not in fact simply hear this from reporters

And finally, he jibes our memory about Sandy “The Burgler” Berger:

PS: The stuff Sandy Berger stole from the archives? Codeword-clearance. The press didn’t seem particularly interested in his theft (and admitted DESTRUCTION!) of original copies of genuine secret documents from the archives.

But some State Department memo has an (S) on it and Walter Pincus gets a dangerous erection lasting more than four hours.

He also makes the point via two of his commenters that they wouldn’t classify one paragraph of a document without classifying the rest.

Gee…do ya think those “former government officials” who’ve been leaking to Pincus for two years in order to damage the Administration may have taken Walter for a ride?

UPDATE IV

The Captain makes the same point I do in the main post - that Pincus only casually mentions that the “S” designation might not mean that Plame’s identity was covert.

That sounds pretty damning — and it might still be, but this description and the rest of the article doesn’t establish this as dispositive at all. In any classified document, each paragraph has to carry a label indicating the level of classification for the information contained within. Later in the article by Walter Pincus and Jim VandeHei, we find out that the paragraph contains seven sentences, and that Plame only gets mentioned in two of them. That doesn’t establish that her identity was classified, although it could. It could just as easily mean that other information in the same paragraph carried that classification.

Again, we have to remember Pincus’ sourcing here. These are former CIA “officials” who have been passing on selective, damaging leaks to Pincus for more than two years. And Pincus, for whatever reason, is playing along.

The war continues.

There are times when Clio, the muse of history, decides to play the role of Shakespeare’s mischievous fairy Puck whose antics in A Midsummers Nights Dream drove the mortals crazy, much to the amusement of his fellows. “Lord, what fools these mortals be” Puck sighs as another one of his tricks hits its intended mark.

Clio was working overtime today as history and fantasy collided in such a way as to jar our sensibilities and shake our complacency about what the Greeks referred to as “the fates” - three sisters who sing of what was, what is, and what will be.

Today, a small part of our past died when James Doohan who played the character Scotty on the original Star Trek series passed away at the age of 85. In a delicious irony that Clio herself would enjoy, we also celebrate the 36th anniversary of what can honestly be described as the most significant technological achievement of the human race; placing the footprints of man on the surface of the moon.

At first glance, the two events would seem to have little in common. After all, Star Trek was off the air by the time Neil Armstrong stepped off the bottom rung of Eagle’s ladder to take the small step for man that sadly, seems to have stalled in mid leap. The last episode of Star Trek aired on June 3, 1969 much to the chagrin of the series’ fanatical followers. But in a very real sense, the death of Scotty and the remembrance of Apollo 11 has everything to do with what we humans dream and how those dreams inspire us and drive us forward to achieve great things.

James Doohan played the Chief Engineer, one of the more popular characters on Star Trek. His “can-do” attitude toward the technical problems associated with the complex and futuristic systems on the starship Enterprise called to mind those NASA engineers who made so much of the space program look effortless.

The scientists and technicians who sent Americans into space were thought of as our country’s best and smartest. They were for the most part young, talented men who graduated from the best schools and came to NASA to participate in the great adventure of space flight. And while the NASA PR machine made it seem as if just about everything was always perfect, behind the scenes - like Scotty on the Enterprise - the engineers in Houston dealt with one problem after another and through sheer brainpower and the occasional piece of good luck, brought the astronauts home.

Scotty would have felt right at home working at NASA in the 1960’s. Scotty, like the NASA techies, lived, breathed, and slept their jobs. To some extent, I’m sure they still do. But when you look back at that effort to place a man on the moon in fulfillment of President Kennedy’s pledge, one is awestruck at some of the figures:

1. Nearly 500,000 human beings laid their hands on one component or another of Apollo 11.
2. Almost 25% of all the man hours worked on the spacecraft were in unpaid overtime.
3. At liftoff, the massive Saturn V rocket generated 7.5 million pounds of thrust. It was as tall as a 37 story building.
4. It took the coordinated efforts of 20,000 people to make the mission a success from launch to splashdown.

The Apollo program dwarfed in size, cost, and scope any other endeavor in human history.

What fascinated so many of us at that time was the same thing that drew us to the TV every Wednesday evening to watch Star Trek - the belief that space flight would somehow change the world for the better. The society invented by Gene Roddenberry for Star Trek, I see now, was ridiculously simpleminded. As one wag put it: In a society where people can be anything they want to be and where there’s no longer any need for money or wealth, who will clean the toilets? The point being not everyone can be a starship captain like James Kirk nor a chief engineer like Scotty.

But that shouldn’t stop us from being inspired by Star Trek. Nor should it keep us from dreaming of a future where we can go from planet to planet as easily as we might travel from Chicago to St. Louis. Because without Star Trek and other fantasies, what would there be to challenge our notions of the possible? Because in the end, that’s what the Apollo program was all about. When the actual Apollo program became part of NASA planning to go to the moon, we had sent exactly 6 men into space for a less than 50 hours total. Not only entirely new systems would have to be invented but entire industries would have to spring from nothing to make a moon landing a reality. It was breathtaking in its audacity.

As we look back and remember both Star Trek and the moon landing, it may be well to also remember the dreams and aspirations of today’s children. What kind of technological future are we going to leave them? Will it be a nightmare future where the very few enjoy the benefits of the best that the human mind can dream? Or will it be a future where, like the world of Star Trek, most can share in the magic and the miracles and the unlimited potential of the human spirit realized through our dreams of what can be accomplished when we are inspired by the better angels of our nature.

This article originally appears in The American Thinker

We interrupt this scandal to ask a question that, due to it’s “explosive” nature was never asked when the story broke almost exactly a year ago…

What were 500 tons of yellow cake uranium still doing at the nuclear research center of Al-Tuwaitha in Iraq when American tanks rolled into Bagdhad?

The fact that the material was under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for more than a decade opens an entirely different line of questioning: Is the entire group of United Nations bureaucrats running the IAEA legally insane?

These issues are somewhat separate from the Plame-Wilson-Rove dust up that’s been roiling Washington recently but nevertheless shed light on why Joe Wilson went to Niger in February of 2002 and why the bureaucratic tussle over those 16 words about the Iraqi-Niger yellow cake connection was so fierce.

The story begins at the end of the first Gulf War when inspectors found a 500 ton cache of refined yellow cake uranium at Iraq’s primary nuclear research facility in Al-Tuwaitha outside of Bagdhad. The cache was part of a huge inventory of nuclear materials discovered by UN inspectors that included low-level radioactive material of the type used for industrial and medical purposes as well as a quantity of highly enriched uranium suitable for bomb production. This HE uranium was shipped to Russia where it was made relatively harmless by a process known as “isotopic dilution” - but only after the Iraqis dragged their heels for more than 6 months following the cease fire by playing a cat and mouse game with the IAEA’s inspectors. The history of those early IAEA inspections can be found here and is an eye opening look at both the gullibility of the IAEA and the lengths to which Saddam sought to keep as much of his nuclear bomb making capability as he could.

The IAEA placed a seal on the nuclear materials in November of 1992. From then until the fall of Saddam, the agency attempted to make sure that Iraq did not use the yellow cake to reconstitute its nuclear program, something the IAEA acknowledged could be done if the Iraqi’s were able to rebuild its centrifuges and gain access to additional fissile material. Keeping track of the material was made extraordinarily difficult by the Iraqis who regularly impeded IAEA officials from carrying out even the most routine inspections.

Flash forward to 1999 when British intelligence found out through multiple sources that representatives of the Iraqi government had met with officials from the Niger government. This fact is not in dispute. The mystery is in what they talked about. A memo obtained by the British - later proven to be a forgery - purported to show the Iraqis were interested in purchasing 500 tons of yellow cake uranium from Niger’s mines. Forgery or not, since Niger’s exports are extremely limited, consisting largely of uranium ore, livestock, cowpeas, and onions, one doesn’t have to be an intelligence analyst to figure out which one of those items the Iraqis might be interested in.

Both the Butler Review and the Senate Select Committee on Pre War Iraq Intelligence (SSCI) point to other efforts by Saddam to purchase uranium, most notably from the Democratic Republic of the Congo . The Butler Review states in 2002 the CIA “agreed that there was evidence that [uranium from Africa] had been sought.” In the run-up to war in Iraq, the British Intelligence Services apparently believed that Iraq had been trying to obtain uranium from Africa; however, no evidence has been passed on to the IAEA apart from the forged documents.

This then was the context in which Ambassador Joe Wilson went to Niger in February of 2002. Based on multiple sources and the best judgement of the CIA, Saddam Hussein was trying purchase uranium. Since there were no working commercial nuclear reactors in all of Iraq, his interest could only be based on his desire to reconstitute his nuclear weapons program. There was no “fixing” of intelligence or “shaping” intelligence to fit some preconceived agenda. Despite UN resolutions and sanctions, Saddam was looking to build the bomb.

What about that 500 tons of yellow cake under seal at Al-Tuwaitha? As long as the sanctions were in place, the inspectors would be able to confirm, albeit with great difficulty, that Saddam would not be able to use the material for his bomb building program. But that fact doesn’t answer the question of why would any organization charged with keeping a lid on nuclear proliferation allow that much fissile material to be kept by a bloodthirsty tyrant who had already demonstrated a desire to construct a nuclear weapon?

In an article that appeared in The American Thinker on July 20, 2004, Douglas Hanson draws some rather unflattering conclusions about the IAEA and their mission:

The actions, or more appropriately, the inactions of the IAEA regarding Iraq since the end of Gulf War I, betray the agency’s true agenda. Rather than inspect, report, and implement restrictions in accordance with the provisions in the treaty, the agency has in effect become an enabler of rogue nations who are attempting, or who have already succeeded in developing or acquiring special nuclear material and equipment. In other words, the IAEA is simply a reflection of its parent organization, which routinely delays and obfuscates the efforts of the US and the UK in controlling banned substances and delivery systems.

Time after time, the agency has either intentionally or naively bought into the lies and deceptions contrived by nations of the Axis of Evil during IAEA visits and inspections. In most cases, the IAEA avoids confrontation like the plague in order to maintain access to the facilities. If they are booted out, as was the case with North Korea, their impotence is on display for all to see. In other cases, the agency joins in the deception, thereby allowing these rogue states to level the nuclear playing field with the West and Russia.

Clearly then, the IAEA was totally dependent on the sanctions to even carry out the limited inspections it was performing in the 1990’s. But how long would the sanctions be in place?

It is an article of faith with critics of the war that “Saddam was in a box” and there was no need for an invasion to remove him. It’s a pity that many of those critics have such a short memory because a review of what many of them were saying about the sanctions prior to September 11, 2001 would show that they were eager to lift the very same sanctions that they now claim was keeping Saddam in check. Thanks to a remarkable propoganda program that included funeral processions of Iraqi babies whose dead bodies were used over and over again in macabre effort to make it appear that the death toll of infants was higher than it was, the world community was, by 2001, agitating for the lifting of sanctions on the Iraq economy. And while the lifting of economic sanctions would not have meant a lifting of the arms embargo, given the limited resources available to both The United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) and the IAEA as well as Iraq’s demonstrated ability to impede, obstruct, and deceive inspectors, it stands to reason that the continuation of the arms embargo would have been a sham. Even with the embargo, the Dulfer Report showed that Saddam’s ability to evade the sanctions and purchase illicit weapons was extremely troubling.
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