I am still working on documenting everything and adding links to original source material, so please be patient while that comes. Until then, you can read it with the caveat that revisions are still being made and changes are likely.
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So, let's take a look at this as part of a bigger story, and forgive me for the length.
The PNAC group takes positions all throughout the administration.
They immediately begin planning to invade Iraq, as has been PNAC's dream since the mid 90s.
Amhed Chalabi has been involved with this crowd on a social and professional level for years, and knows exactly what they want to hear and what they wish to do, so he figures he will help them pain their picture for the President and if he plays his cards right, perhaps he'll be the next President of Iraq.
Cheney's Energy Task force starts to meet. Lots of questions arise as to who is in the meetings and what is being discussed. Executive privilege is invoked.
This is exceedingly strange, because why should the cost of gasoline over the next five years or the cost of heating oil be such a big damn secret?
Now imagine for a second that this Energy Task Force was being included in the preliminary planning for an invasion of Iraq, and these energy companies will be expected to be involved to take over oil operations once we're in Iraq. Suddenly the secrecy behind the meetings would make sense.
FOIA requests are filed and the issue is litigated for years.
Later, Judicial Watch gets a document release that shows the Task Force was dividing up the oil fields amongst the world's major oil companies.
http://www.judicialwatch.org/071703.c_.shtml
If memory serves, there were whispers all over D.C. before September 11th, that the country should expect something to happen with Iraq in 2002 or 2003.
Josh tracked down for us that the Niger document seems to come from someone in the Italian intelligence service.
Hypothetically speaking, the plan is to set up Saddam by forging a memo that would indicate that Iraq was attempting to purchase uranium from Niger. Perhaps someone in our Government faked the document. Not wanting to taint our own experts on whom we may later have to rely on to "authenticate" the document for us, we get someone trust worthy, but not ask knowledgeable to take on the task. We end up with a somewhat convincing document, but we still let it with enough mistakes that a real expert could tell the difference with a little effort.
Then, quite unexpectedly given that we were so focused on Iraq, September 11th happens and the Administration has to regroup. They have the plan for Iraq in the works and as Bob Woodward wrote in Plan of Attack, Rumsfeld wanted to go after Iraq from the very beginning. No good targets and all that jazz.
They come to the conclusion they just couldn't sell it, and they go ahead and invade Afghanistan. They do a half-hearted job in Afghanistan, leaving Osama Bin Laden alive and on the loose and pivot their attention back to Iraq.
The original point of the document was to illustrate Iraq to be in violation of the original agreement that ended the Gulf War. The political boost that Bush received from 9/11 made the process even easier.
People now believed that terrorists were lurking everywhere wanting to kill us. There is anthrax in the mail and no duct tape to be found.
We go back to plan A and plan on using the Niger document to prove that Saddam is trying to build nuclear weapons, but more importantly they've added the new rationale to their case that he's working with Al Qaeda and they will be the recipients of these weapons.
Still being in its state of shock, a majority of this country doesn't question this shift in priorities.
During this time the office of Special Plans is created by Feith and Rumsfeld to allow them to paint the picture they wanted the world to see by cooking the intelligence through their office. Only people they trust are involved in this.
There is web of PNAC guys all working at this in different parts of the executive.
You have Rumsfeld and Feith at the Pentagon.
There is John Bolton over at State. He's there because they know that Powell is not going to go along with this plan, so they make no attempt to involve him. They get him placed exactly where they want him as Under Secretary over Arms Control and International Security.
You have Cheney in the White House overseeing this whole thing, while keeping Karl Rove in the loop so he can handle the politics of getting this war past congress and the American people.
The President shares a desire to see Saddam gone, but he is kept out of the loop to enough of a degree that he can maintain plausible deniability. The intelligence that he sees is very carefully put together to lead to very obvious conclusions.
The President is provided a certain version of the facts. He is faced with a very easy decision to invade based on those facts. He simply never questions what he is told, because he likes the answer he has.
At some point, the Niger document is put in front of the CIA's Counter Proliferation Division (CDP), and questions start to be raised.
At some point, the question is asked if we should attempt to determine if this Niger document as authentic or not. This isn't a question that the PNAC guys like, but they can't exactly say no. At this point, Mrs. Wilson suggests her husband for the trip. (Whether the suggestion of her husband was solicited or not doesn't really matter.)
As former ambassador to Gabon and former acting Ambassador to Iraq, he knows the people he needs to know and he has the connections he needs to have to really determine the document's authenticity.
Someone in the PNAC circle sees and opening in this, and sends word that Wilson is to be the guy to go.
The thinking goes like this: We know the document is fake, and we know whoever checks it out is going to come to this conclusion. Let's go ahead and send Wilson knowing we can use the nepotism argument to negate any inevitable critiques of the document that might arise.
Wilson returns, files his report about the document being a forgery and it is immediately ignored.
Along comes the State of the Union. We hear the 16 words. Joe Wilson writes his piece for the New York Times.
Walter Pincus indicated last week that the plan for discrediting Ambassador Wilson was in place in mid 2002. They were just sitting on it, waiting to use it if need be.
Sometime around now the government begins awarding no bid contracts to Halliburton to provide all kinds of services in the event of war. Think back to the Map of Iraq's oil fields obtained by judicial watch.
Wilson's Op-Ed is published and the plan is put into motion. Rove starts his wrecking machine and begins to leak to reporters their reasoning for ignoring Joe Wilson's claims that the document is a fake.
He returns calls to reporters who have left him messages about other things and at some point changes the subject to Iraq and slips them the info on Wilson and his wife.
The weak story about trying to warn reporters off the story isn't a lie and it isn't a revisionist history. It was just a really weak cover story Rove had planned on using since the moment he leaked the info.
Think about it. He's checked the law. Perhaps he asked someone he trusts to explain everything about the 1982 law against against identifying undercover operatives. He knows what exonerates him.
His leaks are very carefully scripted as have been all of his denials.
The conversation was very short
He did not use Mrs. Wilson's name
He never identifies her as an undercover agent
Plus, he demanded "Super Deep Background" anonymity for all of this
Novak, Miller, Cooper. He tells Chris Matthews that she's fair game.
Things don't go exactly to plan, because rather than the story becoming how untrustworthy Joe Wilson is, the story becomes about the leak. It's not too much of a problem, because the focus was no longer on the authenticity of the Niger document.
They allow the inspectors in, but do not allow them to finish. We claim that the inspectors' inability to locate any hint of WMD only means that Saddam is hiding them and that he's more desperate and might be ready to give them to terrorist or to use them himself rather than giving them up.
We go into Iraq over the hesitation and objections of most of the World's leaders.
True to the document from the energy task force, we secure the oil fields and not much else.
Things didn't go exactly as planned. We're still there. The PNAC guys haven't had enough stability and security to start the free market utopia they wanted to create in Iraq that would allow for the sale of cheap oil.
So the rest has been public and we're pretty clear on where it went from there.
So that’s my conclusion on what went down and why this leak occurred.
I have never been one to believe in conspiracy theories, because I had one very practical problem. People can’t keep secrets, and people aren’t perfect. Any plan is going to have flaws and any conspiracy is going to have people who talk.
But, if someone where to try to pull off a real conspiracy of huge proportions, big lie theory would work in their favor… for a while. But, people aren’t perfect and mistakes were made. People have talked.
What I am seeing going on right now is exactly how I imagine that such a conspiracy would unravel. Slowly, over the course of a long time, people who find out about small pieces of the story but not be able to connect the dots. But the picture is coming slowly into focus.
Most of what I have laid out in this post are commonly accepted facts with several moments of conjecture. I’m more convinced everyday that this is how it happened, or at least is pretty darn close.
The Leo Strauss school of political thought says that our leaders have a responsibility to convince the people of the grand destiny of America. He advocated using religion to control people and the focus on a great enemy to keep the masses from being idle. Most importantly, Strauss said that if you were the one spinning this “grand destiny” or pushing the religious values, it didn’t matter whether you believed it or not, as long as you were convincing in it’s presentation.
This is exactly how these people have governed. They have used religion to control people and they have repeated ad nauseum the refrain that it’s our responsibility to rid the world of evil. The repeated use of emotionally potent oversimplifications to keep people bought into this clusterf*** has been masterful in its simplicity.
Democrats don’t have the lock step message machine necessary to do this like the Republicans do. Democrats allowed the Republican Party the paint them as incompetent by claiming that they have no values, policies, ideas, or beliefs.
This is of course nonsense. Democrats share common beliefs and policy goals, but we don’t try to make sure that every single member of the party has a memo in their hand telling them what the 25 word refrain of the week is.
Good people who should no better went along with this whole mess within the republican establishment out of a misguided sense of party loyalty and sheer ambition.
When the Gingrich Revolution took over Congress in 1994, the rules of the game fundamentally changed. Politics became a brutal blood sport that fostered an environment of toxic partisan ship in this country. Congressional politics was no longer about a marketplace of ideas where real debate occurred and most Congressmen’s loyalties were still somewhat attached to the best interest of their constituents as well as their party.
No longer. It’s about subduing the political opposition. It’s about eradicating any obstacle that stands in the way of gaining more power and influence and eventually money.
We have to take a big step back in this country. We need to acknowledge what has happened and we must find some way to at least attempt some sort of reconciliation.
We allowed a small group of men to stage a war that had nothing to do with out security and everything to do with their personal ambitions.
The culture of corruption that has overtaken the Republican Party is a virus eating away at our society. We must put a stop to it, for I’m not sure how much more we can take.
