Why Cheney Lost It When Joe Wilson Spoke Out
By Ray McGovern
From: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/030707R.shtml
Wednesday 07 March 2007
Testimony at the Libby trial showed a vice president obsessed with retaliating against former ambassador Joseph Wilson
for writing, in the New York Times op-ed section on July 6, 2003, that intelligence had been "twisted" to justify
attacking Iraq. How to explain why the normally stoic, phlegmatic Cheney went off the deep end?
Vice President Dick Cheney can be forgiven for feeling provoked. The Times, having been led by Cheney and others down a
garden path littered with weapons of mass destruction that were not really there, did some retaliation of its own with
the snide title it gave Wilson's op-ed: "What I Did Not Find in Africa." Adding insult to injury, Wilson chose to tell
Washington Post reporters, also on July 6, in language that rarely escapes an ambassador's lips, the bogus report
regarding Iraq obtaining uranium from Niger "begs the question regarding what else they are lying about." That threw
down the gauntlet, and Cheney had to worry that others who knew about the lies might feel it safe to go to the press and
spill the beans. Retaliation had to be swift and as unambiguous as possible.
Having successfully browbeat then-CIA director George Tenet and other malleable managers of intelligence into doing his
bidding, Cheney immediately tried to get the CIA to support the cockamamie story about Iraq getting uranium from Niger.
He was no doubt surprised to be stiff-armed by Tenet, who had been warning senior officials about that bogus report for
almost ten months. On July 7, the administration publicly conceded that the Iraq-Niger fable should not have been
included in the State of the Union address.
On July 8, Cheney mounted his counteroffensive. Libby was sent to Bush administration darling Judith Miller of the New
York Times to prove Wilson's charges wrong: the White House did not "twist" intelligence; the CIA made us do it. To
prove that, Libby was given permission to release a passage buried on page 24 of the 90-page National Intelligence
Estimate (NIR) of October 1, 2002, claiming that Iraq was "vigorously trying to procure uranium ore and yellowcake.... A
foreign government service reported that as of early 2001, Niger planned to send several tons of 'pure uranium'
(probably yellowcake) to Iraq."
Cheney intended this revelation to hoist Tenet on his own petard. Under great pressure from Cheney, Tenet and his
timorous team had acquiesced in allowing the Iraq-Niger fable into the NIE Tenet signed on October 1. It had already
become the centerpiece of the administration's cynical but successful effort to get Congressional approval, culminating
in the October 10/11 vote for war.
In the midst of all this, Tenet was successful in getting the Iraq-Niger story out of President George W. Bush's key
speech on Iraq on October 7. Yes, you read that right. Tenet signed the NIE on October 1, and a few days later
successfully insisted that this dubious intelligence be taken out of the president's speech on October 7.
This piece of "intelligence" smelled so bad that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, who threw everything but the
kitchen sink into his (in)famous UN speech of February 5, 2003, deemed it below his very low threshold. A month later,
the International Atomic Energy Agency director, Mohamed ElBaradei, told the UN Security Council that the documents upon
which the story was based were "obvious" fakes-forgeries.
Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), then-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, rebuffed an urgent appeal from ranking member
Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia) to have the FBI investigate the forgery. Cheney told him not to, and so Roberts said
that would be "inappropriate." Which raises the question, whom are they trying to protect? I don't think either Dick or
Lynne Cheney has a cottage industry of forgery preparation, but they are in close touch with those who do. I continue to
believe Cheney and Libby were the intellectual authors of that incredibly clumsy operation.
There was plenty else to enrage Dick Cheney. It is a safe bet that he went bananas when he learned that Joe Wilson's
wife was a CIA officer - and working on the issue of highest priority, how to prevent countries like Iraq and Iran from
obtaining weapons of mass destruction.
Cheney smelled a rat. It was easy to jump to the conclusion that Valerie Plame and her knowledgeable colleagues would
have seen right through the Iraq-Niger report. The embassy in Niger had poured cold water on it, and a very senior US
Army general, who had journeyed to Niger, came to the same conclusion. So here was Plame, and by extension her CIA
colleagues, preparing to administer the coup de grace. The CIA would send a person with deep substantive expertise on
the subject and also very good contacts in Niger (from previous service in Niger and other African countries, not to
mention Baghdad).
Already, there was no love lost between Cheney and the CIA. And vice versa, Cheney having destroyed the agency's
reputation for objective analysis by insisting on the creation of a fraudulent NIE to get Congress to approve an
unnecessary war. The CIA could not very well say, well, Cheney made us do it. Cheney, on the other hand, was free to
say, well, the CIA misled us badly - and did say that.
Cheney would have seen the daggers out for him, with the Plame/Wilson team commissioned to administer the coup de
grace. For who was in better position to know how spurious the Iraq-Niger report was than the woman professional leading
the clandestine effort to collect intelligence on precisely that subject? The agency, Cheney must have thought, was out
to knock down his favorite report, the premium "evidence" that Iraq was "reconstituting" its nuclear weapons program,
for what it was - a fraud.
The Worst of Times
Wilson's op-ed of July 6 could not have come at a worse time for the White House. Barely four months into invasion of
Iraq, the "justifications" had already evaporated.
CIA analysts were still insisting, correctly, that there were no meaningful ties between al-Qaeda and Iraq, despite Tenet's acquiescence to Powell's request that Tenet sit behind him on camera as Powell wove his web of half-
and un-truths at the UN. (Watching Tenet sit impassively as Powell spoke of a "sinister nexus" between al-Qaeda and Iraq
was a tremendous blow to the morale of the courageous analysts who had resisted that particular recipe for cooking
intelligence. As for their colleagues working on WMD, most of them had long since been pressured to cave in to Cheney's
pressure during the dozen visits he made to CIA headquarters and were not as incensed.)
No trace had been found of weapons of mass destruction. In some quarters (even in the corporate press) the casus belli had morphed into a casus bellylaughi. Reports in Fox
News that Saddam had somehow transported his WMD to Syria undetected (or maybe buried them in the desert) elicited
widespread ridicule. Constant reminders of how difficult it is to find something in such a large country as Iraq - "the
size of California" - were wearing thin. The attempt to associate uranium enrichment with the (in)famous aluminum tubes
had, well, gone down the tubes. And the "mobile biological weapons laboratories," initially applauded by the president
himself as proof the administration had found the WMD, turned out to be balloon-making machines for artillery practice,
as the Iraqis had said. It was getting very embarrassing.
So this new challenge from Joe Wilson and his obnoxiously expert wife made for a very bad hair day. Cheney readily saw
it as payback by honest CIA professionals for all the crass arm-twisting they had experienced at the hands of Cheney and
kemosabe Libby. It is not hard to put oneself in Cheney's frame of mind as he witnessed the gathering storm.
Worst of all, the Iraq-Niger caper was particularly damaging, since it was tied directly to the office of the vice
president. There was that unanswered question regarding who commissioned the forgery in the first place. And not even
Judy Miller could help this time, since most thinking folks knew her to be a shill for the Bush administration.
And yet this insubordination, this deliberate sabotage, had to be answered. Something had to be done, and quickly, so
that others privy to sensitive information about the litany of lies leading up to the war would not think they could
follow Wilson's example and go to the press.
It is hard to believe that the best thing Cheney could come up with was to out Wilson's wife. It is not even clear that
this is what he had in mind. It may have been no more than a decision to name her, irrespective of her cover status, in
order to suggest that she had been responsible for sending her husband to Niger on an all expenses-paid "boondoggle!" -
that somehow nepotism was involved - as if that would somehow impeach Wilson's negative findings regarding the
Iraq-Niger fable. Cheney clearly felt that something had to be done - anything. It seems a mark of desperation that this
is the best they could come up with. They may have concluded that launching a hardknuckle campaign against Wilson might
at least deter others from becoming patriotic truth tellers of the kind Joseph Wilson has modeled so well. Initially,
this tactic succeeded. More recently a cottage industry of patriotic truth tellers has taken shape, and (surprise,
surprise!) even some among the mainstream media have given them ink and air time.
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Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. He
was a CIA analyst for 27 years and is on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).