Enemy Combatant
Saturday, July 23, 2005
New Republic Throws In The Towel
Wow. The editors' mea culpa:Revisiting Wilson
Suddenly, everybody in Washington is an expert on the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, the 1982 law making it a crime to knowingly disclose the identity of a clandestine intelligence agent. And everybody in town has a pet theory on exactly who in the Bush administration leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame and where and how they did it. . . .
[T]he most serious charge that Wilson's critics level against him is the allegation that he was wrong in his assessment of Iraq's dealing with Niger. Supporters of Rove have revived this accusation in an effort to claim that, when Rove spoke to reporters about Plame, he wasn't trying to disparage Wilson so much as warn them off a "bad story." But what, exactly, was "bad" about Wilson's story?
Both the national security adviser and the CIA director at the time (Condoleezza Rice and George Tenet, respectively) issued public apologies for the Niger claim, admitting it was unsubstantiated. And the most authoritative report on the matter comes from the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), which spent a year combing the Iraqi countryside for alleged weapons of mass destruction. Its conclusion: "ISG has not found evidence to show that Iraq sought uranium from abroad after 1991 or renewed indigenous production of such material."
How can the administration and its allies be so cavalier about the truth? Because that's the way they've operated all along. . . .
Of course, the skeptics turned out to be right; as even most supporters of the war (this magazine included) now acknowledge, the publicly stated rationale for war was false. A prosecutor can't indict the administration for those sorts of transgressions. Only the public can.
If Bush thinks he changed the subject with the Roberts nomination, he misunderestimates the American public's newfound ability to multitask.
