Spareink

While I have never officially believed in karma, one of the things that I now understand more clearly in the last few years are the inherent wages of lying.

Anyone who has ever found themselves in a situation in which they choose to get out of it by telling a lie eventually realizes that there is one surefire way of telling a lie convincingly- and that is to make sure you actually believe it yourself.

Men like Karl Rove, or James Carville, their defenders, or basically anyone who believes in the machiavellian use of power believes that truth is political. With sufficiently applied political pressure, whether or not something is objectively true can be framed away or drowned in a sea of messaging. The problem is, if you elevate the goal of ‘staying on message’ to idolatry, and you start to actually believe it, you wind up not just with an increasingly schizophrenic relationship to reality, but an increasingly schizophrenic relationship to one’s own beliefs.

The internal contradictions in your political arguments used to take months in surfacing, now they take weeks. A month ago, the leak of the not-true-but-true allegations about US interrogation practices prompted all sorts of sound and fury over yelling fire in a crowded theater, should Newsweek be punished, etc. An allegation of libel was made in which apparently you had not read the definition of libel. Now, several weeks later, the endangering of a US agent by the press (and presumably whatever intelligence contacts this person had) is excused as if anyone not already subscribing to your politics would not notice the contradictory standard.

More oddly though, you seem genuinely confused that an intelligence organization “answerable to the executive” could ever be the cause of so much trouble. “In theory, the CIA is answerable to the executive, in practice it has a lot of autonomy”. Well, that’s because the CIA is actually tasked with two mandates, yes- protecting the president through plausible deniability is one of them, but calling the shots as they see them, i.e., knowing who our enemies are, what they’re doing, whether what we’re doing is succeeding, and what other governments are doing is the other. Frequently, they conflict as they did in the case of Iraq, WMD, and the Niger forgeries. But in the GWOT, not only is it important that the public and Congress find the CIA credible, but the world’s other intelligence services must also.

The CIA was wrong by a country mile in its National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s weapons stockpiles, because it was flakking for those in the Administration who wanted to go to war with a causus belli they found politically convenient. We went into Iraq with a “high degree of confidence” from the CIA that there were chemical and biological weapons, yet the Iraq Survey Group went around unimpeded for eighteen months *in Iraq* and was mysteriously ‘less certain’ than it had been going in. Tenet fell on his sword in the end, and Porter Goss got put in on the notion that Bush was mislead into war by going off of ‘the best intelligence he had’. As far as I know, the claim that the CIA was too alarmist and bellicose is still the official party line.

The elephant in the living room is that the US has never been more utterly, comprehensively, publicly embarrassingly, wrong about anything ever than in identifying the reasons we went to war in Iraq. The dust-up over Plame is a consequence of the extreme pressure the CIA was under to keep track of the chasm between reality and political exigencies. Perhaps the CIA is capable of undermining the Administration both by saying there was evidence of WMD, and wasn’t evidence of WMD, and is composed of a byzantine and surreal composition of pro and anti-administration forces, some of whom even vote for the administration despite being anti-administration, that change allegiances depending on the day of the week. I think that most questioners find this sort of elaboration ‘looking guilty’.

Incidentally, there is a systemic check on the CIA waging a baseless attack on the administration. Bush’s DOJ didn’t have to take up the complaint.

For the sake of my own sanity, I’m glad I do not have to try to expend the psychic effort is must take to try and convince a skeptical public that the Bush administration is as pure as the driven snow. On a more professional note, I am truly glad I have not been retained as Karl Rove’s lawyer.

Robert, out of curiosity, were you aware that Wilson reported to the CIA that Iraq did in fact contact Niger about acquiring Yellowcake Uranium?

What should an administration do if CIA personell are using their positions to mount an active operation against it?

There are a wide range of legal means at that president's disposal. He can manipulate funding, put pressure on CIA leadership, reorganize the agency, go to Congress with legislation to change the CIA, etc. In the particular case of Wilson delivering unwanted information, the administration could have disowned the mission in a number of ways, including by claiming that both Wilson and those who sent him were politically motivated. None of this would have required the commission of a crime (or the appearance of such), and none of it would have necessitated putting at risk the lives of all of Valerie Plame's contacts throughout her career as a CIA operative.

It is, admittedly, possible that these legal approaches would have been less politically effective than outing Plame. But administration officials are not above the law, and the political game must be played within the boundaries set by law. If you can't win that game without breaking the law, then maybe there's something wrong with your politics.

Most of what I have seen that questions the seriousness of the Plame exposure, is from Chris Hitchens, who has alleged that Iraq was, in fact, trying to purchase yellowcake after all and that the Niger forgeries were based on real sourcing, which he is basing off of the Butler Report. The Iraqi Survey Group, after all, did not find evidence for Iraq having sought uranium since 1991. The Butler Report said that the forged Niger documents had not affected the conclusions drawn by British intel, although earlier they had established that one of the sources had, in fact, been called into question by the revelation that the IAEA had come to possess forged documents (which was a notable aspect omitted in the Butler Report). As for Wilson, his claim was that that transaction had not taken place. You are saying that he initially claimed that a transaction *had* taken place? What incurred the wrath of the White House was his intimation that the sixteen words were based off of the forged documents with the intention of misleading. The Senate Intel Report essentially agrees that the uranium intel was downplayed throughout fall of 2002, both by the CIA and the State Department, was left out of the key conclusions of the National Intelligence Estimate, and they downplayed it to Congress.

Do you believe that Wilson at some point believed in the yellowcake transfer, but then reversed himself in the Post editorial? I am curious as to your theory.