Now This

This blog is now read by more machines than humans: RSS robots, spam-laying insectopoids, echoes of blog-gathering .edu projects. This essentially is the state of affairs that all human activities w

Cleaning Up the Nation

Austin Bay:

If Air America were a conservative radio network its corrupt funding trail and cynical abuse of a poverty program would be front page news at the NY Times and full-time mega-scandal at

Rank Materialism

Freedom. I am now the proud new owner of a Gateway 6020GZ laptop, perfect for students and others with limited means. I can now go into a Starbucks or a Barnes & Noble and look like I'm doing some

Fallujah Fonda

Uh-oh. From the Telegraph comes this exciting news:

Jane Fonda is returning to anti-war activism and embarking on a cross-country tour to call for an end to US military operations in Iraq.

Acros

John Pilger: Partner in Terrorism

In an outrageous piece of terrorist propaganda appearing on the cover of today's New Statesman, John Pilger puts the blame for the 7/7 London attacks not on the terrorists, but rather on Tony Blair:

Joe Wilson in a Nutshell

The CIA, on his wife's suggestion, sent Joe Wilson to Niger to look into reports that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa. He found no proof that Iraq attempted to acquire uranium from Niger, although one Nigerian source said that Iraq made overtures that the source believed was an attempt by Iraq to acquire uranium from Niger.

He duly submits his report to the CIA, which properly assesses Wilson's report as marginally reinforcing the idea that Iraq sought to acquire uranium from Niger. After all, a former US official who is obviously on a mission of the US government is not going to score any information against the interests of the parties he's contacted, and so the story of the Iraqi overture to Niger is just about the maximum confirmation that Wilson's mission could have achieved. It's indicative but not confirmation. It's certainly not exculpatory as Wilson has strangely insisted.

The CIA digests Wilson's report in the normal intelligence-gathering way, and as nothing in Wilson's report confirms or disproves the charge against Iraq, it becomes a smaller part of the conclusions about Iraq each time intelligence is passed upwards and is subject to another iteration of summarizing. It wouldn't take many such iterations until all details about Wilson's trip disappear.

But Joe Wilson is against the impending war in Iraq. He thinks, and there may be an inappropriate level of self-regard at play here, that his trip to Niger, and his conclusions about it (which differ from the CIA's conclusions about his trip) are a vital piece of information that the public needs to know in order to make the correct decision against the war. He is convinced that his undigested conclusions about Niger have made it to the White House. It isn't possible that the CIA, his sympathetic wife's employer, have dismissed his findings as marginal or inconclusive, or worse, that the CIA reached the opposite conclusion from the one he did with the facts that he supplied them. It wasn't possible that Joe Wilson invested his time and energy in a mission that turned out to be ho-hum as far as intelligence-gathering goes.

So as a whistle-blowing hero then, he went to the press, convinced that there were powerful forces counteracting his unimpeachable finding that Iraq never sought uranium from Niger. His utter belief in Iraq's innocence and his anti-war position was merely a happy coincidence, and not to be examined too closely.

The American media, happy for the controversy, and happy to present an anti-war argument supposedly grounded in facts, never thought twice about why a public figure, a former US ambassador, was sent on a CIA mission. His general anti-war stance wasn't considered. His status as a former official wasn't considered a handicap to getting access to secrets. To explain why the CIA employed him even though he wasn't really qualified to conduct such a mission for the CIA, someone mentioned that his wife, a CIA operative, is the one who suggested him for the job. Oops.

So now he's a whistle-blower and a martyr.

But the facts are that his mission was only ever of marginal importance. It could have proved Iraqi misbehavior but it could never have refuted it. Joe Wilson vastly overestimated his role. He drew the wrong conclusions from his own observations. It's doubtful that anyone at the White House ever knew about his mission until after he went public. And a willfully famous CIA operative should not complain too much when his secret CIA operative spouse who got him his gig loses her cover.

There's always a danger when you use someone from outside the company. You've got to be really careful. They may, and probably do, have their own agenda. The Church commission had a few things to say about that, didn't they?

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