It's the WHIGs Fixing the Facts Around the Policy

It's the WHIGs Fixing the Facts Around the Policy

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10639.htm
It's Bush-Cheney, Not Rove-Libby
By Frank Rich

10/16/05 "New York Times" -- -- There hasn't been anything like it
since Martha Stewart fended off questions about her stock-trading
scandal by manically chopping cabbage on "The Early Show" on CBS. Last
week the setting was "Today" on NBC, where the image of President Bush
manically hammering nails at a Habitat for Humanity construction site
on the Gulf Coast was juggled with the sight of him trying to duck Matt
Lauer's questions about Karl Rove.

As with Ms. Stewart, Mr. Bush's paroxysm of panic was must-see TV. "The
president was a blur of blinks, taps, jiggles, pivots and shifts," Dana
Milbank wrote in The Washington Post. Asked repeatedly about Mr. Rove's
serial appearances before a Washington grand jury, the jittery Mr.
Bush, for once bereft of a script, improvised a passable impersonation
of Norman Bates being quizzed by the detective in "Psycho." Like Norman
and Ms. Stewart, he stonewalled.

That stonewall may start to crumble in a Washington courtroom this week
or next. In a sense it already has. Now, as always, what matters most
in this case is not whether Mr. Rove and Lewis Libby engaged in a petty
conspiracy to seek revenge on a whistle-blower, Joseph Wilson, by
unmasking his wife, Valerie, a covert C.I.A. officer. What makes
Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation compelling, whatever its outcome, is
its illumination of a conspiracy that was not at all petty: the one
that took us on false premises into a reckless and wasteful war in
Iraq. That conspiracy was instigated by Mr. Rove's boss, George W.
Bush, and Mr. Libby's boss, Dick Cheney.

Mr. Wilson and his wife were trashed to protect that larger plot.
Because the personnel in both stories overlap, the bits and pieces
we've learned about the leak inquiry over the past two years have
gradually helped fill in the über-narrative about the war. Last week
was no exception. Deep in a Wall Street Journal account of Judy
Miller's grand jury appearance was this crucial sentence: "Lawyers
familiar with the investigation believe that at least part of the
outcome likely hangs on the inner workings of what has been dubbed the
White House Iraq Group."

Very little has been written about the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG.
Its inception in August 2002, seven months before the invasion of Iraq,
was never announced. Only much later would a newspaper article or two
mention it in passing, reporting that it had been set up by Andrew
Card, the White House chief of staff. Its eight members included Mr.
Rove, Mr. Libby, Condoleezza Rice and the spinmeisters Karen Hughes and
Mary Matalin. Its mission: to market a war in Iraq.

Of course, the official Bush history would have us believe that in
August 2002 no decision had yet been made on that war. Dates bracketing
the formation of WHIG tell us otherwise. On July 23, 2002 - a week or
two before WHIG first convened in earnest - a British official told his
peers, as recorded in the now famous Downing Street memo, that the Bush
administration was ensuring that "the intelligence and facts" about
Iraq's W.M.D.'s "were being fixed around the policy" of going to war.
And on Sept. 6, 2002 - just a few weeks after WHIG first convened - Mr.
Card alluded to his group's existence by telling Elisabeth Bumiller of
The New York Times that there was a plan afoot to sell a war against
Saddam Hussein: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce
new products in August."

The official introduction of that product began just two days later. On
the Sunday talk shows of Sept. 8, Ms. Rice warned that "we don't want
the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," and Mr. Cheney, who had
already started the nuclear doomsday drumbeat in three August speeches,
described Saddam as "actively and aggressively seeking to acquire
nuclear weapons." The vice president cited as evidence a front-page
article, later debunked, about supposedly nefarious aluminum tubes
co-written by Judy Miller in that morning's Times. The national
security journalist James Bamford, in "A Pretext for War," writes that
the article was all too perfectly timed to facilitate "exactly the sort
of propaganda coup that the White House Iraq Group had been set up to
stage-manage."

The administration's doomsday imagery was ratcheted up from that day
on. As Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus of The Washington Post would
determine in the first account of WHIG a full year later, the
administration's "escalation of nuclear rhetoric" could be traced to
the group's formation. Along with mushroom clouds, uranium was another
favored image, the Post report noted, "because anyone could see its
connection to an atomic bomb." It appeared in a Bush radio address the
weekend after the Rice-Cheney Sunday show blitz and would reach its
apotheosis with the infamously fictional 16 words about "uranium from
Africa" in Mr. Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address on the
eve of war.

Throughout those crucial seven months between the creation of WHIG and
the start of the American invasion of Iraq, there were indications that
evidence of a Saddam nuclear program was fraudulent or nonexistent.
Joseph Wilson's C.I.A. mission to Niger, in which he failed to find any
evidence to back up uranium claims, took place nearly a year before the
president's
16 words. But the truth never mattered. The Bush-Cheney product rolled
out by Card, Rove, Libby & Company had been bought by Congress, the
press and the public. The intelligence and facts had been successfully
fixed to sell the war, and any memory of Mr. Bush's errant 16 words
melted away in Shock and Awe. When, months later, a national security
official, Stephen Hadley, took "responsibility" for allowing the
president to address the nation about mythical uranium, no one knew
that Mr. Hadley, too, had been a member of WHIG.

It was not until the war was supposedly over - with "Mission
Accomplished," in May 2003 - that Mr. Wilson started to add his voice
to those who were disputing the administration's uranium hype. Members
of WHIG had a compelling motive to shut him down. In contrast to other
skeptics, like Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy
Agency (this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner), Mr. Wilson was an
American diplomat; he had reported his findings in Niger to our own
government. He was a dagger aimed at the heart of WHIG and its
disinformation campaign. Exactly who tried to silence him and how is
what Mr. Fitzgerald presumably will tell us.

It's long been my hunch that the WHIG-ites were at their most brazen
(and, in legal terms, reckless) during the many months that preceded
the appointment of Mr. Fitzgerald as special counsel.

When Mr. Rove was asked on camera by ABC News in September 2003 if he
had any knowledge of the Valerie Wilson leak and said no, it was only
hours before the Justice Department would open its first leak
investigation. When Scott McClellan later declared that he had been
personally assured by Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby that they were "not
involved" with the leak, the case was still in the safe hands of the
attorney general then, John Ashcroft, himself a three-time Rove client
in past political campaigns. Though Mr. Rove may be known as "Bush's
brain," he wasn't smart enough to anticipate that Justice Department
career employees would eventually pressure Mr. Ashcroft to recuse
himself because of this conflict of interest, clearing the way for an
outside prosecutor as independent as Mr. Fitzgerald.

"Bush's Brain" is the title of James Moore and Wayne Slater's
definitive account of Mr. Rove's political career. But Mr. Rove is less
his boss's brain than another alliterative organ (or organs), that
which provides testosterone. As we learn in "Bush's Brain," bad things
(usually character assassination) often happen to Bush foes, whether
Ann Richards or John McCain. On such occasions, Mr. Bush stays
compassionately above the fray while the ruthless Mr. Rove operates
below the radar, always separated by "a layer of operatives" from any
ill behavior that might implicate him. "There is no crime, just a
victim," Mr. Moore and Mr. Slater write of this repeated pattern.

THIS modus operandi was foolproof, shielding the president as well as
Mr. Rove from culpability, as long as it was about winning an election.
The attack on Mr. Wilson, by contrast, has left them and the
Cheney-Libby tag team vulnerable because it's about something far
bigger: protecting the lies that took the country into what the Reagan
administration National Security Agency director, Lt. Gen. William
Odom, recently called "the greatest strategic disaster in United States
history."

Whether or not Mr. Fitzgerald uncovers an indictable crime, there is
once again a victim, but that victim is not Mr. or Mrs. Wilson; it's
the nation. It is surely a joke of history that even as the White House
sells this weekend's constitutional referendum as yet another "victory"
for democracy in Iraq, we still don't know the whole story of how our
own democracy was hijacked on the way to war.

Ra Energy Fdn.
Raleigh Myers
http://raenergy.igc.org/raenergy.html
Worksheet bio
http://www.igc.apc.org/raenergy/bio.html
The Archetype of Fairness
http://raenergy.igc.org/ArchitypeOfFairness.html