| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"Harry Hope" |
| Date: |
20 Jul 2005 10:28:28 AM |
| Object: |
Bushies once again "fix" the story to fit the crime. |
From The Palm Beach Post, 7/20/05:
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/opinion/content/opinion/epaper/2005/07/20/m14a_rove_edit_0720.html
Why Rove is like Iraq
Palm Beach Post Editorial
When President Bush raised the bar for firing Karl Rove, he dropped
his administration's standard for ethical conduct.
A year ago, Mr. Bush agreed that he would fire anybody involved in
leaking CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity.
On Tuesday, he said he would fire anybody convicted of a crime.
He flip-flopped after the revelation that Mr. Rove was involved in the
leak to smear a critic of the premise for invading Iraq.
So was Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President ***** Cheney's chief of
staff.
The changing standard is not out of character for an administration
that covers its mistakes by retroactively altering its reasons for
going to war.
Douglas Feith, a top policy adviser to Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld and one of the key voices encouraging war with Iraq, said
last week that when building its case for invasion the administration
should have said less about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass
destruction -- not a hard call, since there weren't any -- and more
about Hussein's attempts to acquire such weapons.
The problem with Mr. Feith's back-filling is that attempts to acquire
weapons wouldn't have justified the invasion.
Inspections and monitoring would have worked, just as they had done
after the first Gulf War.
In fact, President Bush did claim that Hussein was trying to rebuild
his nuclear program.
Including that claim in his 2003 State of the Union address led to the
Rove leak.
In a July 6, 2003, New York Times article, former Ambassador Joseph
Wilson revealed that several months before President Bush's speech,
the CIA sent him to Niger to investigate claims that Hussein had tried
to buy "yellowcake" uranium there and found no truth to the
allegations.
Mr. Rove and others tried to portray the former charge d'affaires in
Baghdad as an amateur sent on a pleasure junket as a favor to his
wife, Valerie Plame.
In fact, Mr. Wilson was proven right. Documents that purported to
prove a nuclear deal proved to be forgeries, and administration
officials admitted that the claim should have been deleted from Mr.
Bush's speech.
Only when caught in the most embarrassing misstatements did the White
House admit that it should have had higher standards for the
intelligence used to justify the war.
How much more embarrassment must Karl Rove cause before Mr. Bush
admits that he needs higher standards for advisers?
_________________________________________________________
"the intelligence and the facts are being fixed around
the policy"
The Downing Street Memo
Harry
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