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[Bring It On] Injust Desserts: Todd Johnston wrote this brilliant piece (really, go read it) explaining why the whole Niger\Yellowcake thing was a horseshit lie used to justify the war and scare stupid (me me me) Americans into supporting it.
[Old Hickory's Weblog] The state of the CheneyGate scandal: Without wading into the particular arguments, one of the more important outstanding questions about the forged document purporting to show an Iraqi purchase of uranium is, were these documents the main basis, or even the exclusive basis, for the British report cited in the "16 words" claiming Iraq "sought" uranium? This is important, because the claim about seeking uranium was the single most vivid piece of evidence out of all the prewar WMD claims.
[Oh Well: A Commentary on News and Politics] La Repubblica Scoop--Some More Answers and Questions: The vice-president, as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence tells it, once again asked the CIA "very decisively" to find out more about the "possible acquisition of Nigerien uranium." In this meeting, Dick Cheney explicitly said that this piece of intelligence was at the disposition of a "foreign service." Cheney didn't say what foreign intelligence service these documents came from--If the CIA knew that they came from Italy, the CIA would immediatly claim they were bogus since the CIA had already seen these documents. But the White House gets these documents, and it is almost too good to be true.
[Nur al-Cubicle] Nigergate: The Great Nuclear Centrifuge Scam: The role of Silvio Berlusconi’s diplomacy advisor, Gianni Castellaneta, has been key in mediating the relations between Italy with the parallel conduit [“Stovepipe”””Nur] that Dick Cheney creates with financing from Ahmed Chelabi’s Iraqi National Congress to funnel intelligence “edited” by the Office for Special Plans which is then distributed to the media by the “Iraq Group,” which is seen in action in the Judith Miller-
[Rigorous Intuition] Into the black: The Colorado town of Calhan is baffled by two mass deaths taking the lives of 22 horses, nearly five years to the day after 24 cattle were found dead in Roswell, New Mexico following a visit by Dick Cheney. "Foul play is not suspected," though in the first group of deaths, "the animals were riddled with puncture wounds that authorities initially thought were bullet holes but were later determined to be from an unknown source."
[Nur al-Cubicle] Yellowcake Dossier Not the Work of the CIA: The men of Mukhabarat, the Iraqi intelligence agency, acquired the ore through a Jordanian middleman in far-away Nigeria, where a few traders succeeded in smuggling it after stealing it from a nuclear depot in a republic of the former USSR. The cargo containing 500 kilograms of uranium was then docked at Amman and afterwards shipped overland in a 7-hour journey to its final destination: the al-Rashidiyah plant 20 km north of Baghdad, recognized as a site for the production and processing of fissile material
[Stevegilliard.blogspot.com] THE NEWS BLOG: The reason why Cheney, Rove, and Libby were so aggressive in attacking anyone who questioned their rationale for war is because, by the summer of 2003, it was becoming embarrassingly clear how wrong they had been about Iraq -- wrong about WMD, wrong about flowers thrown at our feet, wrong about the cost of the war. Had their incompetence not been so grotesquely manifest, there would have been no need for the attack on Wilson -- and the resulting coverup -- that has now landed them all in such legal hot water.
[Crooksandliars.com] Crooks and Liars: The White House is up to its ears in controversy, but made time to send a legal letter to The Onion ordering the satirical newspaper to stop using the presidential seal. The seal can't be used commercially or to suggest the president's endorsement.
[Antiwar.com] Antiwar.com Blog: This opens the door to what has always been the most serious implication of the CIA leak case, that the Bush administration could face a brutally damaging and public inquiry into the case for war against Iraq being false or artificially exaggerated. This was the same charge that imperiled the government of Bush's closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, after a BBC Radio program claimed Blair's aides has "sexed up" the evidence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
[Justoneminute.typepad.com] JustOneMinute: Who Is Joseph Wilson?: But she said, essentially, that Joseph Wilson's report was comprised of official denials from Nigerien government officials and the suggestion that a private businessman acting as an intermediary for the Iraqis had made an overture to one of those officials about possible uranium sales.
[Motherjones.com] MoJo Blog: No simple application of more outside force can make conflicting parties agree in any meaningful way or conjure up social forces of liberalism, compromise, and tolerance where they don’t exist or are too weak to prevail.That's obviously true of the United States military, which has classically been good primarily at smashing things, although our twenty-year-old soldiers have adapted to "mission creep" unbelievably well in Iraq. But Donald Rumsfeld now wants to make the military even better at smashing things, as opposed to people like Thomas Barnett who want to see a more fully developed "SysAdmin" side—and regardless of what you want to call it, the "Jacksonian tradition" in American foreign policy has never had much interest in anything more than overwhelming bloodletting in the defense of the national interest.
Reflected tags on Technorati: Blog, Iraq, Iraq Reviews