The Osterley Times: There's a liar in the White House.

Monday, April 10, 2006

There's a liar in the White House.

There's a wonderful article in the Washington Post regarding what Patrick Fitzgerald calls "a "concerted action" by "multiple people in the White House" -- using classified information -- to "discredit, punish or seek revenge against" a critic of President Bush's war in Iraq.

Bluntly and repeatedly, Fitzgerald placed Cheney at the center of that campaign.

But the story's most damning allegation is that the information that Cheney and Libby had fed to reporters had been disproved months before. They knew they were lying when Cheney dispatched Libby to talk to Judith Millar of the New York Times.

United Nations inspectors had exposed the main evidence for the uranium charge as crude forgeries in March 2003, but the Bush administration and British Prime Minister Tony Blair maintained they had additional, secret evidence they could not disclose. In June, a British parliamentary inquiry concluded otherwise, delivering a scathing critique of Blair's role in promoting the story. With no ally left, the White House debated whether to abandon the uranium claim and became embroiled in bitter finger-pointing about whom to fault for the error. A legal brief filed for Libby last month said that "certain officials at the CIA, the White House, and the State Department each sought to avoid or assign blame for intelligence failures relating to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction."

It was at that moment that Libby, allegedly at Cheney's direction, sought out at least three reporters to bolster the discredited uranium allegation. Libby made careful selections of language from the 2002 estimate, quoting a passage that said Iraq was "vigorously trying to procure uranium" in Africa.

Bob Woodward, the first person Libby lied to about Niger says that in his notes, it states that Libby said Iraq's atttmpts to obtain Yellocake from Niger were "vigorous".

Now Libby is saying this when he knows it's been disproven.

However, Libby may be firing the shots, but it's Cheney who is loading the bullets.

The Vice President set out to destroy Joseph Wilson for telling the truth and he did so by ordering the release of information that he, at the time, knew to be false.

There's a liar in the White House.

Click on title for the Washington Post story.