Hear No Evil…
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in General Politics, History, The War On Terrorism, WarTalking Points Memo points to some interesting contradictions that both parties have seemed to gloss over.
So Wilson didn’t say he’d seen the report back to the vice president or that he knew for a fact that one had been sent. He said that he’d been in government long enough to know that this was standard procedure and that he was confident that it had been. And if it had this amounted to an indictment of the administration.Only it hadn’t, or that’s what the people in the White House say. And unlike the question of whether his wife recommended him for the job, this actually is a relevant fact in understanding the story.
So the question is, why?
The explanation confected by the authors of the SSCI report was the rather contradictory one that either Wilson’s trip generated no substantive information or that it in fact tended to confirm suspicions of an illict uranium traffic between the two countries. No one who’s looked at the evidence involved believes that. Nor is that cover story compatible with the CIA’s subsequent and repeated attempts to prevent the White House from using the Niger story.
Here in Pincus’s reporting — before the evidentiary and political battle lines were drawn — is the answer: “Information not consistent with the administration agenda was discarded.”
And here’s the Pincus report he mentions.
Take a look and tell me your thoughts.
This entry was posted on Saturday, July 16th, 2005 and is filed under General Politics, History, The War On Terrorism, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 16th, 2005 at 9:36 pm
I think a reading of the SICR shows that, at the very worst, the ‘wrong’ half of the Pincus quote is pasted above. If there is any problem with the way the CIA handled Wilson’s report, I believe it arose from the possibility that “information that was [consistent] was not seriously scrutinized.”
We now know (as opposed to what Pincus or his source knew on June 12, 2003) that Wilson reported his findings to the CIA and that they determined that his findings were relatively uninteresting BUT also consistent with other intelligence they had collected on the subject. This can be verified by reading p. 46 of the SICR. And if one has worked in intelligence gathering, one recognizes the pragmatic truth in this.
That same page also clearly indicates that Wilson’s report was not passed along to the VP, and why. Wilson, perhaps justifiably, based on his past experience, assumed that the report HAD been passed along and that it was subsequently ignored and/or distorted by the WH. His later criticisms and accusations appear to be based on this misunderstanding. And that’s really where this conflict started.
So we have Wilson, thinking he’d “clearly” indicated that the Niger rumor was false and certain that this information had been passed to the VP. Thus his subsequent anonymous and then overt campaign to paint the WH as liars, which subsequently dragged the issue of his wife into the mix. I believe that this last was the single most unfortunate aspect of this affair, because it has allowed the media to transform Wilson’s misunderstanding into a scandal and completely obscured the simple fact that what Wilson *thought* he reported was, in fact, not only interpreted differently, but also *not* communicated in the manner he assumed it was.
I’ve learned from hard experience never to attribute to malice that which can be explained by ignorance, poor judgement or a lack of communication. This tenet (ahem) may be less valid in the world of politics, but I think if one looks at this affair with that caveat in mind, it’s possible that everyone said/did exactly what they claim they said/did, but went ballistic when they perceived *others* to be reacting in bad faith or with some degree of disingenuous inconsistency for political gain.
Now, Marshall implies that we should disregard the bipartisan SICR because it’s a “political document” and “No one whose looked at the evidence involved believes that.” I think Josh is simply engaging in the practice his choice of quote, above, implies. He would like to discount the SICR because it doesn’t fit his preferences, but likes the Iraq Survey Group because it does. IMHO, we need to either throw out all the reports or find a way to harmonize them. Cherry-picking based on informal fallacies like “No one … believes that” is simply irresponsible.