Tony, You’re Next.
It’s handy that Mr. Tony Blair is married to a QC – he may need one, given what’s coming out from the CIA/Plame case about the Niger forgeries.
Copyright Ross P Kettle 2005
It has struck me that the Plame affair is being oddly neglected by the UK press considering the huge implications for Tony Blair. It’s almost as though they’re wilfully sticking their heads in the sand, going ‘lalala, schools, lalala, smoking ban’ while not seeing the huge story, the collapse of the Bush administration and its conspiracy to start an illegal war, in which Blair was complicit.
Oh at last! The day indictments are expected, the BBC’s Washington correspondent just deigned to do a 2 minute segment, right at the end of the morning news, when no-one would hear it excpt bloggers in pyjamas like me. He’s gone Beltway native and just regurgitates WH talking points anyway – his main contact appears to be David Frum(!), but that’s a gripe for another day.
Blair’s precarious position may be ignored by UK journalists, but as usual the blogosphere is on it. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has a long piece looking at British complicity in pushing the Niger forgeries:
To date the British have refused to concede that they too may have been relying on flawed or phony evidence. They stand by their claim, but refuse to disclose the source or the nature of their evidence.
Last year’s Butler Report (a rough analogue to last year’s Senate intelligence committee report) went to great lengths to insulate the British finding from the taint of the forgeries. In one passage it says that …
The forged documents were not available to the British Government at the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not undermine it.Later in the Report, in a pretty telling illustration of how tied the Butler Report was to the needs of US politics, the authors went so far as to provide the president with a specific exoneration …
We conclude that, on the basis of the intelligence assessments at the time, covering both Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the statements on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa in the Government?s dossier, and by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons, were well-founded. By extension, we conclude also that the statement in President Bush?s State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003 that:The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa was well-founded.
I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions about how such a passage could have found its way into a British government inquiry. But let’s review the story. The Brits say that they had multiple pieces of evidence upon which they based their claim. And the forged documents — which they only found out about much later — were not one of them. So the discreditation of the forgeries is irrelevant to their finding. The taint, shall we say, does not attach.
My assumption, and that of many others, is that the Brits are, to put it bluntly, full of it on this one. My best guess is that they are holding on to some de minimis ‘other’ evidence as a placeholder to get out of taking their own lumps in the Niger skullduggery.
With the claims of an intelligence agency especially, proving a negative is near impossible. So I can’t prove to you that the Brits have nothing else. But I think I can make a pretty strong argument that the Butler Report was intentionally misleading on this key question.
The Butler Report wasn’t the only British government inquiry into the faulty intelligence question. There was also a parliamentary committee report published in September 2003, before the question of the forgeries and Wilson and the rest of it became so intensely politicized. And a close look at this earlier report, chaired by Labour MP Ann Taylor, shows pretty clearly, I think, that the Butler Report was willfully misleading about the Brits’ reliance on the forgeries.
I discussed this point at length in a post from July 17th, 2004. So if you’re interested in finding out more, seeing the evidence and the argument, read that post and draw your own conclusions.
— Josh Marshall
UPDATE:
Dammit, I should read the Grauniad before posting. My only excuse it’s a reformist rag… however, Jonathan Freedland redeems his profession.
The president is assailed from all sides; from Democrats over his plans to privatise the pensions system, and from conservatives who wanted a rightwing titan nominated to the supreme court – and who feel insulted by the choice of Harriet Miers, a personal lawyer to Bush who has never been a judge and whose best credential is that she once oversaw the Texas lottery.
It adds up to a moment of exceptional weakness, a “perfect storm” for Democrats plotting a comeback in next year’s congressional elections. But it’s more important than that. Now there is a chance to discredit not just Bush’s presidency but the ideology which led to the disastrous adventure in Iraq. Plamegate itself may seem arcane, but that outcome is one in which we all have a stake.
