Dishing the Dirt with Deadeye

Dishing the Dirt with Deadeye

What will happen next? Will Dubya be able to convince the country that a leak isn't a leak even when he leaked? Will Deadeye be found out? Will the country discover they dished the dirt about Joe and Val, then plotted to out the spook as payback for blowing their war lies cover? Stay tuned… As sands through the hour glass, so are the Days of Dubya and Deadeye's lives.

Okay, it's late, the lights are out, so are you ready for some
unnamed sourcing that adds to a dishy story about Dubya, Deadeye and the neocon
crew?

In early June 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney met
with President Bush and told him that CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson was
the wife of Iraq war critic Joseph Wilson and that she was responsible for
sending him on a fact-finding mission to Niger to check out reports about
Iraq's attempt to purchase uranium from the African country, according to
current and former White House officials and attorneys close to the investigation
to determine who revealed Plame-Wilson's undercover status to the media.

Other White House officials who also attended the
meeting with Cheney and President Bush included former White House Chief of
Staff Andrew Card, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, her former
deputy Stephen Hadley, and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove.

This information was provided to this reporter by
attorneys and US officials who have remained close to the case. Investigators
working with Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald compiled the information
after interviewing 36 Bush administration officials over the past two and
a half years.

The revelation puts a new wrinkle into Special Prosecutor
Patrick Fitzgerald's two-year-old criminal probe into the leak and suggests
for the first time that President Bush knew from early on that the vice president
and senior officials on his staff were involved in a coordinated effort to
attack Wilson's credibility by leaking his wife's classified CIA status. …
…

Bush
and Cheney Discussed Plame Prior to Leak

It should be called All the Days of Dubya and Deadeye's lives.

Can't you just see Deadeye talking to his pal George, telling
him that they've got a problem. There's good news and bad news. The bad news
is that some diplomatic pussy is about to blow us out of the water on Iraq.
The good news is that his wife works for the CIA and we can finally pay the
spooks back, give them what they've deserved for so long.

It's what we imagine anyway, if only someone would go on the record.

Deadeye knows where all the bodies are buried. Rummy lets him
in on all the good dirt over at the Pentagon, ground zero for the war against
the CIA. See, this isn't just about Wilson whacking the boss over the head with
truths he couldn't be bothered with sharing. It's about an agency that never
thought Iraq should be the goal.

“It is hard for people outside the
agency to understand how little we were thinking about Iraq,” recalled
one top intelligence official. The CIA's lack of focus on Iraq–and in particular,
the agency's failure to see Saddam Hussein as an imminent threat to the United
States–infuriated the administration's hard-liners. They believed that the
opportunity for war with Iraq presented by the attacks on New York and Washington
could best be exploited by linking Baghdad to 9/11. Failing that, it might
be possible to tie Iraq more generally to al Qaeda.

The problem for the hard-liners was that
the CIA was the keeper of the vast majority of classified intelligence on
al Qaeda, and the agency's analysts had seen no evidence of Iraqi involvement
in 9/11 and had no conclusive proof of a terrorist alliance between Saddam
Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Those answers did not satisfy Wolfowitz, or his
equally certain lieutenant, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith.

State of War, by James Risen

As James Risen goes on to say in his book, because the CIA wouldn't
get with the program, Wolfowitz, joined by Feith, started their own intelligence
apparatus called the Counter-Terrorism Evaluation Group, to “sift through
raw intelligence reports, searching for ties between Iraq and al Qaeda.”
Stephen Hayes was the recipient of some of this raw intelligence, as the Weekly
Standard became the print tool for preemption.

The same could not be done with Joseph Wilson. As a private citizen,
with vast experience in Africa as well as Iraq, he had first hand knowledge
of things Deadeye didn't want people to know. After all, Wilson waited a long
time before going public. But when President Bush continued to use the canard
about Niger, Wilson felt compelled.

That's when Deadeye went hunting. Good thing for Wilson old Deadeye
left his rifle at home or he might have lost an ear lobe. Instead, his wife
lost her career as a CIA agent. Didn't shut Wilson up, but at least there was
one less spook. Not bad pickings for all the president's people. Unfortunately,
it wouldn't stop the truth from coming out or protect the president from reality, though he continues to live in an alternate world.

Not only did President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney talk
about Joseph Wilson's knowledge about the lies they were telling, but he was
credible. Somehow they had to get to him. His CIA wife was simply collateral
damage, part of the price for being a nation at war.

So, who knows? Maybe one night in a muggy June in 2003, Dubya
and Deadeye sat down to have a conversation about the diplomat, his CIA wife
and just how they were going to screw them both good. If it also got people
off the stench of Bush's pre-war whoppers, it would all be worth it. What if? The trouble for Bush is that almost anything is believable at this point.