Sunday, November 06, 2005
Yellowcake And Sandy Berger
No, there's not a connection between the two -- though Lord knows the Bush junta wishes they could invent one and have it be believed. But the time when anyone besides American corporate media employees would take BushCo's word on anything has long since passed. What I'm talking about is something that's hinted at in the opening paragraph of the E&P piece on Jehl's article on the recently declassified DIA documents showing that Bush's main WMD source was literally making things up as he went along (and did so while under torture):
Ever since the Democrats briefly closed the U.S. Senate from view earlier this week, to protest alleged Republican foot-dragging in probing Bush administration pre-war manipulation of intelligence, the press has been asking: So what new evidence do the Democrats have in this matter?The "new evidence" turns out to be old evidence that Jehl had obliquely reported on back in July of 2004, but which was still classified information at the time. What's new is that it has been recently declassified. The mere fact that these documents were classified in the first place -- and I'm betting would have stayed classified were it not for Harry Reid's profile-in-courage bit last week, coupled with the increasing reluctance of GOP legislators to be connected to Bush in any way, shape or form -- is not that they harmed America's national security, but made BushCo look bad. That's probably why so much of the Clinton-era anti-terror documents written up by Sandy Berger are still classified: Because when one compares what the Clinton adminstration did to what the Bush people did and are doing, the Clinton folks come off looking very, very good in comparison. (See also here.) Can anyone else imagine any other reason for BushCo wanting to ensure that Sandy Berger faced jail time for making copies of his own notes? If Bush and his people are mean and stupid and unprincipled enough to out a CIA undercover operative and destroy her intelligence network (not to mention endanger every one of her contacts in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East), they're definitely capable of something as petty as punishing Berger for looking at his own notes.
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