Tuesday, July 13, 2004

More on the Senate Report

Partisan Politics

This was too big to fit in a comment, and is maybe deserving of its own post.  Consider this a continuation:

I think Blixa wrote early on that maybe both sides are correct, more or less.

Let me try and find some middle ground here.  Each side accuses the other of lying.  Rights say Wilson is a liar.  Lefts say Bush lied in the State of the Union.

If we start by assuming that both men were acting on the information they had, there’s a pretty reasonable construction of events available to us.  If we put it in context, I think the problem sort of goes away.

First have a look at Ari’s July 7 press gaggle:  http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/07/20030707-5.html.

He specifically says this:

MR. FLEISCHER: I’m sorry, I see what David is asking. Let me back up on that and explain the President’s statement again, or the answer to it.

The President’s statement was based on the predicate of the yellow cake from Niger. The President made a broad statement. So given the fact that the report on the yellow cake did not turn out to be accurate, that is reflective of the President’s broader statement, David. So, yes, the President’ broader statement was based and predicated on the yellow cake from Niger.

Q So it was wrong?

MR. FLEISCHER: That’s what we’ve acknowledged with the information on --

Q The President’s statement at the State of the Union was incorrect?

MR. FLEISCHER: Because it was based on the yellow cake from Niger.

Q Well, wait a minute, but the explanation we’ve gotten before was it was based on Niger and the other African nations that have been named in the national intelligence --

MR. FLEISCHER: But, again, the information on—the President did not have that information prior to his giving the State of the Union.

Q Which gets to the crux of what Ambassador Wilson is now alleging—that he provided this information to the State Department and the CIA 11 months before the State of the Union and he is amazed that it, nonetheless, made it into the State of the Union address. He believes that that information was deliberately ignored by the White House. Your response to that?

MR. FLEISCHER: And that’s way, again, he’s making the statement that—he is saying that surely the Vice President must have known, or the White House must have known. And that’s not the case, prior to the State of the Union.

Q He’s saying that surely people at the decision-making level within the NSC would have known the information which he—passed on to both the State Department and the CIA.

MR. FLEISCHER: And the information about the yellow cake and Niger was not specifically known prior to the State of the Union by the White House.

Bush was told by his intelligence guys that there was a deal between Niger and Iraq to buy uranium.  Tenet tells him it’s true.  Based on this pretty scary fact the white house decides it rises to a level where it can be included in the State of the Union.  They include it.

Did Bush deliberately lie here?  No.  And, given that his statement is likely correct (sought uranium from africa) from a factual standpoint, does it in retrospect represent a lie?  Nope. 

Bush does have two problems, though.  First, there was a breakdown in the vetting process.  At the point of the state of the union, it was known that the deal didn’t happen, and the documents were forged (this doesn’t mean that Iraq didn’t seek uranium—only that the deal hadn’t happened). 

We can’t seem to see Ari Fleischer’s July 9 press briefing on the White House site.  It’s been removed.  But we can still see it elsewhere:

http://www.usembassy-israel.org.il/publish/press/2003/july/071002.html

In it, Ari says this:

MR. FLEISCHER: No, because the regime is gone. The regime is gone. You know, just because something didn’t make it to the level where it should have been included in a presidential speech, in hindsight, doesn’t mean the information was necessarily inaccurate. It means it should not have risen to his level.

I think it’s right there in a nutshell.  Wilson felt at the time (and others did as well), that the uranium information “didn’t make it to the level” of a presidential speech, based on his trip.  Had Bush known that the central piece of intelligence underlying that line of the speech was bogus (or had his speechwriters known), it wouldn’t have made it in the speech. 

What made Wilson mad was that someone on the white house staff deliberately (or inadvertently) outed his wife to get back at him.  Once again, there are shades of gray on the motivations of the person who did it.  They might have thought that everybody already knew, or thought that they weren’t committing a crime; maybe it was a total slip of the tongue.  Regardless, it brought Wilson’s wife into the equation fairly deliberately, broke the law doing so, and may have had some effect on past or present intelligence issues.

There’s a standard of truth being put forward on both sides that just isn’t really achievable, by anybody. 

Wilson fired back at the administration with everything at his disposal.  The only part of his story that can really be contested is what he said about his wife’s involvement.  It’s clear that this was a tricky area for him, and he was boxed in a bit.  He’s not allowed to talk about what his wife does, since she’s an intelligence operative.  He knows that she didn’t make the decision to send him.  He’s being accused to nepotism, but knows that he wasn’t paid to go on the trip. 

It results in a little fuzziness in his public statements about her.  But...if we completely separate her involvement, is he still “a liar”?  No.  Even if we put the quote from his book in place, it’s clear that he wasn’t hiding anything, as he publicly responded to, on more than one occasion, the existence of the memo from his wife.  How did he respond?  He responded by saying he wouldn’t discuss that.  When you know you’re not supposed to talk about something and you’re a politician, how do you respond?  You say that you are unable to discuss it. 

Bottom line is this: Bush was let down by his security people (inside the circle or outside), who knew that the central bit of intelligence underlying the line in the speech was false.  So no lie there.  Somebody in the White House took revenge, committed a crime, and outed Wilson’s wife.  Wilson should have found a better way to characterize his wife’s involvement, if he was unable to say exactly what it was; he should have made no statement at all rather than a misleading one.

So maybe there’s common ground in all of this.  I don’t know.

The question we all have to ask ourselves is this: What kind of standards do we want to apply to all of these public statements?  Do the Bushies _really_ want us to apply their Wilson standard to everything he’s ever said?  More to the point, _should_ we? 

Language is a loose thing.  Maybe we all need to keep that in mind.  In this case we’ve been reduced to parsing the various grammatical and contextual forms of sentences—this is a silly way to have a discussion.

Occam’s razor gives us the simple path; the path upon which people make mistakes, sometimes, in what they say. 


Posted by Ross on 07/13/04 at 05:00 PM
Partisan Politics • (0) Trackbacks • Permalink