A Second Take on Scooter-gate (Justin Raimondo)

[shraby]

It's all about treason.

Editorial note: The original version of this column, which ran on October 3, contained a number of errors involving dates, which I have now corrected. I have also added a significant amount of new material, so much that it is, for all intents and purposes, quite a different piece from the original.

<http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=7490>

Well worth the read!

[Donailin]

1. it's all about the illigetimate case for war in iraq

and it's a good effort. kudos to justin

[kohodog]

2. great column. missed it the first time. n/t

[stillcool]

3. nice piece of work....

thanks for the link.

[kestrel91316]

4. It's about the use of espionage to facilitate treason.

[shraby]

5. He pulls threads into a coherent whole

very nicely, with the connections being Miller and Hannah.

[DemInDistress]

6. Yes,that was a grest read...

Thanks for sharing that story and the website.This guy Justin
Raimondo is one good reporterso I put his site on my favorites.How
did I miss this site?I'm always searching for truth on the internet and anti-war.com is superb....thanks again
have a bud on me...:toast:

[enough]

7. Well worth reading. Let's hope he's right.

snip>

This is the criminal conspiracy Fitzgerald has set about uncovering. It isn't about Karl Rove, as I said months ago; it isn't about a possible violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, as I maintained from the beginning. It's about how a small group of government officials, in tandem with their overseas allies, engaged in a criminal conspiracy to falsify "intelligence" – and, in the process, lie the nation into war.

The event that ostensibly precipitated Fitzgerald's probe – the publication of Valerie Plame's name in a column by Robert Novak published in the Chicago Sun-Times – has garnered the lion's share of media attention, but Fitzgerald's concerns appear to have extended way beyond this starting point. As the Washington Post reported back in July:

"Special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has asked not only about how CIA operative Valerie Plame's name was leaked but also how the administration went about shifting responsibility from the White House to the CIA for having included 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Africa, an assertion that was later disputed."

From the possible violation of a law that had only been successfully prosecuted on a single occasion, and for which the penalty is a few years in the hoosegow and a hefty but payable fine, the investigation morphed into a probe of one of the most baffling mysteries of recent times: how did the White House fall for the Niger uranium forgeries, crude fabrications of documents that purported to show Saddam's Iraq was trying to procure fissionable uranium – yellowcake – from the African nation of Niger? It only took the International Atomic Energy Agency a few hours with Google to debunk this "evidence" of Iraq's efforts to build nukes, yet somehow the infamous 16 words pinpointing "Africa" as the site of Iraq's supposed violation made it into the president's 2003 State of the Union address. Who snookered the White House?

This question, I believe, was the real genesis of the inquiry Scooter-gate, and not the outing of Valerie Plame, which didn't come until July 14, 2003.

snip>