The Spin Cycle
The people who care about these issues will continue to care, and will seek accountability from the administration.
The Niger uranium intelligence was declared forgeries and now the British and US administrations are saying they are not--that the intelligence is accurate based on other intelligence from other countries. Yet, they cannot reveal which country this intelligence hails from. Furthermore, they have not proved how any of these countries involved in this Niger uranium fiasco know that the intelligence is accurate.
So we are back where we started with purported accurate and valid intelligence that only the administrations have access to. One has to wonder how much clandestine intelligence such as this it will take until the public and the media says enough! We cannot (nor should not) expect to go to war on hearsay and non-scrutinized intelligence; we need tried-and-true evidence, especially under the military style of preemption.
Today, AP reported on Fleischer’s comments regarding the continuing controversy over the uranium claim. From Willaim C. Mann’s article "Fleischer calls Uranium Flap a ‘Bunch of Bull,’" Fleischer is reported as saying: ""I think the bottom has been gotten to."
At the same time, Fleischer said, "No one can accurately tell you it was wrong. That is not known."
Too bad Fleischer did not realize before he spoke that if "no one can accurately tell you it was wrong," then logically, no one can accurately tell you it is right.
Rice also attempted to clear the Bushies from the fiasco again by stating that the US does not have access to the source of the intelligence that Britain says it originates from:
Still, "The British stand by their statement," Rice said on "Fox News Sunday." "They have told us that despite the fact that we had apparently some concerns about that report, that they had other sources, and that they stand by the statement." U.S. officials have been denied access to the additional evidence, she said.
I agree with Kerry’s assessment on this matter, mainly the fact that Bush thinks the episode is over, as reported by Mann:
[Kerry] told CNN's "Late Edition, [that] there remain[s] "enormous questions still about the overall intelligence given to the Congress, the quality of that intelligence and even about the politics that entered into the judgment of taking that famous phrase out of one speech (in Cincinnati) but leaving it in another."
In my last posting, July 13th, I mentioned that you could visit The Left Coaster for a timeline on the Niger uranium affair. A good friend sent me a link today from TIME magazine. They printed an excellent article A Question of Trust by Michael Duffy and James Carney (July 13th) that also has a good descriptive timeline. Other than this, Duffy and Carney offer great commentary on why this Niger uranium issue is a relevant one:
Yet the controversy over those 16 words would not have erupted with such force were they not emblematic of larger concerns about Bush's reasoning for going to war in the first place. Making the case against Saddam last year, Bush claimed that Iraq's links to al-Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) made the country an imminent threat to the region and, eventually, the U.S. He wrapped the evidence in the even more controversial doctrine of pre-emption, saying America could no longer wait for proof of its enemies' intentions before defending itself overseas-it must sometimes strike first, even without all the evidence in hand. Much of the world was appalled by this logic, but Congress and the American public went along. Four months after the war started, at least one piece of key evidence has turned out to be false, the U.S. has yet to find weapons of mass destruction, and American soldiers keep dying in a country that has not greeted its liberators the way the Administration predicted it would. Now the false assertion and the rising casualties are combining to take a toll on Bush's standing with the public.
Well, it really is premature to say what Bush's standing with the public is or will be because of this. That ability has been about as reliable as predicting weather.
However, there is one thing I can agree with--the people who care about these issues will continue to care, and will seek accountability from the administration. Those who chose to avoid these issues will, likewise, continue down that path following the sound of and spitting out the same rhetoric as they have heard before with overly-trusting hearts and possibly with eyes wide shut.
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