Re: Who Is Lying About Iraq? Liberals, Left-wing MoonBats & Neo-Kommies

I post the entire article so that it is available in the archive for all
time

"George Bush lied": the leftist slander that refuses to die.


http://www.commentarymagazine.com/Production/files/podhoretz1205advance.html

Who Is Lying About Iraq?

Among the many distortions, misrepresentations, and outright falsifications
that have emerged from the debate over Iraq, one in particular stands out
above all others. This is the charge that George W. Bush misled us into an
immoral and/or unnecessary war in Iraq by telling a series of lies that have
now been definitively exposed.

What makes this charge so special is the amazing success it has enjoyed in
getting itself established as a self-evident truth even though it has been
refuted and discredited over and over again by evidence and argument alike.
In this it resembles nothing so much as those animated cartoon characters
who, after being flattened, blown up, or pushed over a cliff, always spring
back to life with their bodies perfectly intact. Perhaps, like those cartoon
characters, this allegation simply cannot be killed off, no matter what.

Nevertheless, I want to take one more shot at exposing it for the lie that
it itself really is. Although doing so will require going over ground that I
and many others have covered before, I hope that revisiting this
well-trodden terrain may also serve to refresh memories that have grown dim,
to clarify thoughts that have grown confused, and to revive outrage that has
grown commensurately dulled.

The main "lie" that George W. Bush is accused of telling us is that Saddam
Hussein possessed an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, or WMD as they
have invariably come to be called. From this followed the subsidiary "lie"
that Iraq under Saddam's regime posed a two-edged mortal threat. On the one
hand, we were informed, there was a distinct (or even "imminent")
possibility that Saddam himself would use these weapons against us and/or
our allies; and on the other hand, there was the still more dangerous
possibility that he would supply them to terrorists like those who had
already attacked us on 9/11 and to whom he was linked.

This entire scenario of purported deceit has been given a new lease on life
by the indictment in late October of I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, then chief of
staff to Vice President *** Cheney. Libby stands accused of making false
statements to the FBI and of committing perjury in testifying before a grand
jury that had been convened to find out who in the Bush administration had
"outed" Valerie Plame, a CIA agent married to the retired ambassador Joseph
C. Wilson, IV. The supposed purpose of leaking this classified information
to the press was to retaliate against Wilson for having "debunked" (in his
words) "the lies that led to war."

Now, as it happens, Libby was not charged with having outed Plame but only
with having lied about when and from whom he first learned that she worked
for the CIA. Moreover, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor who
brought the indictment against him, made a point of emphasizing that

[t]his indictment is not about the war. This indictment is not about the
propriety of the war. And people who believe fervently in the war effort,
people who oppose it, people who have mixed feelings about it should not
look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or any
vindication of how they feel.

This is simply an indictment that says, in a national-security investigation
about the compromise of a CIA officer's identity that may have taken place
in the context of a very heated debate over the war, whether some person-a
person, Mr. Libby-lied or not.

No matter. Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, spoke for a host
of other opponents of the war in insisting that
[t]his case is bigger than the leak of classified information. It is about
how the Bush White House manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order
to bolster its case for the war in Iraq and to discredit anyone who dared to
challenge the President
..
Yet even stipulating-which I do only for the sake of argument-that no
weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq in the period leading up to the
invasion, it defies all reason to think that Bush was lying when he asserted
that they did. To lie means to say something one knows to be false. But it
is as close to certainty as we can get that Bush believed in the truth of
what he was saying about WMD in Iraq.

How indeed could it have been otherwise? George Tenet, his own CIA director,
assured him that the case was "a slam dunk." This phrase would later become
notorious, but in using it, Tenet had the backing of all fifteen agencies
involved in gathering intelligence for the United States. In the National
Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of 2002, where their collective views were
summarized, one of the conclusions offered with "high confidence" was that

Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding its chemical, biological,
nuclear, and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions.

The intelligence agencies of Britain, Germany, Russia, China, Israel,
and-yes-France all agreed with this judgment. And even Hans Blix-who headed
the UN team of inspectors trying to determine whether Saddam had complied
with the demands of the Security Council that he get rid of the weapons of
mass destruction he was known to have had in the past-lent further
credibility to the case in a report he issued only a few months before the
invasion:

The discovery of a number of 122-mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at
a storage depot 170 km southwest of Baghdad was much publicized. This was a
relatively new bunker, and therefore the rockets must have been moved there
in the past few years, at a time when Iraq should not have had such
munitions. . . . They could also be the tip of a submerged iceberg. The
discovery of a few rockets does not resolve but rather points to the issue
of several thousands of chemical rockets that are unaccounted for.

Blix now claims that he was only being "cautious" here, but if, as he now
also adds, the Bush administration "misled itself" in interpreting the
evidence before it, he at the very least lent it a helping hand.

So, once again, did the British, the French, and the Germans, all of whom
signed on in advance to Secretary of State Colin Powell's reading of the
satellite photos he presented to the UN in the period leading up to the
invasion. Powell himself and his chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, now
feel that this speech was the low point of his tenure as Secretary of State.
But Wilkerson (in the process of a vicious attack on the President, the Vice
President, and the Secretary of Defense for getting us into Iraq) is forced
to acknowledge that the Bush administration did not lack for company in
interpreting the available evidence as it did:

I can't tell you why the French, the Germans, the Brits, and us thought that
most of the material, if not all of it, that we presented at the UN on 5
February 2003 was the truth. I can't. I've wrestled with it. [But] when you
see a satellite photograph of all the signs of the chemical-weapons
ASP-Ammunition Supply Point-with chemical weapons, and you match all those
signs with your matrix on what should show a chemical ASP, and they're
there, you have to conclude that it's a chemical ASP, especially when you
see the next satellite photograph which shows the UN inspectors wheeling in
their white vehicles with black markings on them to that same ASP, and
everything is changed, everything is clean. . . . But George [Tenet] was
convinced, John McLaughlin [Tenet's deputy] was convinced, that what we were
presented [for Powell's UN speech] was accurate.

Going on to shoot down a widespread impression, Wilkerson informs us that
even the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) was
convinced:

People say, well, INR dissented. That's a bunch of bull. INR dissented that
the nuclear program was up and running. That's all INR dissented on. They
were right there with the chems and the bios.

In explaining its dissent on Iraq's nuclear program, the INR had, as stated
in the NIE of 2002, expressed doubt about
Iraq's efforts to acquire aluminum tubes [which are] central to the argument
that Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program. . . . INR is not
persuaded that the tubes in question are intended for use as centrifuge
rotors . . . in Iraq's nuclear-weapons program.

But, according to Wilkerson,
The French came in in the middle of my deliberations at the CIA and said, we
have just spun aluminum tubes, and by God, we did it to this RPM, et cetera,
et cetera, and it was all, you know, proof positive that the aluminum tubes
were not for mortar casings or artillery casings, they were for centrifuges.
Otherwise, why would you have such exquisite instruments?

In short, and whether or not it included the secret heart of Hans Blix, "the
consensus of the intelligence community," as Wilkerson puts it, "was
overwhelming" in the period leading up to the invasion of Iraq that Saddam
definitely had an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, and that he
was also in all probability well on the way to rebuilding the nuclear
capability that the Israelis had damaged by bombing the Osirak reactor in
1981.

Additional confirmation of this latter point comes from Kenneth Pollack, who
served in the National Security Council under Clinton. "In the late spring
of 2002," Pollack has written,

I participated in a Washington meeting about Iraqi WMD. Those present
included nearly twenty former inspectors from the United Nations Special
Commission (UNSCOM), the force established in 1991 to oversee the
elimination of WMD in Iraq. One of the senior people put a question to the
group: did anyone in the room doubt that Iraq was currently operating a
secret centrifuge plant? No one did. Three people added that they believed
Iraq was also operating a secret calutron plant (a facility for separating
uranium isotopes).

No wonder, then, that another conclusion the NIE of 2002 reached with "high
confidence" was that
Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires
sufficient weapons-grade fissile material.(1)

But the consensus on which Bush relied was not born in his own
administration. In fact, it was first fully formed in the Clinton
administration. Here is Clinton himself, speaking in 1998:

If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We
want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's
weapons-of-mass-destruction program.

Here is his Secretary of State Madeline Albright, also speaking in 1998:

Iraq is a long way from [the USA], but what happens there matters a great
deal here. For the risk that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear,
chemical, or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest
security threat we face.
Here is Sandy Berger, Clinton's National Security Adviser, who chimed in at
the same time with this flat-out assertion about Saddam:

He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times
since 1983.

Finally, Clinton's Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, was so sure Saddam
had stockpiles of WMD that he remained "absolutely convinced" of it even
after our failure to find them in the wake of the invasion in March 2003.

Nor did leading Democrats in Congress entertain any doubts on this score. A
few months after Clinton and his people made the statements I have just
quoted, a group of Democratic Senators, including such liberals as Carl
Levin, Tom Daschle, and John Kerry, urged the President

to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile
strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed
by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons-of-mass-destruction programs.

Nancy Pelosi, the future leader of the Democrats in the House, and then a
member of the House Intelligence Committee, added her voice to the chorus:

Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of
weapons-of-mass-destruction technology, which is a threat to countries in
the region, and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.

This Democratic drumbeat continued and even intensified when Bush succeeded
Clinton in 2001, and it featured many who would later pretend to have been
deceived by the Bush White House. In a letter to the new President, a number
of Senators led by Bob Graham declared:

There is no doubt that . . . Saddam Hussein has invigorated his weapons
programs. Reports indicate that biological, chemical, and nuclear programs
continue apace and may be back to pre-Gulf war status. In addition, Saddam
continues to redefine delivery systems and is doubtless using the cover of a
licit missile program to develop longer-range missiles that will threaten
the United States and our allies.

Senator Carl Levin also reaffirmed for Bush's benefit what he had told
Clinton some years earlier:

Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the
region. He has ignored the mandate of the United Nations, and is building
weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton agreed, speaking in October 2002:

In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that
Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical- and biological-weapons
stock, his missile-delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also
given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaeda members.

Senator Jay Rockefeller, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee,
agreed as well:

There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively
to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the
next five years. . . . We also should remember we have always underestimated
the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction.

Even more striking were the sentiments of Bush's opponents in his two
campaigns for the presidency. Thus Al Gore in September 2002:

We know that [Saddam] has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical
weapons throughout his country.

And here is Gore again, in that same year:

Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to
deter, and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is
in power.

Now to John Kerry, also speaking in 2002:

I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to
use force-if necessary-to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a
deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and
grave threat to our security.

Perhaps most startling of all, given the rhetoric that they would later
employ against Bush after the invasion of Iraq, are statements made by
Senators Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd, also in 2002:

Kennedy: We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and
developing weapons of mass destruction.

Byrd: The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are
confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and
biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to
build up his chemical- and biological-warfare capabilities. Intelligence
reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons.(2)

Liberal politicians like these were seconded by the mainstream media, in
whose columns a very different tune would later be sung. For example,
throughout the last two years of the Clinton administration, editorials in
the New York Times repeatedly insisted that

without further outside intervention, Iraq should be able to rebuild weapons
and missile plants within a year [and] future military attacks may be
required to diminish the arsenal again.

The Times was also skeptical of negotiations, pointing out that it was

hard to negotiate with a tyrant who has no intention of honoring his
commitments and who sees nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons as his
country's salvation.

So, too, the Washington Post, which greeted the inauguration of George W.
Bush in January 2001 with the admonition that
[o]f all the booby traps left behind by the Clinton administration, none is
more dangerous-or more urgent-than the situation in Iraq. Over the last
year, Mr. Clinton and his team quietly avoided dealing with, or calling
attention to, the almost complete unraveling of a decade's efforts to
isolate the regime of Saddam Hussein and prevent it from rebuilding its
weapons of mass destruction. That leaves President Bush to confront a
dismaying panorama in the Persian Gulf [where] intelligence photos . . .
show the reconstruction of factories long suspected of producing chemical
and biological weapons.(3)

All this should surely suffice to prove far beyond any even unreasonable
doubt that Bush was telling what he believed to be the truth about Saddam's
stockpile of WMD. It also disposes of the fallback charge that Bush lied by
exaggerating or hyping the intelligence presented to him. Why on earth would
he have done so when the intelligence itself was so compelling that it
convinced everyone who had direct access to it, and when hardly anyone in
the world believed that Saddam had, as he claimed, complied with the sixteen
resolutions of the Security Council demanding that he get rid of his weapons
of mass destruction?

Another fallback charge is that Bush, operating mainly through Cheney,
somehow forced the CIA into telling him what he wanted to hear. Yet in its
report of 2004, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, while
criticizing the CIA for relying on what in hindsight looked like weak or
faulty intelligence, stated that it

did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce,
influence, or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's
weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities.

The March 2005 report of the equally bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission,
which investigated intelligence failures on Iraq, reached the same
conclusion, finding

no evidence of political pressure to influence the intelligence community's
pre-war assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. . . . [A]nalysts universally
asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or
alter any of their analytical judgments.

Still, even many who believed that Saddam did possess WMD, and was ruthless
enough to use them, accused Bush of telling a different sort of lie by
characterizing the risk as "imminent." But this, too, is false: Bush
consistently rejected imminence as a justification for war.(4) Thus, in the
State of the Union address he delivered only three months after 9/11, Bush
declared that he would "not wait on events while dangers gather" and that he
would "not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer." Then, in a speech at
West Point six months later, he reiterated the same point: "If we wait for
threats to materialize, we will have waited too long." And as if that were
not clear enough, he went out of his way in his State of the Union address
in 2003 (that is, three months before the invasion), to bring up the word
"imminent" itself precisely in order to repudiate it:

Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have
terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on
notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly
emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late.
Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy,
and it is not an option.

What of the related charge that it was still another "lie" to suggest, as
Bush and his people did, that a connection could be traced between Saddam
Hussein and the al-Qaeda terrorists who had attacked us on 9/11? This charge
was also rejected by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Contrary to how its
findings were summarized in the mainstream media, the committee's report
explicitly concluded that al Qaeda did in fact have a cooperative, if
informal, relationship with Iraqi agents working under Saddam. The report of
the bipartisan 9/11 commission came to the same conclusion, as did a
comparably independent British investigation conducted by Lord Butler, which
pointed to "meetings . . . between senior Iraqi representatives and senior
al-Qaeda operatives."(5)

Which brings us to Joseph C. Wilson, IV and what to my mind wins the palm
for the most disgraceful instance of all.
The story begins with the notorious sixteen words inserted-after, be it
noted, much vetting by the CIA and the State Department-into Bush's 2003
State of the Union address:

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought
significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
This is the "lie" Wilson bragged of having "debunked" after being sent by
the CIA to Niger in 2002 to check out the intelligence it had received to
that effect. Wilson would later angrily deny that his wife had recommended
him for this mission, and would do his best to spread the impression that
choosing him had been the Vice President's idea. But Nicholas Kristof of the
New York Times, through whom Wilson first planted this impression, was
eventually forced to admit that "Cheney apparently didn't know that Wilson
had been dispatched." (By the time Kristof grudgingly issued this
retraction, Wilson himself, in characteristically shameless fashion, was
denying that he had ever "said the Vice President sent me or ordered me
sent.") And as for his wife's supposed non-role in his mission, here is what
Valerie Plame Wilson wrote in a memo to her boss at the CIA:

My husband has good relations with the PM [the prime minister of Niger] and
the former minister of mines . . . , both of whom could possibly shed light
on this sort of activity.

More than a year after his return, with the help of Kristof, and also Walter
Pincus of the Washington Post, and then through an op-ed piece in the Times
under his own name, Wilson succeeded, probably beyond his wildest dreams, in
setting off a political firestorm.

In response, the White House, no doubt hoping to prevent his allegation
about the sixteen words from becoming a proxy for the charge that (in Wilson
's latest iteration of it) "lies and disinformation [were] used to justify
the invasion of Iraq," eventually acknowledged that the President's
statement "did not rise to the level of inclusion in the State of the Union
address." As might have been expected, however, this panicky response served
to make things worse rather than better. And yet it was totally
unnecessary-for the maddeningly simple reason that every single one of the
sixteen words at issue was true.

That is, British intelligence had assured the CIA that Saddam Hussein had
tried to buy enriched uranium from the African country of Niger.
Furthermore-and notwithstanding the endlessly repeated assertion that this
assurance has now been discredited-Britain's independent Butler commission
concluded that it was "well-founded." The relevant passage is worth quoting
at length:

a. It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999.
b. The British government had intelligence from several different sources
indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium. Since
uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger's exports, the
intelligence was credible.
c. The evidence was not conclusive that Iraq actually purchased, as opposed
to having sought, uranium, and the British government did not claim this.

As if that were not enough to settle the matter, Wilson himself, far from
challenging the British report when he was "debriefed" on his return from
Niger (although challenging it is what he now never stops doing (6)),
actually strengthened the CIA's belief in its accuracy. From the Senate
Intelligence Committee report:

He [the CIA reports officer] said he judged that the most important fact in
the report [by Wilson] was that Niger officials admitted that the Iraqi
delegation had traveled there in 1999, and that the Niger prime minister
believed the Iraqis were interested in purchasing uranium.

And again:

The report on [Wilson's] trip to Niger . . . did not change any analysts'
assessments of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal. For most analysts, the
information in the report lent more credibility to the original CIA reports
on the uranium deal.

This passage goes on to note that the State Department's Bureau of
Intelligence and Research-which (as we have already seen) did not believe
that Saddam Hussein was trying to develop nuclear weapons-found support in
Wilson's report for its "assessment that Niger was unlikely to be willing or
able to sell uranium to Iraq." But if so, this, as the Butler report quoted
above points out, would not mean that Iraq had not tried to buy it-which was
the only claim made by British intelligence and then by Bush in the famous
sixteen words.

The liar here, then, was not Bush but Wilson. And Wilson also lied when he
told the Washington Post that he had unmasked as forgeries certain documents
given to American intelligence (by whom it is not yet clear) that supposedly
contained additional evidence of Saddam's efforts to buy uranium from Niger.
The documents did indeed turn out to be forgeries; but, according to the
Butler report,

[t]he forged documents were not available to the British government at the
time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does not
undermine [that assessment].(7)

More damning yet to Wilson, the Senate Intelligence Committee discovered
that he had never laid eyes on the documents in question:

[Wilson] also told committee staff that he was the source of a Washington
Post article . . . which said, "among the envoy's conclusions was that the
documents may have been forged because 'the dates were wrong and the names
were wrong.'" Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have
come to the conclusion that the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong"
when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names
and dates were in the reports.

To top all this off, just as Cheney had nothing to do with the choice of
Wilson for the mission to Niger, neither was it true that, as Wilson
"confirmed" for a credulous New Republic reporter, "the CIA circulated [his]
report to the Vice President's office," thereby supposedly proving that
Cheney and his staff "knew the Niger story was a flatout lie." Yet-the mind
reels-if Cheney had actually been briefed on Wilson's oral report to the CIA
(which he was not), he would, like the CIA itself, have been more inclined
to believe that Saddam had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger.

So much for the author of the best-selling and much acclaimed book whose
title alone-The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and
Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity-has set a new record for chutzpah.

But there is worse. In his press conference on the indictment against Libby,
Patrick Fitzgerald insisted that lying to federal investigators is a serious
crime both because it is itself against the law and because, by sending them
on endless wild-goose chases, it constitutes the even more serious crime of
obstruction of justice. By those standards, Wilson-who has repeatedly made
false statements about every aspect of his mission to Niger, including whose
idea it was to send him and what he told the CIA upon his return; who was
then shown up by the Senate Intelligence Committee as having lied about the
forged documents; and whose mendacity has sent the whole country into a
wild-goose chase after allegations that, the more they are refuted, the more
they keep being repeated-is himself an excellent candidate for criminal
prosecution.

And so long as we are hunting for liars in this area, let me suggest that we
begin with the Democrats now proclaiming that they were duped, and that we
then broaden out to all those who in their desperation to delegitimize the
larger policy being tested in Iraq-the policy of making the Middle East safe
for America by making it safe for democracy-have consistently used
distortion, misrepresentation, and selective perception to vilify as immoral
a bold and noble enterprise and to brand as an ignominious defeat what is
proving itself more and more every day to be a victory of American arms and
a vindication of American ideals.
-November 7, 2005

NORMAN PODHORETZ is the editor-at-large of COMMENTARY and the author of ten
books. The most recent, The Norman Podhoretz Reader, edited by Thomas L.
Jeffers, appeared in 2004. His essays on the Bush Doctrine and Iraq,
including "World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to
Win" (September 2004) and "The War Against World War IV" (February 2005).

1 Hard as it is to believe, let alone to reconcile with his general
position, Joseph C. Wilson, IV, in a speech he delivered three months after
the invasion at the Education for Peace in Iraq Center, offhandedly made the
following remark: "I remain of the view that we will find biological and
chemical weapons and we may well find something that indicates that Saddam's
regime maintained an interest in nuclear weapons."
2 Fuller versions of these and similar statements can be found at
http://www.theconversationcafe.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-3134.htmland.
Another source is http://www.rightwingnews.com/quotes/demsonwmds.php.
3 These and numerous other such quotations were assembled by Robert Kagan in
a piece published in the Washington Post on October 25, 2005.
4 Whereas both John Edwards, later to become John Kerry's running mate in
2004, and Jay Rockefeller, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence
Committee, actually did use the word in describing the threat posed by
Saddam.
5 In early November, the Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who
last year gave their unanimous assent to its report, were suddenly mounting
a last-ditch effort to take it back on this issue (and others). But to judge
from the material they had already begun leaking by November 7, when this
article was going to press, the newest "Bush lied" case is as empty and
dishonest as the one they themselves previously rejected.
6 Here is how he put it in a piece in the Los Angeles Times written in late
October of this year to celebrate the indictment of Libby: "I knew that the
statement in Bush's speech . . . was not true. I knew it was false from my
own investigative trip to Africa. . . . And I knew that the White House knew
it."
7 More extensive citations of the relevant passages from the Butler report
can be found in postings by Daniel McKivergan at www.worldwidestandard.com.
I have also drawn throughout on materials cited by the invaluable Stephen F.
Hayes in the Weekly Standard.



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