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Originally posted by sgtclub
It has been argued that how he was hired goes to his credibility. To me it is not relavent, but that is what the chattering classes are saying.
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So what? Why is his credibility important? It has nothing to do with the legality of burning his wife, and it has nothing to do with the decision to go to war? It's only of interest to people wanting to trash him.
eta: As Kevin Drum says, "Bottom line: Joe Wilson could be the biggest liar since Baron Munchausen, but who cares? Having gotten things started, he's now out of the picture. Fitzgerald is all that matters now."
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He has not been "proven right" about the uranium scare, and you conveniently ignored by post on this. Remember, Wilson is only a moderately significant figure in all this mess because he raised the 16 SOTU words issue. The UK stands by their assessment of the Niger issue and FT reporting is backing that up. So how is he proven right?
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(1) We don't know the rest of the story about the forged documents.
(2) Our intel people thought the British were all wet on that story, so it's a little bizarre to see conservatives ignore our own intel in favor of theirs simply because theirs reaches the right result, particularly when we don't know their sources. While bizarre, it does underscore the larger problem with pinning the policy failures on the CIA, which is that it's painfully obvious that the White House is deciding what it wants to do, and then cherry-picking whatever intelligence supports that end (here, British intel, no matter that the CIA said it was wrong), and, further, that the CIA got the message and told the White House only what it wanted to hear. This, presumably, is why the CIA apparently never bothered to tell Cheney what Wilson said when he got back from Niger, notwithstanding that Cheney's request for more info apparently was what got him sent there in the first place.
(3) There was no nuclear program. Iraq was not trying to get uranium. So the only question now is how embarrassed all these people should be. Wilson was on the right side of that one.*
(4) If you are defending Bush from lying in the State of the Union re the Nigerian uranium, I think you can rest easy, for others have already fallen on their swords for him. Even though the same claim was taken out of an earlier Bush speech because the CIA said it was wrong, and even though it's not clear why White House speechwriters were working so hard to put it back in -- lack of more compelling support for the war, perhaps? -- Tenet took the blame for not reading the speech. Conveniently enough, he has resigned. No one but no one pretends that Bush bothered to inform himself about what was, you know, in his own speech, so we all just accept that the President is a mouthpiece for whoever is feeding him policy, and -- since the speechwriters are off the hook until the election -- we've all decided to chalk it up to
structural problems and Tenet's oversight.
"The buck stops here."
-- Harry S Truman
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eta: George Tenet: "These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president....and CIA should have ensured that it was removed."
