White House lie machine exposed

BY ITSELF, the CIA leak scandal is about a narrow question: Did White House officials reveal the identity of an undercover CIA agent, as political retribution against her husband. The frenzy in Washington reached a fever pitch last week as Patrick Fitzgerald--the federal prosecutor who took over a Justice Department investigation after former Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself nearly two years ago--announced an indictment against Lewis “Scooter” Libby, but not Karl Rove, mastermind of Bush’s presidential campaigns.

But the scandal raises much deeper questions--above all, why and how the U.S. went to war in Iraq based on lies. The leaks to the press about Valerie Plame are at the end of a long chain of fraud and manipulation, managed by a government within the government--concretely, the White House Iraq Group, established in August 2002 with Rove as its chair, to come up with the strategy to sell the war.

The heart of the leak scandal is one relatively minor claim in the White House case for war--that the Iraqi government was seeking uranium for nuclear weapons from the African country of Niger.

The documents that supposedly proved Iraq’s hunt for uranium were crude forgeries. According to an investigative series in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, they were cooked up by an Italian freelance spy with connections to the country’s paramilitary police and assorted right-wing groups. The information was fed by Italy’s intelligence agency to like-minded right-wingers in Washington, such as Michael Ledeen, the influential neocon in Washington, and Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley.

Several times, intelligence agents for different countries--including the CIA--recognized the Niger story as a fraud. But the information continued to circulate, with the U.S. and British governments each advising the other of the allegations, apparently not realizing that the information came from the same crooked source.

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http://www.socialistworker.org/2005-2/564/564_06_LieMachine.shtml