Among the White House materials withheld from the committee were Libby-authored passages in drafts of a speech that then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell delivered to the United Nations in February 2003 to argue the Bush administration's case for war with Iraq, according to congressional and administration sources. The withheld documents also included intelligence data that Cheney's office -- and Libby in particular -- pushed to be included in Powell's speech, the sources said.
My first thought is that the fallout from the Fitzgerald investigation is looking like it will be far wider than expected. But then my second thought is about the 2004 election. A popular refrain on the right during the election was that John Kerry had the same intelligence as Bush when he voted to authorize the use of force. Therefore, Kerry couldn't really attack Bush on the war. Carla Marinucci of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote about this strategy on the part of the Bush campaign last summer.
"If Sen. Kerry now wants to come out and say, ' I looked at the intelligence ... I said (Hussein) was a danger. I said he had weapons of mass destruction. But the president is a liar for saying the same thing?' That's going to be a hard sell to the American people,'' Rove said in an interview during a stopover in Sacramento on Friday.
"In order to be intellectually honest, then (the Democratic presidential team) has got to say if Bush is wrong for believing these things, Kerry is equally wrong for believing them as well.''
But did they really have the same intelligence? We know what kind of deceptions the White House was willing to engage in to justify a war in Iraq. And we now know that they lied to the Senate about the intelligence, at least after the war. While it's now a moot point to say that Kerry and Bush did not have the same intelligence on Iraq during the run up to war (not to mention not at all a surprise), everyone who repeated that charge owes Kerry a serious apology, from the so-called liberal media on down.
Kerry's not really the point here, though. The focus should be on Vice President Dick Cheney and the fact that he and his staff have continuously and repeatedly conspired to conceal the truth from the American people. And I'd be surprised if they did it without cooperation from the President's staff as well. The other day, I was half-joking about the prospect of Cheney leaving the administration. Now I'm starting to think it's practically a done deal.
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