Dubya Part of the Plame Cover-up?

AlterNet

The latest piece of evidence was the statement from former White House press secretary Scott McClellan that Bush was one of five senior officials who had him clear Karl Rove and I. Lewis Libby in the leak when, in fact, they were two of the leakers.


"The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore the credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq," McClellan said in a snippet released by the publisher of his upcoming memoir.


"So I stood at the White House briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby," McClellan said. "There was one problem. It was not true."


After McClellan's statement touched off a brief furor on the Internet and cable TV shows, his publisher Peter Osnos tried to soften the blow. Osnos told Bloomberg News that McClellan didn't mean that Bush deliberately ordered his press secretary to lie.


"He told him something that wasn't true, but the President didn't know it wasn't true," Osnos said.


What Bush Knew


But neither McClennan nor Osnos knows what Bush really knew.


The revelatory point in McClellan's statement was that Bush was a direct participant in the campaign to protect Rove and Libby as they lied about their roles in the leak. Previously that was an inference one could draw from the facts, but it had not been confirmed by a White House official.


Indeed, looking at the available evidence, it would defy credulity that Bush wasn't implicated in the Plame-gate leak and the subsequent cover-up, which led to Libby's conviction earlier this year on four counts of perjury and obstruction of justice.


For Bush not to have been involved would have required him to be oblivious to the inner workings of the White House and the actions of his closest advisers on an issue of great importance to him.


From the evidence at Libby's trial, it was already clear that Bush had a direct hand in the effort to discredit Plame's husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, after he had gone public in July 2003 with his role in a CIA investigation of what turned out to be bogus claims that Iraq had sought yellowcake uranium from Niger.


Bush, who had cited those bogus claims in his 2003 State of the Union Address in making his case for invading Iraq, was worried about his credibility when U.S. forces failed to find WMD evidence and when Wilson became the first Washington insider to start questioning Bush's case for war.


So, Bush collaborated with Vice President Dick Cheney in mounting a counter-attack against Wilson. Bush decided to selectively declassify portions of a National Intelligence Estimate in order to undercut Wilson's credibility and agreed to have that information leaked to friendly reporters.