More on Rove/Plame

Some months ago I posted this hypothesis that rather than Plame being outed for what Wilson did, Wilson was manoeuvred into going to Africa and then into telling the media about it so that the administration could destroy Plame's network of operatives and sources by outing her (supposedly in retaliation). As time passed I realized there were weak spots in the hypothesis, such as the Bush Family Evil Empire apparently being phenomenally lucky in that Wilson could be exploited to attack Plame, and addressed such matters in amendments which shored up the weak points.

Since the last amendment it has looked (to me) to be entirely plausible. Things most definitely could have played out in the way the hypothesis states but it's not compelling enough to make it extremely likely that things did play out that way. Late last night I realized two things that make it very compelling indeed.

The first thing is that the Bush administration didn't need the "Niger documents" any more than Saddam needed yellowcake from Niger. Saddam already had barrels and barrels of the stuff under UN inspections seals. If he were going to reconstitute his nuke program he'd send somebody with wirecutters to snip the seals and use the yellowcake he already had. The Busheviks needed a big lie about a "nukyular" weapons program but they could have lied and said Saddam had opened the barrels he already had. With no weapons inspectors in Iraq at the time they could have got away with it.

The UN did go back to Iraq before the war started and did verify that the seals had not been tampered with. But by then the public had been convinced that Saddam was a major threat and it wouldn't have mattered. Even now some people remain convinced Saddam had WMDs. Even now that we know conclusively that he did not, "Crashcart Cheney" still trots out the lie occasionally.

The Bush Family Evil Empire did not need the Niger Documents. And yet they never made the obvious claim that Saddam was using his existing stocks. They repeatedly tried to use the Niger Documents, even inserting the yellowcake into the State of the Union speech after they had been forced to take it out of a previous speech because the facts did not support the claim. After being told by Wilson, via many of his administration contacts, that the Niger yellowcake never happened, after being told by their own State Department analysts that the Niger yellowcake never happened, after the CIA made them remove mention of it from one of his earlier speeches, why did they persist in using it? They could have just dropped it and instead claimed Saddam had also been using his existing stocks. The timing would have raised serious suspicions amongst those few of us who think but the media would have glossed over it and the sheeple would have been none the wiser.

Now for the second thing. After repeatedly defending the Niger yellowcake claim and apparently being too dim to switch to the "existing stocks" claim, why was Condi so unconcerned about Wilson letting the cat out of the bag? They were, apparently relying on the Niger yellowcake claim to make their threat of nukes seem plausible. It would have kicked away one of the main supports of their argument for war if Wilson went public. So why is it that when Wilson finally got to speak with Condi directly about it she told him that if he was that concerned about the issue he could go to the press about it. She practically begged him to expose one of the lies that was the main supporting argument for war.

I've said it before: these people are not incompetent or stupid, just evil. But let's assume they're too stupid to have thought of the "existing stocks" claim. That would mean they would be desperate to stop Wilson going public. Here are the options they could have chosen to silence him:

1. Claim some matter of national security for keeping the lie going. But Wilson wouldn't fall for that without being told what the matter was (and it would have to be convincing).
   
   Not a good option.
   
   
2. Use the provisions of the misnamed USA PATRIOT Act to "disappear" Wilson and Plame. The trouble is her colleagues would wonder why she had vanished and might do some digging. The people at the top of the CIA and Justice Department may have been replaced by corrupt, evil Busheviks but the people lower down are still fairly honest. And it's the people lower down who handle the details and get the job done. So there's a very good chance that somebody within Justice would have told somebody within the CIA what had happened to Plame.
   
   Not a good option.
   
   
3. Get the CIA to do a "wet job" on Plame and Wilson. They have a department just for that kind of work. But they might not like being asked to take out one of their own, and the details might leak out.
   
   Not a good option.
   
   
4. Get a co-operative intelligence agency to do the dirty work. There is no shortage of candidates willing to do the job. But the most obvious one would be Israel's Mossad. Most of the neocons are strong supporters of Israel. Part of the real reason for the war in Iraq is to make Israel feel safer. The US gives a phenomenal amount of "aid" to Israel every year.
   

So there you have it. A few words in the right ears and a day or two later some crooks burglarize the Wilson household and shoot Wilson and Plame when they are disturbed.

If the Niger yellowcake really was as important as it appeared, and if there were reasons why the "existing stocks" claim could not be used, then that is what would have happened. It didn't happen that way because the whole point of the Niger yellowcake fable was to manipulate Wilson into investigating it. And the reason Condi didn't have Wilson and Plame killed was because the BFEE wanted him to go public so that they could pretend to be retaliating against him when they outed his wife. Not only did she not try to have him silenced, she encouraged him to go public.

The reason they wanted to out Plame was to destroy her network of sources and operatives. They tracked the trafficking of weapons of mass destruction. Plame and her network was a threat to the lies the BFEE will tell in the future about Iran and Syria and every other country they want to invade for oil. They got Jose Bustani, head of the UN chemical weapons inspection team fired because he was on the point of getting his team into Iraq. They tried their hardest to get head of the IAEA, ElBaradei fired so that he couldn't expose their lies about nukes.

If you want to believe that Plame wasn't the real target then you have to give convincing reasons why the Bushies didn't say Saddam had opened his existing barrels of yellowcake and why Condi encouraged Wilson to go public. Note that "incompetence" is not a convincing reason.