Ever since it started becoming clear that the war in Iraq was based on exaggerated and inaccurate assertions about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, the Bush White House has found itself, every once in a while, furiously trying to deflect the blame.
The effort has not been entirely successful. Polls show that a majority of Americans now believe the Bush administration intentionally misled the public about WMDs.
But then again, President Bush did win reelection.
One of the more furious bursts of blame-deflection, of course, came after former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV disclosed in July 2003 that U.S. intelligence officials had plenty of reason to know that there was no evidence to support allegations that Iraq was seeking uranium in Niger -- but that Bush chose to assert as much in his 2003 State of the Union speech anyway.
White House officials launched a dual attack -- both of which involved the CIA. On one front, they began assailing Wilson, a process that eventually led to press leaks outing his wife as a CIA agent. On the other front, they forced the CIA to take responsibility for not having insisted that Bush remove the famous "16 words" from his address.
No official body has thus far investigated the White House's use of intelligence in the run-up to war, or whether it was fair for the White House to blame the CIA and other agencies, instead of taking the blame itself. The Senate intelligence committee chose to put that issue off indefinitely and the Silberman-Robb "WMD Commission" was explicitly not authorized to do so.
But now comes today's news from Walter Pincus and Jim VandeHei on the front page of The Washington Post: "The special prosecutor in the CIA leak probe has interviewed a wider range of administration officials than was previously known, part of an effort to determine whether anyone broke laws during a White House effort two years ago to discredit allegations that President Bush used faulty intelligence to justify the Iraq war, according to several officials familiar with the case. . . .
"In doing so, special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has asked not only about how CIA operative Valerie Plame's name was leaked but also how the administration went about shifting responsibility from the White House to the CIA for having included 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Africa, an assertion that was later disputed."
So in addition to those we knew about before, who has talked to prosecutors? "[F]ormer CIA director George J. Tenet and deputy director John E. McLaughlin, former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, State Department officials, and even a stranger who approached columnist Robert D. Novak on the street," Pincus and VandeHei write.
"Based on the questions they have been asked, people involved in the case believe that Fitzgerald looked into this bureaucratic fight because the effort to discredit Wilson was part of the larger campaign to distance Bush from the Niger controversy."
There's lot of new details there, including this one: "Harlow, the former CIA spokesman, said in an interview yesterday that he testified last year before a grand jury about conversations he had with [columnist Robert] Novak at least three days before the column was published. He said he warned Novak, in the strongest terms he was permitted to use without revealing classified information, that Wilson's wife had not authorized the mission and that if he did write about it, her name should not be revealed."
Novak Speaks, Says Nothing (Again)
You may remember that Novak gave an extended on-air no comment to his CNN colleagues last month. (See my June 30 column.)
