I don't know if this was a calculated move on Howard Dean's part, or just a random shot. But it has interesting possibilities either way:
Dean . . . said whoever was responsible for misleading Bush over claims of Iraq's nuclear weapons program should quit."Whoever it was who withheld that information, needs to resign," he said in an interview with ABC's "Good Morning America" show."
I say interesting, because the White House is obviously angling for George Tenet's resignation -- something that the neocon firebrands have been demanding since Bush took office.
But now, if Tenet resigns, it will look like Dean has drawn blood -- and an implicit confession that there is something very serious and very wrong going on inside the Bush administration. This has connotations of a different Dean's warning to a different Republican president:
John Dean: We have a cancer within, close to the Presidency, that is growing.
On the other hand, if the White House backs down, and keeps Tenet, Bush will look like he's either:
a.) Conceding his responsiblity for the Niger uranium fiasco.
or:
b.) Allowing a lying, incompetent CIA director (and even worse: a lying, incompetent Clinton-appointed CIA director) to remain in office because he doesn't want to take the political heat for firing him.
And of course, those of a more conspiratorial nature could (and no doubt would) whisper dark rumors to the effect that Shrub can't fire Tenet because he knows too much.
Nice.
If random, it was a hell of a lucky shot. If intentional, it was a very clever piece of political theatre.
Which means Karl Rove might just want to rethink his desire to run against Dean. Because this guy really is starting to sound like a different kind of Democrat -- one who knows how to use a stiletto.
Dean also called for investigation; as did McCain, who suggested whoever was responsible ought to be "fired", rather than resigning (same net effect, though).
This could be aimed higher, too; this kind of criticism doesn't accuse the President, but has clear implications, if an investigation does find the fault going all the way to the top.
Where is DIck Cheney???
what I find the most impressive about Dean's call for a resignation is the documents he lists on his site giving backup to his call. He has three documents showing timelines of statements by various parts of the administration, and then facts from other sources refutting those statements. well done. it's nice to see a politician actually have something substantial to back up his claims and make them available to the public... impressive.
Wow. A story just went up on MSNBC that goes into the fracturing of Team G-Dub unity. Check out this lead:
July 11 — The familiar drip, drip, drip of a brewing political scandal echoes through the power centers of Washington and London these days as the Bush administration and the government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair are pelted daily with increasingly pointed questions about the case they made for going to war against Iraq. The admission that the president made an apparently false allegation against Iraq in his State of the Union address was supposed to help put the issue to rest. Instead, it reopened fissures inside the administration and in Blair’s government over the validity of their case for war.
If MSNBC is putting a story like that right smack in the middle of the home page, there's trouble afoot for Bush. Big trouble.
Dean's call is quite brilliant.
First, he says that someone obviously lied to the President, and should resign. He doesn't exclude Dick Cheney from the possible suspects.
Second, he says (wink, wink) the alternative is "unthinkable," namely that Dubyah himself deliberately lied to the American people.
By caling for resignations, he's "elevating" the transgression's seriousness, and framing it as a grave breach of the public trust, and the trust of the President.
By not accusing Bush of the lie, directly, he's forcing Bush to either admit his complicity by NOT firing anyone or demanding their resignation...or he inflates the story to full blown "Watergate/Monicagate" scandal mode by firing a top level Administration official.
[Goerge Tenet would be the LOWEST level person implied in Dean's exhortation].
It, of course, has a number of other permutations as well, because by fingering Tenet today, they've declared open war on the CIA.
The CIA will then continue to leak and provide more smoking guns to implicate Condi Rice [and by extension Bush] in this whole thing.
I think it's all on Bush.
Condi was the conductor, and she doesn't take a shit without Dubyah's permission.
hmmmmmm, truly you weave a "kilim" afgani rug on that one. their house of most wanted card deck is spinning out of control. just look at 'w' in his photo opts abroad. truly the cocaine is taking its toll. twilight empire, apenas (barely).
Suggest everyone sign the deanforamerica.com petition calling for resignations.
Tenet is toast; even Pat Roberts is piling on.
I think the big question now is whether the Tenet tourniquet will stop the bleeding. It'd sure be nice if some other, bigger extremities were lost before that happens.
Where is Karen Hughes these days? Think W. will be having an impromptu meeting with Karen and Karl as soon as he gets back to D.C.?
Any chance that Nigeria will offer political asylum to G Dubya? He might need it before this weekend is out.
gDub and Charles Taylor could set themselves up in a real bad-ass crib in downtown Abuja.
When the press finally gets off it's knees, as it seems to be doing, Georgie is going to really feel the heat. Surface of the sun heat!
And why did you do all this? For money? Oooh, Boy! Lava enema time!!!!
Dean, as an early 'dissenter' on Iraq is looking smarter and smarter. He's my first choice for Dem candidate... he has earned it by standing up when even the DLC was dissing him. This Dem can and will 'carry the coals to Newcastle' and burn down the Rethuglican house of cards!
I'd like another Dem in office, any Dem, but a guy who stands up to the Rethuglicans looks very good to me. It seems to me that Howard Dean could have long coattails as well. Hey, smart Dems, imagine the Dean activists helping out in a local contest!
Go, Dems! You are going to defeat the Rethuglicans in detail! We need to start picking Rethuglicans, like DeLay, to pick off in the coming Dem landslide.
MMMMM'Kaaaaay!!!! DeLay!!!
I think Tenet was set up for this fall. He's known he's on shaky ground with the administration since 9/11, and probably caved an endorsed the misfactualized report since that was what his boss wanted from him. Now that the lid's blown off the report, Bush can easily hang him for not raising a fuss in the first place. Tenet looks incompetent, Bush looks screwed over by a Clinton appointee.
Oh god what a thought I just had. A nigerian fraud spam from GW... makes me shudder - and chuckle. I can only imagine...
Strictly confidential
Former POTUS George W. Bush, Lagos, Nigeria
...blahblah...money transfer...blahblah...contractors...blahblah...
icky.
CNN... CIA director Tenet says he made a mistake in not getting the uraninum from Africa statement removed from the SOTU.
Oh, and the CIA wrote Georgie's speech? I thought Condi was the major influence on it. And what about the buck stops here?
Sounds to me like Tenet stays on at CIA if he helps Georgie with the heat for his LIES.
This mess isn't over by a long shot!
MMMM'Kaaaay!!! Georgie!!!
Why doesn't Tenet just say they TOLD the White House that the Niger info was bogus (as they undoubtedly did)? By pointing fingers at the CIA, the White House is risking major shit.
Does anyone know the possessive for Niger? Nigeran?
I think people are getting confused with Nigeria / Nigerian in many blogs (damn those American geography skills)...
Isn't the war between the White House and the CIA is being overstated? After all George H W Bush was director of CIA, the ties that bind n all that?
Yep, having read thro' the comments again, I agree with KellyH:
Tenet looks incompetent, Bush looks screwed over by a Clinton appointee.
This is a BushCo attempt to do to the CIA what Rumsfeld has done to DoD.
Oops, that was me again.
Residents of Niger are Nigeriens.
Residents of Nigeria (which has a population 13 times that of Niger) are Nigerians.
The countries are very, VERY different, although they share a long common border.
Incidentally, the reference to Charles Taylor threw *Liberia* into the mix. That is a whole 'nother can 'o worms.
Damn I love the Whiskey Bar. I made this comment over at the DailyKos and I think it just may apply here as well:
Once again, the regime is depending on the aforementioned "fickleness" of our nation's citizens (comment posted in "Have You No Decency Sir"). In the span of 48 hours they have successfully directed attention away from the actual lie to the events surrounding the lie.
Here we sit (along with every single mass media outlet) debating whether or not the CIA was responsible, or the White House, or the Vice President, or OJ, or the LAPD, and so on and so on; but the reality of it is there is only one person responsible: GW. It's very simple. The CIA put word out that the document and its subsequent allegations were false. The White House knew and the British knew. So, through their infinite wisdom, they fixed it by changing the wording to reflect "we learned through the British that......" Which, in no way, shape or form, changes the lie. Regardless of who they say the information came from, they already knew it was false, therefore it's STILL a lie. A lie is a lie no matter how you dress it up. Prior knowledge of the lie, then pawning it off on the British for credit is still a lie.
Merriam-Webster defines a LIE (n) as:
1a: an assertion of something known or believed by the speaker to be untrue with intent to deceive
Using this definition, a lie requires three parts: a speaker; a false assertion; and intent to deceive. GW is the speaker. The statement was known to be untrue (regardless of wording). And the only plausable intent would be to deceive. If it walks like a lie, talks like a lie.....you know the rest.
One more ingredient in this: The 9/11 report. If the Bush administration is going to fire Tenet, they'd better do it quickly, because if he's still in place when that report comes out, things could get stickier. Either he'll be absolved (the report will show that his agency did what they could to provide the executive with enough intelligence), or he'll be dead meat, for not providing same intelligence.
Either way, though, the principle of vicarious responsibility needs to be applied here: the person ultimately responsible for this situation is the head of state.
L
This could get really interesting if someone inside the CIA gets pissed off about the way the White House is trying to pass the buck to the agency. Perhaps some secret documents will be forthcoming and then....
Good CNN interview with Dean here.
Choice quotes:
...So this is a serious credibility problem, and it's a lot deeper than just the Iraq-Niger deal, it has to do with assertions by the secretary of defense that he knew where weapons were that turned out not to be there, it has to do with assertions by the vice president there was a nuclear program that turned out not to exist, and assertions made by the president himself, not just about the acquisition of uranium, but also about the ability of [deposed Iraqi President] Saddam [Hussein] to use chemical weapons on the United States. We need a full-blown public investigation not held in Congress but by an outside bipartisan commission.
[i.e. 'Sixteen little words,' my ass. It goes beyond just the SOTU speech. ]
...It's beginning to sound a little like Watergate. They start throwing people over the side. The deeper you go, the more interesting it will be. It's very clear that it may be George Tenet's responsibility, but that information also existed in the State Department and it also existed in the vice president's office, so they will not get away with simply throwing George Tenet over the side.
[ How long before They start calling it 'Iraqgate?' Besides getting rid of Tenet won't be enough. ]
...Well, I think those that voted for the war in Iraq are on very thin ice. They did not exercise their senatorial requirement to advise and consent knowing all the facts. They jumped five months ahead of time, voted for a pre-emptive strike based now on what appears to be evidence that they did not question. I think that's a problem for them as well.
[ And let's not forget my fellow candidate Senators. ]
there is no exucse...SOTU is the heart of the matter...this is the defining statement of the excutive...never before and never again should the PEOPLE have this lying and ducking laid on them as policy from above...there lies the rub...in a classless society there are no redoubts to hide behind...the first thing they teach you in basic training in the Army is that there is NO EXCUSE SIR whenever confronted with your errors...good enough for the troops...good enough for the commander in chief...oh, i forgot...it's aWol
and he's daddy's little oilman...
Barbara Lee for President....
Well, the Bushit has certainly hit the fan now! (Just reading between the lines, I couldn't help but notice how decidedly partisan the rapid response of GOP Senator Roberts [Intelligence Committee] seemed.)
Bush Team Split as CIA Becomes the Fall Guy
' ONE BY ONE, all the President’s men rounded on George Tenet yesterday, forcing the CIA Director to issue a resounding mea culpa that is likely to bring his career to an abrupt end. ...'
I wonder what the next SOTU speech is going to be like...?
I don't think the Tenet mea-culpa is really a mea culpa, it is just a big honking machete going for the jugular as Tenet says "I told him we had no good evidence, but they wanted to put it in, so we did not do a good enough job of putting my foot down in keeping them from knowingly lying." Then see today's leak that the CIA told the Assistant National Security Advisor before the Cincinatti Speech to take that line out. The buck just got passed back to Condi.
Fester
Then see today's leak that the CIA told the Assistant National Security Advisor before the Cincinatti Speech to take that line out.
Fester: That's certainly music to my ears. I was thinking exactly like you afterwards -- it may be the Director's reponsibility to audit those speeches, but if his *superiors* issue a stern "No" ...
I'll be looking around for that, but post a link if you have one handy, OK? Thanks!
Found it, Fester:
CIA Got Uranium Reference Cut in Oct. [Washingon Post]
CIA Director George J. Tenet successfully intervened with White House officials to have a reference to Iraq seeking uranium from Niger removed from a presidential speech last October, three months before a less specific reference to the same intelligence appeared in the State of the Union address, according to senior administration officials.
Tenet argued personally to White House officials, including deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley, that the allegation should not be used because it came from only a single source, according to one senior official. Another senior official with knowledge of the intelligence said the CIA had doubts about the accuracy of the documents underlying the allegation, which months later turned out to be forged. ...
I think you're overcomplicating things a little.
I saw that call for resignations as a clever move; Dean knows that no one will resign -- these guys will have to be pried out of their jobs with the Jaws of life -- but he claims the higher ground by calling for unnamed executives to do the right thing and resign, instead of going on a straightforward attack.
Skillful, no doubt.