Sue Schmidt has the article today in the Post covering the release of <$NoAd$>Joe Wilson’s new book. The article is about as exculpatory of the administration as it could possibly be — rather like if she were the defense attorney trying to order the evidence on the administration’s behalf. She goes as far as she is able to actually revive the uranium claim.
Read the piece through to get a full sense of what I mean. But take for example her description of one key element of the Wilson story …
Sahhaf’s role casts more light on an aspect of Wilson’s report to the CIA that was publicly disclosed last summer. On the heels of Wilson’s public criticism that intelligence was exaggerated and his statement that his trip to Niger had turned up no uranium sales to Iraq, agency Director George J. Tenet took the blame for allowing President Bush to make assertions about the Iraqi quest for nuclear material in his 2003 State of the Union address. Tenet said the intelligence had been too “fragmentary” to merit inclusion in the speech.
Here Schmidt essentially buys into to the cover that no one who has looked into this story at all takes seriously — namely, George Tenet’s taking the fall for his agency’s allowing itself to be bullied by the White House into letting this bogus story into the president’s State of the Union address.
Now, I’m not in a position to get deeply into this question because I’ve been reporting on just these issues for several months. But from what’s already been quite well reported in Schmidt’s own paper, we know that Tenet’s fault in this case was finally giving in to pressure from two top officials at the NSC who insisted repeatedly — with regards to more than one speech — that these bogus claims be placed in the president’s speech.
