A number of readers wrote in yesterday about my morning post on the ‘futility’ of aggressively reporting on the secret British government memo (actually, minutes) which surfaced late in the British election and claimed that the White House was rigging the intelligence on Iraq to support a decision for war as far back as mid-2002.
I was less clear than I should have been. Because what I meant was not that there’s no point in aggressively reporting on this issue. My point was rather how astonishing it is that such a revelation should even be news. It truly should be old news — and thus worthy of little more than passing comment — since it only provides some further level of support or confirmation for something we know or should know clearly did happen.
It was fairly clear when it was all happening. And after the fact the details have been reported in abundance, not just in obscure publications, but in many of the nation’s leading newspapers and magazines, albeit usually shoved to the back pages. And yet the claim — not the individual morsels of the story, but the whole narrative wrapped together — still seems wildly controversial. And no one has been held to account, or rather only those who tried to stop the scam while it was afoot or put up some resistance to being coopted into it.
And with all that, why exactly did Sen. Rockefeller(D) of West Virginia roll over when Sen. Roberts (R) of Kansas pulled the plug on the rest of the inquiry into administration manipulation of intelligence on Iraqi WMD?
