Ah, so you're admitting Rove committed a crime!! Seriously, how did Wilson expose his wife's identity NOT AS HIS WIFE, but as a CIA operative??? Her EXISTENCE was never in question, it was her JOB that made talking about her, um, problematic.
Hitchens wieghs in. What does it mean when promient left-leaning intellectuals keep saying there's no there there? Sachin
He was pretty strong in his support for the war so if he allows himself to admit that Wilson's report was credible, then he looks like an idiot. Simple.
But Wilson's report was not at all credible. The CIA apparently never even included it in any of their summaries, and in any case they considered it - as does anyone who has actually read it, including the bipartisan Senate Investigation Committee - to be SUPPORTIVE of the position that Iraq had tried to buy yeloowcake uranium. Why is that simple fact so difficult for all of you to grasp here? Wilson said that the miniter of mines told him that Iraq had approached him about buying the stuff. Period. Now later on he said the opposite and then went to work for John Kerry, who quickly dumped him like a rock when the 9/111 commission pointed out that he was lying. None of this is deniable. Secondly, pardon me, but exactly what kind of intelligence gathering is this? Wilson himself says he sat by a hotel pool "drinking sweet tea" as a bunch of Niger-government arranged interviews took place. Is this how the Mossad gathers reliable intelligence? MI-%? The Surite? ANYBODY? This had so much resonance (despite the $10,000 fee Wilson collected) that apparently his findings, EVEN THOUGH THEY SUPPORTED THE BRITISH POSITION, were not included in the CIA's report because they just lacked any kind of serious sourcing. Look, let's be honest: the problem here is that for the last five years the first words out of any leftie's mouth is "Bush lied" and the only thing you can find that he "lied" about was this (even though, of course, what he SAID was the "British intelligence" had made a finding, which was then and is now completely true. But you know that and don't care, right?) . So when it turns out that the ONLY "evidence" you have comes from Wilson, who then had to turn around and admit to the 9/11 commission that in fact it was HE who lied, not Bush, what do you do? YOU IGNORE IT. Pretend it didn't really happen. Because you simply cannot abandon the "Bush lied" meme, despite the fact that he simply did not. But simply refusing to admit the plain unvarnished truth is like putting your hands over your ears and screaming I CAN'T HEAR YOU LALALALALALALA. It doesn't make you right. Just really scary.