David Ignatius of the Washington Post has the same problem the rest of the MSM has with the Plame Game. First by way of example, a fact of science is that if your premise (or beginning for the Kos Kids) is wrong then your conclusions will be off by a million miles.

Ignatius as the rest have this problem because they see the Plame Game as ONLY “The administration’s attempt to silence a critic of the war”. No David, we have guns for that, and quite frankly Bill Clinton silenced a lot of his critics very well and forever in some cases - right Ron?

Anyway I digress.

In his latest “opinion” which he titles, “A Failed Cover-Up“, he begins with a debunked false premise:

“Why was the White House so nervous in the summer of 2003 about the CIA’s reporting on alleged Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Niger to build a nuclear bomb? That’s the big question that runs through the many little details that have emerged in the perjury trial of Vice President Cheney’s former top aide, Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

The trial record suggests a simple answer: The White House was worried that the CIA would reveal that it had been pressured in 2002 and early 2003 to support administration claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and that in the Niger case, the CIA had tried hard to resist this pressure. The machinations of Cheney, Libby and others were an attempt to weave an alternative narrative that blamed the CIA.”

Whooboy, and they pay this guy. Had he done his research - something modern day journalism dispenses with in order to get the headline out - he would have known that the “Bush administration pressured the CIA” myth was debunked long ago, not by media, but by those who participated in the process of providing the data.

First, Stu Cohen who is an intelligence professional with 30 years of service in the CIA, and who was acting Chairman of the National Intelligence Council when the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction was published, said:

“The judgments presented in the October 2002 NIE were based on data acquired and analyzed over fifteen years. Any changes in judgments over that period were based on new evidence, including clandestinely collected information that led to new analysis. Our judgments were presented to three different Administrations. And the principal participants in the production of the NIE from across the entire US Intelligence Community have sworn to Congress, under oath, that they were NOT pressured to change their views on Iraq WMD or to conform to Administration positions on this issue. In my particular case, I was able to swear under oath that not only had no one pressured me to take a particular view but that I had not pressured anyone else working on the Estimate to change or alter their reading of the intelligence information.”

Therefore from this false and debunked premise Ignatius begins his decent into hyperbole and fantasy about how Bush and Cheney tried to hide the truth, when in fact the opposite was true. That they were instead trying to get to the bottom of an analsys that had been accepted but now called into question because of activity of a few rogue officers of the service.

The “Niger Question” wasn’t the only rationale for war in case anyone has forgot and in fact Wilson’s so-called report to the agency indeed confirmed that Iraq had been seeking Uranium but in fact no “buy” had been accomplished, a fact that Ignatius in his BDS conveniently failed to mention. In fact Wilson had previously been to Niger in 1999 as I covered previously to provide “cover” for an elaborate Uranium black market scheme which has yet to find the light of day in the press, but is at the heart of the Plame Game. That in fact the “cover up” wasn’t with the Bush Administration but from a small group of rogues who were trying to coverup illegal activities.

Yet for clarification on the Niger question being the ONLY rational for war, again Cohen says in the estimate it was only a small piece of the equasion.

“{the yellow cake question} was not one of the reasons underpinning our Key Judgment about nuclear reconstitution. In the body of the Estimate, after noting that Iraq had considerable low-enriched and other forms of uranium already in country‚Äîenough to produce roughly 100 nuclear weapons‚Äîwe included the Niger issue with appropriate caveats, for the sake of completeness. Mentioning, with appropriate caveats, even unconfirmed reporting is standard practice in NIEs and other intelligence assessments; it helps consumers of the assessment understand the full range of possibly relevant intelligence”

False premise, false conclusions.