Where Left Is Right / The Old Site

One of the great losses resulting from the NY Times' recent "Times Select" policy -- in which you must pay to access what the Times considers premium content -- remains the unavailability to non-subscribers of Frank Rich's Sunday column. Today's entry, headlined "It's Bush-Cheney, Not Rove-Libby," is a case in point.

The thrust of Rich's argument, as the headline asserts: Don't be distracted by the Grand Guignol entertainments (rich though they may be) of who leaked the information on Valerie Plame's CIA employment to the media (particularly to the execrable Novak). Remember what that leak was really about: protecting the White House-based conspiracy of lies leading to the Iraq invasion.

Rich:

Deep in a Wall Street Journal account of Judy Miller's grand jury appearance was this crucial sentence: "Lawyers familiar with the investigation believe that at least part of the outcome likely hangs on the inner workings of what has been dubbed the White House Iraq Group."

Very little has been written about the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG. Its inception in August 2002, seven months before the invasion of Iraq, was never announced. Only much later would a newspaper article or two mention it in passing, reporting that it had been set up by Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff. Its eight members included Mr. Rove, Mr. Libby, Condoleezza Rice and the spinmeisters Karen Hughes and Mary Matalin. Its mission: to market a war in Iraq.

Never heard of the White House Iraq Group? Despite what Rich says, it's been written about before, many times. You just won't find anything about it on The Weasel's own site. It's invisible and, apparently, unasked-about once you set foot anywhere at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. (Note: This is not the same as the Iraq Stabilization Group, which you will find referred to as the "Iraq Group" at whitehouse.gov, in a Scott McLellan press briefing of October 2003.)

Digby, for one, mentioned the WHIG as early as February, 2004:

According to Newsday today [Note: story no longer available online]:

Also sought in the wide-ranging document requests contained in three grand jury subpoenas to the Executive Office of President George W. Bush are records created in July by the White House Iraq Group, a little-known internal task force established in August 2002 to create a strategy to publicize the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

So, it now turns out that the "Iraq Group," the supervisory marketing arm of the Iraq march to war is in the sights of the Plame grand jury. Jim Wilkinson is the one member of the administration who is simultaneously a member of the OGC and the Iraq Group.

The thing to remember about both the OGC and the Iraq Group is that they are not just spin artists. They are propagandists. They were very involved with Alisdair Campbell in the "sexing up" of the WMD threat, so it will be very interesting to see if these documents are turned over without a lot of national security hoo-hah.

(Aside: The OGC is the Office of Global Communications, "formerly the Coalition Information Center (CIC)," which Digby had covered earlier.)

If you're even minimally aware of the Downing Street Memos, it comes as no news at all that the White House was beating the Iraq war drums well in advance of any actual evidence that Iraq had anything significant to do with terrorism or, for that matter, with 9/11. Where the information about the WHIG becomes more significant is that it (the information) isn't based on possibly suspect European (albeit British) documents; it's based on the actual hard work of US journalists. (Even if, you know, the results of the hard work have since been overlooked.)

Rich again, and finally:

And on Sept. 6, 2002 - just a few weeks after WHIG first convened - Mr. Card [that's Andrew Card, The Weasel's chief of staff] alluded to his group's existence by telling Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times that there was a plan afoot to sell a war against Saddam Hussein: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."

The official introduction of that product began just two days later. On the Sunday talk shows of Sept. 8, Ms. Rice warned that "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," and Mr. Cheney, who had already started the nuclear doomsday drumbeat in three August speeches, described Saddam as "actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons." The vice president cited as evidence a front-page article, later debunked, about supposedly nefarious aluminum tubes co-written by Judy Miller in that morning's Times. The national security journalist James Bamford, in "A Pretext for War," writes that the article was all too perfectly timed to facilitate "exactly the sort of propaganda coup that the White House Iraq Group had been set up to stage-manage."

The administration's doomsday imagery was ratcheted up from that day on. As Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus of The Washington Post would determine in the first account of WHIG a full year later, the administration's "escalation of nuclear rhetoric" could be traced to the group's formation. Along with mushroom clouds, uranium was another favored image, the Post report noted, "because anyone could see its connection to an atomic bomb." It appeared in a Bush radio address the weekend after the Rice-Cheney Sunday show blitz and would reach its apotheosis with the infamously fictional 16 words about "uranium from Africa" in Mr. Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address on the eve of war.

[...]

Whether or not Mr. Fitzgerald uncovers an indictable crime, there is once again a victim, but that victim is not Mr. or Mrs. Wilson; it's the nation. It is surely a joke of history that even as the White House sells this weekend's constitutional referendum as yet another "victory" for democracy in Iraq, we still don't know the whole story of how our own democracy was hijacked on the way to war.

An irony unremarked upon by Rich is that August, 2002 -- when the WHIG was first set up -- was exactly a year after the notorious "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." Presidential Daily Briefing.

And although he soft-pedals it, also notable in this passage is Rich's naming of the Times' own Judy Miller as an accessory to the pre-war fog of mis- and disinformation. While it's exhilarating to see the So-Called Liberal Media finally bestirring itself to cover, on a grand scale, the depredations of The Weasel's misAdministration, that they took so frigging long to get to it must rank as one of the greatest failures of a "free" press in our nation's history.