Administration's Stories Don't Add Up

The Administration’s story about why they outed Valerie Plame makes no sense.

One strategy early on was to deny they even knew who Joseph Wilson was. Don’t know him. Who is he? I wouldn’t know if he even had a wife. etc etc.

Soon after, and side by side with this previous denial strategy, Cheney and the others started claiming that the real reason, now, that they started focusing on Joseph Wilson—who is he? we don’t know….—was to “set the record straight.”

On what exactly? Well, it seems the most publicly damaging piece of “misinformation” about Joseph Wilson’s trip to Niger to look into the uranium claims was…who sent him.

Wilson had said that the CIA sent him, after a request from the Vice President’s office for more information about the Niger uranium claims. He never said the Vice President sent him. The CIA sent him. And they did. No false information there.

But the new lie was that the Administration was not outing a CIA agent, they were merely “setting the record straight” that it was Joseph Wilson’s wife—who is, oh yes, a CIA agent—who arranged the trip for him.

Meanwhile, everybody in the Admin during the investigation was denying outright that anybody in the Admin actually leaked the identity to the press. Apparently everybody in the Admin just heard it from the press, who got their information who the hell knows where. “Joe Wilson’s wife works at the CIA? I’ll be darned. News to me.” This was Libby’s line and that’s why he’s on the hook for five felony counts and thirty years.

Their story is ludicrous and makes no sense for several reasons.

1) There was no mistaken information to “set straight” in the first place. Wilson’s public account of his trip was true. If his wife was involved in recommending her husband—well qualified for the trip, by the way—that is an additional detail that in no way contradicts the original version.

2) How does one both not know anything about a person or his wife, but also undertake to “set the record straight” about that person and his wife?

3) Why would Scott McClellan split hairs in public about how “setting the record straight” differs from leaking a CIA operatives identity for political revenge, if it were in fact true (as in Libby’s sworn testimony) that the Admin did not reveal Plame’s name at all, rather the Admin only heard of her to begin with from journalists?

One could go on. The stories we’ve been told don’t jibe together, they just don’t add up. Rather, there are two or three contradictory narratives being used simultaneously in an attempt to explain away what really happened.

“We don’t know Joe Wilson or his wife.”

“We only heard about them from the press.”

“We only wanted to ‘set the record straight.”

These stories don’t add up—except to lies, and the liars ought to be tried, convicted, and shunted out of office into dismal cellblocks.