Newsweek agrees, It's all about Cheney

This morning I suggested the Plamegate was all about Dick Cheney. Well Michael Isikoff and Newsweek agree.

Prelude to a Leak

Gang fight: How Cheney and his tight-knit team launched the Iraq war, chased their critics—and set the stage for a special prosecutor's dramatic probe.

They give us a good look of the mindset and workings of Dick Cheney and the gang around him, especially one Scooter Libby.
The Gang

Cheney had long distrusted the apparatchiks who sat in offices at the CIA, FBI and Pentagon. He regarded them as dim, timid timeservers who would always choose inaction over action. Instead, the vice president relied on the counsel of a small number of advisers. The group included Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and two Wolfowitz proteges: I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, and Douglas Feith, Rumsfeld's under secretary for policy. Together, the group largely despised the on-the-one-hand/on-the-other analyses handed up by the intelligence bureaucracy. Instead, they went in search of intel that helped to advance their case for war.

As Rumsfeld would say, sometimes you have to start a war based on the intelligence you want not the intelligence you have.
Enter Joe Wilson
Cheney told the CIA he wanted evidence that Saddam had tried to buy uranium from Niger. The CIA sent Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger to investigate. Joe Wilson returned and told the CIA the story was false. Newsweek doubts that Wilson's report ever made it to Cheney but believes he would have ignored it even if it had; not the intelligence we want. And then:

Joseph Wilson grew increasingly agitated that the White House had not come clean about how the African-uranium claim made it into George W. Bush's 2003 State of the Union address. In June, Condoleezza Rice went on TV and denied she knew that documents underlying the uranium story were, in fact, crude forgeries: "Maybe somebody in the bowels of the agency knew something about this," she said, "but nobody in my circles." For Wilson, that was it. "That was a slap in the face," he told NEWSWEEK. "She was saying 'F--- you, Washington, we don't care.' Or rather 'F--- you, America'." On July 6, Wilson went public about his Niger trip in his landmark New York Times op-ed piece.

From there, as we now know, things got a bit out of hand. Within the White House inner circle, Wilson's op-ed was seen as an act of aggression against Bush and Cheney. Someone, perhaps to punish the loose-lipped diplomat, let it be known to columnist Robert Novak and other reporters that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was an undercover CIA operative, a revelation that is a possible violation of laws protecting classified information.

There is more in the article that's worth reading but the above is the meat of it. An attack on the Cheney/Rumsfeld cabal was a crime to be punished.

One thing that is becoming clear is that Karl Rove was little more than a trained attack dog but I guess that's really all he's ever been.

It will be curious to see what General Scowcroft has to say tomorrow.