Only because individuals inside the White House may have broken the law are we seeing any accountability for the administration's twisting of intelligence to convince the American people, erroneously, that Saddam Hussein was somehow involved in the attacks of September 11. Congress, namely Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS) who is Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has rolled over nicely for the administration.
In the end, it is not all that surprising. That is: the lengths to which the administration had to go in order to kill any dissention within the government. The problem all along was that not every employee in the federal government is a political appointee, so the President did not have the opportunity to install his cronies in every corner of the bureaucracy. The CIA, with all of its career professionals, always had doubts about the administration's claims about Iraq, and shared them with the administration. From today's L.A. Times:
For example, CIA officials repeatedly told Cheney and others in his circle that they did not think Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had met with Iraqi agents in Prague, Czech Republic, before the attacks. [...]
"It's been pretty well confirmed that he did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack," Cheney said Dec. 9, 2001, on NBC's "Meet the Press."
The allegation was not backed up with reliable intelligence, as Cheney and his staff had been repeatedly told, according to a former CIA official. The matter was addressed in public when senators asked CIA Director Porter J. Goss during his confirmation hearings last year to assess the accuracy of Cheney's allegations.
"I don't think it was as well-confirmed perhaps as the vice president thought," said Goss, a Florida Republican who had been chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. "But I don't know what was in the vice president's mind, and I've certainly never talked with him about this. So I don't know how we came to that conclusion."
How WE came to that conclusion?! The possible indictments of White House officials in the Plame case are just a byproduct of the administration's whole Iraq marketing campaign. A campaign that has included nothing less than the wholesale misrepresentation of facts by the President and Vice President, with statements like: "It's been pretty well confirmed..." No. It hasn't.
Maybe some individuals who work in the White House, even high-ranking ones like Karl Rove, will be found guilty of going too far in the administration's campaign to sell the war in Iraq by revealing the identity of an undercover CIA agent to the press. That the possibility even exists seems indicative of the whole enterprise.
Update: From Roll Call's "Heard on the Hill" column...
House Republican leaders apparently have floated Cheney to receive the prestigious Congressional Medal of Freedom award, along with CIA director and former Florida Republican Rep. Porter Goss.
