William Safire leaves us wondering just how subtle he is, in the conclusion to his column warning against certitude:
Don't jump to hasty derision. As Mark Twain advised, the problem is not just what we don't know, but what we do know that ain't so.
Mark Twain may well have advised that, but the correct attribution seems to be to "Artemus Ward". Safire will surely be alerted.
Josh Marshall is skeptical of Safire's main point; Safire might want to re-read Tenet's July 2003 account. In anycase, the Butler report on British intelligence, which will address the British side of the Niger-uranium link, is now scheduled for July 14. Time will tell!
MORE: This article does not pin it on him, and Google can't verify it, but I KNOW that Safire once delivered the popular misquote, "Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well". I even want to date it to a summer between 1987 and 1989.
An inexplicable sloppiness has dominated this matter from the outset (Wilson op-ed last summer).
Niger wasn't mentioned in SOTU.
Brit assessment wasn't -- apparently -- limited to Niger (as Tenet statement notes). Makes sense, as Niger not only yellowcake source in Africa.
Brits didn't share sources on their assessment, leaving the CIA's doubts rather dubious, as it's hard to judge reporting when you don't know what it is.
Brits insisted their assessment took no account whatsoever of the allegedly forged documents.
Two parliamentary bodies reviewed SIS assessment while examining collateral matters and pronounced it reasonable. The Butler inquiry presumably will be more thorough and definitive -- but even that may be hard to tell.
So the weirdly, inexplicably PR-challenged WH and the preposterously biased and unreasonable press gave us a "controversy" based on:
* an op-ed by a special envoy who got a very limited and perhaps entirely misleading picture of the situation with one potential African yellowcake-source country that may well have not even been the country in question in the British assessment mentioned in the SOTU
* a brouhaha about forged documents that played no role in the matter
* a Brit assessment that the SIS and parliament stood by, and which was doubted by the CIA based on concerns about reporting they hadn't even seen
* the CIA's estimate re Iraqi nukyler activities supported the SOTU's basic message on the subject, and neither Niger nor other African uranium sources were even a factor in that estimate
Some controversy. The UK assessment may turn out to have been correct, or not (or we'll never be sure). But it's been clear since early on in the "controversy" that neither Wilson's mission nor forged documents were pertinent to the assertions in the SOTU, and clear for a long time that neither had much impact on our own CIA's estimate of the subject.
A "Seinfeld Crisis" -- a crisis about nothing. Well, not about nothing. It's a pretty good example of how the press, aptly called the "public's intelligence service," has indeed suffered a breakdown.
Posted by: IceCold | July 01, 2004 at 02:38 AM