"Oh what a tangled web we weave,The conspiracy that bubbles around Judith Miller protecting a source -- whose name she couldn't remember -- and Robert Novak using his column to out undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame should soon evaporate. The next step should lead Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald to the heart of the matter: a much more pernicious conspiracy designed to mislead the United States into war with Iraq. The crime to name a covert CIA official pales in comparison with conspiring to lead the nation to war under false pretenses.
When first we practice to deceive!"
--Walter Scott
Novak served as White House mastermind Karl Rove's press poodle. He punished former Ambassador Joseph Wilson by revealing his wife's name and ending her career on Juuly 14, 2003, eight days after Plame's husband revealed in a NY Times op-ed (July 6, 2003) the fraudulence of Bush Administration claims that Iraq had tried to purchase African uranium for its nuclear weapons program.
Instead of following the logic of Wilson's story, that the White House had conspired to lead the country into an unjust war, the media focused on the leak of a CIA' official's name. Reporters should have seen the Wilson story as one piece of a larger puzzle. They should have read Wilson's Times op ed and other stories as an opening to look for who had motive to forge a document and plant it, so that the media would get properly "spun" and accept this forged paper as proof of Saddam's perfidy.
Now, it begins to emerge that the White House undertook a major effort to mislead and manipulate the media and U.S. public opinion in general in order to get support for an unjust war.
