Greg Sargent comments on Murray Waas and Valerie Plame

i posted on murray waas' national journal article last week... greg sargent builds on murray's article and 'splains it all for you...

The history of recent presidential deception tells us that the small, initial cover-ups, ones which at first appear to make little sense, are frequently motivated by a desire to prevent other, larger damaging revelations from surfacing. If Waas is right, it seems plausible that the whole sordid saga unfolded this way:

White House officials, including Bush himself, withheld critical information it had about doubts over supposed evidence of Saddam's nuke ambitions in order to better make the case for war. Then they subsequently discovered that hard evidence existed of that duplicity. Then, anxious that this evidence might surface before the 2004 reelection, they engaged in a relentless campaign to cover up what really happened during the Iraq run-up and to prevent an aggressive congressional investigation until after the election. They relied on Pat Roberts to run a pseudo-investigation; they withheld the daily briefs; they leaned on Hill allies not to talk to the press. And they obscured their role in the outing of Plame to prevent an outcry that would have certainly forced Congress and the press to probe far more aggressively than they did. And they succeeded: If Congress and the press had been more aggressive -- and this may be the real significance of Waas's story -- it's perfectly possible that John Kerry would now be president.

If that’s how it happened, then it may be only a matter of time before the whole story comes tumbling out. Waas has reported that there’s a piece of paper out there that proves Bush deceived the nation during the run-up to the war. The nation’s premiere investigative reporters, one would think, would very much like to see that piece of paper for themselves. And if there’s one thing recent history tells us, it’s that the small, short-term cover-ups never do succeed in preventing the larger story from coming to light. That larger story is still waiting to be told in all its gristly detail – and, eventually, reporters other than Murray Waas will get around to telling it.

dribble, dribble, drip, drip, piece by piece, we're gettin' the truth... i'm just sayin'...

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