The Plamegate Anomalies

Part 1

Have you ever seen one of those fiendishly-clever jigsaw puzzles which can be put together in two different ways giving two different pictures? The really fiendish thing about those puzzles is that there is only one correct solution. Put it together one way and you get a picture with no pieces left over; put it together the other way and you get a different picture with half a dozen pieces left over, and you know you have to start over. It goes without saying that the puzzle is intentionally designed so that as you piece it together the picture that is most likely to emerge is the wrong one.

Plamegate is like that: with the conventional explanation of Plamegate you end up with five pieces left over. Five big anomalies that cannot be resolved by the conventional understanding of what took place: supposedly that Wilson exposed a Bushevik lie, that the Busheviks retaliated, that the retaliation had the unwanted side-effect of outing Plame (collateral damage), and that outing Plame had the unwanted side-effect of destroying her network (yet more collateral damage).

Most people have overlooked these anomalies, never even noticing that they had pieces of the puzzle left over. Those who did notice the extra pieces decided they were unimportant since they had a complete picture. But the puzzle is not complete unless you use all the pieces.

As explanations go, the conventional explanation is quite plausible since we expect the Busheviks to punish those that oppose them. We'd have been stunned if the Busheviks hadn't attacked Wilson. But like those jigsaw puzzles, Plamegate was designed so that the picture most likely to emerge was the wrong one.

As I said, there are five pieces left over. Here are the anomalies that the conventional explanation does not resolve:

1. The Bushies didn't need the Niger documents.

2. The forgeries were incredibly bad.

3. Cheney asked that the claims be investigated.

4. When Wilson finally managed direct contact with Condi she practically begged him to go public.

5. The Bushies were incredibly lucky that Wilson's wife was a CIA NOC ("Non-official cover," meaning "spy," meaning "if you get caught, you're not a diplomat so you have no protection.") who could be outed as a means of punishing Wilson.

I'd like to propose an alternative explanation that uses all those left-over pieces to construct a different picture. One that is darker, and far more evil. First, let me expand upon those anomalies so you realize just how important they are. They are not pieces from a different jigsaw puzzle that accidentally got into the box. They are not unimportant pieces. Unless you can fit those extra pieces into the puzzle by explaining these anomalies, the picture you end up with is not the correct solution.

1. Saddam already had many barrels of yellowcake under UN inspection seals. He'd have had to kick the UN inspectors out (if they were already there) in order to construct the centrifuges and all the rest of the plant he'd need to process the yellowcake into weapons, so he wouldn't worry about getting caught breaking the seals. He simply didn't need the Niger yellowcake.

   Therefore the Bushies didn't need the Niger documents either. Any rational construction would have said "He already has the yellowcake, he's openly bought the tubes for centrifuges [we now know that tubes were entirely unsuited for that] so it's obvious he plans to start building nukes." End of story. An entirely plausible (for those who didn't know the truth about the tubes) story that would scare people into believing Saddam had the intention of making nukes and already had everything he needed to do so.

2. It would appear that the headed paper and seals needed to create the forgeries were stolen from the Niger embassy in Italy some months before the appearance of the forgeries. Nothing else was stolen, so the only purpose of that robbery was to create those forgeries. So we have a forger who can plan, and successfully carry out, a robbery of an embassy for the sole purpose of creating those forgeries. A forger who spends months creating the forgeries. A forger who would almost certainly have had to consult an encyclopædia or use google to find out which officials of state would have to agree to the deal and which people held those offices at the time of the deal, yet got the details wrong.

   If you believe this was done at the behest of the Bushies, surely they'd have known that those documents would be looked at by the CIA, by Colin Powell and the rest of the State Department, and maybe many others. Somebody was bound to spot the errors, and it turned out that both the State Department and the CIA did spot the errors, and told Cheney about them. Surely, if these documents were a critical part of their call for war they'd have taken pains to make them entirely plausible so that nobody would be tempted to double-check, or at least would have difficulty disproving the claims.

   If you believe this was just some random Italian crook who had an idea on how to make money from an Italian tabloid, he doesn't need to do better than fool the reporter long enough to get payment. But why would he deliberately mess up? It would have to be deliberate since he'd have to do the research anyway. Perhaps this hypothetical forger had a heart of gold and wanted to make money but didn't want his creation to be used to justify a war. Possible, but unlikely.

3. Cheney actually requested that the claims be investigated. This is a man who, both before and after, cherry-picked any intelligence, no matter how dubious, no matter how many footnotes from the CIA, or Dept of Energy, of Department of State, stating that they believed it to be bogus, and claimed it as rock-solid fact.

   This is a man who, long after previous lies about WMDs had been proven to be bogus, continued to blithely trot them out as fact. Bush, humiliatingly, was forced to admit the Niger claims were wrong but, for many months after Bush's admission, Cheney continued to repeat those same claims. The US military and UN weapons inspectors found no trace of WMDs in Iraq yet, months after their reports saying that there were no WMDs, Cheney continued to say there were. Bush, in yet another humiliation, was forced to admit there were no connections between Osama been Forgotten and Saddam, yet Cheney still claims there were.

   The evidence is clear. Cheney has never been one to let a trivial thing like "truth" get in his way. And yet, this one time, rather than gleefully accepting the Niger documents as supporting his aims and ignoring CIA warnings that the documents were bogus, Cheney asked for the claim to be investigated. Sure, the investigation might prove the claims to be true, but Cheney had not worried about truth with regard to other claims. More likely the investigation would prove the claims to be false, and Cheney surely wouldn't want that.

   What happened that day? Did aliens replace Cheney with a pod person and it was only when the real Cheney was found in his undisclosed secure location days later that the pod person was destroyed? That same day did Cheney declare that Halliburton should never be given a no-bid, open-ended, cost-plus contract because Halliburton was thieving scum? That same day, did Cheney call for swingeing taxes on the obscenely rich so that the poor could receive free medical care? Any of those events would have been no more astounding than Cheney requesting an investigation into the Niger documents.

   Something really smells here.

4. Wilson made repeated attempts, through various contacts, to get the Bushies to stop referring to the Niger documents. He was ignored. Finally he had direct contact (I don't know if it was face-to-face or a phone call) with Condi. She told him that if it troubled him so much he should go public about it.

   This is absolutely bizarre. The Niger documents were apparently so important to the Bushies' call for war that they'd out a CIA NOC in retribution for Wilson exposing their lies. Bush and Cheney would be made to look like fools and liars (some of us already thought that) if Wilson went public. And yet Condi, faithful and loyal to Bush, casually tells Wilson to go public as though they didn't care if the lie was exposed or not?

   In that situation Condi ought to have told Wilson that there was a deeply secret national security reason why they had to keep those documents alive for the present and that it would take a couple of days to get him the special clearance needed so she could tell him that reason. Then she'd either make up something Wilson might fall for such as "We know Saddam is really up to this, but we want him to think we're following the wrong trail." (except she'd have to have enough evidence to make it very convincing), or order a hit. If she decided on the hit, it would be dangerous to get the CIA to do it (it might leak) so she'd give Mossad a call (Israel strongly wanted this war in Iraq so Mossad would be happy to help out).

   Or, if Condi didn't think she could bluff Wilson with a reason the administration couldn't yet stop using the Niger documents and didn't have the stomach for a hit, would realize the game was up and that whether the administration backed down ("New intelligence has revealed the Niger documents were forgeries.") or Wilson went public, they'd no longer be able to use the Niger claims. Either way the Niger claims would be out of the game, but one way would allow the administration to retain a degree of credibility (their supporters could say the administration was not afraid to admit when it was wrong therefore all the other claims must be true) whilst the other way would make the administration seem like fools and liars so that none of their other claims could be trusted either.

   But what actually happened was that Condi encouraged Wilson to go public. Was that meant to be a bluff? "If I tell him I don't care if he exposes it as a lie then maybe he'll think it's unimportant to me and not bother."

   Again, something smells here, big time.

5. How would they have gotten back at Wilson if Valerie had been a trophy wife who spent all her day playing tennis? Or if she had worked at Langley, but as one of the cafeteria staff? If Wilson's wife had not been in a position to suggest he was a good choice to investigate, they would not have been able to retaliate against Wilson in that way. Although they tried other smears, Wilson's reputation was such that those smears were not very effective and Wilson's fortitude was such that the other smears didn't bother him. Only the outing of Wilson's wife caused him any serious harm.

   Weren't they incredibly lucky that they could get at Wilson that way?

The alternative explanation resolves all of those anomalies. It is an explanation that, when I conceived of it, seemed too improbable to be true. It could have happened that way, but it would require an incredible amount of luck. After some thinking, it finally came to me that the fifth anomaly was a red herring: there was little or no luck involved at all, as I shall show in part 2. Once I realized that there was little or no luck involved in that fifth anomaly, I also knew that the alternative explanation was not just plausible but highly likely. It uses up those left-over pieces and produces a different, more evil, picture.

Note that I one of the people I mailed about this site provided (friendly) criticism stating why he believed these anomalies are perfectly explicable in other ways. I have answered those criticisms here.

More in part 2.