Show Me McClanahan

by
Larry C Johnson

UPDATE:  See Below

Talk about a big fish in a small pond, E. Thomas McClanahan is vying to become the David Brooks of the midwest.  As one who was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri metro area I am entitled to make snide comments about guys like McClanahan.  He is an incompetent wannabee.

One of his latest opinion pieces latches onto the Republican excuse train to explain why Scooter Libby’s commutation is a great thing.  You are invited to read his garbage if you want.  Here’s the link.

I have sent Mr. McClanahan a note.  (Sure spending too much time writing letters to erstwhile journalists.)

Dear Mr. McClanahan:

You recent diatribe regarding the Scooter Libby matter, "Another case of scandal politics run amok", is a sad commentary on the decline of intellectual rigor and honesty at the Kansas City Star. I was born and raised in
Independence, Missouri and grew up reading both Times and Star and came to expect standards of logic and fairness completely absent in your recent opinion piece.  I also had the privilege of working at the Central Intelligence Agency with Valerie Plame. She and I, along with 50 other members of our Career Trainee training class, were undercover. Because of my firsthand knowledge of the damage that has been done to our nation’s security, I am appalled by your craven opinion piece.

Yes it is true that no one
was ever charged with the leak of the covert identity of Valerie Plame, but
that is irrelevant. Why? Because Scooter Libby blocked the
investigation, failed to fully cooperate, and lied to investigators. He actively participated in a cover up that made
it impossible to get to the truth of the underlying crime. That is why Patrick Fitzgerald charged him
with obstruction of justice and perjury. And he was found guilty of both crimes by a jury of his peers and that
conviction was upheld on appeal. 

You also trot out the
distraction that “Fitzgerald never showed that a crime had been
committed".  That is because the trial was focused on
proving that Scooter Libby lied and obstructed justice. What is it about these concepts that you do
not comprehend? 

You are entitled to your
opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts.  Your article is rife with error and
misrepresentation. For example, you
write: 

In an article published in The New York Times after Hussein’s fall, Wilson said Bush included this passage even after being told about Wilson’s conclusion that there was little to the story.  Wilson later termed Bush’s assertion a “lie.”

If this is a typical
example of how you handle quotes in the Kansas City Star then you are guilty of
malpractice.  Here is what Joe Wilson
actually wrote in his July 2003 piece:

Based
on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I
have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to
Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat. . .
. Those are the facts surrounding my
efforts. The vice president’s office asked a serious question. I was asked to
help formulate the answer. I did so, and I have every confidence that the
answer I provided was circulated to the appropriate officials within our
government.

I defy you to show me where
in his July 2003 he made the statement that you claim he made. I am from Missouri, so show me. 

You continue with your
inaccurate, inept characterization of what Joe Wilson said and did. You claim: 

In his report to the CIA after his Niger trip, Wilson said that in 1999, a former prime minister of that country had been asked to meet with an Iraqi delegation seeking improved “commercial relations.” Since Niger’s only significant export was uranium, CIA analysts concluded the Iraqis were after uranium yellowcake — a reasonable assumption, since Niger had been a source of uranium for Iraq in 1981.

You are wrong on all counts. For starters, Joe Wilson did not
file a report to the CIA. He was debriefed by an operations officer and reports officer. The reports officer wrote up the results of that debriefing and it was disseminated as a TD on 8 March 2002 (a TD is CIA shorthand for intelligence produced from a human source). The TD was entitled, “Nigerien Denial of Uranium Yellowcake Sales to Rogue States”. And the source, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, was described as, “a highly reliable sensitive source”.

Even before the report based
on Ambassador Wilson’s trip was released, CIA analysts published a Senior Power Executive Intelligence Brief on 14 February 2002 that concluded: 

Information
on the alleged uranium contract between Iraq and Niger comes exclusively from a foreign government service
report that lacks crucial details, and we are working to clarify the
information and to determine whether it can be corroborated.

In the National Intelligence
Estimate published in October 2002, the Department of State’s Bureau of
Intelligence and Research wrote that:

The
claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are, in INR’s assessment, highly dubious.

No one at the CIA argued the opposite point. In
fact, the CIA’s National Intelligence Officer for Strategic and
Nuclear Programs briefed members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
on 4 October 2002 and
specifically debunked the claims by British intelligence that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium in West Africa.

When the White House tried
to include the claim in the President’s speech in Cincinnati in October 2002,  CIA Director George Tenet specifically intervened with Stephen Hadley, the
Deputy National Security Advisor, to have that claim excised from the speech. 

It does not matter what the
Brits did or did not believe because they are not part of the U.S. intelligence community and they are not charged with
giving the President of the United States their best judgment. Even though the intelligence community repeatedly dismissed the claim
that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium as suspect, the White
House would not take no for an answer. 

It is the ultimate irony
that the CIA, under pressure from the Bush White House,  admitted the day after Valerie Plame’s status
as a clandestine CIA officer was exposed that the so-called “16 words”
should never have been included in the State of Union Address. Why? Because the claim was not true.

You obviously have been
living in a cave if you believe there was no manipulation of the intelligence
used to justify the war in Iraq. You insist
that: 

Wilson’s allegations that the White House manipulated
intelligence were unfounded and — given that — dangerous in the midst of a war.

Fortunately we now have the
public testimony of several intelligence officers, including Paul Pillar and
former CIA Director George Tenet who debunk your fantasy. Paul Pillar, the National Intelligence
Officer for the Middle East, wrote in a 2005 Foreign Affairs article: 

….
The Bush team approached the community again and again and pushed it to look
harder at the supposed Saddam-al Qaeda relationship….The process did not involve
intelligence work designed to find dangers not yet discovered or to inform
decisions not yet made. Instead, it involved research to find evidence in
support of a specific line of argument — that Saddam was cooperating with al
Qaeda — which in turn was being used to justify a specific policy decision.

During a 60 Minutes
interview to tout his recent memoir, Tenet backed up Pillar’s assertion, “Let
me say it again.  CIA found absolutely no linkage between Saddam and
9/11.”

But the Bush Administration
would not take no for an answer. They
refused to accept the fact that Iraq was not trying to buy uranium from Africa and they refused to accept the intelligence community’s position that
Saddam and Osama were not in bed together.

Instead, the Bush
Administration told a simple story deliberately tailored to scare the American
public into supporting an ill-advised pre-emptive war inIraq. George Bush,
Dick Cheney, Condi Rice and Don Rumsfeld insisted repeatedly that Saddam
Hussein was working in tandem with Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Worse, according to the yarn,Iraq was busy trying to buy uranium yellowcake and had
acquired aluminum tubes for processing uranium into nuclear weapons
material. Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld fanned
out in the media. Rice warned:

We
know that he has the infrastructure, nuclear scientists to make a nuclear
weapon. And we know that when the inspectors assessed this after the Gulf War,
he was far, far closer to a crude nuclear device than anybody thought, maybe
six months from a crude nuclear device.

The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how
quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t what the smoking gun to be
a mushroom cloud.

It was because Ambassador
Joe Wilson was one of the first credible voices to blow the whistle on the
Administration’s lies that the Bush White House went after him and his wife in
a coordinated smear campaign. And
Scooter Libby was at the center of that effort. When it came time to admit what he had done Scooter chose to lie and
impede the investigation into who leaked the name of a CIA officer. 

The real irony is that you
fault Joe Wilson for speaking out in a time of war, but say not one word about
the compromise of the identity of the CIA officer who was the operations director of the Iraq Task Force at CIA. The woman heading up the search
for Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction within the CIA has her identity compromised and her life put at risk. And who are you concerned about
protecting? Scooter Libby.

You sir, are a pathetic
excuse for a journalist.

UPDATE:  McClanahan responds

Dear Mr. Johnson:

You send great heat but little light. I
frankly don’t understand your first objection. Are you denying Wilson termed Bush’s remarks a lie? Here’s what factcheck.org wrote about all this:

Based on what Wilson told them, CIA analysts wrote an
intelligence report saying former Prime Minister Mayki "interpreted
‘expanding commercial relations’ to mean that the (Iraqi) delegation wanted to
discuss uranium yellowcake sales." In fact, the Intelligence Committee
report said that "for most analysts" Wilson’s
trip to Niger "lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
reports on the uranium deal." 

Later, the Italian forgeries popped up and the
administration backed away from the uranium in Africa story. Again, factcheck.org:

The Senate report doesn’t make clear why discovery of the
forged documents changed the
CIA’s thinking.
Logically, that discovery should have made little difference since the
documents weren’t the basis for the CIA’s
original belief that Saddam was seeking uranium. However, the Senate report did
note that even within the CIA the comments
and assessments were "inconsistent and at times contradictory" on the Niger story. 

Even after Tenet tried to take the blame, Bush’s critics
persisted in saying he lied with his 16 words — for example, in an opinion
column July 16, 2003 by Michael Kinsley in the Washington Post:

Kinsley: Who was the arch-fiend who told a lie in President
Bush’s State of the Union speech? . . .Linguists note that the question
"Who lied in George Bush’s State of the Union speech" bears a certain
resemblance to the famous conundrum "Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb?"

However, the Senate report confirmed that the CIA had reviewed Bush’s State of the Union address, and — whatever doubts it may
have harbored — cleared it for him.

Senate Report: When coordinating the State of the Union,
no Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
analysts or officials told the National Security Council (NSC)
to remove the "16 words" or that there were concerns about the
credibility of the Iraq-Niger uranium reporting.

The final word on the 16 words may have to await history’s
judgment. The Butler report’s
conclusion that British intelligence was "credible" clearly doesn’t
square with what US intelligence now believes. But these new reports show Bush had plenty of reason
to believe what he said, even if British intelligence is eventually shown to be
mistaken.

Mr. Johnson, you repeatedly say Bush lied but you offer no
evidence. Two independent panels, the Senate Intelligence Committee and the
Robb-Silberman Commission, have concluded otherwise. As for the notion that the
leak of Plame’s ID was some sort of coordinated White House conspiracy, please
read Novak’s account of how it happened.

Tom McClanahan..

To reach E. Thomas McClanahan, call 816-234-4480 or send e-mail to mcclanahan@kcstar.com.

AND MY RESPONSE:
Dear. Mr. McClanahan,

You are a certifiable bonehead.  I am very
familiar with Novak’s account.  What you ignore is the fact that the
White House, via Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, and Ari Fleischer, were
talking to other reporters and spreading the word about Valerie Plame
and Joe Wilson.  Just because Novak was the first one to print with
that "news" does not eliminate the other facts.  Those were established
at the Libby trial but obviously you are incapable of doing any
original investigation.  If it isn’t in "factcheck.org" it must not be
true.

You ask, "Are you denying that Joe Wilson termed Bush’s
remarks a lie?"  YES.  He did not state such a thing in his July 2003
op-ed.  However, you say that he did.  I am simply asking that you act
like a responsible journalist and accurately quote and report on what
has transpired.  I do not deny that Joe has called Bush a liar, but he
did not do so in the July 2003 piece.  Your presentation of what he
wrote is wrong.  Is accuracy too much to ask of a hack journalist?

And
you’re relying on factcheck.org for your sources?  Jesus Christ!!  No
wonder print journalism is failing.  Talk about lazy.  They are wrong.
I have the original sourcing on it which I cite in my response to you.
Look it up for yourself.  However, I realize that is tough because it
would require you to actually expend some effort.
Larry Johnson