The advantage of liberals being ivory tower types is, we're smart
from Kairosnews; and I must say I think it rocks that someone who signs him or herself "blogalvillageidiot" deconstructs this noise so completely.
THE Quote of note:
In plain language now: Did the administration adequately justify the evidence it presented to the public and the Congress? Joe Wilson is simply telling us that it did not, as far as I can tell. And he appears to have some justification for his belief. The question of whether it was deliberately misleading or merely negligent is a red herring. Negligence resulting in multiple deaths is also an actionable cause, and can be argued from demonstrable facts.
The vast right-wing conspiracy is buzzing today with the claim that Joseph Wilson's report to the CIA on uranium from Niger may actually have bolstered the infamous "16 words" in the 2002 State of the Union address.
It seems to me that these exercises in advanced hermeneutics turn on a rather sophisticated interpretation of one of those 16 words: "recently." The administration and its allies are playing a semantic game with "recently" comparable to Bill Clinton's lawyerly parsing of the terms "sex" and "sexual relations."
Wilson had reported vague feelers from the Iraqis about uranium in 1999. The National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002 reported possible Iraqi attempts to procure uranium in 2001, but subsequent investigation along other lines led American intelligence to reject or heavily qualify that conclusion, partly because documents supporting that hypothesis proved to have been forged.
Since Bush did not specify a precise time frame, they can now claim to have been referring to Wilson's report on the 1999 contact with the Iraqi trade delegation, not to the forged documents. Likewise, the Butler Report found that the British intelligence assertion about those contacts was not discredited by the forged documents because it was arrived at independently before the discovery of the forged documents.
In that case, isn't the implication of this version of the story that President Bush and his speechwriters "cherry-picked" a piece of anecdotal evidence that was not subsequently corroborated? Their justification is — and here I proudly dust off my rhetorical vocabulary — a kind of inverted post hoc ergo proper hoc. Yes, the forged letter was not discovered until after the British finding, but this does not mean that it does not play a role in a process of inductive reasoning that is logically prior to that claim. If informants are reporting on Iraqi attempts to acquire uranium and an attempt to falsify records that support that claim are subsequently discovered, it is reasonable to ask whether the sources consulted earlier might also have had an interest in falsifying such reports.
The real problem here, however, lies in the epistemological claim implicit in the five words "the British government has learned ..." Although the Butler Review concluded that the claim, made prior to the discovery of the forged documents, could not have been based on those documents, the British white paper subsequently relied upon by the President provided no other sources for that claim, and may have ignored or overlooked evidence to the contrary.
