Update [2005-7-28 19:23:4 by Dr Seuss]:Ok, so I've added some red meat to the extended.
Ran across
this article today that just sucked me in.
It's fairly long, ok, it's very long.
This article would be a great starting point for a dKospedia timeline. A kind of prequel timeline for the Plame Leak timeline.
Let me know if this article has been diaried already.
I'm going to go grab some choice quotes to update this diary... It's really a long article.
The Source Beyond Rove- Condoleezza Rice at the Center of the Plame Scandal
by Roger Morris
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One summer weekend in 1998 at the family estate at Kennebunkport, Me., former president George H. W. Bush introduced his ambitious son George W. to a 43-year-old political science professor, Condoleezza Rice.
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At Kennebunkport, the politician and academic hit it off right away, and Rice was entrusted with a vital task: "to instruct and protect G.W. at his most vulnerable," as a friend put it. How the woman who became his National Security Adviser and then Secretary of State has fulfilled that trust has had fateful consequences for the United States, other nations, and not least for George W. Bush.
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May-June 2002: With the Iraq-Niger uranium issue apparently laid to rest, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld establishes in the Pentagon, with the full knowledge of Rice, a new Office of Special Plans, under the direction of Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and cabal of neo-conservatives the Bush regime has assembled at the upper civilian reaches of the Defense Department. Believing the CIA, FBI and other agencies in myriad negative reports, including the Wilson mission, have simply “failed” to find existing evidence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and Saddam’s ties to al-Qaeda, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz direct “Special Plans” to gather and interpret its own “intelligence” on Iraq. Meanwhile Rice takes over coordination of efforts to stymie ongoing arms inspections of Iraq by the United Nations. [editor's note, by Dr Seuss]anyone have any specific info on this last claim?
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January 28, 2003: "The British government,” Bush says in his State of the Union litany on the dangers of Iraq, “has [sic] learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
Rice and her staff, of course, have as always laboriously worked and reworked the national security passages of the speech. In readying the address, Rice’s NSC Staff assistant for nonproliferation, Robert Joseph, asks Alan Foley, a ranking CIA expert on the subject, about the “uranium from Africa” passage, which obviously refers to the old Niger issue. Foley says the CIA doubts the Niger letters and connection, has disputed the British White Paper (as Rice and Joseph well know), and recommends that the NSC strike the reference. In typical bureaucratic fashion, however, Foley also says it would be “technically accurate” to say that the British had in fact issued such a report on Iraq, however mistaken. With the approval of Rice and her deputy Hadley, the passage stays, becoming a major piece of “evidence” in the case for war.
and of course the emphasis is mine