Yellowcake Uranium found in Iraq: Vindication, but no thanks to the MSM

It's really quite sad how biased our media has become. I was browsing the web yesterday, looking for topics upon to pontificate, when I came across an op-ed piece written by Christopher Merola on Townhall.com. This column, entitled "Have Your Yellowcake and Eat it too," discusses a recent Associated Press report about how the our military recently shipped approximately 550 tons of yellowcake, FOUND IN IRAQ, back to the United States for safe keeping.

Yet, we've heard virtually nothing in the mainstream media, which, in case you've been living in a cave for the past 20 years, is OVERWHELMINGLY liberal. In fact, reading liberal media, the consensus is either that the Bush Administration PLANTED this uranium in Iraq or his father's administration (H.W.) clandestinely allowed Saddam to keep 550 tons of yellowcake uranium so his son (Dubya) could have impetus to invade Iraq 12/13 years later.

It's almost laughable, but it isn't. For three, four, five years we've been told that George Bush lied to us, that he waged war against Iraq illegally. We were told that Saddam NEVER possessed WMD; in fact, neo-cons and their Republican benefactors recklessly cost us blood and treasure for oil, to retaliate against a regime and a man that attempted to assassinate H.W. Bush, or merely for the fun of it.

We've been told that Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was sent on a fact-finding mission to Niger with the hope of investigating claims that Iraqi agents attempted to purchase yellowcake uranium (to aid in the nuclear process), found no evidence of any transactions or even attempts to purchase said yellowcake uranium, despite intelligence to the contrary not just from the CIA but from British and Russian intelligence.

What you won't hear from the supposedly impartial mainstream media is that in fact the Butler Report from the British Parliamentary found CREDIBLE intelligence that Iraq attempted to purchase 500 tons of yellowcase from Niger in 1999. According to Gregg Jackson's "Conservative Lies to Liberal Comebacks," the Butler Report stated that in order to disparage the Bush Administration and the war effort, someone forged documents and openly distributed them, saying that Saddam had tried to purchase yellowcake uranium. They SO badly forged the documents, they had to make the yellowcake claim to be a lie. MOST, including the mainstream media, elitist liberals, and the rest of the sheeple on the Left, believed it.

We've also been told that in response to Wilson's "claims," Vice President Dick Cheney revealed to columnist Robert Novak, that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a COVERT CIA agent. Furthermore, we've been told that Wilson was sent at the behest of Cheney. Finally, we've been implored to believe that Plame was an active CIA agent. But despite what the mainstream media would have you believe, the FOLLOWING is actually true: first, the revelation that Plame had worked for the CIA came from Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage, who vehemently opposed the Iraq War; second, the request for Wilson to investigate the yellowcake claim came at the behest of Plame herself; finally, Plame had not worked "undercover" (considered a covert agent) for over six years...in fact, she was assigned to a desk job.

I write this because I was having a conversation with my fiance about another lie perpetuated by liberals and their enablers in the media: global warming. She had expressed a desire to know what the TRUTH is about rising gas prices, carbon dioxide, melting icebergs, etc. She subsequently stated that it would be nice if one could navigate to a website that actually stated the facts.

Ironically, this conversation occurred after reading the recent report about the recent shipment of Saddam's yellowcake uranium. It's time for us in the conservative blogosphere to spread the message: we refuse to tolerate the lies and vitriol spread from the left.

Messing with the Democrats

This morning, I was reading Robert Novak's latest op-ed piece, courtesy of Townhall.com; in the column, Novak essentially discusses former Bush Administration Press Secretary Scott McClellan's new book, in which he specifically discusses the SUPPOSED Valerie Plame scandal.

I think we can make the following assumptions, ones that Democrats do NOT want to believe, but should:

1.) Valerie Plame was not some undercover agent, as the Liberal Mainstream Media purported her to be;
2.) Plame's "status" as CIA agent, in which she was almost nothing more than a desk jockey, was not leaked by Vice President Dick Cheney, but rather Secretary of State "mole" Richard Armitage.

McClellan proffers the same tired talking point as so many liberals have uttered over the past 5-6 years: we were MISLED into war, based on faulty evidence.

Keep in mind that the following:

1.) Saddam WAS working on a clandestine weapons program, in violation of United Nations mandates.
2.) Saddam defied over a dozen UN resolutions to make said weapons program transparent, with military action as a consequence.
3.) The Democratic Clinton Administration examined the same evidence years before George Bush won the presidency, and implored the world to act against Saddam.
4.) If we were "misled," we, along with other global intelligence agencies, were misled as well, not by George Bush, but by SADDAM HUSSEIN.

I was reminded of a "conversation" I had a few weeks ago with two liberal co-workers; as I implored them to listen to reason, they were absolutely convinced that the "leaker" or at least the mastermind behind the leak was one Dick Cheney.

Here's the complete piece:

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- In Scott McClellan's purported tell-all memoir of his trials as President George W. Bush's press secretary, he virtually ignores Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage's role leaking to me Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA employee. That fits the partisan Democratic version of the Plame affair, in keeping with the overall tenor of "What Happened."

Although the media response dwelled on McClellan's criticism of Bush's road to war, the CIA leak case is the heart of this book. On July 14, 2003, one day before McClellan took the press secretary's job for which many colleagues felt he was unqualified, my column was published asserting that Plame at the CIA suggested her Democratic partisan husband, retired diplomat Joseph Wilson, for a sensitive intelligence mission. That story made McClellan's three years at the briefing room podium a misery, leading to his dismissal and now his bitter retort.

In claiming he was misled about the Plame affair, McClellan mentions Armitage only twice. Armitage being the leaker undermines the Democratic theory, now accepted by McClellan, that Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and political adviser Karl Rove aimed to delegitimize Wilson as a war critic. McClellan's handling of the leak by itself leads former colleagues to suggest he could not have written this book by himself.

On page 173, McClellan first mentions my Plame leak, but he does not identify Armitage as the leaker until page 306 of the 323-page book -- then only in passing. Armitage, anti-war and anti-Cheney, cannot fit the conspiracy theory that McClellan now buys into. When Armitage after two years publicly admitted he was my source, the life went out of Wilson's campaign. In "What Happened," McClellan dwells on Rove's alleged deceptions as if the real leaker were still unknown.

McClellan at the White House podium never knew the facts about the CIA leak, and his memoir reads as though he has tried to maintain his ignorance. He omits Armitage's slipping Mrs. Wilson's identity to The Washington Post's Bob Woodward weeks before he talked to me. He does not mention that Armitage turned himself in to the Justice Department even before Patrick Fitzgerald was named as special prosecutor.

McClellan writes that Rove told him this about his conversation with me after I called him to check Armitage's leak: "He (Novak) said he'd heard that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA. I told him I couldn't confirm it because I didn't know." Rove told me last week he never said that to McClellan. Under oath, Rove had testified he told me, "I heard that, too." Under oath, I testified that Rove said, "Oh, you know that, too."

McClellan writes, "I don't know" whether the leaker -- he does not specify Armitage -- committed a felony. He ignores that Fitzgerald's long, expensive investigation found no violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, if only because Plame was not covered. Nevertheless, McClellan calls the leak "wrong and harmful to national security" -- ignoring questions of whether Plame really was engaged in undercover operations and whether her cover long ago had been blown.

A partisan Democratic mantra began earlier in the book. McClellan writes George H.W. Bush's 1988 campaign "acquiesced to certain advisers, including Roger Ailes and the late Lee Atwater," who opposed Bush's "civility and decency." (McClellan, then 20 years old, played no part in that campaign.) McClellan contends that thanks to Rove in 2002, "the first cracks appeared in the facade of bipartisan comity."

McClellan's fellow Bush aides do not remember him ever saying anything like that. At senior staff meetings discussing policy, they recall, he was silent. His robotic performances from the White House podium seemed only to disgorge what he had been told, and "What Happened" has the similar feel of someone else's hand.

The book so mimics the Democratic line that Ari Fleischer, McClellan's predecessor as press secretary, asked him last week whether he had a ghostwriter. "No," Fleischer told me that McClellan replied, "but my editor tweaked it." (McClellan did not return my call.)

The bland book proposal McClellan's agent unsuccessfully hawked to publishers early in 2007 is not the volume now in bookstores. How and why McClellan changed is a story so far untold.