Eli Lake, intrepid reporter for the Daily Beast, broke this story on Thursday. It was Karl Rove who was at the center of what could be called a coverup of the discovery of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Here is the opening paragraph of the article:
Starting in 2004, some members of the George W. Bush administration and Republican lawmakers began to find evidence of discarded chemical weapons in Iraq. But when the information was brought up with the White House, senior adviser Karl Rove told them to “let these sleeping dogs lie.”
Mark Levin spent quite a bit of time on this story on Thursday, and he made no secret of his anger at Karl Rove for doing this. When he opened the phone lines, he had a string of former soldiers who called to corroborate that yes, they had found thousands of warheads of chemical weapons. They were made to sign non-disclosure agreements that would put them in jeopardy if they revealed this. They were told that the reason was that they didn’t want information about these weapons to get to insurgents. However, as they also corroborated, insurgents did learn about them anyway, and many of the weapons ended up getting taken to Iran, into the hands of these insurgents, or on the black market in Iraq. Still, the administration persisted with this line, telling the troops that he cared more about their safety than about his legacy. But what Rove was saying back at the White House was that the administration had already lost this battle over WMD’s in the media, and that it would make them look bad to bring it up at this point. “Let sleeping dogs lie,” as we have in the quote above.
Rush Limbaugh also spent time on this story yesterday. Interestingly, it was ignored by both the Drudge Report and Fox News. Fox News is vested in the Republican establishment and Karl Rove is a big regular contributor on Fox. I guess they don’t want to make Rove look bad.
I have learned over many years of observing the political scene that there are too few in political life who have the courage to practice true integrity. But there are many who instead opt for the carefully crafted image of integrity, which takes much less courage. And that is what we have in the case of many moderate Republicans, of whom Karl Rove is one.
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