Marcy details a bit of worry at the Bush WH regarding potential re-opening of the Fitzgerald investigation and related matters by Reps. Conyers and Waxman's committees.

And I wondered whether it might have even more to do about what we do not yet know about the WHIG. At this end of a long stand-off with Dick Cheney's office, what would the folks at CIA and DOD be willing to now reveal to Congressional investigators who asked the right questions.

Of course, they have to actually ask them first.

Attaturk hit the ground running on this earlier, but something that Pincus points out ever so clearly deserves exposure:

...the Iraq Group "had been set up in the summer of 2002 to coordinate the marketing of the war to the public."

"The script had been finalized with great care over the summer," McClellan wrote, for a "campaign to convince Americans that war with Iraq was inevitable and necessary."...

Two days later, WHIG's product placement was on display. It began with a front-page story in the Times describing Iraq's clandestine purchase of aluminum tubes that, the story said, could be used to produce weapons-grade uranium. The story said that information came from "senior administration officials."...

That same morning, the message was carried on three network news shows. Cheney appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press" and, referring to the Times story, said that intelligence showed that Hussein "has reconstituted his nuclear program to develop a nuclear weapon." The Iraqi leader was "trying, through his illicit procurement network, to acquire the equipment he needs to be able to enrich uranium to make the bombs," Cheney said.

That same day, on CNN's "Late Edition," Rice said, "There will always be some uncertainty" in determining how close Iraq may be to obtaining a nuclear weapon but, "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."...

WHIG's records would shed much light on whether, as Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), chairman of the intelligence panel, put it: "In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when it was unsubstantiated, contradicted or even nonexistent."

Why is this relegated to the Walter Pincus page, among wholesale electronics and gift-with-purchase perfume ads on page A15? That the Senate Intel Committee couldn't be bothered to examine a WH public relations scheme for disseminating pre-war propaganda in an inquiry into Administration "truth or consequences" is news. Big news.

While the WHIG's activities have been dissected on liberal blogs for years, as the Knight Ridder reporters note above from Buying The War, editors of major papers and teevee newsrooms front page cheerleading stories instead of in-depth reporting. Time and time again. When Congress could expose the WHIG's domestic propaganda operation to sell lies to the American public to gin up a war of choice? They punted.

No one wants to touch this -- in the media or the political process -- because almost all of them are complicit or duped. And no one wants to admit it. Or own up to their role in it.

The American public deserves to know the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The sordid underbelly of media manipulation was laid bare during the Libby trial, when the rock got lifted just a bit by the prosecution team during Cathie Martin's testimony. To take a nation to a war of choice is bad enough. To do so on a deliberate foundation of lies for which you have spent years tap dancing around any responsibility whatsoever? Unacceptable.

The truth will out...it's only a matter of when.

(YouTube -- excerpt of Bill Moyer's Buying The War.)