Villainous Company

« The Enemy Within, II | Main | The Horror... »

April 07, 2006

NY TimesWatch: Still Plaming The Victim

Watching the New York Times twist themselves into rhetorical pretzels over L'Affair Plame is more fun than an old-fashioned round of The Limbo. The only question left in our minds is: how low can they go in their transparent efforts to frame the Bush White House for an offense Joe Wilson committed?

Reading today's truly majestic effort, the answer becomes apparent: pretty low.

For more than two years, Senate Republicans have dragged out an investigation into how the Bush administration came to use bogus intelligence on Iraq to justify a war. A year ago, Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called it "a monumental waste of time" to consider whether the White House manipulated intelligence to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

Could this possibly be because the American taxpayers already funded not one, but two investigations into this very question?

Has the Times forgotten the Senate Select Committee Report and the Robb-Silverman Report, both of which came back negative on the question of whether intel was manipulated by the White House? Doesn't it strike anyone as the least bit odd that this editorial, along with most mainstream media news reports on the Joe Wilson story, remain blissfully free of references to either investigation? It is almost as though, in the minds of the press, they never happened. The media would certainly like us to think so. They keep trying to imply the matter has never been investigated when in fact it has: twice.

Meanwhile, the evidence has steadily mounted that President Bush and his team not only did that before the war, but kept right on doing it after the invasion. The most recent additions to this pile came yesterday, in reports by The New York Sun, The National Journal and other news organizations on documents from the case against Lewis Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Cheney who is charged with lying about the unmasking of Valerie Wilson, a covert C.I.A. agent.

According to these papers, Mr. Libby testified that President Bush authorized him to tell reporters about classified intelligence on Iraq as part of an effort to discredit Mrs. Wilson's husband, Joseph Wilson, a retired diplomat who had cast doubt on the claim that Iraq tried to acquire uranium for nuclear bombs from Niger. The National Journal reported that Mr. Libby has also said that Mr. Cheney authorized him to leak classified information before the invasion to make the case for war.

This is, not to put too fine a point on it, a distortion. From the National Journal article:

Libby also testified that an administration lawyer told him that Bush, by authorizing the disclosure of classified information, had in effect declassified the information. Legal experts disagree on whether the president has the authority to declassify information on his own.

The NIE is online now, in case anyone is interested.

What the referenced articles actually say is that Libby says the President authorized Libby, through Cheney, to release [note, this is not a "leak"] declassified [note, this is not "classified information" because the President has declassified it] information to the press to counter false information Joe Wilson published in the New York Times. Why Joe Wilson felt it necessary, after being asked to conduct a fact-finding mission for the CIA (hardly an organization renowned for openness) to tell the world "what he didn't find in Africa" is open to question. Why a man married to a "secret agent" couldn't be trusted with information relating to our national security (and which directly related to her job) makes one wonder why he was chosen for the job in the first place. Why Wilson would deliberately draw attention to himself when his wife was a "covert operative" boggles the mind. These are all questions one might expect an unbiased media to ask on behalf of the reading public. But despite several red flags that should have made any unbiased professional doubt his claims, the Times displayed a touching trust in Mr. Wilson. It chose then, and has continued in the face of all contrary evidence, to take Mr. Wilson's story at face value.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence later found, in an investigation paid for by our tax dollars, that the claims made by Joe Wilson in his NY Times op-ed were false in several respects. But predictably, the New York Times sees no reason to inform its readers that Wilson misled both readers of his op-ed and the Washington Post:

Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, dispatched by the CIA in February 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq sought to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program with uranium from Africa, was specifically recommended for the mission by his wife, a CIA employee, contrary to what he has said publicly.

Wilson last year launched a public firestorm with his accusations that the administration had manipulated intelligence to build a case for war. He has said that his trip to Niger should have laid to rest any notion that Iraq sought uranium there and has said his findings were ignored by the White House.

Wilson's assertions -- both about what he found in Niger and what the Bush administration did with the information -- were undermined yesterday in a bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report.

The panel found that Wilson's report, rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, bolstered the case for most intelligence analysts. And contrary to Wilson's assertions and even the government's previous statements, the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence that made its way into 16 fateful words in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address.

So it would seem Wilson wasn't telling the truth. Why, then, doesn't the Times tell us that? Maybe, like Scooter Libby, they "forgot". Apparently the Times can't even remember what they published in their own paper:

Mr. Wilson was sent by the administration to Niger to check out the report that Iraq tried to buy uranium in the late 1990's. He concluded that it was bogus and said so in a Times Op-Ed article in July 2003. In response, the administration leaked word that Mr. Wilson's wife was a C.I.A. agent.

There are two quibbles with this. First of all, what Wilson "didn't find" in Africa was that Iraq had not completed a sale of uranium, not that they had never attempted to purchase it. Two very different things. Secondly, as I've written many, many times before, after a two year investigation during which he never tried to ascertain her status, it has never been shown by special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald that Val Plame was a covert agent or that her identity was classified. The elements of the IIPA have never been established. No matter how many times the media attempt to convict the administration in the press, it remains an unproven case.

Tom McGuire catches the Times in the Mother of all Distortions on the aluminum tubes issue:

The Times also pounds the table on the aluminum tubes, which, in a particular left-wing constellation, have replaced the Niger uranium as the shining star for the case that Saddam had nuclear aspirations:

According to The National Journal, that document said the State Department and the Energy Department had concluded that it also was not true that Iraq bought aluminum tubes to enrich uranium. During his State of the Union address in 2003, Mr. Bush said flatly that it was true.

Flatly? No, he didn't. Here we go from January 2003:

Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.

But the Times relentlessly continues to mislead its readers:

We don't know for certain whether Mr. Wilson's conclusions got to Mr. Bush before the war. But we do know that they were omitted from the sanitized intelligence report presented to Congress and later to the public.

Again, anyone with access to the SSCI report, assuming the NY Times bothered to report this important fact , would know that Mr. Wilson's conclusions:

...rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, bolstered the case for most intelligence analysts.

Furthermore, reading farther along they would find that Mr. Wilson's report was disregarded because it "added nothing new" to multiple reports on uranium sales obtained by other intelligence services. But the Times doesn't want its readers to know that fact either. Just like it doesn't want you to read the conclusions of the Butler Report:

We conclude that, on the basis of the intelligence assessments at the time, covering both Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the statements on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa in the Government's dossier, and by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons, were well-founded. By extension, we conclude also that the statement in President Bush's State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003 that: The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa was well-founded.

Instead they repeat, over and over again, the known lies of a discredited charletan whose transparent fabrications to the NY Times and the Washington Post were documented by a Senate investigation; a little fact the Times conveniently fails to mention.

Is there anything the media won't lie about in this Case about Nothing? Apparently not. The Times is so eager to convict the administration that they uncritically accept the word of Scooter Libby, a man they secretly believe to be guilty of something, as "proof" of the President's guilt.

I have a question for the Times: would they be so willing to accept Scooter's word that the President (or Karl Rove, for that matter) were innocent?

Posted by Cassandra at April 7, 2006 08:55 AM

Comments

Posted by: John of Argghhh! at April 7, 2006 01:49 PM

Posted by: Cassandra at April 7, 2006 01:59 PM

Posted by: camojack at April 7, 2006 03:10 PM

Posted by: beautifulatrocities at April 7, 2006 04:22 PM

Posted by: Cassandra at April 7, 2006 04:28 PM

Posted by: Cassandra at April 7, 2006 04:29 PM

Posted by: Pile On at April 7, 2006 07:37 PM

Posted by: Cassandra at April 8, 2006 06:41 AM

Posted by: Cassandra at April 8, 2006 06:48 AM

Posted by: William Teach at April 8, 2006 07:02 PM

Post a comment

Name:

Email Address:

URL:
Remember Me? YesNo

Comments: (you may use HTML tags for style)