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August 30, 2006
Plaming The President: The Anatomy Of A Lie
“The broad mass of the nation ... will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one."- Adolph Hitler
It's been a long wait. For a moment there was a sense of unreality. Was I really reading these words in a major American newspaper?
Armitage's involvement in the matter does not fit neatly into the assertions of Bush administration critics that Plame's employment was disclosed as part of a White House conspiracy to besmirch Wilson by suggesting his Niger trip stemmed from nepotism at the CIA. Wilson and Plame have sued top administration officials, alleging that the leak was meant as retaliation.But Armitage, the source Novak had described obliquely as someone who is "not a political gunslinger," was by all accounts hardly a tool of White House political operatives. As the No. 2 official at the State Department from March 2001 to February 2005, Armitage was a prominent Republican appointee. But he also privately disagreed with the tone and style of White House policymaking on Iraq and other matters.
It's tempting to feel a sense of vindication; to think perhaps the long nightmare might be over. Maybe now the slumbering curiosity of those who eagerly swallowed a carefully edited version of events will awaken.
Maybe now they will finally begin to ask questions.
Maybe now that it is obvious many journalists knew far, far more about this story than the pittance they saw fit to tell us, (though they are furiously back-pedalling as I type these words) the reading public might wake up and ask whatever happened to transparency, to the public's right to know?
Or is accountability only for government figures? Is the media's role as the 'fourth branch of government' just a convenient fiction, adopted when the status it implies suits them but quickly doffed as soon as any concommittant responsibility is demanded of them? How long will the press continue to wield the First Amendment like a virtual get out of jail free card, using it to exempt them from prosecution when they break laws other professionals must obey, to tip off terrorism suspects, to assert non-existent federal shield laws, to demand the right to unilaterally declassify and publish national secrets at will? If, as Bill Keller asserts, an unchecked unitary executive is to be feared, is not an unelected, unappointed, and ultimately unaccountable unitary editor even more of a menace? Who watches the watchers?
One can't help but wonder in the aftermath of Plame whether we'll see the media, the CIA, the State Department, or Joe Wilson subjected to the kind of full bodied, La Brea tar pit wallowing-in-schadenfreude navel gazing we've come to expect from the lamestream media. On a careful ninety seconds of caffeine induced rumination, we're inclined to think not. The odds are a few honest voices will chime in before the inevitable spin begins. Chris Hitchens led the chorus yesterday:
In his July 12 column in the Washington Post, Robert Novak had already partly exposed this paranoid myth by stating plainly that nobody had leaked anything, or outed anyone, to him. On the contrary, it was he who approached sources within the administration and the CIA and not the other way around. But now we have the final word on who did disclose the name and occupation of Valerie Plame, and it turns out to be someone whose opposition to the Bush policy in Iraq has—like Robert Novak's—long been a byword in Washington. It is particularly satisfying that this admission comes from two of the journalists—Michael Isikoff and David Corn—who did the most to get the story wrong in the first place and the most to keep it going long beyond the span of its natural life.As most of us have long suspected, the man who told Novak about Valerie Plame was Richard Armitage, Colin Powell's deputy at the State Department and, with his boss, an assiduous underminer of the president's war policy. (His and Powell's—and George Tenet's—fingerprints are all over Bob Woodward's "insider" accounts of post-9/11 policy planning, which helps clear up another nonmystery: Woodward's revelation several months ago that he had known all along about the Wilson-Plame connection and considered it to be no big deal.) The Isikoff-Corn book, which is amusingly titled Hubris, solves this impossible problem of its authors' original "theory" by restating it in a passive voice:
The disclosures about Armitage, gleaned from interviews with colleagues, friends and lawyers directly involved in the case, underscore one of the ironies of the Plame investigation: that the initial leak, seized on by administration critics as evidence of how far the White House was willing to go to smear an opponent, came from a man who had no apparent intention of harming anyone.
Spin, spin, spin. In the grand tradition of the Big Lie, Corn tells the biggest lie of all - he never really claimed BushCo, et al were out to get Val Plame - instead, this absurd fiction was "seized upon by administration critics", whoever they might be. Except as Hitchens points out, the historical record is rather against him here. Corn, in "the July 16, 2003, blog post credited with starting the entire distraction":
The Wilson smear was a thuggish act. Bush and his crew abused and misused intelligence to make their case for war. Now there is evidence Bushies used classified information and put the nation's counter-proliferation efforts at risk merely to settle a score. It is a sign that with this gang politics trumps national security.
But Corn is hardly the only one who may have lied in this sad affair. There is also the matter of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald:
Patrick Fitzgerald's three-year manhunt to track down who blew Valerie Plame's CIA "cover" has been exposed as a costly sham. He apparently knew all along that his man was not Scooter Libby.In the Oct. 28 press conference announcing Libby's indictment, Fitzgerald claimed that "in fact, Mr. Libby was the first official known to have told a reporter when he talked to Judith Miller in June of 2003 about Valerie Wilson."
According to the Newsweek account, Armitage disclosed his role in the Plame case to Justice department officials on October 2, 2003:
The next day, a team of FBI agents and Justice prosecutors investigating the leak questioned the deputy secretary. Armitage acknowledged that he had passed along to Novak information contained in a classified State Department memo: that Wilson's wife worked on weapons-of-mass-destruction issues at the CIA. (The memo made no reference to her undercover status.) Armitage had met with Novak in his State Department office on July 8, 2003—just days before Novak published his first piece identifying Plame. Powell, Armitage and Taft, the only three officials at the State Department who knew the story, never breathed a word of it publicly and Armitage's role remained secret.
It would appear that Fitzgerald, knowing full well that Armitage was the leaker, went on to make, not a false, but perhaps more a misleading statement to the public. This may be splitting hairs, but Mr. Fitzgerald did not claim that Scooter Libby was the first to leak to Robert Novak (a non-leak we now know took place on July 8th and was committed not by Libby but by Richard Armitage), but the first to discuss Ms. Plame with a reporter:
And in fact, we now know that Mr. Libby discussed this information about Valerie Wilson at least four times prior to July 14, 2003: On three occasions with Judith Miller of the New York Times and on one occasion, with Matthew Cooper of Time magazine.The first occasion on which Mr. Libby discussed it with Judith Miller was back on June 23, 2003, just days after an article appeared on line in the New Republic, which quoted some critical commentary from Mr. Wilson.
After that discussion with Judith Miller on June 23, 2003, Mr. Libby also discussed Valerie Wilson on July 8, 2003. And during that discussion, Mr. Libby talked about Mr. Wilson in a conversation that was on background as a senior administration official, and when Mr. Libby talked about Wilson, he changed the attribution to a former Hill staffer. During that discussion, which was to be attributed to a former Hill staffer, Mr. Libby also discussed Wilson's wife, Valerie Wilson, working at the CIA and finally again on July 12.
The reason Fitzgerald's statement is so egregious, however, is that he was already well aware no crime had been committed. At this point, his office should have reported its findings and the investigation should have been called off. Instead, he chose to jail one reporter for refusing to reveal sources whose identity he already knew and indict a public official for perjury and obstruction in a case where almost every media witness had intentionally witheld evidence from the Justice Department citing non-existent federal shield laws and one witness, Judy Miller, suddenly "remembered" a notebook only after 85 days in jail for refusing to testify and was then mysteriously excused entirely from further testimony, though she had been jailed on the pretext that her testimony was "essential to the government's case". That the prosecutorial standards seem to have been somewhat unevenly applied is an understatement.
The third prevaricator in this unholy triumvirate is Joe Wilson, and today's New York Times continues to give him a pass, adopting a curiously hands-off tone now that the facts no longer support their two year long campaign against the White House:
Some administration critics said her name had been made public in a campaign to punish Mr. Wilson, who had written in a commentary in The Times that his investigation in Africa [?] him to believe that the Bush administration had twisted intelligence to justify an attack on Iraq.
As has been the Times' long practice, there is nary a mention of the Butler Report, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report, or the Robb-Silverman Report. Again, in the grand tradition of The Big Lie the meme that the Bush administration has blocked any investigation into whether prewar intelligence was manipulated is allowed to fester unchecked, never countered by inconvenient facts which might counter the spin. The American Thinker painstakingly contrasts each of Wilson's "Bush lied" accusations with specific findings from the SSCI and the British Butler report. I have also done this in the past, but this is one-stop shopping.
How does such a Big Lie get started in a society with a free press? More importantly, why does it take this long for the truth to come out? These are questions that should prompt an honest media to do some serious soul searching. Why do I get the feeling that process will be a long time in coming?
Posted by Cassandra at August 30, 2006 07:05 AM
Comments
I note that there are no shortage of cowards connected with this affair.
Posted by: spd rdr at August 30, 2006 09:53 AM
This whole thing is unbelievable. So sordid, unethical, and in using the levers of government and press to settle a score so much like a novel that I'm still kinda stunned. I thought I was pretty clear-eyed about the sewer that is politics. But I guess not...
Posted by: FbL at August 30, 2006 10:45 AM
Most of the behaviors herein discussed match my low expectations for the named players.
But Armitage, absent an articulate rationale not yet made manifest, reveals himself to be a man of little honor.
Posted by: John of Argghhh! at August 30, 2006 11:12 AM
Libby is still indicted and will still stand trial for obstructing the Special Persecutors' vendetta, and frankly, that's my opinion of the story line out there and how it will play out.
Does any of the half-vast staff at VC and your friendly but demented readers (like me!)really expect a dozen NY Times' Op-eds in the next month discussing how this travishamockery continued for three years? Do we really expect a thousand pundits to take back their words and perform a huge 'mea culpa'?
I think not.
The case against Libby may collapse in court (heh) or he may be aquitted (maybe) but this whole sordid mess has had its desired effect.
Smear Bush, smear Bush, smear Bush.
After all, it may be fake, but many out there believe that it's accurate (Trade Marked by Dan Rather, patent pending).
The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.
Posted by: Don Brouhaha at August 30, 2006 11:18 AM
There was a time when I would have voted for Colin Powell for President, and for once wouldn't have had to hold my nose as I pulled the lever for the lesser of two evils. Whew, dodged that bullet! His willing complicity in this scheme should be prosecuted to the fullest extent possible, which unfortunately is probably "not at all." What a pity.
I wait with bated breath for the emergence of Joe Wilson Lied bumperstickers. I suspect I'll be waiting for a good long time.
Posted by: Daveg at August 30, 2006 12:04 PM
What is worth noting about 'big lie' attempts isn't so much that people will more readily believe them than smaller lies, but that it doesn't matter if they believe it. This is the critical point that people don't understand, but need to know.
What studies of the phenomenon show, consistently, is that people often don't believe the lies. Often, they are fully conscious that the lie is unlikely; and often, they critically view the evidence of the facts, and become aware that (a) the lie is in fact a lie, and (b) the truth is X, which for now they know.
The important part of the phenomenon comes later. Asked a year or more afterwards about the subject of the lie, the studies consistently find that their opinion of the person or institution is badly damaged off of where it was before the lie was told. Even though they had received the lie critically, and found out the truth later, in the long term the harm is done regardless.
The way the human mind works is that it forgets the details, but it remembers that 'something really bad' was attached to that person or institution. They're damaged goods foreverafter, even though you can't remember exactly why you think so -- and if you could remember, the facts would work against the impression.
That's the real function of the technique.
Posted by: Grim at August 30, 2006 02:20 PM
And Grim lives up to his moniker...
Posted by: John of Argghhh! at August 30, 2006 03:18 PM
Grim,
I thought I made that clear with:
"smear Bush, smear Bush, smear Bush"
Whydja hafta use all them pair-o-graphs to repeat that? :D
Daveg,
I think "Joe Wilson is a Horse's Ass" would be a better bumper sticker. :)
Posted by: Don Brouhaha at August 30, 2006 03:32 PM