Re: CIA agent's naming let to giant hoax by Bush foes


GRH wrote:
More republicon lies, it took the idiots quite a while to concoct this bs,
but then they are total morons and unedercated hillbillies,
and so are you for posting this ***, and even worse if you believe it
yourself
"California Poppy" <GoldenStatePoppy@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1158264341.438822.21170@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
CIA agent's naming led to giant hoax by Bush foes
Fred Barnes
15sep06

THE rogues' gallery of those who acted badly in the CIA "leak" case
turns out to be different from what the media led us to expect.

Note that we put the word "leak" in quotation marks, because it's clear
now that there was no leak at all, just idle talk, and certainly there
was no smear campaign against former US ambassador Joseph Wilson for
criticising President George W.Bush's Iraq policy.
It's as if a giant hoax were perpetrated on the country - by the media,
by partisan opponents of the Bush administration, even by several Bush
subordinates who betrayed the President and their White House
colleagues.

The hoax lingered for three years and is only now being fully exposed
for what it was. Let's start at the top of the rogues' list:

Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state under Colin Powell, was
the first to reveal that Wilson's wife was a CIA employee. He blabbed
carelessly to Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, then to columnist
Robert Novak, who mentioned it in a July 2003 column.
Armitage, after admitting this to the FBI in October 2003, stood by
silently year after year as Vice-President *** Cheney, Cheney's chief
of staff, Scooter Libby, Karl Rove and other White House officials were
blamed for what he had done, and Bush suffered politically.

Loyalty is not Armitage's strong suit.

Colin Powell, Bush's friend and secretary of state in the first Bush
term, knew what Armitage had done and never let on.
He met with Bush countless times as the White House was being pummelled
in the media and by Democrats for outing a CIA agent to take revenge on
her husband.

Bush called publicly for the leaker to be identified. Powell knew the
identity, but remained silent. Some friend.

Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the "leak" case, was
aware of the source of Novak's story when he began his continuing
investigation in December 2003. Yet finding that source was supposedly
the object of his probe.
Now working with a second grand jury, Fitzgerald surely knows the
supposed conspiracy to defame Wilson is, and always was, a fantasy.
Still he won't let go. Fitzgerald has proved once more why naming a
special prosecutor is a colossal mistake.

The Ashcroft Justice Department. Armitage brought his story to
investigators after the CIA requested an investigation when the name of
Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, appeared in Novak's column.
So when the department decided weeks later to appoint a special
prosecutor, it already knew who had "leaked" Plame's name. Then
attorney-general John Ashcroft excused himself, leaving the decision to
his deputy, James Comey.

Rather than face a torrent of partisan recriminations for dropping the
case, Comey passed the buck to Fitzgerald. There were no profiles in
courage at Justice.

Joseph Wilson, an ex-ambassador and National Security Council official
in the Clinton and first Bush administrations, sparked the "leak"
controversy in the first place by writing in The New York Times that
Bush had lied in his 2003 State of the Union address about Saddam
Hussein's seeking uranium in Africa for nuclear weapons.
The CIA had sent Wilson to Niger in 2002 to check out precisely that
point, and he claimed to have debunked it.

Later, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that nearly
everything Wilson wrote or said about Bush, Cheney, Iraq, and his own
trip to West Africa was untrue. Wilson was a fraud.

The media - especially The Washington Post and The New York Times -
relied heavily on Wilson's reckless and unfounded charges to wage
journalistic jihad against the White House and Bush political adviser
Karl Rove.
Reporters and columnists, based on little more than Joe Wilson's
harrumphing, bought the line that the White House had "leaked" Plame's
name to discredit her husband.

In an editorial last January, the Times said the issue in the case "was
whether the White House was using this information in an attempt to
silence Mrs Wilson's husband, a critic of the Iraq invasion, and in
doing so violated a federal law against unmasking a covert operative".
The paper's answer was yes.

So instead of Cheney or Rove or Libby, the perennial targets of media
wrath, the Plame Hall of Shame consists of favourites of the Washington
elite and the mainstream press.

The reaction, therefore, has been zero outrage and minimal coverage.
The appropriate step for the press would be to investigate and then
report in detail how it got the story so wrong, just as the Times and
other media did when they reported incorrectly that weapons of mass
destruction were in Saddam's arsenal in Iraq. Don't hold your breath.

Not everyone got the story wrong. The Senate Intelligence Committee
questioned Wilson under oath. It found that, contrary to his claims,
his wife had indeed arranged for the CIA to send him to Niger in 2002.

It found that his findings had not, contrary to Wilson's claim,
circulated at the highest levels of the administration.

And Bush's 16 words in the State of the Union to the effect that
British intelligence believed Saddam had sought uranium in Africa -
words Wilson insisted were fictitious - had been twice confirmed as
true by none other than the British Government.

Worse, Wilson failed in the single reason for his trip to Niger: to
ferret out the truth about whether Iraq had sought uranium there.
Wilson said no, dismissing a visit by Iraqis in 1999.

But journalist Christopher Hitchens learned the trade mission was led
by an important Iraqi nuclear diplomat. And uranium, of course, was the
only thing Niger had to trade.

The fascination in Washington with the idea of a White House conspiracy
to ruin Plame's career and punish Wilson never made sense. If there had
been one, it had to be the most passive conspiracy in history.

The suspected mastermind was Rove, the Bush political adviser. But all
Rove did was to acknowledge off-handedly to two reporters that he'd
heard that Wilson's wife, whose name he didn't know, was a CIA
employee.

And the two reporters were more likely to agree with Wilson about the
war in Iraq than with the Bush administration. The conspiracy charge
was untrue.

What's left to do? Fitzgerald, in decency, should terminate his probe
immediately. And he should abandon the perjury prosecution of Libby,
the former Cheney aide. Libby's foggy memory was no worse than
Armitage's.

Last but not least, a few apologies are called for, notably by Powell,
but also by the press. A correction - perhaps the longest and most
overdue in the history of journalism - is in order.

The Weekly Standard


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