Where do you think the claims above can be found? Are you sitting down? They can be found in an editorial at the Washington Post.
PRESIDENT BUSH was right to approve the declassification of parts of a National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq three years ago in order to make clear why he had believed that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons. Presidents are authorized to declassify sensitive material, and the public benefits when they do. But the administration handled the release clumsily, exposing Mr. Bush to the hyperbolic charges of misconduct and hypocrisy that Democrats are leveling.
Rather than follow the usual declassification procedures and then invite reporters to a briefing – as the White House eventually did – Vice President Cheney initially chose to be secretive, ordering his chief of staff at the time, I. Lewis Libby, to leak the information to a favorite New York Times reporter. The full public disclosure followed 10 days later. There was nothing illegal or even particularly unusual about that; nor is this presidentially authorized leak necessarily comparable to other, unauthorized disclosures that the president believes, rightly or wrongly, compromise national security. Nevertheless, Mr. Cheney’s tactics make Mr. Bush look foolish for having subsequently denounced a different leak in the same controversy and vowing to “get to the bottom” of it.
The affair concerns, once again, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV and his absurdly over-examined visit to the African country of Niger in 2002. Each time the case surfaces, opponents of the war in Iraq use it to raise a different set of charges, so it’s worth recalling the previous iterations. Mr. Wilson originally claimed in a 2003 New York Times op-ed and in conversations with numerous reporters that he had debunked a report that Iraq was seeking to purchase uranium from Niger and that Mr. Bush’s subsequent inclusion of that allegation in his State of the Union address showed that he had deliberately “twisted” intelligence “to exaggerate the Iraq threat.” The material that Mr. Bush ordered declassified established, as have several subsequent investigations, that Mr. Wilson was the one guilty of twisting the truth. In fact, his report supported the conclusion that Iraq had sought uranium.
Mr. Wilson subsequently claimed that the White House set out to punish him for his supposed whistle-blowing by deliberately blowing the cover of his wife, Valerie Plame, who he said was an undercover CIA operative. This prompted the investigation by Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald. After more than 2 1/2 years of investigation, Mr. Fitzgerald has reported no evidence to support Mr. Wilson’s charge. In last week’s court filings, he stated that Mr. Bush did not authorize the leak of Ms. Plame’s identity. Mr. Libby’s motive in allegedly disclosing her name to reporters, Mr. Fitzgerald said, was to disprove yet another false assertion, that Mr. Wilson had been dispatched to Niger by Mr. Cheney. In fact Mr. Wilson was recommended for the trip by his wife. Mr. Libby is charged with perjury, for having lied about his discussions with two reporters. Yet neither the columnist who published Ms. Plame’s name, Robert D. Novak, nor Mr. Novak’s two sources have been charged with any wrongdoing.
Link and excerpt via Ace of Spades (except that I chose to quote a lengthier excerpt because I liked it so much). The title of this post is from him, too. I completely stole it all.
Just think back on all those 60 Minutes pieces, as well as all those other network profiles portraying Wilson as the brave whisleblower trying to protect his victim wife. The media coverage of Wilson was lengthy and fawning. The reporters never pointed to any of the many inconsistencies in Wilson’s stories. They fed him softballs and pointed to a scary government that would out a CIA agent, putting her very life in danger, in order to discredit and get revenge on a critic of the President’s war policy. Where are all the network news anchors rushing to report what the Washington Post has determined? Katie Couric could set the record straight and correct all the misleading reporting done on 60 Minutes. She could make that her first big story in her new gig at CBS News. Maybe she will get around to it right after she finishes her investigative piece on who forged the Bill Burkett documents.
Update: Jim Hoft has an excellent timeline.
This was originally posted at Polipundit.com.
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