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Is Hypocrisy Still Considered A Vice?

We rarely read the New York Times' editorials except for their occasional humor value; today's editorial on the Valerie Plame affair is a case in point. To begin with, the Times has a bit of a problem denouncing leaks, as it admits: "Far be it for [sic] us to denounce leaks." No kidding; the Times has carried on a guerrilla war against the Bush administration for the last four and one-half years, relying largely on anti-Bush leaks by Democrats in the CIA and the State Department.

But the Plame "leak" is different, somehow:

But it is something else entirely when officials peddle disinformation for propaganda purposes or to harm a political adversary.
Yes, we certainly agree with that. That's why our opinion of Joe Wilson is so low. He leaked the contents of his own report to the CIA--in the pages of the New York Times!--only he lied about his own report. He "peddled disinformation," falsely claiming to have found no evidence of an Iraqi effort to buy uranium from Niger, in order to "harm a political adversary," President Bush. The Times didn't mind that particular disinformation, however, since it fit the paper's political agenda. In fact, the Times has never issued a correction of the misstatements in Wilson's op-ed. On the contrary, today's editorial links to Wilson's 2003 piece and repeats its central allegations, without even mentioning that Wilson's op-ed has been found to be fraudulent by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee!

The Times continues:

Mr. Rove said the origins of Mr. Wilson's mission were "flawed and suspect" because, according to Mr. Rove, Mr. Wilson had been sent to Niger at the suggestion of his wife, who works for the Central Intelligence Agency. To understand why Mr. Rove thought that was a black mark, remember that the White House considers dissenters enemies and that the C.I.A. had cast doubt on the administration's apocalyptic vision of Iraq's weapons programs.
No! Rove "thought that was a black mark" because Wilson had falsely claimed, in the very New York Times op-ed that the editorial linked to this morning, that he had been sent to Niger at the request of Vice-President Cheney's office:

In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake — a form of lightly processed ore — by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990's. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office.
This was another lie by Wilson, as Cheney pointed out at the time, and as the Senate Intelligence Report confirmed. Contrary to false statements made by Wilson and his wife, it was Valerie Plame who suggested her husband for the Niger venture, and the Vice-President's office had nothing to do with it. This is precisely what Karl Rove told Matt Cooper, but the Times demurely fails to quote Cooper's email to that effect.

As usual, the Times's editorial will sound plausible only to the uninformed. But it seems to me that there is a deeper level of malfeasance here.

In all of the liberal huffing and puffing over the supposed "outing" of Valerie Plame--as though she might be in danger as she drove to and from her desk job in Langley, and as though she hadn't posed for a photo shoot in Vanity Fair, dressed up as a spy--I've seen no liberal criticism of a more recent, real outing of a clandestine CIA operation. In this case, those who outed a CIA operation exposed secret agents operating in the field, in circumstances of great personal danger, not a civilian desk employee. The outing of the CIA operation undoubtedly forced the CIA to terminate or change what had been an effective means of protecting the nation's security, and likely did endanger the lives of real covert agents.

I'm referring, of course, to the exposure of a purportedly civilian airline as a CIA operation:

While posing as a private charter outfit - "aircraft rental with pilot" is the listing in Dun and Bradstreet - Aero Contractors is in fact a major domestic hub of the Central Intelligence Agency's secret air service. The company was founded in 1979 by a legendary C.I.A. officer and chief pilot for Air America, the agency's Vietnam-era air company, and it appears to be controlled by the agency, according to former employees.
An analysis of thousands of flight records, aircraft registrations and corporate documents, as well as interviews with former C.I.A. officers and pilots, show that the agency owns at least 26 planes, 10 of them purchased since 2001. The agency has concealed its ownership behind a web of seven shell corporations that appear to have no employees and no function apart from owning the aircraft.

The planes, regularly supplemented by private charters, are operated by real companies controlled by or tied to the agency, including Aero Contractors and two Florida companies, Pegasus Technologies and Tepper Aviation.

Who was it who "outed" these CIA employees, blew their cover and perhaps endangered their lives? The New York Times, of course! In an article that was based largely on leaks by former CIA employees, who were out to embarrass the administration. Ah, but that's the "good" kind of leak--the kind that exposes the Agency's real covert operatives, not the kind that tries to correct lies told by Democratic Party loyalists in the pages of the New York Times.

-- John, powerlineblog.com/archives/011019.php

How About A Few Facts With That Coffee?

The Times promotes the story of Rove and the Plame leak with another long story lacking in new developments.

However, we find plenty to mock:

Mr. Bush, who once said he would fire anyone on his staff who had knowingly leaked the name of a C.I.A. operative, Valerie Wilson, also known by her maiden name, Valerie Plame, ignored a question about Mr. Rove posed to him on Tuesday by a reporter on the edges of an Oval Office meeting with the prime minister of Singapore.

The President's words are here, and he said "if the person has violated law". We have yet to see whether the actual pledge, rather than the Times restatement, is still operative.

Mr. Rove can take heart in one fact: so far every other senior official caught up by the cascading series of questions that were touched off by 16 words in Mr. Bush's 2003 State of the Union address has survived, even prospered. Three of Mr. Bush's closest advisers were involved in the drafting or reviewing of the now-discredited language, which said: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

The Times can take heart in one fact - although they wrote many articles about the "16 Words" when that controversy was hot, they only wrote one weak, concealed follow-up announcing that - oh, my - maybe Bush was right about those 16 Words after all.

But Mr. Rove's case is a lot more complicated. By all accounts he had nothing to do with the wording in the speech. Instead, it appears he may have been part of the White House effort to push back after Mr. Wilson wrote a July 7, 2003, Op-Ed article in The New York Times declaring that Mr. Bush's description of Mr. Hussein's search for uranium was false, and that it ignored information that he passed on to the C.I.A. casting doubt on the story about an Iraqi search for uranium.

Oh, for heaven's sake - it was July 6! And there was a bit more to be pushed back then the Times troubles us with here. Maybe the Times could start with Wilson's leak to Nick Kristof for his May 6, 2003 column - since it launched Wilson's star, and eventually led to a question that caught Ms. Rice off-balance on a Sunday talk-show, maybe the Times could explain the errors in Kristof's reporting and the lack of follow-up.

The entire contretemps at the White House this week centers on whether Mr. Rove tried to discredit Mr. Wilson by suggesting that his mission to Niger was the product of nepotism, and that Ms. Wilson had arranged for it. Why a mission to Niger would be such a plum assignment is still a mystery, but the Senate Intelligence Committee, in a report last year, quotes a State Department official as saying that Ms. Wilson had suggested sending her husband. She denies it.

"She" denies it? I know Joe Wilson did, but I don't recall seeing her cited previously. No matter - is the Times going to leave this as "she said, they said"? Although the Senate Democrats would not vote on the specific conclusion, they did not dispute the evidence, which included a memo she wrote extolling his qualifications and a memo by an INR staffer describing a meeting at which she introduced her husband. The INR staffer's memo told Colin Powell that Joe Wilson's wife was involved in selecting her, but did not give her last name or mention her covert status.

And why do we care if his wife was involved? The Times pushes the nepotism line, which has us as puzzled as they. But Walter Pincus, in an article which also includes Joe Wilson as an anonymous source, had written this in the WaPo on June 12, 2003:

However, a senior CIA analyst said the case "is indicative of larger problems" involving the handling of intelligence about Iraq's alleged chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs and its links to al Qaeda, which the administration cited as justification for war. "Information not consistent with the administration agenda was discarded and information that was [consistent] was not seriously scrutinized," the analyst said.

So, a CIA analyst is criticizing the President anonymously in June for mishandling intelligence. In July, a former ambassador comes forward, also criticizing the Administration's handling of intelligence. Is the Ambassador simply a professional, detached, objective careerist from the State Department offering his own point of view?
Or is it at all relevant in assessing his credibility to know that he is in bed with a CIA professional? Does knowing that give a hint as to what side he might be on in this discussion?

Not in Timesworld.

I CAN STOP ANYTIME:

Let's rip the Times editorial while we are at it:

...it is something else entirely when officials peddle disinformation for propaganda purposes or to harm a political adversary. And Karl Rove seems to have been playing that unsavory game with the C.I.A. officer Valerie Plame Wilson and her husband, Joseph Wilson IV, a career diplomat who ran afoul of President Bush's efforts to justify the invasion of Iraq. An e-mail note provided by Time magazine to the federal prosecutor investigating the case shows that Mr. Rove's aim in talking about Ms. Wilson to Matthew Cooper, a Time reporter, was to discredit Mr. Wilson, perhaps to punish him.

Well, what "disinformation" was Rove putting out? The Times editors lack the character to excerpt the e-mail in any detail, so here we go, excerpting Newsweek:

Cooper wrote that Rove offered him a "big warning" not to "get too far out on Wilson." Rove told Cooper that Wilson's trip had not been authorized by "DCIA"—CIA Director George Tenet—or Vice President Dick Cheney. Rather, "it was, KR said, wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip." Wilson's wife is Plame, then an undercover agent working as an analyst in the CIA's Directorate of Operations counterproliferation division. (Cooper later included the essence of what Rove told him in an online story.) The e-mail characterizing the conversation continues: "not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[d] suspect but so is the report. he [Rove] implied strongly there's still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro[m] Niger ... "

So, the "16 Words" might be correct - that panned out.

Cheney did not initiate this trip - lots of newsies had this wrong (Wolf Blitzer had not gotten the memo as of July 13) - but that checked out. In fact, Tenet made that announcement hours after Rove spoke with Cooper.

And Ms. Plame was involved in some way, although Rove was wrong that she "authorized" it. Even the Times is catching up to the significance of this - in the paragraph above, they note that maybe this is meant to "discredit Wilson, perhaps to punish him".

"Perhaps" to punish? Based on what, other than Joe Wilson's bloviatings? The Times focuses on the "discredit" theory a bit later:

Mr. Rove said the origins of Mr. Wilson's mission were "flawed and suspect" because, according to Mr. Rove, Mr. Wilson had been sent to Niger at the suggestion of his wife, who works for the Central Intelligence Agency. To understand why Mr. Rove thought that was a black mark, remember that the White House considers dissenters enemies and that the C.I.A. had cast doubt on the administration's apocalyptic vision of Iraq's weapons programs.

Well, yes - if the Times wants to admit that there were two sides in a factional dispute, and that a hint to Wilson's true allegiance might have been contained in the fact that he was married to someone in the CIA, then we are in agreement. But how is that "disinformation"?

"Disinformation" is what Wilson gave Nick Kristof when he gave him (anonymously, and with his wife there at breakfast) the background for this column:

I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged.

The envoy reported, for example, that a Niger minister whose signature was on one of the documents had in fact been out of office for more than a decade.

Wrong, wrong, and wrong - Dick Cheney did not ask for an investigation; his office did not receive the result. Per both Tenet's statement and the SSCI report, Wilson's report was inconclusive. And the forgeries Wilson masterfully debunked by pointing out the phony signature? Wilson later wrote that he never saw them, which we believe since they were not in Washington until the fall of 2002.

And how did Kristof get so many points wrong? There is an easy explanation - although, as a diplomat one might think that he is a professional communicator, Wilson explained to Paula Zahn that "those are either misquotes or misattributions if they're attributed to me."

Or disinformation. Against which, Rove was pushing back. Waiting for Wilson to auto-discredit took about a year.

-- Tom Maguire, justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2005/07/how_about_a_few.html