XDA

There comes a point where the worst lies are those of omission. Like in this really horrible op-ed by H.D.S. Greenway this morning in my crisp electronic edition of the Rocky Mountain News.

Here are the first few sentences: What the perjury trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby really revealed was the astonishing lengths to which Vice President Dick Cheney and others in the Bush administration went to discredit Ambassador Joseph Wilson for his 2003 claim that the administration had been dead wrong about Saddam Hussein trying to buy material from Niger to make nuclear weapons. The intensity and single-mindedness of this pursuit leaped out from the testimony.

The decision to "out" a covert CIA officer, Wilson's wife -- which is a federal crime -- showed a kind of desperation.

Let's take them one at a time. 1) ...the astonishing lengths to which Vice President Dick Cheney and others in the Bush administration went to discredit Ambassador Joseph Wilson...

Is this guy high? What astonishing lengths? Jedi mind control of Richard Armitage so that he mentioned as gossip with Woodward the fact that Joe Wilson's wife, who worked at the CIA, recommended him for the 'investigation' in Niger. Joe Wilson denied his wife got him the job. "Valerie had nothing to do with the matter," Wilson wrote in a memoir published this year. "She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip." He was lying, as usual. There's a memo (p. 38) where wife urges husband as the right choice for the job. Does Greenway not know this? He certainly doesn't mention it.

2) ...discredit Ambassador Joseph Wilson for his 2003 claim that the administration had been dead wrong about Saddam Hussein trying to buy material from Niger to make nuclear weapons.

Some U.S. support for the well founded European intelligence that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy partially processed uranium ore (called yellowcake) from Niger, was former Ambasdor Wilson himself, who confirmed that Wissam al-Zahawie, Iraq’s former IAEA Representative and former head of the pre-1991 Iraqi nuclear weapons program, went to Niger as part of a trade delegation, in a move correctly interpreted as an attempt to buy uranium for use in Iraq. After Wilson's debriefing to the CIA confirming these facts (pp. 43-4), Joe Wilson began, as usual, to lie about what he did indeed find in Niger in an op-ed in the New York Times on July 6, 2003. So the administration does a rather ineffectual job of trying to expose Wilson as a man who said one thing to the CIA and the exact opposite to the world, through the NYT; and Greenway, who again does not mention the Wilson lies, interprets that as an intense and single-minded pursuit. Incredible. Not my idea of a political Jihad. Not Clintonian war room in the slightest.

And there was one more Wilson lie not mentioned by Greenway, and this one's a dusie: The former ambassador also told Committee staff that he was the source of a Washington Post article ("CIA Did Not Share Doubt on Iraq Data; Bush Used Report of Uranium Bid," June 12, 2003) which said, "among the Envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because `the dates were wrong and the names were wrong." Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong" when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports. The former ambassador said that he may have "misspoken" to the reporter when he said he concluded the documents were "forged." He also said he may have become confused about his own recollection after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported in March 2003 that the names and dates on the documents were not correct and may have thought he had seen the names himself. The former ambassador reiterated that he had been able to collect the names of the government officials which should have been on the documents. (non-pdf version here). He lies about his lying.

3) The decision to "out" a covert CIA officer, Wilson's wife -- which is a federal crime -- showed a kind of desperation.

If it's a crime--why wasn't Armitage or anyone charged with the crime? The simple answer is that it wasn't a crime to identify a CIA desk jockey (analyst) as gossip (just as it's not a crime to mention who is the head of the CIA, whoever that is now). What is a crime is to publish the names of our spies in place overseas with the specific intent to get them captured or killed. There was no crime here, and there never was. Nor was there any and I mean any evidence at the trial about some intensely desperate and single-minded pursuit in revenge of a truth teller. What existed was the question--how did Wilson get to Niger for the CIA? to which the answer was--his wife got him the gig. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, Washington gossipers (like Armitage) abhor unanswered questions.

The sense any sane and fair journalist would take from the affair du Plame is Joe Wilson told lie after lie and the administration took steps to reveal them. That seems a perfectly rational reaction to a liar. Greenway is either a fool (unlikely--he went to Harvard) or so partisan he cannot see the truth as it slaps him in the face.

And the op-ed just got ever worse after that.