MSM Weighs in on Armitage Vis-à-vis Plame

And guess what? The New York Times and Washington Post have filed such biased accounts they both sound as though they were written by White House flacks. On August 31, the LATimes published a balanced account (“Ex-State Department Official Said to Be Source of Plame Leak”) re former Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage being the Valerie Plame leaker. But the New York Times article this morning, “New Questions About Inquiry in CIA Leak” sounds like a pro-Bush editorial. And yesterday’s WaPo article (“End of an Affair”) actually was an editorial. That hatchet job winds up with this stunning paragraph: “Nevertheless, it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush's closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It's unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.” So when George W. Bush said in his State of the Union Speech on January 28, 2003, that, “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa”, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on CNN on July 14, 2003, “So yes, it is unfortunate that this one sentence, this 16 words, remained in the State of the Union speech,” that all never happened? When was Wilson’s claim proven false? I must have missed that. As did Secretary of State Rice when she spent minutes on CNN explaining away the fact that the Prez made a statement in his SOTU Speech that was not true. But the WaPo editorial does prove one thing. WaPo obviously believes that Plame’s status with the CIA was leaked to the press as retribution for her husband telling the truth. WaPo says, “Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge… he ought to have expected that (questions) would point to his wife.” Yes, the Wilsons probably did suspect the Bush administration would try to ruin then both for telling the truth. That’s why they have filed a suit in federal court in Washington against Rove, Libby and Cheney, alleging that these men conspired to deprive them of their constitutional rights by leaking Plame's CIA connection.