The GOP Liar's Club
Seemed like every time I turned on the Tee Vee there was some GOP shill lying his or her face off about the Plame scandal, and the point they kept hitting over and over again is that Joe Wilson is not credible because his wife sent him to Niger on a boondoggle.
Aside from the high hilarity of watching serial hypocrites like John Fund who reportedly fucked his girlfriend's kid then told her to have an abortion sitting in judgment of Joe Wilson, all evidence points to the fact that the claim simply isn't true. So says Walter Pincus today in the WaPo, anyway.
What Pincus says is more clarification than news, but he reiterates that according to the CIA, Wilson was chosen for the trip by senior officials in the Directorate of Operations counterproliferation division because he had made a similar trip for them in 1999. On that particular trip, Plame had suggested him for the task. But intelligence officials support Wilson's assertions that Plame's only role in the 2002 trip was to write a memo at the request of her bosses regarding Wilson's credentials, and to introduce him at a Feb. 19, 2002 meeting she did not attend.
Why is Pincus bringing this up now? Well, as Swopa notes, the article points out that the only two known documents that spread the GOP lie intended to "feminize" Wilson are the INR memo of June 2003 where the information regarding Plame was marked "top secret," and the statement of views of Pat Roberts in the 2004 report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (and not in the report itself, as Fund and other Rovians repeatedly claim). Since the Roberts statement is based on the INR report and happened long after the original lies were spread by "senior administration officials" to Novak and others, that means the only known source document would be the INR memo.
Which puts Rove, Libby et. al. in a precarious position. Because that memo clearly states that the information regarding Plame's identity is "top secret," and if Fitzgerald can prove that this was the source of Rove and Libby's information they become a lot more culpable for having knowingly leaked classified information.
Pincus goes on to mention that he was one of the people this erroneous information was "leaked" to. What he doesn't say is that he promised confidentiality to someone who bold-faced lied to him and tried to use him as a tool for spreading political misinformation, and that by refusing to now identify this person he shows he really doesn't care much about the vaunted principle of journalistic privilege nearly as much as he does continuing to collect a paycheck.
posted by Jane Hamsher @ 8/10/2005 10:59:00 PM
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