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Skriven 2006-09-05 18:41:00 av ROSS SAUER (1:123/140)
Ärende: Washington Post
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Can't have anyone being critical of "Dear Leader," can we?

Smearing Joe Wilson, Again
By Robert Parry
September 1, 2006

In a world that wasn’t upside-down, the editorial page of Washington’s 
biggest newspaper might praise a whistleblower like former Ambassador 
Joseph Wilson for alerting the American people to a government deception 
that helped lead the country into a disastrous war that has killed 2,627 
U.S. soldiers.

The editorial page also might demand that every senior administration 
official who sought to protect that deception by leaking the identity of 
a covert CIA officer (Wilson’s wife) be held accountable, at minimum 
stripped of their security clearances and fired from government.

But the United States, circa 2006, is an upside-down world. So the 
Washington Post’s editorial page instead makes excuses for the 
government deceivers, treats their exposure of the CIA officer as 
justifiable, and attacks the whistleblower by recycling the government’s 
false spin points against him.

If future historians wonder how the United States could have blundered 
so catastrophically into Iraq under false pretenses and why so few 
establishment figures dared to speak out, the historians might read the 
sorry pattern of the Post’s editorial-page attacks on those who did 
dissent.

Washington Post Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt, who fell for virtually 
every Iraq War deception that the Bush administration could dream up, is 
back assaulting former Ambassador Wilson, again, in a Sept. 1 editorial, 
falsely accusing Wilson of lying and concluding that "it’s unfortunate 
that so many people took him seriously."

In the view of the Post’s editorial page, Wilson’s chief offense appears 
to be that he went public in July 2003 with a firsthand account of a 
fact-finding trip that he took in early 2002. At the CIA’s request, he 
traveled to the African nation of Niger to check out a report alleging 
that Iraq was trying to obtain yellowcake uranium, presumably for a 
nuclear bomb.

The yellowcake allegations had attracted Vice President Dick Cheney’s 
attention because, in 2002, the Bush administration was trying to build 
a case to justify invading Iraq. But Wilson found no hard evidence to 
support the suspicion that Iraq had tried to obtain any uranium ore, and 
U.S. intelligence subsequently agreed that the claim was a fraud.

Government Lies

Nevertheless, President George W. Bush cited the claim of Iraq’s 
supposed attempt to procure the yellowcake during his State of the Union 
Address in January 2003. The next week, on Feb. 5, 2003, Secretary of 
State Colin Powell made his famously bogus presentation to the United 
Nations accusing Iraq of hiding vast stockpiles of weapons of mass 
destruction (though Powell knew well enough to leave out the yellowcake 
canard).

The next day, Hiatt’s pro-war editorial page hailed Powell’s evidence as 
"irrefutable" and chastised any remaining skeptics. "It is hard to 
imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass 
destruction," the editorial said.

Hiatt’s judgment was echoed across the Post’s Op-Ed page, with Post 
columnists from Right to Left presenting a solid wall of misguided 
consensus. [Washington Post, Feb. 6, 2003]

But the Post’s gullibility about Powell’s testimony wasn’t a one-day 
aberration. As a study by Columbia University journalism professor Todd 
Gitlin noted, "The [Post] editorials during December [2002] and January 
[2003] numbered nine, and all were hawkish." [American Prospect, April 
1, 2003]

After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and the failure to 
discover evidence supporting the administration’s pre-war WMD claims, 
Hiatt acknowledged that the Post should have been more circumspect.

"If you look at the editorials we write running up [to the war], we 
state as flat fact that he [Hussein] has weapons of mass destruction," 
Hiatt said in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review. "If 
that’s not true, it would have been better not to say it." [CJR, 
March/April 2004]

But Hiatt’s supposed remorse didn’t stop him and the Post editorial page 
from continuing their attacks on Bush’s critics, from Democrats who 
showed insufficient enthusiasm when Hiatt was detecting war progress in 
2005 to retired generals who challenged the war strategy in 2006. [See 
Consortiumnews.com’s "Shame on the Post’s Editorial Page."]

Gullibility

While some Americans might still think that a major newspaper would want 
to know the truth, the Post’s hierarchy has behaved with petulance 
whenever evidence has emerged that reveals the depths of the Bush 
administration’s deceptions, and the extent of the Post’s gullibility.

For instance, in 2005, when secret documents were disclosed in Great 
Britain describing Bush’s efforts in 2002 to "fix" the Iraq WMD 
intelligence to justify the war, the Post first ignored the so-called 
"Downing Street Memo" and then disparaged those who considered this 
powerful evidence of Bush’s deceptions important.

On June 15, 2005, the Post’s lead editorial asserted that "the memos add 
not a single fact to what was previously known about the 
administration’s prewar deliberations. Not only that: They add nothing 
to what was publicly known in July 2002."

But Hiatt’s assessment simply wasn’t correct. Looking back to 2002 and 
early 2003, it would be hard to find any "reputable" commentary in the 
mainstream U.S. press calling Bush’s actions fraudulent, which is what 
the "Downing Street Memo" and other British evidence have since revealed 
them to be.

The British documents prove that much of the pre-war debate inside the 
U.S. and British governments was how best to manipulate public opinion 
by playing games with the intelligence. If that reality "was publicly 
known" before the war, why hadn’t the Post reported it and why did its 
editorials continue to parrot the administration’s lies and distortions?

Yet despite this disturbing record of the Post’s credulity (if not 
outright dishonesty), Hiatt has published yet another editorial 
concentrating his ugliest attacks not against the administration for 
misleading the nation to war or against the failure of officials (like 
Powell) to express their misgivings in a timely fashion, but against Joe 
Wilson.

The context of this latest broadside is a recent published report 
asserting that former deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was the 
first administration official to leak to right-wing columnist Robert 
Novak that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA officer and that she 
had played a small role in Wilson’s Niger trip.

Because Armitage was a reluctant supporter of the Iraq War, the Post 
editorial then jumps to the conclusion that "it follows that one of the 
most sensational charges leveled against the Bush White House, that it 
orchestrated the leak of Ms. Plame’s identity, is untrue."

But does it lead to that conclusion? Just because Armitage may have 
blurted out this classified information to Novak supposedly as gossip, 
that doesn’t mean that there was no parallel White House operation to 
peddle Plame’s identity to reporters as retaliation.

In fact, evidence uncovered by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald 
supports a conclusion that White House officials, under the direction of 
Vice President Cheney and including Cheney aide Lewis Libby and Bush 
political adviser Karl Rove, approached a number of reporters with this 
information.

Indeed, Rove, who remains in Bush’s inner circle and presumably still 
sees secret information, appears to have confirmed Plame’s identity for 
Novak and leaked the information to Time magazine’s Matthew Cooper. 
Meanwhile, Libby, who has been indicted on perjury and obstruction 
charges, pitched the information to the New York Times’ Judith Miller. 

Blaming the Victim

The Post’s editorial does acknowledge that Libby and other White House 
officials are not "blameless," since they allegedly released Plame’s 
identity while "trying to discredit Mr. Wilson." But the Post reserves 
its harshest condemnation for Wilson, blaming his criticism of Bush’s 
false State of the Union claim for Plame’s exposure.

"It now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. 
Plame’s CIA career is Mr. Wilson," the editorial said. "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."

The Post’s editorial, however, is at best an argumentative smear and 
most likely a willful lie. Along with other government investigators, 
Wilson did debunk the reports of Iraq acquiring yellowcake in Niger and 
those findings did circulate to senior levels, explaining why CIA 
Director George Tenet struck the yellowcake claims from other Bush 
speeches.

( The Post’s accusation about Wilson "falsely" claiming to have debunked 
the yellowcake reports apparently is based on Wilson’s inclusion in his 
report of speculation from one Niger official who suspected that Iraq 
might be interested in buying yellowcake, although the Iraqi officials 
never mentioned yellowcake and made no effort to buy any. This 
irrelevant point has been a centerpiece of Republican attacks on Wilson 
and is now being recycled by the Washington Post.)

Hiatt also is absolving the White House, Novak and implicitly himself 
(since he published Novak’s column revealing Plame’s identity) from 
responsibility for protecting the identity of an undercover CIA officer 
and her spy network. Plame’s operation was then focused on Iran’s WMD 
programs including its alleged nuclear ambitions.

Contrary to the Post’s assertion that Wilson "ought to have expected" 
that the White House and Novak would zero in on Wilson’s wife, a 
reasonable expectation in a normal world would have been just the 
opposite.

Even amid the ugly partisanship of today’s Washington, it was shocking 
to many longtime observers of government that any administration 
official or an experienced journalist would disclose the name of a 
covert CIA officer for such a flimsy reason as trying to discredit her 
husband.

Only in this upside-down world would a major newspaper be so 
irresponsible and so dishonest as to lay off the blame for exposing a 
CIA officer on her husband because he dared criticize lies told by the 
President of the United States, deceptions that have led the nation into 
a military debacle.

Consortiumnews.com is a product of The Consortium for Independent 
Journalism, Inc.

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