Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Connecting The Dots
What is the thread that connects these men?
Richard Clarke. Joseph Wilson. John Murtha.
There's an obvious connector: all three are outspoken critics of the administration. But there's a less-obvious factor which binds all three men. All of them have repeatedly and dramatically contradicted themselves while making the case that the administration is itself misleading the American people. And that is the charitable construction: many observers would conclude that these men have willingly lied about facts that were objectively knowable and easily verifiable, in order to make their case. And yet the media continue to promenade them, front-and-center as 'honest whistleblowers' before the American public. People we should trust.
Richard Clarke testified under oath before the 9/11 Commission that either the White House or State Dept. cleared Saudi Arabian citizens (including several bin Laden relatives) to leave the country right after 9/11 in March. A mere two months later, he reversed his testimony and admitted the decision was his alone, again under oath. This apparent contradiction bothered neither the press nor anyone else.
Clarke has repeatedly lambasted the Bush administration for "doing nothing" and "not having a terrorism plan". Yet in this 2002 FOX interview he praised the White House for a proactive turnover:
Even Time Magazine couldn't help noticing the discrepancies between what he said and what he wrote:
And then there's Joe Wilson, who couldn't wait to come back from Africa to tell us what the CIA didn't want him to find there:
The British Butler report further undercut Wilson's story, as the liberal New Republic scathingly commented:
But Saint Joe and his long-suffering wife Val appear in our morning papers with disturbing regularity, their rather distressing unreliability in matters of fact nothwithstanding.
And now we come to John Murtha, the latest in a long stream of fine, principled, anti-war critics who dare to speak truth to power. Rep. Murtha is being brandished against the Bush White House like the White Hot Flame of Truth... well, sort of...
If only those annoying ankle-biters would quit questioning his patriotism. A few examples of this below-the-belt journalism:
This gentleman (who apparently didn't read the defeatism playbook) doesn't think he's living hand to mouth.
And Mickey Kaus asks, is it too much as ask for this guy to get his story straight?
No wonder the man counsels retreat. He's at war with himself and to all appearances he's losing a fight against an unarmed opponent.
The more important question in all of this is why do the media insist on parading these lying fools in front of us 24/7. When our elected President says anything, the media are all over him like a pack of hounds, deconstructing every word for deeper meaning and trying to prove their journalistic independence by taking the other side lest they be suspected of harboring revisionist patriotic tendencies. But let one of these fools open their mouths and utter easily disprovable falsehoods and the media give them a complete pass. No fact-checking, no scrutiny whatsoever.
I don't understand it. I guess it's all part of having 'fair and balanced' press coverage in a 'free' society. We're 'free' to be sheltered from the unvarnished words of our elected leaders, lest we decide for ourselves what they mean, while the lies of known prevaricators go unchallenged daily in the newspapers to give us much-needed "perspective" on daily events. Hopefully this is something we can pass on to the Iraqi press as they 'mature'.
Richard Clarke. Joseph Wilson. John Murtha.
There's an obvious connector: all three are outspoken critics of the administration. But there's a less-obvious factor which binds all three men. All of them have repeatedly and dramatically contradicted themselves while making the case that the administration is itself misleading the American people. And that is the charitable construction: many observers would conclude that these men have willingly lied about facts that were objectively knowable and easily verifiable, in order to make their case. And yet the media continue to promenade them, front-and-center as 'honest whistleblowers' before the American public. People we should trust.
Richard Clarke testified under oath before the 9/11 Commission that either the White House or State Dept. cleared Saudi Arabian citizens (including several bin Laden relatives) to leave the country right after 9/11 in March. A mere two months later, he reversed his testimony and admitted the decision was his alone, again under oath. This apparent contradiction bothered neither the press nor anyone else.
Clarke has repeatedly lambasted the Bush administration for "doing nothing" and "not having a terrorism plan". Yet in this 2002 FOX interview he praised the White House for a proactive turnover:
...that process which was initiated in the first week in February, uh, decided in principle, uh in the spring to add to the existing Clinton strategy and to increase CIA resources, for example, for covert action, five-fold, to go after Al Qaeda...in their first meeting, changed the strategy by authorizing the increase in funding five-fold,...then changed the strategy from one of rollback with Al Qaeda over the course of five years, which it had been, to a new strategy that called for the rapid elimination of Al Qaeda.
Even Time Magazine couldn't help noticing the discrepancies between what he said and what he wrote:
The accounts of high-level conversations and meetings given by Clarke in various television appearances, beginning with the 60 Minutes interview, differ in significant respects from the recollections of a former top counterterrorism official who participated in the same conversations and meetings: Richard Clarke.
And then there's Joe Wilson, who couldn't wait to come back from Africa to tell us what the CIA didn't want him to find there:
Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, dispatched by the CIA in February 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq sought to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program with uranium from Africa, was specifically recommended for the mission by his wife, a CIA employee, contrary to what he has said publicly.
Wilson's assertions -- both about what he found in Niger and what the Bush administration did with the information -- were undermined yesterday in a bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report.
The panel found that Wilson's report, rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, bolstered the case for most intelligence analysts. And contrary to Wilson's assertions and even the government's previous statements, the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence that made its way into 16 fateful words in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address.
The British Butler report further undercut Wilson's story, as the liberal New Republic scathingly commented:
The tale spun by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson that Iraq did not ever try to buy uranium yellowcake from Niger is now in the process of unraveling. And, of course, the phalanx of anti-war journalists is desperately trying to stop the bust-up. But it can't be done. The flying apart began with two stories in the Financial Times (London), one on June 28, the other on July 4. Relying on information ultimately sourced to three European intelligence services--none of them British and one of them that had monitored clandestine uranium smuggling to Iraq over three years--Mark Huband reported that the network also serviced or was to service Libya, Iran, China, and North Korea. A tell-tale element of the story is that the mines in Niger from which several thousand tons of uranium had been extracted and sold were owned by French companies. Apparently, after a time, they had abandoned the mines as economically unviable. But, as a counter-proliferation expert told Huband, this does not mean that extraction stopped.
In any case, Lord Butler's altogether independent panel in the United Kingdom concluded that Tony Blair's claim about Hussein being in the market for uranium was "well-founded." These are the same claims made by George W. Moreover, the U.S. Senate report undercuts Wilson's very believability. I myself had wondered why the CIA had been so dumb--such dumbness is something to which we should have long ago become accustomed!--as to send a low-level diplomat to check on yellowcake sales from Niger to Iraq when it should have dispatched a real spook. Well, it turns out that a "real spook" had recommended him to her boss, that spook being Valerie Plame, who happens also to be Wilson's wife. He has long denied that she had anything to do with his going to Niger and that, alas, was a lie. It appears, in fact, that this is the sole reason he was sent. Still, in a lot of dining rooms where I am a guest here, there is outrage that someone in the vice president's office "outed" Ms. Plame, as though everybody in Georgetown hadn't already known she was under cover, so to speak. Under cover, but not really. One guest even asserted that someone in the vice president's office is surely guilty of treason, no less--an offense this person certainly wouldn't have attributed to the Rosenbergs or Alger Hiss, Daniel Ellsberg or Philip Agee. But for the person who confirmed for Robert Novak what he already knew, nothing but high crimes would do....
But Saint Joe and his long-suffering wife Val appear in our morning papers with disturbing regularity, their rather distressing unreliability in matters of fact nothwithstanding.
And now we come to John Murtha, the latest in a long stream of fine, principled, anti-war critics who dare to speak truth to power. Rep. Murtha is being brandished against the Bush White House like the White Hot Flame of Truth... well, sort of...
If only those annoying ankle-biters would quit questioning his patriotism. A few examples of this below-the-belt journalism:
Brookings has estimates of Iraqi unemployment at 27-40%, hardly 60%. [Ed. note: Joe Biden had it at 40% in a WaPo editorial last weekend, too, which is on the high end but still only 2/3 of Murtha's grossly inflated figure).
Murtha writes that “Average monthly death rates of U.S. service members have grown since the Abu Ghraib prison scandal from one per day to almost four.”
This is blatantly false, as the number of killed Americans fluctuates widely. In April it was 4.9 (Abu Ghraib story broke in late April, with higher casualties before than after that month). In March 2004 it was 1.7 per day. In April it was 4.9; in June 2004 again 1.5. In 2005 we have 1.6 in September and 3.1 in October. So far this month the figure has been 2.66.
This gentleman (who apparently didn't read the defeatism playbook) doesn't think he's living hand to mouth.
And Mickey Kaus asks, is it too much as ask for this guy to get his story straight?
We'll stay there forever. The Iraqis are never going to say turn it over. We can't allow them to say when it's gonna turn it over.--This Week, 12/4/05
You're gonna see the Iraqis clamoring. Listen, anybody we support in Iraq loses the election. And so they're gonna be clamoring for us to get out. -- same show, a few moments later.
[T]here's a civil war going. We're caught in between a civil war right now. Our troops are the targets of the civil war. They're the only people that could have unified the various factions in Iraq. And they're unified against us. --ABC's This Week, 12/4/05
[W]hy should I believe what the CIA says about what's happening in Iraq, that there's going to be a civil war? First of all, al Qaeda was wrong. It was wrong on the nuclear stuff. It was wrong on everything they have said over there. So why should I believe that there's going to be a civil war? -- same show, a few moments later.
No wonder the man counsels retreat. He's at war with himself and to all appearances he's losing a fight against an unarmed opponent.
The more important question in all of this is why do the media insist on parading these lying fools in front of us 24/7. When our elected President says anything, the media are all over him like a pack of hounds, deconstructing every word for deeper meaning and trying to prove their journalistic independence by taking the other side lest they be suspected of harboring revisionist patriotic tendencies. But let one of these fools open their mouths and utter easily disprovable falsehoods and the media give them a complete pass. No fact-checking, no scrutiny whatsoever.
I don't understand it. I guess it's all part of having 'fair and balanced' press coverage in a 'free' society. We're 'free' to be sheltered from the unvarnished words of our elected leaders, lest we decide for ourselves what they mean, while the lies of known prevaricators go unchallenged daily in the newspapers to give us much-needed "perspective" on daily events. Hopefully this is something we can pass on to the Iraqi press as they 'mature'.
3 Comments:
By 
Sissy Willis, at
Tue Dec 06, 03:44:00 PM:
Haven't I always said?
"That's what lying is"
Will the real Richard Clarke please stand up.
By Steve, at
Wed Dec 07, 03:42:00 AM:
The Niger mines are anything BUT economically unviable. I visited them yesterday and they are buzzing. That doesn't mean that uranium is being smuggled out though.
By Cassandra, at
Wed Dec 07, 05:49:00 AM:
No, it certainly doesn't, but that isn't the point. The 'objectionable' statement (notably distorted by Wilson) was the Hussein was still *seeking* yellowcake uranium, and we had viable intelligence from multiple sources (and still do) that he was.
Furthermore, according to the SSCI and CIA officials, Wilson's report was never given to the White House because it "added nothing new" to existing information (and in any event, Wilson would not have been on the distribution list so he certainly should not have written in the NY Times he "knew" the White House had seen it, as he later admitted he had no way of knowing).
That the press has not called him out on this and other major lies in his accusations against the President remains a major black mark against their vaunted "objectivity" and journalistic ethics. This isn't rocket science. They could at least raise the issue, even if they had doubts, but instead they swept it under the rug because it doesn't tend to support their political agenda.
