Tuesday, April 11, 2006

OOPS!



It looks like Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald was a bit overzealous in something that he filed in the Valerie Plame/ Scooter Libby/ Joe Wilson/ Judith Miller investigation.
Actually, it's not really fair to term what he did as being overzealous. He was flat out wrong.

From the
Washington Post:

The federal prosecutor overseeing the indictment of Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, yesterday corrected a claim in an earlier court filing that Libby had misrepresented the significance placed by the CIA on allegations that Iraq attempted to buy uranium from Niger.

Last week, Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald wrote that, in conversation with former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, Libby described the uranium story as a "key judgment" of the CIA's 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, a term of art indicating there was consensus within the intelligence community on that issue. In fact, the alleged effort to buy uranium was not among the estimate's key judgments and was listed further back in the 96-page, classified document.

In a letter to U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, Fitzgerald wrote yesterday that he wanted to "correct" the sentence that dealt with the issue in a filing he submitted last Wednesday. That sentence said Libby "was to tell Miller, among other things, that a key judgment of the NIE held that Iraq was 'vigorously trying to procure' uranium."

Instead, the sentence should have conveyed that Libby was to tell Miller some of the key judgments of the NIE "and that the NIE stated that Iraq was 'vigorously trying to procure' uranium."

Hmmm. That's interesting. A misplaced word here and there can be very misleading.

It's a good thing that Fitzgerald saw fit to "correct" his blunder. He wouldn't want to be accused of lying.

Something that I doubt will ever be presented correctly in the lib media is Plame's status with the CIA.

In this blurb by Post writer Dafna Linzer, she writes that Libby was charged for lying to the FBI and a grand jury in connection to what he told reporters. That's correct. Libby was not charged for leaking.

Linzer screws up, or she intentionally sets out to deceive the reader, when she claims:

The indictment came as part of Fitzgerald's investigation into who leaked to the media the name of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, whose husband became a public critic of the Bush administration's case for the Iraq war.

VALERIE PLAME WAS NOT A COVERT CIA OPERATIVE.

THIS IS SO MISLEADING. NO, IT'S A LIE, AND IT REALLY BUGS ME.





2 comments:

The WordSmith from Nantucket said...

Christopher Hitchens had a nice piece in Slate: http://www.slate.com/id/2139609/

Mary said...

Well, well, well.

Wowie Zahawie! :)