The AP is reporting today that Scooter Libby's attorneys are chomping at the bit to "make public" that it was the CIA that sent Joe Wilson to Niger, not the White House. Okay, but that has been public knowledge for quite some time, from the horse's mouth:
...on the August 3, 2003, edition of CNN's Late Edition, Wilson flatly stated that "it's absolutely true that neither the vice president nor Dr. [then-national security adviser Condoleezza] Rice nor even [then-Director of Central Intelligence] George Tenet knew that I was traveling to Niger."
Maybe Libby's legal team hopes this long ago established fact will finally trickle down to New Yorker columnist Nicholas Lemann, who wrote this today:
...the White House dispatched former Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger, in February of 2002, to find proof that the country had shipped yellowcake uranium to Iraq.
Fact checking is, apparently, not in vogue at the New Yorker. Actually, Lemann's outline of events in the Rove/Plame affair is nowhere near truth. He asserts that there was no intelligence pointing to Iraq's attempted purchases of yellow cake uranium, forcing Bush to create some, and that the heroic Wilson debunked the theory.
He then uses that meme to explain why the Bush administration maliciously "debunked" Wilson. Since none of it is actually true, Lemann's entire premise drops out from under him, leaving only the reckless "debunking" assertion without any basis. Along the way, claims Lemann, Valerie Plame was "unlawfully" outed. Of course, that charge too was debunked, by Wilson himself.
Nevertheless, Lemann uses his falsely crafted moral high ground to make this claim:
The problem with the Bush Administration is not that it is uninterested in hard facts. The problem is the way in which the Administration goes about marshalling those facts. Its working hypotheses can’t be falsified, because anything that contradicts them must be dismissed.
No, it is not a punchline. But it is pretty damn funny considering the source.
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