Joe Wilson & The Gray Wall Of Silence

(This post has been updated)

Bob Novak is finally talking about L'Affaire Plame. In doing so, he finally pulled the plug on a story that has been on Democrat-induced life support for years:

In my sworn testimony, I said what I have contended in my columns and on television: Joe Wilson's wife's role in instituting her husband's mission was revealed to me in the middle of a long interview with an official who I have previously said was not a political gunslinger. After the federal investigation was announced, he told me through a third party that the disclosure was inadvertent on his part.

Following my interview with the primary source, I sought out the second administration official and the CIA spokesman for confirmation.

I learned Valerie Plame's name from Joe Wilson's entry in Who's Who in America.

I considered his wife's role in initiating Wilson's mission, later confirmed by the Senate Intelligence Committee, to be a previously undisclosed part of an important news story. I reported it on that basis.

Even though this faux scandal has totally imploded, I wouldn't hold out hope for a mea culpa from the MSM. I find it to be undeniably hypocritical that they expose and berate any attempts by their stories' subjects to stonewall, but they circle the wagons and enforce their gray wall of silence when their own deceptions and agenda-driven sensationalism becomes apparent.

Lorie Byrd said it best:

If A Reporter Wanted To Tell A Really Interesting Story...They could tell the story of how Joe Wilson's tall tale was spun, produced and mass distributed. [...] The Novak story will get some television coverage, and even more print, but I will be really surprised if there is any attempt, especially in network television coverage, to expose the lies that Joe Wilson told and, more importantly, to explain how those at the networks bought his story hook, line and sinker. Remember that the entire time so many at the networks and elsewhere were telling a story of an innocent falling victim to vicious political retribution, Bob Novak was arguing (obviously without specifics) that it just didn't go down that way.

The Novak revelation is just a piece of the original puzzle (admittedly the great big fat piece that the entire puzzles rests upon) that started the Democrat spinmeisters and the mainstream media machine churning. The rest of the story is of the media all too eager to regurgitate the Wilson/Democrat talking points by repeatedly stating as fact things that simply were not. I know we will hear the Novak story in the coming days. I wonder if we will hear the rest of the story.

In two words Lorie, not likely. But if there's one thing I've learned about journalists throughout my short experience as a blogger, it's that many journalists appear to be very lazy when it comes to information gathering and fact checking. But then again, desire often trumps accuracy for many biased journalists when they're reporting on news that negatively affects a politician that they despise. So to help these slothful sleuths, I'll point them in the right direction with the hopes that Lorie will get to read that "really interesting story" about the media's canonization of Joe Wilson and the unjustified ubiquity of his lies.

Here are some of the common misperceptions regarding the Wilson/Plame story:

Exposing Plame's involvement in the Niger mission had nothing to do with "punishing Wilson" for embarrassing the Administration.

Exposing her role actually helped to blow the whistle on Wilson's lies -- or at least it would have if the unraveling of his lies was as widely reported as the lies themselves.

The lack of malice in revealing her name became apparent when Matt Cooper of Time magazine explained that Plame's occupation only emerged when he was warned by Administration officials (namely Karl Rove) that Wilson was lying about the VP's office sending him to Niger. It had been Wilson's CIA desk job wife that recommended such an unlikely candidate. To put it more simply, the Administration rightly told reporters not to take Wilson's claims at face value and not to print every word as fact for fear of having to issue a retraction.

Valerie Plame was not a double-secret undercover super-agent.

The CIA feared that Aldrich Ames exposed Plame (among many others) in 1997. She's had a desk job at Langley ever since.

This was not a scandal deserving of a special prosecutor (almost none are).

As a mater of fact, the feeding frenzy involving the press only served to "out" their anti-Bush agendas. At the same time that journalists were publicly demanding an investigation into the supposed crime committed by outing Plame, thirty-six news agencies not so publicly filed a friend of the court brief suggesting that there was little evidence to suggest that a crime had even been committed.

The entire faux-scandal involving Wilson/Plame/Rove/etc... only reached fever pitch because of the upcoming 2004 election and liberal journalists' desire to effect change at the Presidential level by running their own smear campaign.

Don't believe me? Let's look at the timeline: (most info via Fact Check)

• May, 2003: Joseph Wilson begins advising the Kerry campaign on foreign policy issues.
  
  
• June 12, 2003: A Washington Post article quotes an "envoy" (Wilson) as saying that the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong" on the Italian document determined to be forged by the IAEA. ("CIA Did Not Share Doubt," Washington Post, June 2003) / (Wilson would later tell the Senate Intelligence Committee that he hadn't seen the documents)
  
  
• June 19, 2003: The New Republic publishes "The Selling of the Iraq War: the First Casualty". The article mentions an unnamed ambassador (Wilson) was sent to Niger per the request of the Vice President's office delivered via the CIA. The article quotes the unnamed ambassador as saying the administration "knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie."
  
  
• July 6, 2003: Wilson publishes "What I didn't find in Africa" in The New York Times.
  
  
• July 14, 2003: Bob Novak's "Mission to Niger" article corrects the record, stating that the VP's office didn't send Wilson, but rather he was put forth by his wife who was involved because she works there. This is the first time she is named. Novak learned her name from Joe Wilson's entry in Who's Who. So in essence, her own husband "outed" her in a vain attempt to enhance his résumé.

You know the rest. If you want the close-up, high resolution play-by-play of the entire story, go visit Tom Maguire's blog. I'm more interested in the larger picture; mainly, how did this story grow from just one critic's opportune accusation into a widely reported "Bush Lied!" meme. Why did everyone cling without question to David Corn's allegation that naming Plame was a smear by Bushco? After all, it came from the hyper-liberal, virulently anti-Bush magazine, The Nation:

Did senior Bush officials blow the cover of a US intelligence officer working covertly in a field of vital importance to national security--and break the law--in order to strike at a Bush administration critic and intimidate others?

This is where it all began. Of course, the story didn't really grow legs until we got closer to the election and it was proven that Bush wasn't invincible on security issues. Why were so many professional reporters basically reprinting the accusations of a blatantly partisan editorialist? Why were Joe Wilson's political affiliations omitted from most reporters' accounts of the story? Why was he painted as a concerned, independent, third party whistleblower trumpeting the truth when he was on the Kerry/Edwards campaign's payroll?

These questions need answers. Will no professional journalists take up the call?

The funniest thing about this entire story is that the Senate Intelligence Report (pdf) found that Wilson's debriefing after his trip to Niger actually bolstered, rather than discredited, the CIA's case that Saddam was seeking yellowcake from Niger. So why didn't that ruin his credibility with those journalists who relied on him as a source for their news stories?

All of this begs the question; are journalists self-avowed information gatherers or public opinion shapers? If they tend to be more of the latter than the former, then they would be better off as editorialists or bloggers than news reporters. Of course, that all depends on introspection and self image rather than observable fact. But one fact is for certain and not open to interpretation; Joe Wilson is a dirty little liar with his own agenda. His lies are well documented. Okay, they're not that well documented, thanks to the reluctance of those journalists he manipulated to admit their own fallability. But to respond to Lorie's comment; this would indeed be a perfect story to tell, but I have a feeling we won't hear anything about it until after the 2006 midterm elections. After all, Joe and his megaphones in the media still have one more shot at knocking the Republicans down a notch.

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UPDATE:

Novak talked to Brit Hume about his role in the Plame investigation/witchhunt: (video) / (via NRO)

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UPDATE 7/14/6:

Mary Matalin explained to Alan Colmes in very small words why no crime was committed in the Plame case, and why the "retribution" meme is patently absurd: (video) / (via Expose the Left)