Just five days ago, I wrote that my local paper, the LA Times left out key facts in article on Bush Administration’s efforts to discredit a dishonest critic. Well, they’ve done it again today. In the paper’s article on the continuing “CIA leak investigation,” different reporters (from those who wrote on Monday) offer the same biased account of the claims that former Kerry campaign aide Joseph C. Wilson IV made in the summer of 2003. According to the Times:
Wilson later wrote in the op-ed piece that the claims were likely false and that intelligence cited by the Bush administration to support the invasion of Iraq “was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.”
Note that the reporters rely on Wilson’s writing to define the claims. Nowhere do they mention the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq which debunked what Wilson had written. Indeed, Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-KS) wrote:
The former Ambassador, either by design or through ignorance, gave the American people and, for that matter, the world a version of events that was inaccurate, unsubstantiated, and misleading.
Thus, once again the LA Times‘ reporting is incomplete. The only reference this paper makes to the story the White House was trying to discredit is Wilson’s words, words which were later discredited by a Senate report the article doesn’t mention, a report whose conclusions even the Washington Post described as “contrary to Wilson’s assertions.”
If you read only this Southern California daily, you might not be aware that a unanimous Senate committee had discredited Mr. Wilson. Indeed, shortly after the Senate Intelligence Committee released its report, the name of this one-time Kerry aide disappeared from the Democratic presidential candidate’s web-site. Once again, the LA Times appears more interested in discrediting Karl Rove than it is in providing a complete and accurate report of the circumstances surrounding this investigation.
-Dan (AKA GayPatriotWest): GayPatriotWest@aol.com
UPDATE: Tom Maguire finds a press coverup in the Wilson/Plame affair (via Instapundit).
UPDATE #2: Since some of my critics claim that the aforementioned report does not buttress my claim that Wilson was dishonest, let me cite just one passage (which goes to the heart of the matter at hand). Wilson claimed that his wife did not recommend him for the mission to Niger. According to the report (that part approved by the unanimous Senate Intelligence committe: CIA’s DO Counterproliferation Division (CPD) “reports officer told Committee staff that the former ambassador’s wife ‘offered up his name’.“).