Amazing how desperate the Democrats are to find a Bush Administration scandal. While trying to get caught up on my e-mail and checking the news, I chanced on this story, Bush claims privilege to withhold CIA leak records, leading the headlines on Yahoo! My Congressman, Henry Waxman, chairman of House Oversight Committee, is still investigating something already investigated by a zealous and exacting fellow prosecutor.
Yup, ol’ Henry is probing the leak of Valerie Plame’s name, even though Patrick Fitzgerald, the aforementioned prosecutor, after a thorough investigation, did not indict anyone for the underlying offense (i.e., that which he was hired to investigate). In other words, there was no crime.
What is interesting here is not just the Democrats endless probing of this story, but the disingenuous coverage in the MSM. In the first version I read, the Associated Press’s Laurie Kellman reported:
They also include notes about the 2003 State of the Union address, during which President Bush made the case for invading Iraq in part by saying Saddam Hussein was pursuing uranium ore to make a nuclear weapon. That information turned out to be wrong.
(I have saved that version as a .pdf.)
Well, in that version, it wasn’t the information that turned out to be wrong, but Ms. Kellman’s reporting. While the White House may have retracted those remarks, the evidence shows that Bush was not lying. Here’s the president said in that 2003 address: “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” And the evidence, including a British intelligence review of their government’s claim, backs him up.
So, AP changed the paragraph:
Other records sought by the House committee include notes about Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address, during which he made the case for invading Iraq in part by saying Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was pursuing uranium ore in Africa to make a nuclear weapon. In the spring of 2003, [Joe] Wilson claimed publicly that he had gone to Africa for the CIA to investigate the report and advised the administration it was false months before Bush cited it in the State of the Union speech.
That paragraph is true, but incomplete. Wilson did indeed make such public claims. And he had indeed gone to Africa. But, the CIA found his findings (which he delivered orally) lent credence to claims that Saddam was trying to get yellowcake from Iraq. Not just that, Mr. Wilson could produce no evidence that the Administration had even been aware of his report.
Of course if the White House had been aware of Joe’s mission, it would have gotten the CIA’s interpretation–which would have helped confirm the words the president spoke in the SOTU.
I wonder why Ms. Kellman and her editors at the AP chose to leave that out?
