Novak names names in Plame leak case

[kluge]

<p>Fundingfather, your last two posts highlight why the “Bush lied” controversy probably won’t go away. While I don’t doubt the sincerity of your opinion, your defense of the Administration displays many of the same overreaching techniques used by the administration, and therefore undercuts your personal credibility and gives rise to the question of whether your are consciously misleading. Let’s take a look at the snippets you cut and pasted from the Senate report in post #272.</p>

<p>First, you have selectively quoted from parts of the report discussing the oral statements made long after the fact by the WINPAC Director and the NSC Special Assistant as proof of how the reference to the British was inserted into the yellowcake line of the SOTU. But here’s what you left out:

In a follow up interview with Committee staff, he [the WINPAC Director] said that he still recalls the conversation the way he described it to the Committee originally, however, he believes that he may have confused the two conversations because the documentation he found does not support his version of events. …
Finally, the two disagreed about the WTNPAC Director’s account that he had told the NSC Special Assistant that the CIA had urged the British to remove the uranium reference from their white paper, also because of concerns about sources and methods. The NSC Special Assistant told Committee staff that the WINPAC Director did not tell him the CIA had asked the British to remove the reference from their white paper.

Apparently the White House speechwriters - who all agree actually inserted the reference to “the British” into the speech - were never interviewed, so all we have is the recollections of two men about past conversations which are in significant respects directly contradicted by contemporaneous documents, and in others contradict each other. That’s not to say it’s necessarily untrue, just that the evidence supporting the claim you make is seriously flawed - and you did not disclose that in your post, preferring instead to project an aura of truth and reliability to your statement that you have to know was not warranted. </p>

<p>Did you “lie” when you did that? I’m sure you do believe the gist of what you wrote, but you also deliberately misled us about the basis for whatever level of confidence you had in that statement by selectively quoting from your source so as to conceal the legitimate doubts as to its accuracy evident on the face of your source. </p>

<p>Moving to your next points, you quote “Conclusion 21”, but not

Conclusion 16. The language in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that “Iraq also began vigorously trying to procure uranium ore and yellowcake” overstated what the Intelligence Community knew about Iraq’s possible procurement attempts.

or

Conclusion 22. The Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) should have taken the time to read the State of the Union speech and fact check it himself. Had he done so, he would have been able to alert the National Security Council (NSC) if he still had concerns about the use of the Iraq-Niger uranium reporting in a Presidential speech.

…or, for that matter, Conclusions 17 through 20. The end result is that you have selected statements which you feel support your position, and deleted those which don’t, in order to present a distorted view of what the Senate report states. You also ignore all of the discussion about why the Niger yellowcake claim was not included in Powell’s UN briefing a week later, the discussion of how an intelligence agency recommended that the claim not be included in the January 20, 2003 report to Congress, the June 17, 2003 CIA memo which states: “since learning that the Iraq-Niger uranium deal was based on false documents earlier this spring we no longer believe that there is sufficient other reporting to conclude that Iraq pursued uranium from abroad.” etc., etc.</p>

<p>Again, I don’t think you’re “lying” in the sense that you’re making statements you believe to be untrue as to their gist, but you are unquestionably trying to mislead people as to the strength of the evidence you believe supports your position. Is that “lying?” Because I think Bush & Co. believed the gist of what they were saying - i.e., that Iraq had WMD’s - but I think that they, like you, weren’t too particular about the accuracy of the way they tried to convince others of that fact. Some people consider that “lying”, others don’t. But to bring this full circle - it’s a “shred” or “scintilla” of evidence that they did, in fact, “lie.”</p>