Lee P Butler

Media Wants Heads To Roll At White House, Not The Truth In CIA Investigation

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10-25-2005

Lee P. Butler

A recent Associated Press article written by Tom Raum started this way: "Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s CIA-leak inquiry is focusing attention on what long has been a Bush White House tactic: slash-and-burn assaults on its critics, particularly those opposed to the president’s Iraq war policies."

The most obvious problem with his statement is his promotion of the left-wing accusations that those on the Right use ‘slash-and-burn assaults’ to attack people who disagree with the President or his policies. That idea is something the media has consistently hammered in their coverage of the Bush White House.

Repeatedly, media elitists have produced 'news' stories that have originated as liberal spin, but were reported as 'fact' by liberal media counterparts. The whole CIA leak case has been nothing short of innuendo from liberal circles, but that hasn't stopped reporters from presenting it through their liberal prism.

The whole saga of Joe Wilson's lies and his wife's connection to his Niger trip and ensuing New York Times hit piece on the President that has repeatedly been debunked as factually inaccurate... even by his own writing... has been used by media elitists as their 'Holy Grail' for 'slash-and-burn assaults' on the Bush administration.

Even that same Associated Press article verifies this as Mr. Raum writes, "The grand jury is concluding a 22-month investigation of whether administration officials illegally leaked information disclosing the identity of an undercover CIA officer, Valerie Plame, in an effort to discredit her husband, former diplomat and war critic Joseph Wilson."

At no point has anyone, including the media, been able to prove their constant harping of the liberal conspiracy theory that Plame was 'outed' as an attempt to 'discredit' Joe Wilson. Wilson discredited himself... repeatedly!

The administration officials who did talk to media representatives, evidence has proven, were trying to let them know that continuing to promote the Wilson assertion that he went to Niger at the behest of the Vice President's office, when in fact the trip had been orchestrated by his wife, who was no longer an 'undercover' operative, was a mistake and at worst a misrepresentation of the truth.

Now those are cold, hard facts that media elitists continue to ignore in their coverage of the issue. One can only assume that they disregard those facts because they don't fit in well with their own agenda of 'slash-and-burn assaults' on the President who they probably oppose politically.

Then the Associated Press writer did what every liberal reporter does to justify their own political attack, he used a statement from another liberal to verify his own liberal contention. Liberal political scientist James Thurber told Raum, "The grand jury investigation has the possibility of really shining a light on the credibility of the administration, how officials tried to undermine those who were criticizing them and how they then covered up that attempt."

Here's an obvious liberal promoting conjecture that the administration was undermining it's critics with no evidence to prove that charge and a reporter using that fallacious comment to maintain his own unsubstantiated political rhetoric being passed off in the media as 'news reporting'.

Again, even the information that has appeared in media news reports confirms that the administration officials were warning reporters that they were utilizing information in their reports that was inaccurate, specifically, that the Vice President's office had sent Wilson to Niger.

Did the media take heed of that inaccurate information? No. As a matter of fact, they have embraced Wilson and his own 'slash-and-burn assaults' on the President using the very misinformation he produced in his op-ed.

Then Raum's own liberal agenda of 'slash-and-burning' the administration took over and he went on a complete left-wing tirade that was not only opinionated, but false. "The war clearly was not going well, despite Bush's "mission accomplished" speech two months earlier," Raum ranted. "And Bush was already reeling from criticism over mentioning the African yellowcake connection - which turned out to be based on faulty British intelligence - in his State of the Union address."

In the first place, the part of the war that was accented by the President's 'mission accomplished' speech was over! In the second place, the 'yellowcake connection' he tries to imply was based on faulty British information, has yet to be proven faulty. The British continue to stand behind that assertion and even their own investigative committee reported the accuracy of that intelligence.

Add to that the fact that Wilson himself wrote in his own book that he discovered information that at least one representative from Iraq had been in Niger and was looking to purchase something... Wilson wrote that the agent who gave him that information believed the Iraqi, who Wilson thought was 'Baghdad' Bob, was there to buy yellowcake uranium! That's in Wilson's own book!

But according to his New York Times op-ed, Wilson 'found no evidence' that Iraq had sought to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger!

Now the media, who won't accurately report the facts of this situation are concerned that Republicans are going to be upset if criminal charges are brought against administration officials that are not related to the 'intentional outing of an undercover CIA agent', but because of some lesser charge.

Republican from Texas, Kay Bailey Hutchinson openly hoped, 'that if there is going to be an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn't indict on the crime and so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and tax-payer dollars."

Of course she is right in the sense that the investigator's intention was to find if criminal conduct had taken place with the issuance of Plame's name, not try and trick somebody into saying something differently than they had earlier just to get any charge they could out of the investigation.

But the media doesn't care about 'technicalities', they want to see heads roll at the White House and they will use any slash-and-burn assault they deem necessary to justify that happening.

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