Wilson Denied His Wife Suggested He Travel To Niger, But Documentation Showed She Proposed His Name:

Wilson Claims His Wife Did Not Suggest He Travel To Niger To Investigate Reports Of Uranium Deal; Instead, Wilson Claims It Came Out Of Meeting With CIA To Discuss Report. CNN’S WOLF BLITZER: “Among other things, you had always said, always maintained, still maintain your wife, Valerie Plame, a CIA officer, had nothing to do with the decision to send to you Niger to inspect reports that uranium might be sold from Niger to Iraq. … Did Valerie Plame, your wife, come up with the idea to send you to Niger?” JOE WILSON: “No. My wife served as a conduit, as I put in my book. When her supervisors asked her to contact me for the purposes of coming into the CIA to discuss all the issues surrounding this allegation of Niger selling uranium to Iraq.” (CNN’s “Lade Edition,” 7/18/04)

But Senate Select Committee On Intelligence Received Not Only Testimony But Actual Documentation Indicating Wilson’s Wife Proposed Him For Trip. “Some [CIA Counterproliferation Division, or CPD,] officials could not recall how the office decided to contact the former ambassador, however, interviews and documents provided to the Committee indicate that his wife, a CPD employee, suggested his name for the trip. The CPD reports officer told Committee staff that the former ambassador’s wife ‘offered up his name’ and a memorandum to the Deputy Chief of the CPD on February 12, 2002, from the former ambassador’s wife says, ‘my husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.’” (Select Committee On Intelligence, “Report On The U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments On Iraq,” U.S. Senate, 7/7/04)

Dispelling Media Elitist Bias Concerning Karl Rove

7-19-2005

Lee P. Butler

The media frenzy created by the revelation that Karl Rove had talked to a Time magazine correspondent about the issue of Joe Wilson’s claims that CIA Director George Tenet and Vice President Dick Cheney had authorized his trip to Niger continues to build as media elitists are unrelenting in their biased news coverage.

These media elitists are liberal Democrats and have by all accounts decided that it is to their advantage to echo politically charged rhetoric of the Democrat party, instead of adhering to their regular assertions that they maintain a ‘neutral’ or ‘unbiased’ position when reporting news events in lieu of their own personal ideological beliefs.

In the case of Karl Rove, media elitists and their Democrat brethren believe that Karl Rove is the sole architect in the diminished political presence of the Democrat party across the American landscape. They now view him as the ‘puppet master’ instead of Vice President Cheney who used to be the brunt of that charge.

As was written in a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, ‘Rove’s most significant relationship in Washington is the one he has with Bush. The partnership not only helped Bush win the Texas governor’s mansion twice and two White House terms but has also fueled a political transformation that has made the GOP dominant in a growing number of states.

Rove has used the power he accumulated in his office to oversee presidential policy decisions. He has also overseen electoral politics down to individual congressional races. Rove helped steer the Republicans to victory in 2002 midterm elections and Bush to re-election in 2004, and had actively recruited candidates for key races.’

In the liberal worldview, Rove has single-handedly decimated the Democrat party, but more importantly, they see him as being the heart and soul of the political process that currently buoys the Republican dominance in this country, but specifically, in Washington D.C..

They believe destroying Karl Rove will remove the wind from the Republican sails and that without him the Bush administration would fold like a house of cards. Plus, for them, his destruction would be the salve to heal their political wounds.

Understanding the liberal mentality, they will never accept that their political defeats have been incurred because of their own philosophy and ideological principles as they relate to the political arena. It had to be because of something someone else did to them, not what they did to themselves.

And that person, in their minds, is the ‘evil genius’ Karl Rove.

So carrying the water for liberal Democrats seeking their revenge, media elitists started the campaign of destruction against Rove utilizing a common liberal media tactic of promoting news stories based on factually inaccurate information.

Let’s start with the repeated falsehood that Rove ‘outed’ Valerie Plame as a CIA agent. Rove actually told Matt Cooper that Wilson’s wife apparently worked at the CIA on ‘WMD issues’. The fact is, he never told Cooper who she was and what her position was at the CIA... she could have been a secretary as far as anyone knew based on Rove’s statement.

The media has also made a point of engaging the idea that since an investigation is underway and a Grand Jury has been convened, Rove must have broke the law though he has been convicted of no crime. Wilson himself admitted that his wife wasn’t a ‘covert agent’ at the time, specifically because her field agent status had to be removed when she married him and that she hadn‘t been on an overseas assignment in five years, which automatically removed any covert status.

What the media is doing is labeling Rove as ‘guilty until being proven innocent’, which liberals always claim they never do... unless they are attacking conservatives.

The whole basis of their attack on Rove is focused on destroying his credibility through their own created conspiracy theory that Rove ‘outed’ Wilson’s wife because he was trying to discredit Wilson and his ‘proof’ that Bush had lied in his State of the Union speech.

To better understand this conspicuous ruse, you have to remember that the media whole-heartedly accepted the ‘misinformation’ Wilson wrote in his New York Times op-ed piece where he reported that he had found ‘no evidence of a uranium buy by Iraq in Niger’ and then labeled President Bush a liar generating hundreds of headlines across the country screaming that ‘Bush Lied’.

In the first place, not only didn’t Wilson find any evidence of a buy, neither did he find evidence that a buy hadn’t taken place... he found NO evidence either way. In the second place, he wrote in his own book that he did find evidence that Iraq had ‘sought’ to buy uranium in Niger because Wilson had met with a covert agent who told him Baghdad Bob had been in Niger doing that very thing!

That story concretely confirmed that President Bush’s State of the Union address was in fact accurate, which made Joe Wilson’s own op-ed attack piece on the President nothing but a misleading attack piece. Since the mainstream media had invested itself in this falsehood, instead of admitting their mistake, they decided to circle the wagons around Wilson and have continued repeating his ‘no evidence, Bush lied’ mantra.

Then the Valeria Plame issue erupted and they just transformed that mantra into the conspiracy theory that she was ‘outed’ as a covert CIA agent by the Bush administration to ‘get even’ with Wilson and his ‘proof’ that Bush lied.

So the premise of these media attacks is itself based on factually inaccurate information.

Now that it looks as though Rove has committed no crime, Democrats have changed their cries of outrage for Rove’s firing to still happen because he was ‘part of a leak’. This, too, has turned into an episode of misinformation by the media.

AP reporter Pete Yost wrote in a recent article, ‘Bush said in June 2004 that he would fire anyone in his administration shown to have leaked information that exposed the identity of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame. On Monday, however, he added the qualifier that it would have be shown that a crime was committed.’

In the very next paragraph, he contradicted himself by writing, ‘Asked at a June 10, 2004, news conference if he stood by his pledge to fire anyone found to have leaked Plame's name, Bush answered, "Yes. And that's up to the U.S. attorney to find the facts.’

There’s a big difference between ‘leaked information that exposed the identity of Wilson’s wife’ and ‘anyone found to have leaked Plame’s name’.

But according to liberal media pundits, it’s the President who has changed the standard by ‘raising the bar’, not media elitists who are trying desperately to squirm through their own rhetoric.

In 2003, President Bush said, "If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is and if the person has violated the law, the person will be taken care of,” yet media elitists assert that is somehow different from what he says today, “If someone committed a crime, they will no longer work in my administration."

It seems based on the comparison of those two statements, it’s not the President who is changing the story, it’s the media.