The Media's Roving Eye

Oh what a tangled web we weave

When we first practice to deceive?

I've written regularly about the media's inability to connect the dots. The other day a reporter out in the far-flung reaches of our imperium wrote in to Tomdispatch pointing to a front-paged dot that no one -- myself included -- had bothered to pay much attention to or connect to anything at all. In the July 21st Washington Post, Walter Pincus and Jim VandeHei wrote a piece, Plame's Identity Marked as Secret, describing a memo from the State Department's intelligence experts that Secretary of State Colin Powell had with him on a 5-day trip to Africa he took with the President and his aides that began on July 7, 2003.

This was only a day after former Ambassador Joseph Wilson published What I Didn't Find in Africa on the op-ed page of the New York Times, exposing the Bush administration's Niger uranium lie. ("Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."); only four days before Time magazine's Matt Cooper had that conversation "on double super secret background" with Karl Rove and was told that "wilson's wife? apparently works at the agency on wmd"; only five days before CIA Director George Tenet took a provisional fall for the administration for letting those "16 words" that started the whole thing on Saddam's supposed search for African uranium for his supposed atomic program into the 2003 State of the Union Address the previous January; only seven days before Robert Novak wrote his now infamous Mission to Niger column outing Joe Wilson's wife as a CIA agent. ("Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report.")

What an action-packed week for the White House and its operatives. The Pincus/VandeHei piece in the Post focused on the fact that Plame was identified by name in the secret State Department memo Powell had with him on Air Force One. They wrote that the memo "contained information about CIA officer Valerie Plame in a paragraph marked ?(S)' for secret, a clear indication that any Bush administration official who read it should have been aware the information was classified, according to current and former government officials." The rest of the piece went on to discuss who knew what about Plame -- with the exception of a single paragraph which indicated that Plame was the least of what the memo was about:

"Almost all of the memo is devoted to describing why State Department intelligence experts did not believe claims that Saddam Hussein had in the recent past sought to purchase uranium from Niger. Only two sentences in the seven-sentence paragraph mention Wilson's wife."

"Why State Department intelligence experts did not believe the claims"? So on Air Force One that July 7 was clear and present evidence not just about Valerie Plame's identity, but that one set of government intelligence experts was ready and willing to debunk the President's sixteen-word claim of the previous January (and so implicitly undermine the administration's whole case for a Saddamist nuclear arsenal in the making). It's worth reminding ourselves that they were hardly the first experts to do so. In the pre-war months, when the documents which supposedly supported the Niger uranium claim first surfaced, they proved so crudely and poorly forged that it took experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency only an afternoon, and nothing more complicated than Google.com, to utterly discredit them. The Director-General of the IAEA, Mohamed El Baradei, would inform the UN on March 7, 2003 that they were frauds (though being a foreigner, representing an international agency that seemed to stand in the administration's path to a much-wanted war, he was thoroughly disparaged and ignored).