Robert Parry on Armitage outing Plame: U.S. Press Bigwigs Screw Up, Again

[Fridays Child]

U.S. Press Bigwigs Screw Up, Again
By Robert Parry
September 14, 2006


So, right-wing columnist Robert Novak now says that Richard Armitage, Novak’s initial source on the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame, wasn’t just some loose-lipped gossip blurting out her name, but rather that Armitage urged Novak to write about Plame’s alleged role in her husband’s fact-finding trip to Niger.

In a Sept. 14 column, Novak calls Armitage’s depiction of their conversation in July 2003 “deceptive” for suggesting that his leaking of Plame’s CIA identity was innocent and inadvertent, when Novak recalled it as intentional and even calculating.

Yet, for the past two weeks, major Washington journalists have been treating Armitage’s account as the gospel truth and, further, as proof that George W. Bush’s White House had gotten a bum rap on the Plame-leak scandal.

This misplaced “conventional wisdom” extended from the Washington Post’s editorial pages to virtually every major TV chat show – and even touched off another round of personal attacks by Bush allies against Plame’s husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, for having dared to stand up to the President over his false claims that Iraq sought uranium ore from Niger.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/091406.html

[glitch]

1. K & R - I am going with "willfully obtuse" or even worse... complicit.

"Yet, David Broder and many other Washington journalists either still don’t get it – how the administration set out to destroy this couple and make them an example for other potential critics – or perhaps the pundits are as willfully obtuse as the corrupt prison warden in “Shawshank Redemption.”"

[blm]

5. Complicit - come on... apologize to Rove? What a crock of a setup.

.

[glitch]

6. amateurish even. they may choose to spew it, but we don't need to buy it

and we don't. They appear to be quite happy playing to themselves.

[lumpy]

2. Both Armitage and Novak et al

should be prosecuted for this crime of subversion. Novak is admitting that he knew the leak was intentional so he is just as guilty for outing Valerie Plame.

[Fridays Child]

3. Either way, the media failed in their ethical responsibility to

...get it right. If not for a handful of journalists with integrity, we would be completely in the dark.

[dogday]

4. Here is the official book they used to out her.....