Reading the news this morning (my usual practice, with a cup of wonderul Pannikin Kenya AA coffee in my hand), I came across this startling headline and lead paragraph:
From the (consistently lame) Washington Post: Libby Testified He Was Told To Leak Data About Iraq
Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff testified that his bosses instructed him to leak information to reporters from a high-level intelligence report that suggested Iraq was trying to obtain weapons of mass destruction, according to court records in the CIA leak case.
Now from all I think I know about Libby and Cheney, this is a most unlikely story. So I read on, until I got to the key part:
In a letter written in January and released in court papers filed by Libby’s defense Monday, Fitzgerald wrote that Libby testified that his “superiors” authorized him to disclose information from the National Intelligence Estimate to reporters in the summer of 2003.
Just in case it’s not obvious to you what the WAPO has done, let me spell it out. Libby (presumably in response to someone’s request) sought authorization from his bosses (including Cheney) to release the answer — from the already declassified National Intelligence Estimate. There’s no smoke and no fire here, folks — that’s just a bureaucrat doing his job. And the WAPO attempting to twist that into something sinister.
Their headline clearly implies that Libby testified that he was told to deliberately leak some information, presumably for political reasons. But when you look at what he actually testified to, you find that it was something else altogether. This is exactly the sort of thing that occurs when a reporter’s own political agenda runs into the facts: the facts get twisted, stretched, and distorted so that they fit into the reporter’s preconceived notions — and hardly resemble reality any more. You really have to work at it to find out what really happened, instead of what the reporter wants us to believe happened…
How lame is that?
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