“All the news that’s fit to print.’ I guess mottoes hang on long after the truth of them has faded into distant memory.
You don’t expect the NYT to do any favors for people that embarrassed them. But you would think they would either stick to the truth or at least not revisit the embarrassment
But they choose to revisit the Plame/Wilson affair in a movie review. But they had to genuflect at one of the stations of the Liberal canon.
Film – ‘Nothing but the Truth’ – Fictional Reporter in Real-Life Mess – NYTimes.com
ROD LURIE knew from the start that his new film, about a newspaper reporter who goes to jail to protect a source, might be a tough sell in an age in which the press is held in widespread and casual disdain. But it took a throttling from a fellow director, Oliver Stone, to really drive the point home.
Mr. Stone was working with Josh Brolin on a California soundstage this spring, testing the makeup Mr. Brolin would use to portray President Bush in “W.” Mr. Lurie was nearby, reshooting a scene in “Nothing but the Truth,” which stars Kate Beckinsale and will remind some viewers of the real-life travails of Judith Miller, the former reporter for The New York Times who spent 85 days in jail in 2005.
Mr. Stone spotted Mr. Lurie and stormed over. “He puts his beefy fingers around my neck,” Mr. Lurie recalled, “and said, ‘Don’t turn Judy Miller into a hero.’ ”
It was at that moment, Mr. Lurie said, that he realized just how tough it would be to separate his film from its real-life roots.
[…]
Hostility among media critics toward Ms. Miller’s Iraq reporting spilled over into skepticism about her motives in another matter, her protection of the source who told her that Valerie Wilson (often referred to by her maiden name, Valerie Plame) was an undercover operative for the Central Intelligence Agency. It surfaced yet again when the source, I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, told her she was free to talk, effectively freeing her from the jail where she had spent almost three months after a federal judge held her in contempt of court.
Actually the person that ‘outed’ le femme Valerie was Richard Armitage, one of Colin Powell’s assistants at State.
But there was an independent counsel, and by golly, if there’s a counsel, there had better be a prosecution.
Scooter Libby was never convicted of leaking her name, he was never charged with leaking her name. Libby ran into that prosecutor’s trick of charging someone for perjury when their memory of events differs from other witnesses.
As for Plame’s status as an “undercover” operative, she wasn’t working as an undercover agent, hadn’t worked as an undercover agent in quite a while and was not considered someone who would be sent to work undercover in the future.
When the question of the “sixteen words” in President Bush’s State of the Union address came up, she did suggest her husband for the job. Somehow that phrase “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa” morphed into Saddam Hussein has recently received yellowcake uranium from Niger. Someone is going to have to walking me through the transition of that phrase someday.
When her husband returned he submitted a verbal report saying that he found that the story was most likely true.
Wilson’s report bolstered suspicions that Iraq was indeed seeking uranium in Africa. The Senate report cited an intelligence officer who reviewed Wilson’s report upon his return from Niger:
Committee Report: He (the intelligence officer) said he judged that the most important fact in the report was that the Nigerian officials admitted that the Iraqi delegation had traveled there in 1999, and that the Nigerian Prime Minister believed the Iraqis were interested in purchasing uranium, because this provided some confirmation of foreign government service reporting.
I don’t doubt for a minute that Libby and probably others in the Bush administration did leak the fact that Wilson’s husband worked at the CIA. Politics ain’t beanball. Ask anyone who got sideways with the Clinton administration during the 1990s.
Liberals can’t stand to look the fool. So they will go to any lengths to destroy anyone who allows people to see they are. Even years later and even if they have to ignore facts.
