A Barrier To Understanding

Much will be written about the conviction of Lewis Libby, and I may write some of it myself. But first I want to get one quick post up about Amy Goldstein's and Carol Leonnig's impressively pure misrepresentation of what Joe Wilson found in Niger. Their record is intact through Wednesday's Post, with Libby Found Guilty in CIA Leak Case on A1:

Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, publicly accused the White House of using flawed intelligence to justify the war and cited a CIA mission he took to Niger in 2002, which found no merit to claims that Iraq was trying to buy weapons-grade uranium.

I find no merit in that sentence, but a startling resemblance to truth on July 10, 2004, when reporter Susan Schmidt was not in the witness protection program:   

The [Senate] panel found that Wilson's report, rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, bolstered the case for most intelligence analysts....   

The report turns a harsh spotlight on what Wilson has said about his role in gathering prewar intelligence, most pointedly by asserting that his wife, CIA employee Valerie Plame, recommended him....

Wilson's reports to the CIA added to the evidence that Iraq may have tried to buy uranium in Niger, although officials at the State Department remained highly skeptical, the report said.   

Wilson said that a former prime minister of Niger, Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, was unaware of any sales contract with Iraq, but said that in June 1999 a businessman approached him, insisting that he meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations" between Niger and Iraq -- which Mayaki interpreted to mean they wanted to discuss yellowcake sales. A report CIA officials drafted after debriefing Wilson said that "although the meeting took place, Mayaki let the matter drop due to UN sanctions on Iraq."*   

No worries about the harsh spotlight on what Wilson said about his role--it burned out! The afterglow diffused enough light to inform the Washington Post editorial page on Sept. 1, 2006 that:

it now appears the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials.

But as Mark Twain once said, lies travel from here to Bombay and back and do a loop-de-loop over the Willard Hotel before the truth can find its pantaloons. (source: Wikipedia).

Meanwhile back in opposite world:

• Carol Leonnig and Amy Goldstein, March 7: Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, publicly accused the White House of using flawed intelligence to justify the war and cited a CIA mission he took to Niger in 2002, which found no merit to claims that Iraq was trying to buy weapons-grade uranium.
• Carol Leonnig and Amy Goldstein, Feb. 8: Prosecutors spent three years investigating whether senior Bush administration officials deliberately revealed Plame's status to punish her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. The CIA had sent him to Africa in 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq had been trying to buy nuclear material there. Wilson found no evidence of the activity...
• Almost every other Leonnig/Goldstein story in which the dynamic duo reports Wilson "concluded" there was no evidence, a construction a lawyer could love.
• Howard Kurtz, July 12,2006: Novak triggered one of the capital's most tangled investigations with a July 2003 column reporting that Plame had suggested sending her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, to Niger to investigate whether Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was trying to obtain nuclear material from that country -- an unsupported claim that was included in President Bush's State of the Union speech.
• Eric Weiss and Charles Lane, July 14, 2006: Wilson had been sent by the CIA to investigate whether Iraq had sought nuclear weapons material from Niger. He reported that the charge could not be proved, but Bush nevertheless asserted in his 2003 State of the Union address that intelligence existed that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Africa.
• Daniela Deane, July 15, 2006: Wilson said yesterday that he told the administration repeatedly that, after two missions to Niger to investigate, he had "found no evidence" that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was attempting to buy yellowcake uranium in Niger for nuclear weapons.

Also on Wednesday Howard Kurtz writes A Case of Bad Ink: Portrait of Media is Not So Flattering.  He's not referring to this problem, but he should be.

Update: The Post editorial page again gets it right where Leonnig and Goldstein get it wrong. The editorial:

Mr. Wilson was embraced by many because he was early in publicly charging that the Bush administration had "twisted," if not invented, facts in making the case for war against Iraq. In conversations with journalists or in a July 6, 2003, op-ed, he claimed to have debunked evidence that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger; suggested that he had been dispatched by Mr. Cheney to look into the matter; and alleged that his report had circulated at the highest levels of the administration.

A bipartisan investigation by the Senate intelligence committee subsequently established that all of these claims were false...

This has never been reported by Leonnig and Goldstein, not once, during their many variations of the theme that Joe Wilson "concluded" that the charges of Iraq seeking uranium in Niger were unfounded, or that he found no evidence, or in today's report that he "found no merit" in them.

*Correction: I've edited this post to remove my mistaken citation of false information in Schmidt's story that Wilson told the CIA Iraq had tried to buy 400 tons of uranium from Niger in 1998. It was actually Iran, as noted in a correction that has run next to Schmidt's story since it was first published.