Salon: With a nod to Jeff Gannon, Novak smears Wilson

[Bush_Eats_Beef]

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/index.html?blog=/politics/war_room/2005/08/02/novak/index.html

We took Robert Novak to task yesterday for his selective sense of outrage, but the conservative pundit's odd sense of indignation wasn't the only thing that struck us as strange about his breaking-the-silence column on the Valerie Plame case. There's the matter of the gratuitous -- and, as it turns out, fundamentally false -- attack on Joseph Wilson that Novak apparently felt compelled to tack on to the end of his column. Novak said he just had to write yesterday's column over the objections of his lawyers in order to defend his "integrity" against comments made by a former CIA spokesman with whom Novak spoke twice before first outing Plame in his column in July 2003. But if that's the limited purpose for which Novak thought it was worth ignoring his lawyers' advice, why did he proceed, in the final paragraph of his column Monday, to engage in some Wilson bashing? And if Novak is so concerned about his "integrity," why couldn't he bother to get the facts straight before launching his attack?

At the end of yesterday's column, Novak says that "Joseph Wilson was discarded a year ago by the Kerry presidential campaign after the Senate committee reported much of what he said 'had no basis in fact.'" Relevant to Novak's defense of his "integrity"? Not particularly. Factually correct? Not even close. Robert Parry does the dismantling.

As Parry notes, the notion that Wilson was "discarded" from the Kerry campaign comes straight from a July 2004 story written by -- drumroll, please -- Jeff Gannon! Gannon deduced then that the Kerry campaign had jettisoned Wilson based on his own analysis of Kerry's Web site: There had been references to Wilson on the site, and then they were gone, and Gannon assumed that the change was an attempt to "quietly break official contact" with Wilson because he was "something of a loose cannon." But someone with just a little more firsthand knowledge of the facts -- Peter Daou, who worked on Kerry's Web site and now runs the Daou Report -- says that references to Wilson, along with a whole lot of other stuff, disappeared from the Kerry Web site when it was redesigned for the start of the fall campaign. "I wasn’t aware of any directive from senior Kerry staff to 'discard' Joe Wilson or do anything to Joe Wilson for that matter," Daou tells Parry. "It just got lost in the redesign of the Web site, as did dozens and dozens of other pages."

OK, but even if the Kerry campaign didn't "discard" Wilson, the Senate Intelligence Committee did find that much of what Wilson had said about the Iraq-Niger connection had "no basis in fact," right? Well, no, that part of Novak's smear is wrong, too. The "no basis in fact" characterization wasn't included in the Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq filed by the 17 members of the committee. Rather, it came in a separate statement filed by three Republican senators -- Pat Roberts, Christopher Bond and Orrin Hatch -- who apparently couldn't get any of the 14 other senators on the committee to agree with them. It was, in essence, a dissent from the full committee report; to say that the "Senate committee reported" that much of what Wilson said "had no basis in fact" is about as accurate as saying that the Supreme Court put Al Gore in the White House in 2000.

[Bush_Eats_Beef]

1. Gannon's original "news article," mentioned in the article:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1179407/posts

Kerry Dumps Joe Wilson From Campaign Team
Talon News ^ | 7/27/2004 | Jeff Gannon

Posted on 07/27/2004 7:22:20 AM PDT by ConservativeMajority

WASHINGTON (Talon News) -- Last week, the presidential campaign of Democratic candidate Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) very publicly distanced itself from former National Security Advisor Samuel "Sandy" Berger after it became known that Berger was under investigation for removing highly classified documents from the National Archives.

Talon News reported that Kerry's anti-terror policy was removed from the candidate's web site immediately following Berger's dismissal as a campaign advisor. But in the last few days, another advisor has apparently been jettisoned from the Kerry campaign. All traces of former Ambassador Joe Wilson, the central figure in the controversy of faulty intelligence about Iraq and uranium has disappeared from the Kerry web site. Wilson had appeared on a web site www.restorehonesty.com where he restated his criticism of the Bush administration. The link now goes directly to the main page of www.johnkerry.com and no reference to Wilson can be found on the entire site.

Wilson was discredited by a Senate Intelligence Committee report that contradicted Wilson's public statements about how he was selected for a sensitive mission to Niger in 2002 and the results of his report about Saddam Hussein's attempt to purchase uranium in Africa. Wilson represented his investigation as proof that President Bush misled the United States in making the case for the invasion of Iraq. An investigation into British intelligence confirms that Bush's claim was "well founded."

It is likely that Kerry's handlers took advantage of the Berger affair to quietly break official contact with someone who has proved to be something of a loose cannon. The ambassador was known for his vitriolic rhetoric against members of the Bush administration, particularly political advisor Karl Rove. Last year he suggested that Rove be "frog-marched from the White House in handcuffs," over the alleged leak of his wife's identity. The Kerry campaign did not respond to a Talon News inquiry about Wilson's departure.

Copyright © 2004 Talon News -- All rights reserved.

[LeftNYC]

2. I sent an email to NoFacts based on this...nt

[Supersedeas]

4. Funny how the small cadre of NeoFascists stick together lockstep

[jenmito]

7. That's funny...

The article states, "There had been references to Wilson on the site, and then they were gone, and Gannon assumed that the change was an attempt to "quietly break official contact" with Wilson because he was "something of a loose cannon." This coming from something of a loose GANNON!

[kodi]

3. recycled lying shit is still shit.

.

[Peace Patriot]

5. Let me get this straight...

Robert Novak, who was used by the Bush Cartel to destroy the CIA's "weapons of mass destruction" monitoring capability around the world, used Jeff Gannon, a planted White House reporter who was a male prostitute on the side and who was used by whoever planted him in the White House to lob softball questions at Bush during press conferences, as his SOURCE in spreading FALSE stories about a Bush opponent, Joseph Wilson, whom the Cartel is out to destroy because Wilson wrote the truth about the Cartel's FALSE claims about "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, which were based on blatantly FALSIFIED documents and on the FALSE WORD of double-agent and bank felon Ahmed Chalabi who was paid millions of dollars by the Pentagon to feed FALSE intelligence about "weapons of mass destruction" into FALSE headlines in the New York Times written by Judith Miller, whose special "embed" contract to get the "scoop" on "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq was signed by Donald Rumsfeld, in order to propagandize the American people on the Cartel's 100% FALSE allegations that there were "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, upon which PACK OF LIES the Cartel sought to justify the slaughter over 100,000 Iraqis and the re-writing of Iraqi law to make the Cartel's takeover of Iraq's oil fields seem legal.

Have I got to bottom of this black hole yet? Probably not.

All is darkness. No light can get out. And if you approach the edge of it, you find that you can never get there, because the normal laws that govern the universe don't seem to apply. You merely stop, and stare forever into the abyss that is sucking up all light and all matter.

But maybe God then intervenes and recreates time:

May 22, 2003: Brit chief WMD expert David Kelly begins whistleblowing to the BBC about the Brits "sexed up" Iraq WMD intel.
July 7, 2003: Blair informed that Kelly "could say some uncomfortable things" (COULD say; not HAD said)
July 14, 2003: First Plame outing (by Novak).
July 18, 2003: Kelly found dead, under extremely suspicious circumstances; his office and computers searched.
July 22, 2003: Second Plame outing (by Novak), of the entire CIA front company, disabling all its WMD monitoring projects and putting all agents at grave risk.

...a little bit of light in the dark, dark whirlpool into which David Kelly found himself disappearing, on July 17, 2003, when he emailed Judith Miller of his concern about the "many dark actors playing games."

Were they trying to PLANT nukes or other WMDs in Iraq, for the enormous political gain? Is that what they were up to? And somebody foiled them?

Is that the light that we should follow in this dark, dark place?

[DoYouEverWonder]

6. I think you are on the right track

I just hope David Kelly comes back to haunt them all.

[spooky3]

8. Media Matters also has a story on this. Good post!