Monday, January 22, 2007

The Head of The Columbia Journalism School...   [John Podhoretz]

...gets really quite a lot of facts wrong in this one partial paragraph from this week's New Yorker:

"[T]he White House dispatched former Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger, in February of 2002, to find proof that the country had shipped yellowcake uranium to Iraq. Wilson not only came up empty-handed; he said so publicly, in a Times Op-Ed piece that he published five months later. The Administration then went on another search for evidence—the kind that could be used to discredit Wilson—and began disseminating it, off the record, to a few trusted reporters. That led to the unlawful exposure of Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, as a C.I.A. agent."

Now, to correct Dean Nicholas Lemann:

First: The White House did not dispatch Wilson to Niger. The CIA — acting on the recommendation of Wilson's wife — did.

Second: Wilson wrote an op-ed for the New York Times not five months later, but seventeen months later. There was an intervening event. It was called "the war in Iraq." Perhaps Lemann has heard of it.

Third: It is probably untrue that the "exposure" of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was "unlawful." No one has been charged with any such offense, and there is a significant question about whether she maintained covert status in the five years preceding the publication of her name by Robert Novak — the trigger for the possibility that a crime was committed.

Nicholas Lemann is a journalist with a remarkable record and is, I think, an honorable person. His inability to get straight what happened in the Wilson case is another example of why the prosecution of Scooter Libby is a shameful botch.

01/22 02:11 PMShare