John Harris may allege that the title of Dan Froomkin's washingtonpost.com column invites confusion, but when it comes to the Plame affair and the WMD scandal, it seems the Washington Post Political Editor either doesn't understand the basic issues or will not separate fact from spin.
Let's take first this shockingly casual shrug at the media's supine obsequiousness prior to the war. Embedded in this quote (from a Post online chat transcript on Oct. 20) is a misrepresentation of what journalism should be about.
The fact is, all the intelligence sources and elected officials in both parties did believe there was WMD in Iraq. It seems hard to imagine that the press could easily counter that. That said, there was good reporting by such people as the Post's Walter Pincus that did raise skeptical questions about whether the administration was exaggerating the evidence it had.
Mr. Harris simultaneously acknowledges, dismisses and misrepresents the WMD debate. It's true that most everyone suspected he had a few vials of something lying around, but the question was whether Iraq indeed posed such a "grave and gathering danger" that we had to pull the weapons inspectors out of Iraq and launch a preemptive war of aggression.
Did Harris direct his staff to talk to key people at State and Energy and the CIA to verify these claims? If not, why? Yes, Pincus penned excellent work, but the Post gave slight weight to his work and didn't back it up with a broader investigation -- and as it's not easy to counter a full-fleged propaganda campaign with the truth, that is a true shame.
Moving on to the Plame affair, Harris (in the same transcript) displays a misunderstanding of just what the hell Patrick Fitzgerald has been investigating all this time.
I think you are identifying important questions: What was the actual degree of intelligence damage by the disclosure of Plame-Wilson's name, and what was the specific crime?
It has long also seemed to me that Joe Wilson's own activities--publishing op-eds etc.--were not exactly calculated to maintaining secrecy about himself and his family.
The Political Editor first cannot seem to grasp that Fitzgerald was indeed investigating the specific crime of outing an undercover operative and that the degree of intelligence damage is irrelevant to the law.
He then spins out on Wilson, who quietly made his report and went public only after a year and a half of Administration propaganda went practically uninvestigated. At no point, of course, did Wilson refer to his wife; he represented himself honestly as a former diplomat who was asked to draw upon his expertise in Africa.
Finally, Harris just plain blows it with this:
On this point, I tend to be more believing of the White House line. It has always seemed clear to me--and the evidence coming out over time has strengthened the point--that the White House motive in talking about Plame was not "to get back at Wilson." This was not about revenge. It was about trying to persuade reporters not to write about Wilson's allegations or take them seriously, because his mission to Niger was a low-level endeavor that had been cooked up lower down in the bureaucracy (with the assistance of his wife) and was not something that was done with White House knowledge. Remember, at the time, Wilson's suggestion was that of course the vice president knew about the results of his trip to Niger, because he had ordered it.
Huh? I mean, did Harris ever read Wilson's op-ed? Because here is what Wilson wrote:
In February 2002, I [Wilson] was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report... The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office... Though I did not file a written report, there should be at least four documents in United States government archives confirming my mission [including] a specific answer from the agency to the office of the vice president (this may have been delivered orally). While I have not seen any of these reports, I have spent enough time in government to know that this is standard operating procedure.
So no, Cheney did not order Wilson to go to Niger, but per standard operating procedure Cheney would have known the results of the investigation. That was Wilson's allegation and it's disheartening to know that the Political Editor of the Washington Post either cannot grasp the basic facts of a major political story or tendentiously chooses to spin the GOP talking points.
As for the Froomkin flap itself, Harris misrepresents Froomkin's work.
What irked me about Froomkin's reply to the ombudsman was his pompous suggestion that he is a lonely truth-teller at the Washington Post and the way he held himself up as a high priest and arbiter of good journalism:
"The journalists who cover Washington and the White House should be holding the president accountable. When they do, I bear witness to their work. And the answer is for more of them to do so -- not for me to be dismissed as highly opinionated and liberal because I do."
Froomkin's column, of course, reviews the entire galaxy of US political reporting as well as select international outfits and political blogs; he does not even begin to limit his comments to Washington Post staff -- and I'm sure Froomkin would agree that the Post's WH reporters often do good work. His comment cannot be interpreted as a slam at Post staff.
Is Harris stupid? Is he ignorant? Or should we wonder who, exactly, is tendentious and unfair?