Right Wing Nut House

From our “This is News?” department comes the revelation that, in response to Joe Wilson’s attack on the President’s credibility, Bush’s top aide Karl Rove and VP Cheney’s top aide Scooter Libby collaborated on a response to Wilson’s charges of shaping intelligence on the Iraq-Niger uranium connection.

The NY Times story is interesting in that it says absolutely nothing. They don’t have one iota of news to impart to their readers. They do, however, have plenty of juicy speculation that they can disguise as news which for the New York Times, is pretty much the same thing.

The response they were working on was given by CIA Director George Tenet on July 12, 2003 in which Tenet insisted that the shaky Niger uranium story was the fault of bad analysis at the CIA. Rove and Libby were drawing up a statement in response to a request by Tenet himself who wanted to set the record straight.

A former government official, though, added another element to how the statement was prepared, saying that no one directed Mr. Tenet to issue it and that Mr. Tenet himself felt it was needed. The statement said that the “C.I.A.’s counterproliferation experts, on their own initiative, asked an individual with ties to the region to make a visit to see what he could learn.”

According to the Times, there may have been other more sinister reasons for the Rove-Libby collaboration:

It is not clear what information Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby might have collected about Ms. Wilson as they worked on the Tenet statement. Mr. Rove has said he learned her name from Mr. Novak. Mr. Libby has declined to discuss the matter.

The effort was striking because to an unusual degree, the circle of officials involved included those from the White House’s political and national security operations, which are often separately run. Both arms were drawn into the effort to defend the administration during the period.

“It is not clear what information Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby might have collected…”

What an extraordinarily biased statement! The reason it’s “not clear” what the two “might” have collected could very well be that they weren’t collecting anything! ABP makes the same point:

And what did they say between themselves about Valerie Plame. Nothing at all. But that doesn’t stop this “news” article from wondering, stating that It is not clear what information Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby might have collected about Ms. Wilson as they worked on the Tenet statement. Why not just say “There is nothing to suggest Rove and Libby ever discussed Valerie Plame”. Because it’s The New York Times of course.

The Times is a master at this form of attack. This not very subtle indictment uses pure speculation without any evidence to back it up. They’re just throwing crap against the wall to see if anything sticks.

It’s disgusting.

UPDATE

Tom Maguire links to the Times piece and highlights the possible role of Ari Fleisher in the scandal pointing out a discrepancy in Fleisher’s reported grand jury testimony about not seeing the State Department memo and an eyewitness who claims he did:

Well. I am sure he is a great American, but this is not good. And, as with Karl, since Ari was involved with the Wilson push-back, why would he *not* have seen the memo, or been apprised of it?

And yes, if Ari is The One, since he left the Administration on July 14, 2003, we are back to an Incredible Shrinking Scandal.

Possibly…but then there are still all of those statements by the White House denying Rove’s involvement which is, of course, a political not a legal problem. And by listening to the WH press corps, I doubt whether those questions are going to stop anytime soon.