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Achieving critical mass

by Mark Gisleson

I missed this Wednesday Chicago Tribune report on Dick Durbin and the growing scandal over the outing of Valerie Plame, primarily because the ChiTrib had the good taste not to mention Joseph Wilson’s wife by name (link courtesy of TAPPED). So add the Chicago Tribune to the major media list. This made me stop and think a bit. Google News isn’t LexisNexis, but it is a powerful research tool and, maybe, I thought, I wasn’t running the right search. Alert reader Peter Danbury had just sent me a New York Times link that went up late last night (once Schumer commented, the ever alert NYTimes had to write about Wilson-Plame). Danbury, however, found the article by searching for "wilson wife CIA."

So I popped “Joseph Wilson wife” in, and immediately got 140 responses. I put quotes around “joseph Wilson” and that narrowed it to 51 hits, including The Guardian, Palm Beach Post, Falls Church News, Sify News (India), Arab Times, LewRockwell.com, The Herald (Canada), ABC News, IRNA Press Digest (Iran), and Hi Pakistan. All the links are new (although the information is essentially the same at all of these sites) — but there's still not a shred of proof that anyone anywhere had ever mentioned Valerie Plame (let alone Valerie Plame and the CIA) prior to Bob Novak's column outing her CIA employment status.

I think it's safe to say that this story has broken, and that between Schumer's call for an FBI investigation, and Dick Durbin's efforts in the Senate, this matter will be investigated, and it won't be good for the Bushies. Even Paul Krugman stalker Donald Luskin “gets it” on Valerie Plame (courtesy of CalPundit).

The Internet is, of course, all over this story. A regular Google search for "'joseph wilson' wife CIA" now pulls up 515 links. It’s been noted by many that rightwing bloggers avoid certain topics entirely. Valerie Plame is certainly appears to be one of those verboten topics. This doesn’t mean that online Bush supporters don’t respond to stories like Plame’s, it's just that they don’t always clearly reference what it is they’re responding to. I think that’s the case with this “legal analysis” currently being touted by Instahack regarding the vulnerability of bloggers to being charged with treason. Author Tom Bell won’t say who exactly is guilty, just that everyone should watch their step (shades of Ari Fleischer). And, since criticism of this administration is tantamount to treason...

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Steve Perry is busy reading all 800+ pages of the Congressional 9/11 Report over the weekend, and will post on it next week. In the meanwhile, he's asking for any readers who are doing the same to email him with their impressions of what's reported, what's redacted and what's left out. E-mail Steve here.

In any event, the report is here (.pdf format). That should save you some Google time. It's not as easy to find as you might think. It seems that many sites didn't bother to provide the link, and, strangely, they mostly tended to be Bush supporters or sympathizers.

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Vice President Dick Cheney finally speaks out:

"If we had not acted," Cheney said, "the torture chambers would still be in operation, the prison cells for children would still be filled, the mass graves would still be undiscovered."

Tim Noah nicely dissects Cheney's comments at Slate.

Just a personal comment, but wasn't Iraq running torture chambers, jailing children and filling mass graves back when they were our allies? Just asking.

***

Turns out peace activists weren’t imagining things — they were being targeted for harassment by airport security. [must be a member of Salon or watch an annoying Sprint commercial]

And, one last item that's begging for attention: Jim Hoagland's disgraceful shilling on behalf of Ahmed Chalabi in this morning's WaPost:

Chalabi sits at noon in a spacious reception hall, listening to a group of robed tribal sheiks from southern Iraq express support for the INC. A nuclear scientist who once worked for the regime sits waiting for a chance to lay out plans for a new science ministry.

Bobbing through the door next comes a wave of roly-poly Baghdadi businessmen in polyester suits to talk about the economy. Behind them are three Sudanese immigrants in jeans who are forming an association of political independents. And so it goes long after dusk, with visits from the Iranian and Turkish ambassadors thrown in for intrigue.

This is a scene that the Iraq experts at the State Department and the CIA said could never happen. They have consistently painted Chalabi and his organization as not having any local "roots."

These experts deployed the "rootless" argument in an unsuccessful attempt to get Bush to shut down all support for Chalabi, who they (correctly) figured could help provoke a war they did not want. Unfortunately, they were more successful in halting the administration's effort to train Chalabi's exile forces as military policemen, soldiers or translators who could have helped save American lives in the war and its aftermath.

So there you have the new Bush team spin on Iraq: Ahmed Chalabi would have had a police force in place, but the CIA wouldn't let him.

When exactly did the CIA become the GOP's new Bill Clinton? And when's the last time Jim Hoagland wrote anything you could respect?

Posted by Steve Perry at July 25, 2003 1:14 PM

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