Topic: NewsBusters
A Jan. 16 NewsBusters post by Scott Whitlock attacked an ABC "Good Morning America" report on the Scooter Libby trial as skipping "important facts," then counters with his own version of the "facts" that turn out to be, uh, less than factual. Whitlock wrote:
[ABC's Claire] Shipman neglected to cite some extremely salient facts in her report. For starters, there’s no mention of the fact that [Joseph] Wilson’s wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame, actually sent Wilson on the trip to Africa.
In fact, according to the Wikipedia entry on Wilson to which Whitlock later links, the farthest the committee went in stating as "established fact" was that "Valerie Plame suggested her husband travel to Niger to look into" claims of attempted purchases of uranium by Iraq. In case Whitlock isn't aware, "suggested" is not the same thing as "sent."
Whitlock linked to Wikipedia in support of his claim that "the Senate Intelligence Committee published a report essentially saying that everything Joseph Wilson said was a lie" (he linked to a Power Line entry as well). But that's not exactly true either. According to Media Matters:
[W]hile the CIA initially interpreted Wilson's findings as confirmation of Iraq's supposed efforts to acquire uranium from Niger, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) interpreted his findings as confirmation that the Niger claim was not credible. As Media Matters further noted, the Senate Intelligence Committee reached no conclusion about the credibility of Wilson's July 6, 2003, New York Times op-ed describing his fact-finding mission to Niger.
