Here is a rebuttal about the Tierney column. Get educated and learn something about spin!
Chris Christensen: 'The trouble with Tierney: Why the New York Times columnist makes my head spin'
Posted on Tuesday, November 15 @ 09:53:41 EST
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Chris Christensen
After reading New York Times columnist John Tierney's article on October 25 regarding the CIA leak case , I was so enraged that I couldn't concentrate enough to write a letter to the editor. Since then Tierney has added two similar columns on the subject, and I have at least gained enough sanity to respond.
"Lacking in candor; giving a false appearance of simple frankness; calculating." These are the words that define disingenuous. They also describe John Tierney.
This is not to say Tierney is a liar. To be disingenuous entails a degree of subtlety--though not much--that removes it from outright lying. Tierney is a master at employing the clever tactics that mark the disingenuous: he minimizes or omits evidence that would weaken his argument; he misrepresents the views of his opponent; he cites testimony that on the surface appears cogent, but on examination is irrelevant; and he carefully selects information that bolsters his argument while willfully ignoring that which contradicts it. In a word, Tierney engages in sophistry.
In his October 25 column ("And Your Point Is?"), just before the indictment of Scooter Libby, Tierney takes on an air of bewilderment. "If you, like me, have been trying to figure out the point of Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation, Howard Dean has a couple answers." One of Dean's answers is that the investigation is not so much about Libby as it is about the Bush administration not telling the truth about going to war.
"I have a hard time with this argument," writes Tierney, who adds that he was against going to war. "The Bush administration plan to quickly transform a Middle Eastern country struck me as terribly naive." Of course, this is not the reason given for invading Iraq. Tierney knows this, but to fully acknowledge the extent of White House mendacity would hurt his view that the Plame affair is of little consequence.
He does admit that Bush and his advisors were "eager to embrace any bit of evidence for weapons there . . . but they had plenty of company in their suspicions, including Democrats Bill and Hillary Clinton." Regardless of President Clinton's position on WMD, the salient point is he never chose to invade and occupy Iraq. And the administration had far more than suspicions about weapons; they claimed to be certain about it.
Tierney is not alone in citing Democrats as fellow believers in the existence of WMD. Bush apologists, including Tierney's colleague at the Times, David Brooks, make a habit of it. What they don't do is discuss the distinctions. I don't recall President Clinton saying that Saddam Hussein was six months from having nuclear weapons; that was Dick Cheney, dismissing dissenting views.
I don't remember Hillary Clinton claiming that those infamous aluminum tubes had only one purpose--nuclear weapons; that was Condalizza Rice, ignoring evidence to the contrary. I can't think of a Democrat who said that Iraq could ready its chemical and biological arsenal in 45 minutes; that was George Bush.
I can't recall a Democrat repeatedly conveying the impression that Iraq was involved in the attacks of September 11; that was the Bush administration.
And finally, was it President Clinton who said Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa? No, it was George Bush in his State of the Union address. (I thank Bob Somerby of the Daily Howler for this list.)
In a column immediately after the Fitzgerald press conference, on October 29 ("What Fitzgerald Didn't Say"), Tierney writes, "The leak was imagined to be a deliberate crime, part of an elaborate plot to cover up the administration's efforts to hype prewar intelligence." This sentence, as much as any, summarizes the trouble with Tierney.
The leak was clearly part of a concerted effort ("plot," if you like) to smear and silence critics of the prewar hype, not to cover it up. And imagined? Beliefs that the Bush team engaged in nefarious, even illegal, activities were based on far more than imagination.
Even before the indictments, it was already reasonably suspected that Dick Cheney was involved. It was already known that Karl Rove was one of the leakers. Tierney should be more concerned with what Fitzgerald did say. He confirmed that Cheney and Rove were involved. Fitzgerald also said, with great emphasis, that perjury and obstruction of justice were serious crimes.
In his third column on the subject , on November 1 ("Let's Have a Big Hand For"), Tierney equates perjury and obstruction of justice with "tax evasion." (Tax evasion no doubt akin to jaywalking.) To buttress this view, he quotes Sam Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan: "Perjury is extremely common . . . perjury prosecutions are incredibly uncommon." Tierney left out part of Gross's quotation, however. Perhaps the most important part.
"I did say that," the professor wrote in a letter to the Times, "but I added an important qualification: The most common perjury cases that are prosecuted, at least in federal courts, are for perjury before an investigative grand jury--the type of perjury with which Mr. Libby is charged." Gross ends his letter lamenting the lack of prosecution of perjury in depositions, civil trials, and criminal trials that are not in federal courts.
From his lofty perch on the New York Times op-ed page, John Tierney portrays the outing of Joe Wilson's wife, an undercover CIA agent, as merely "hardball politics." He says this is about "administration officials replying in kind to leaks from a critic;" that the "White House struck back by leaking its side of the story and disparaging Wilson . . . . "
This attempt at finding moral equivalence is curious. Joe Wilson writes an article accusing the administration of twisting prewar intelligence by referring to a uranium deal that didn't happen.
Then the Vice President, his top aide, and the man closest to the President expose a covert agent--a treasonous act, according to the senior President Bush. So, Joe Wilson, a seasoned diplomat, tells the truth about what didn't happen in Niger, and for that, the White House undercuts national security just to get even.
Tierney doesn't stop there. He claims that "some" of Wilson's accusations "were indeed found to be false" by a Senate investigation. Tierney is apparently referring to a comment in the bipartisan Senate Select Intelligence Committee's Report on the U. S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Assessment.
The comment reads in full: "The Committee found that, for most analysts, the former ambassador's report lent more credibility, not less, to the reported Niger-Iraq uranium deal."
There are two problems with using this quotation. The quote is actually an "additional comment" to the Niger section of the report and is not considered a part of the main body of the report--for good reason. It's not a bipartisan comment. It was added to the Senate report by three Republican senators: Pat Roberts, Kit Bond, and Orrin Hatch.
In fact, several sections in the main body of the report support the conclusion of Wilson's op-ed piece that "some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."
Tierney would do well to consider the fact that the White House itself admitted that the reference to the Niger-Iraq deal ought not to have been in the State of the Union address. And it's not news that the Bush team is capable of using phony intelligence.
Recently, Tierney's own newspaper reported that "a top member of Al Qaeda in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members . . . . "
However one judges the credibility of Joe Wilson, that judgment, if arrived at honestly, ought to include this question: Is there corroborative testimony from credible persons that would support Wilson's claims? John Tierney turns a blind eye to the evidence.
"From the very instance, it was about Iraq. It was all about finding a way to do it." (Paul O'Neill, Treasury Secretary in George W. Bush's first term.)
"The President dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find out whether Iraq did this.' Now, he never said 'Make it up,' but the entire conversation left me with absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this." (Richard Clarke, national security expert under seven presidents, right after 9/11.)
"We have not seen such systematic distortion of intelligence, such systematic manipulation of American opinion since the war in Vietnam." (John Brady Kiesling, 20-year foreign service officer, upon his resignation in 2003.)
"Bogus evidence, evidence known to be erroneous and even forged was used to deceive the Congress . . . . " (Ray McGovern, CIA analyst for 27 years.)
"This administration has had a faith-based intelligence attitude . . . We have the answers--give us the intelligence to support the answers." (Gregory Thielmann, 25-year foreign service officer, who retired as head of the State Department Intelligence Office.)
"The Office of Special Plans lied and manipulated intelligence to further its agenda of removing Saddam. It's a group of ideologues with pre-determined notions of truth and reality." (Larry Johnson, former CIA analyst with 20-plus years experience.)
"The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." (Richard Dearlove, former chief of British Intelligence, in the Downing Street memo.)
These quotes are from men with over 150 years total service. Can they all be lying? Or are they just being disingenuous? Or, if they and Joe Wilson are telling the truth, what does it say about what was done to Valerie Plame, and what does it say about Patrick Fitzgerald findings? That the whole thing is "just hardball politics? Just a case of one side getting even with the other? John Tierney may honestly think so. I suspect history will tell another story.
Chris Christensen is a veteran of the Air Force and Peace Corps. He writes for the baseball digest Elysian Fields Quarterly. He lives and works in Portland, Oregon, where he lives with his sidekick and wife, Bobbie Savitz, to whom he is indebted (big time, as Dick Cheney would say). He can be reached at bobbitz@yahoo.com.
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