The United States, circa 2006, is an upside-down world

i'm glad that robert parry is on the job... i've been most disturbed by the obvious whitewashing of the plame affair that's been going on since the revelation about armitage, and it's good that it's being debunked... first up, today's pandering wapo editorial on joseph wilson...

In a world that wasn’t upside-down, the editorial page of Washington’s biggest newspaper might praise a whistleblower like former Ambassador Joseph Wilson for alerting the American people to a government deception that helped lead the country into a disastrous war that has killed 2,627 U.S. soldiers.

The editorial page also might demand that every senior administration officials who sought to protect that deception by leaking the identity of a covert CIA officer (Wilson’s wife) be held accountable, at minimum stripped of their security clearances and fired from government.

But the United States, circa 2006, is an upside-down world. So the Washington Post’s editorial page instead makes excuses for the government deceivers, treats their exposure of the CIA officer as justifiable – and attacks the whistleblower by recycling the government’s false spin points against him.

[...]

Washington Post Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt, who fell for virtually every Iraq War deception that the Bush administration could dream up, is back assaulting former Ambassador Wilson, again, in a Sept. 1 editorial, falsely accusing Wilson of lying and concluding that “it’s unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.”

In the view of the Post’s editorial page, Wilson’s chief offense appears to be that he went public in July 2003 with a firsthand account of a fact-finding trip that he took in early 2002. At the CIA’s request, he traveled to the African nation of Niger to check out a report alleging that Iraq was trying to obtain yellowcake uranium, presumably for a nuclear bomb.

and here's brent budowsky showing how using the armitage revelation as a way to let the lying bastards off the hook is totally missing the point...

The U.S. news media -- and conservative pundits -- are seeing vindication for the White House in the disclosure that former State Department official Richard Armitage may have been the first official to blurt out Valerie Plame's CIA identity to a reporter. After all, they say, Armitage was not an Iraq War hawk and apparently was not part of any cabal to willfully leak Plame's identity to the news media as a way to undercut her war-critic husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

But this overriding fact remains: other administration officials were intentionally passing on word about Plame's undercover CIA role. The likes of White House aides Lewis Libby and Karl Rove were peddling Plame's identity to some half dozen journalists under the guidance of Vice President Dick Cheney, who was livid when Wilson challenged the White House case for war with Iraq. There's also the question of why political adviser Rove was given access to the sensitive information about Plame; he had no legitimate "need to know."

patrick fitzgerald is still out there and, hopefully, hasn't given up the ghost...

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