<font size=4>Tim Rutten Distorts, You Decide
Tim Rutten -- a man so far to the left that he once uttered the phrase <font color=blue>"the mythology of liberal Hollywood"<font color=black> without a trace of irony -- is now waging a one-man war on alternatives to the liberal mainstream media.
Two weeks ago, Rutten mocked the Fox News Channel, calling it <font color=blue>"the most blatantly biased major American news organization since the era of yellow journalism."<font color=black>
On Saturday, Rutten took some cheap potshots at pro-war bloggers -- including Roger L. Simon, and some unnamed critics of the L.A. Times's woefully deficient coverage of the implosion of Joe Wilson's credibility. (As Rutten no doubt knows, yours truly has been one of the more prominent of these unnamed critics of the Times.) See, some of us had the gall to point out that papers like Rutten's L.A. Times had trumpeted Wilson's allegations on their front pages -- but then remained silent for days after the recent bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report had shattered Wilson's credibility.
How dare we!
In classic L.A. Times style, Rutten commits the exact
crimes of which he accuses his opponents: inaccuracy,
distortion, and a lack of civility.
Rutten's piece, titled <font color=blue>Fuel for the pro-war blogs<font color=black>, opens as follows:
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It takes a strong stomach to plunge into the sea of malice, mendacity and misrepresentation that now churns around the affair of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV and his wife, Valerie Plame.
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Malice, mendacity, and misrepresentation! These are harsh words. I know what you're thinking: but Patterico, Wilson's blatant lies merit this intemperate language!
Heh.
If you are unfamiliar with Mr. Rutten and his paper, you could be excused for assuming that Rutten is indeed referring to Joe Wilson with the phrase <font color=blue>"malice, mendacity and misrepresentation."<font color=black> After all -- as I have detailed in several previous posts (here, here, here, here, and here) -- a recent bipartisan report of the Senate Intelligence Committee published some strong findings demolishing the credibility of Joe Wilson -- findings studiously ignored by the Los Angeles Times for almost a week.
But those familiar with Rutten and the Times should not be surprised to learn that he is referring, not to lying Joe Wilson, but rather to . . . bloggers.
In his piece, Rutten presents a selectively one-sided account of Wilson's claims, omitting Wilson's worst lies, as well as the most damning evidence of those lies. Rutten purports to summarize the bloggers' case against Wilson -- and, by extension, our case against the L.A. Times, for doing such a poor job of reporting the Senate committee's findings regarding Wilson's deceptive statements. Rutten's summary is misleading:
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The bloggers, whose rhetoric gains heat and velocity as it ricochets from one site to another through a chain of self-referential links, basically formulated a two-count indictment: First, Wilson lied by saying he was not recruited for the mission by his wife and about the conclusiveness of what he had found once in Niger. . . Second, major newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, were alleged to be suppressing the story of Wilson's mendacity. In other words, why won't the media tell us the truth?
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(Side note: it is richly ironic that, shortly after denouncing bloggers as full of <font color=blue>"malice, mendacity and misrepresentation,"<font color=black> Rutten is soon decrying the overheated rhetoric of these same bloggers. Rutten's argument is fairly translated as follows: Bloggers are nasty liars! And they're name-callers, too!)
In the context of Rutten's entire piece, his purported summary of the bloggers' arguments is distorted and misleading. Rutten omits the most salient evidence against Wilson, thus making the bloggers' arguments sound weak and easily rebutted.
For example: Wilson did indeed baldly lie about the conclusiveness of what he had found in Niger -- but you'd never know it by reading Rutten's piece.
First, Rutten misleadingly understates what Wilson claimed. According to Rutten, all Wilson said was that he had <font color=blue>"found nothing to support allegations"<font color=black> that Baghdad had attempted to buy Nigerian yellowcake.
Even if that had been all Wilson had said, that would be a lie. After all, as Wilson reported to the CIA, the former prime minister of Niger had told Wilson that he had been approached by an Iraqi delegation seeking to <font color=blue>"expand[] commercial relations."<font color=black> Possibly because uranium is the only Nigerian export in which Iraq might possibly have had any interest, the former prime minister told Wilson that he had concluded that the Iraqis were interested in buying uranium from Niger. Obviously, this fact supported evidence of Iraqi interest in Nigerian uranium -- as many intelligence analysts concluded. For Wilson to claim that he had found <font color=blue>"nothing"<font color=black> to support the allegations is simply false, as the bipartisan Senate report found.
Rutten mentions not a word of this.
But, Rutten's false characterization notwithstanding, Wilson didn't claim simply that he had found <font color=blue>"nothing to support the allegations."<font color=black> Wilson's claim was much grander: he claimed to have conclusively rebutted the allegations that Iraq had been interested in Nigerian uranium -- and further claimed certain knowledge that this refutation had been communicated to top Bush Administration officials.
Details are available here. For example, the New York Times's Nick Kristof, relying on an interview with Wilson, reported that the allegations of Iraqi interest in Nigerian uranium were <font color=blue>"unequivocally wrong."<font color=black> Wilson told The New Republic that Bush Administration officials <font color=blue>"knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie."<font color=black> On <font color=blue>"Meet the Press,"<font color=black> Wilson told Andrea Mitchell that his findings <font color=blue>"effectively debunked the Niger arms uranium sale."<font color=black>
As Wilson stated on page one of his book (quoted here):
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I stated that the Bush Administration had been informed a year and a half earlier that their claims of Iraqi attempts to purchase uranium from Niger were false. I knew what information the administration had about Niger... My report -- and two others from American officials -- had apparently been disregarded.
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Such a conclusive refutation would be a tough trick, especially in light of the evidence provided by the former prime minister to Wilson, that Iraq had indeed sought uranium. Wilson has tried to explain away the conclusiveness of his statements by saying they reflected <font color=blue>"a little literary flair."<font color=black>
A little literary flair? What an incredibly flippant way
to describe a direct accusation that your president has
lied on a vital issue relating to national security --
relating to the very decision to go to war and risk our
soldiers' lives.
A little literary flair.
Rutten doesn't mention that cute statement, or any of Wilson's overhyped statements calling Bush a liar.
Even more implausibly, Wilson claimed that he had rebutted the claim in Bush's 2003 State of the Union address that, according to British intelligence, Iraq had sought uranium from Africa. As Bob Somerby notes, there are a few other countries in Africa besides Niger -- and some of them sell uranium (for example, Somalia and the Congo). How was Wilson able to determine that the entire African continent was uninterested in selling uranium, based on a single sweet-mint-tea-drinking binge in Niger?
Rutten never explains this to us.
So when Wilson claimed that he had conclusively refuted Bush's statements, that was bunk. What's more, the fact that his claims were bunk was obvious to anyone who knows that Niger is not the only country in Africa that sells uranium. Who didn't seem to know this? Why, the L.A. Times itself, for one, which reported -- repeatedly and breathlessly -- that Wilson had refuted Bush's State of the Union claim. For example, as I told you previously, the Times reported on July 12, 2003 that Wilson had <font color=blue>"concluded that the allegations were false."<font color=black> As recently as June 25 of this year, the Times reported that Wilson had <font color=blue>"determined that the statement [regarding Iraqi attempts to buy uranium in Niger] was untrue."<font color=black>
These were conclusive and rash statements -- made by Wilson without foundation, and repeated time and time again by the L.A. Times.
There is not one word about any of this in Rutten's article.
Rutten omits other damning evidence of Wilson's self-aggrandizing fibbing. For example, Wilson supported his ridiculous claims that he had <font color=blue>"debunked"<font color=black> the yellowcake claims by asserting that he had given the Bush administration chapter and verse on how he could tell that the documents supporting the claims were forgeries. There was only one slight problem: as the Senate report showed, Wilson had never seen these documents at the time he made these claims. A chagrined Wilson later had to admit that he had not seen the forged documents. He weakly and unconvincingly explained that he had likely filled in gaps in his memory based on later press reports. This was stunning evidence of Wilson's tendency towards self-promoting exaggeration -- and that's putting it kindly.
Rutten doesn't mention this either.
Rutten's selective disclosure of the facts continues with his claim that, according to bloggers, <font color=blue>"Wilson lied by saying he was not recruited for the mission by his wife."<font color=black> Rutten then claims:
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While the Senate report says that Plame "offered up" her husband's name for the mission, a senior CIA official this week told the Los Angeles Times' Doyle McManus: "Her bosses say she did not initiate the idea of her husband going…. They asked her if he'd be willing to go, and she said yes."
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Once again, Rutten misstates the bloggers' arguments, which are much broader than the characterization by Rutten. Our claim is that Wilson lied by saying that his wife had nothing to do with his going on the trip.
Our claim is the truth. Wilson did say that. In his memoir, Wilson stated: <font color=blue>"Valerie could not—and would not if she could—have had anything to do with the CIA decision to ask me to travel to Niamey [the capital of Niger and the location of the U.S. Nigerian Embassy]."<font color=black> As the Senate report found, Wilson's claim is conclusively refuted by documentary and testimonial evidence. As the Washington Post reported the day after the Senate report came out:
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The report states that a CIA official told the Senate committee that Plame "offered up" Wilson's name for the Niger trip, then on Feb. 12, 2002, sent a memo to a deputy chief in the CIA's Directorate of Operations saying her husband "has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity." The next day, the operations official cabled an overseas officer seeking concurrence with the idea of sending Wilson, the report said.
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So, even if the Senate report is wrong, and Wilson's wife only agreed to the assignment after it was initially suggested, she still had something to do with it. So, Wilson still lied about his wife's involvement.
But Rutten doesn't tell readers that either.
In conclusion, with another swipe at Fox News, Rutten comically pretends that he has set forth the bloggers' entire argument, which is refuted by the allegedly simple and complete factual record he has presented:
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There you have it: full disclosure. As they say on television, you decide.
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If you can read this entire post and agree with Rutten that he has given <font color=blue>"full disclosure,"<font color=black> then you're a lost cause.
If Rutten's selective view of the Wilson saga were the truth, then maybe it really would be a <font color=blue>"bit of a footnote"<font color=black> not worth an immediate story on page A1. However, as I (and countless others) have amply demonstrated, there is much more to the Wilson story -- and it goes to the heart of the <font color=blue>"Bush lied!"<font color=black> canard. When a paper trumpets allegations like this in front-page story after front-page story, it has an obligation to correct the record, as prominently as it initially distorted that record. The L.A. Times hasn't done this, and Rutten's defense of this failure is transparently phony.
And gee, I'm sorry if that doesn't seem civil enough for you.
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