Nearly eight years after the Monica Lewinsky scandal, a number of Democrats are expressing deep satisfaction with the prospect of the Bush administration running afoul of a criminal investigation of its own. "Those who thought investigations were a wonderful thing when Bill Clinton was president are suddenly facing prosecutors, and they don't like it," wrote E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post on October 18. "A process that was about 'the rule of law' when Democrats were in power is suddenly an outrage now that it's Republicans who are being held accountable."
"Now," of course, means now that the Bush White House is at the center of the CIA leak probe. But commentators on the Left know full well that prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald might not have enough evidence to seek charges based on the two difficult-to-prosecute national-security laws involved in the case, the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act and the 1917 Espionage Act. But that still leaves the possibility that Fitzgerald might charge some Bush administration officials with perjury, making false statements, or obstruction of justice.
And that means the case could become a prosecution in which one or more administration figures are charged with lying about acts that were not in themselves crimes. "At the end of the day," a former intelligence official told National Review last week, "this could end up being a situation where there wasn't a crime until there was an investigation."
So what? say the president's adversaries. Isn't that what happened in the Lewinsky scandal? "During the Monica madness, Clinton's champions argued that lies about sex are not really lies — or, at least, don't merit prosecution," David Corn of The Nation wrote on his blog on October 14. But now, Corn argued, things are different. "What about lies about leaking classified information? No one should get a pass for that."
It's a common argument these days: Lewinsky was an investigation without a crime — lies about sex — but this CIA thing is something else entirely. Perhaps the people making the argument sincerely believe that, but they have, at best, a flawed recollection of what happened in the Lewinsky matter. Whatever else it was, it was without doubt an investigation with a crime.
In January 1998, when the Lewinsky affair broke, Kenneth Starr had finished most of the investigation collectively known as Whitewater. The Travelgate investigation was pretty much over, as was the Filegate probe, the Vincent Foster suicide review, and other parts of the investigation. But Starr was still looking into another aspect of the affair: the big-money, little-work consulting deals that Clinton crony Webster Hubbell received at the same time he was, in the eyes of Starr's prosecutors, failing to cooperate fully with the investigation. Hubbell, the prosecutors suspected, was being paid not to talk.
Starr knew that one person who had arranged "work" for Hubbell was Clinton friend Vernon Jordan. "Prior to January 1998, the Office of Independent Counsel possessed evidence that Vernon Jordan — along with other high-level associates of the President and First Lady — helped Mr. Hubbell obtain lucrative consulting contracts while he was a potential witness and/or subject in the OIC's ongoing investigation," says The Starr Report. "This assistance took place, moreover, while Mr. Hubbell was a target of a separate criminal investigation into his own conduct. The OIC also possessed evidence that the President and the First Lady knew and approved of the Hubbell-focused assistance."
Specifically, the report says, Jordan helped Hubbell receive assistance from MacAndrews & Forbes, the holding company for Revlon, for which Jordan served as a director. "Mr. Jordan introduced Mr. Hubbell to senior executives at New York-based MacAndrews & Forbes Holding Co.," the report says. "The introduction was successful; MacAndrews & Forbes retained Mr. Hubbell at a rate of $25,000 per quarter. Vernon Jordan informed President Clinton that he was helping Mr. Hubbell."
That was all known in January 1998. So when, in that month, Starr's prosecutors received word that the president's former girlfriend planned to lie to the judge in the Paula Jones case, and that at the same time she had received help in getting a job — at Revlon, among other places — from Vernon Jordan, there seemed to be a connection worth investigating. "Office of Independent Counsel investigators and prosecutors recognized parallels between Mr. Jordan's relationship with Ms. Lewinsky and his earlier relationship with a pivotal Whitewater-Madison figure, Webster L. Hubbell," the report says. "Based in part on these similarities, the OIC undertook a preliminary investigation. On January 15, 1998, this Office informed the Justice Department of the results of our inquiry. The Attorney General immediately applied to the Special Division of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit for an expansion of the OIC's jurisdiction."
So the investigation was underway. It had its beginnings in the effort to glean information from a convicted felon, Hubbell, about possible crimes stemming from the felony convictions of the president's former business partners. (That is, Starr was seeking information from Hubbell and others about whether President Clinton had testified truthfully at the trial of Jim McDougal, Susan McDougal, and Jim Guy Tucker, in which all three were convicted of felonies.) Based on that criminal background, Starr's prosecutors began a new investigation when it appeared that the main link, Jordan, was involved in similar activities in the Jones civil case.
"Sex with Lewinsky was not a crime," says a former Starr prosecutor. "But I would think that the answer is that there was, at the core, an underlying crime, namely the Whitewater offense for which Tucker and MacDougal were convicted, and thus that the Hubbell cover-up stuff was a real crime."
That was Lewinsky. So what about the current CIA leak investigation? Certainly there are no background crimes, like the convictions of Hubbell and the McDougals, from which any suspected crimes by Karl Rove, Lewis Libby and others could derive. If Fitzgerald charges that Rove or Libby or other officials violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act or the Espionage Act, then there would be an allegation of an underlying crime, and all the discussion of lying about non-criminal activity would be moot. But if Fitzgerald does not bring any charges of betraying the identity of a covert agent or misusing classified information, but does bring charges of perjury, false statements, or obstruction of justice, then the case, unlike the Lewinsky matter, would be a classic cover-up without a crime.
As such, it would likely give rise to all sorts of bitter arguments about precedents in the Clinton investigations and accusations that hypocrisy abounds on one side or the other. People who in 1998 argued that lying under oath didn't really matter, at least if it was about sex, will passionately argue that lying under oath really, really matters now. And people who in 1998 argued that lying under oath mattered very much will argue that it is not such a big deal today. Before anyone starts making such arguments, they should at least remember what happened in 1998.
— Byron York, NR's White House correspondent, is the author of the new book The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy: The Untold Story of How Democratic Operatives, Eccentric Billionaires, Liberal Activists, and Assorted Celebrities Tried to Bring Down a President — and Why They'll Try Even Harder Next Time.
Is there anyone more full of malarkey than the ineffable mainstream media? It's hard to believe they could top themselves on the hypocrisy meter, but in the Valerie Plame leak investigation, they've managed to do just that.
I refer not to their precious wailing over the refusal of the special prosecutor, in a leak investigation, to leak to them — which has, even more than usual, reduced them to loading 24/7 news cycles with their hopes and dreams for a Bush calamity. Nor is this even about reporters pretending to be dispassionate raconteurs when, in fact, they are actors on the stage: participants who testify about their role in events one day and then merrily report on those same events the next — quite aware that they'd be screaming "conflict of interest" if such flim-flam were attempted by anyone else.
Yes, those and other thoughtless embarrassments could fill a book. But today's topic, instead, is the Fourth Estate's vainglorious paeans to source confidentiality and their own transcendent heroism in preserving it.
And did they mention, by the way, that it is a selfless heroism? So vital to our democracy, to our liberties, yea, to our very lives is the principle that a reporter must be able to conceal the identity of a source that nothing can supersede it. No subpoena, no public-safety urgency, no cry for justice. The lips of these titans are sealed.
Unless, of course, it makes for a good story. Then all bets are off.
Naturally, they won't tell you that. After all, it's not a very becoming posture for First Amendment martyrs. But for divas like Judith Miller, Matthew Cooper, and their respective employers, the New York Times and Time, it's exactly where they're coming from. Better to prattle on about confidential sources as "the life's blood of journalism," as Miller told the Senate Judiciary Committee last week. That way, readers may not notice that the king has no clothes.
Unless you've been living under a rock, you now know that Scooter Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, was Miller's source that Plame worked at the CIA. And you know that Karl Rove, President Bush's top political adviser, was a source who confirmed that fact for Cooper.
But how do you know?
You don't know it from the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald. He has a confidentiality commitment too — except his, unlike the one claimed by the media, is actually recognized by the law. And it is one he has honored, much to the chagrin of the journalists he is depriving of all that life's blood.
You also don't know it from Libby and Rove. As we are now informed, they spoke to reporters on condition that they not be publicly identified by name. Indeed, Libby is said to have gone so far as insisting that Miller refer to him as a "former Hill staffer" rather than a "senior administration official" to make extra sure his words would never come back to bite him you know where.
Note that at the time Libby insisted on this nom de leak — which is to say, insisted on that oh-so-solemn promise of confidentiality to which the Millers and Coopers and editorialists from coast-to-coast have effused about their unflinching dedication — there was no special prosecutor. Pat Fitzgerald was still in Chicago, minding his own business (or, at least, minding al Qaeda's business).
No, the promise Libby and Rove were seeking, and that Miller and Cooper purported to give, had nothing to do with any grand jury. It was that the sources' names would never be revealed to the public.
Yet, you are the public, and you do know their sources. Why?
You know them because the journalists decided to tell you. Miller and Cooper both made certain that the public knew every syllable uttered by the sources they've sanctimoniously told us, again and again, they made commitments to shield. And they did it in the worst possible way: in hyper-hyped, autobiographical, self-adulating accounts of their valiant struggle to withhold information from a grand jury despite that nagging inconvenience the rest of us know as the law. Miller, in fact, is planning to cash in with a book about the whole thing, while the previously obscure Cooper has become America's latest fifteen-minute celebrity (whose clock, we can hope, is nearing its last ticks).
But, as these reporters and their publications well know, they didn't have to do it.
If their principle was what they purported it to be, if they were as committed to it as they feigned, you wouldn't know anything. Their sources would remain confidential — perhaps forever. In the chain of charades begun by the charlatan Joseph Wilson, the phoniest of all may be that the special counsel, rather than mendacious media themselves, outed confidential sources.
Federal law makes grand-jury proceedings secret — prosecutors, grand jurors, and stenographers are obliged to keep what is said there confidential. Miller and Cooper ultimately had to comply with the law that requires each person to disclose his evidence to the grand jury. That law does not, however, require revelation to anyone else. The reporters could easily have told the grand jury what they knew but maintained their silence as to the rest of the world.
But wouldn't the sources have been revealed anyway? Possibly, but not necessarily — and there's a very good chance that they wouldn't have. Much of grand-jury proceedings ends up disclosed if an indictment is returned. But Fitzgerald may decide not to bring any charges. In that event, the matter could be closed without any need to reveal publicly who said what to whom — the limited disclosure would have died with the grand jury to whom it was made, leaving the sources protected.
Further, even the filing of charges would not have led inexorably to exposure of sources. There is no requirement that indictments detail every aspect of the evidence — they need only generally alert an accused of what statute he is alleged to have violated, where, and when. To be sure, if it looked like the case was ultimately headed for a jury trial, there would probably be a more expansive indictment, and trial testimony would no doubt let the cat out of the bag. But over 90 percent of criminal cases are disposed of by guilty plea. In that scenario, there would almost surely have been no need for public revelation of all reporter-source communications.
It's worth remembering the now ancient history of this affair. Matters got kicked off over two years ago when Robert Novak wrote a column recounting what two Bush administration officials told him about Plame.
Who were Novak's confidential sources? We don't know.
It's fair to assume Novak has told the grand jury who they were. The law gave him no choice. But having promised to shield his sources from the public, he evidently did not regard a narrow legal compulsion to provide evidence in a secret proceeding as license to expose those sources for the entire universe to see and snicker at. And if the investigation ends without charges or with guilty pleas, you won't know anymore about Novak's sources tomorrow than you do today.
Yet, in the inverted world of media morality, it's Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper who are the polar stars of integrity. Go figure.
— Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
When New York Times reporter Judith Miller went to jail in July in the CIA leak case, the Times editorialized about her brave sacrifice: "She is surrendering her liberty in defense of a greater liberty, granted to a free press by the founding fathers so journalists can work on behalf of the public without fear of regulation or retaliation from any branch of government." But a funny thing happened on the way to this stirring vindication of freedom — Miller got tired of being in jail.
The special-prosecutor investigation into the leak of the identity of CIA employee Valerie Plame — wife of President Bush critic Joe Wilson — might yet be the undoing of high Bush officials. But it should already have been the undoing of the media's high self-regard. A cause that had been hyped relentlessly as synonymous with freedom and good journalism — Miller and Time reporter Matt Cooper protecting their sources — has collapsed into farce.
When Miller was subpoenaed in August 2004, her lawyer, Floyd Abrams, immediately called Joseph Tate, the lawyer for her source, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby. Tate told him that Libby was serious about the waiver he had signed releasing reporters from their pledges of confidentiality. Abrams wasn't so sure. This could have been cleared up if Miller had called Libby and asked. She didn't, because she thought that would have been pressuring Libby to allow her to testify. She wanted to be extremely cautious, what with the fate of the free press hanging on her every move.
She instead waited for Libby to call, as her appeals ran out and she ended up going to jail. He didn't. "I interpreted the silence as 'Don't testify,'" Miller has explained. But Libby's silence could have instead meant, "I have already signed a waiver and my lawyer told your lawyer you can testify — what else do you want?"
In jail, Miller had a conversion. The First Amendment, or at least her courageous role in preserving it, wasn't so important after all. With the possibility of spending real time in jail looming if she continued to refuse to testify, Miller decided to contact Libby. Ten weeks in jail to protect all that we hold dear as a country was one thing, but 10 months or more was something else.
She had her new lawyer, Bob Bennett, contact Tate again. Libby's lawyer was very clear that Miller could testify, that, in fact, he had said as much a year earlier. So Miller's jail time was pointless. She could have testified all along. Even the minuscule principle she had stood on — a reporter shouldn't ask a source whether she can be released from her pledge of confidentiality — was violated when she tired of sleeping on the thin mattresses at the Alexandria Detention Center.
Miller's case mirrors that of Time reporter Matt Cooper, who refused to accept as legitimate a blanket waiver signed by Karl Rove, until he was on the verge of going to jail. It is understandable that reporters don't want to be behind bars. But please spare us all the sanctimony about the hallowedness of confidential sources. After their grand-jury testimony, Miller and Cooper went on to write 3,000- and 2,000-word articles, respectively, detailing their confidential conversations that they supposedly testified about only under duress. Did Patrick Fitzgerald make them write these pieces as well?
Now Miller is being savaged by Times editors and writers not only for her shoddy past work, but for the fact that the source she was protecting was an aide to that icky Vice President Cheney. Times editor Bill Keller said, "I wish it had been a clear-cut whistle-blower case." Translation: If only our reporter's source had been somebody attacking the Bush administration, instead of somebody defending it. Those dozen or more editorials defending her as a heroine? Never mind.
No wonder the book Matt Cooper reportedly wants to write about this imbroglio is a comedy.
— Rich Lowry is author of Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years.
ON JUNE12, 2003, when he first published a story about the matter, Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus became the second journalist to have been used by Ambassador Joseph Wilson to peddle bogus information about his February 2002 trip to Niger.
Wilson told Pincus that he had debunked Bush administration claims that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger. He was specific and apparently seemed credible. And Pincus bought it all.
He wrote:
Armed with information purportedly showing that Iraqi officials had been seeking to buy uranium in Niger one or two years earlier, the CIA in early February 2002 dispatched a retired U.S. ambassador to the country to investigate the claims, according to the senior U.S. officials and the former government official, who is familiar with the event. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity and on condition that the name of the former ambassador not be disclosed.
During his trip, the CIA's envoy spoke with the president of Niger and other Niger officials mentioned as being involved in the Iraqi effort, some of whose signatures purportedly appeared on the documents.
After returning to the United States, the envoy reported to the CIA that the uranium-purchase story was false, the sources said. Among the envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong," the former U.S. government official said.
There is one problem with this: It's wrong. Wilson lied and lied repeatedly. His central contention--that he had seen documents about the alleged sale and determined that they were forgeries--was a fabrication. We know this because Wilson took his trip in February 2002 and the U.S. government did not receive those documents until October 2002. It could not have happened the way Wilson described it to Pincus.
Wilson was later confronted about his misrepresentations. He told investigators from the Senate Intelligence Committee that he may have "misspoken." CNN's Wolf Blitzer asked Wilson specifically about these obvious discrepancies, citing Pincus's June 12, 2003, Washington Post story. Wilson decided to share the blame. He pointed the finger squarely at Walter Pincus:
Yes, I am male, I'm over 50. By definition, I can misspeak. I have gone back and taken a look at this particular article. It refers to an unidentified former government official. If it is referring to me, it is a misattribution, of facts that were already in the public domain and had been so since March. My first public statement on this, in my own words, was on July 6." [emphasis added]
The following day, Wilson was confronted again, this time by CNN's Paula Zahn. This time he played dumb before once again blamed the reporters who retold his phony story.
Zahn: I want you to respond to that very specific allegation in the addendum to the Senate report, which basically says that your public comments not only are incorrect, but have no basis in fact. Wilson: Well, I'm not exactly sure what public comments they're referring to. If they're referring to leaks or sources, unidentified government sources in articles that appeared before my article in the New York Times [July 6, 2003] appeared, those are either misquotes or misattributions if they're attributed to me.
It was a stunning reversal. Wilson had turned on the very people who had given him prominence and had trusted that his story was accurate.
All of which brings us to the very bizarre story in today's Washington Post. The article is a rather transparent attempt to rehabilitate Joseph Wilson, casting the current debate about his credibilityas a battle between Wilson's antiwar supporters and his pro-war critics. It fails.
IT FAILS BECAUSE outside of the pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times, there is no real debate over Joseph Wilson's credibility. He doesn't have any. It is something that Walter Pincus should understand well, having been one of the earliest peddlers of Wilson's fabrications. And one might think that Pincus would be angry at Wilson after the former ambassador accused him of sloppy reporting to cover up Wilson's own misrepresentations.
But one would be wrong. Pincus is the co-author--along with Dana Milbank--of this morning's amusing attempt to reframe the Wilson story.
"To his backers, Joseph C. Wilson IV is a brave whistle-blower wronged by the Bush administration," claim Pincus and Milbank. "To his critics, he is a partisan who spouts unreliable information."
And why has Wilson's credibility become an issue? A reasonable outside observer might think that Wilson's credibility is an issue because, well, he lied about his findings. That doesn't work for the Post reporters. Wilson's claims are once again at issue because "Republicans [are] preparing a defense of the administration."
The Post report continues: "Wilson's central assertion--disputing President Bush's 2003 State of the Union claim that Iraq was seeking nuclear material in Niger--has been validated by postwar weapons inspections. And his charge that the administration exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq has proved potent."
It is the 60 Minutes defense all over again: Fake, but accurate. Yet there are two problems with these claims.
First, it is far from clear that Bush's claim has been invalidated by postwar inspections. Weapons inspections in 2003 and 2004 have little bearing on whether Iraq sought uranium in 1999. And the British review of prewar intelligence (known as the Butler report) concluded that the claim was--and remains--solid. Even Wilson's own reporting about a 1999 meeting between Nigerien government officials and an Iraqi delegation seemed to corroborate earlier reports, dating back to October 2001, that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger.
More problematic: Wilson's "central assertion" was not a soft, subjective claim that Bush's statement was incorrect. His central assertion was that he had seen the documents that proved the Bush administration had lied. Wilson's story was compelling not because he had simply come to a different conclusion than the Bush administration, but because he alone could demonstrate that the administration's claim was built on a lie.
So how does the Post deal with Wilson's fabrications? Very politely. Wilson "armed his critics by misstating some aspects of the Niger affair" and when later confronted with his misrepresentations "had to admit he had misspoken." But none of this was important, according to the Post. "That inaccuracy wasnot central to Wilson's claims about Niger, but his critics have used it to cast doubt on his veracity about more important questions, such as whether his wife recommended him for the 2002 trip . . . "
Come again? The fact that he misrepresented his findings and invented a story about evidence he had never seen is "not central to his claims about Niger?"
IN ANY CASE, Pincus hasn't always believed that the involvement of Wilson's wife was a "more important question." On August 8, 2005, he wrote an article with this headline: "Side Issue in the Plame Case: Who Sent Her Spouse to Africa?"
And what about Wilson's claims that his wife had nothing to do with sending him? When Time magazine interviewed Wilson for an article published July 17, 2003, the Time reporters confronted him with those allegations. Wilson, according to Time, "angrily said that his wife had nothing to do with his trip to Africa." Said Wilson: "That is bull----. That is absolutely not the case."
Today's Post article once again plays this as an ambiguity: The reporters note a Senate report that suggests she was involved, but also cite anonymous CIA officials who "have always said" that "Plame's superiors chose Wilson for the Niger trip and she only relayed their decision."
Two points: By the CIA's own account, Mrs. Wilson was "involved" in sending her husband to Niger. So his denial is, again, false. Furthermore, the Senate Intelligence Committee report makes clear that Mrs. Wilson was instrumental in facilitating her husband's trip to Niger. She suggested him for the job, even writing a memo to her superiors detailing his qualifications for the mission. She introduced him at the subsequent meeting about the trip. And, upon his return, she was present for his debriefing, which was conducted by two CIA officials in their home.
The Post piece closes by citing "another item of dispute": The claim that Wilson was dispatched to Niger by Vice President Dick Cheney. In a recent interview with the Post, Wilson claims: "I never said the vice president sent me or ordered me sent."
But in his May 6, 2003, column in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof wrote: "I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged." Was that Wilson? We cannot be certain. But both Kristof and Wilson have acknowledged that he was a primary source for the piece.
Wilson further claimed that Cheney had received Wilson's report--allegedly debunking the claim--and had chosen to ignore it. From the New Republic, June 30, 2003: "The CIA circulated the ambassador's report to the vice president's office, the ambassador confirms to TNR." Wilson added: "They knew the Niger story was a flatout lie."
TODAY'S Post story is one in a long stream of news reports in both the Post and the New York Times which have given credence to Wilson's bogus claims. For more than a year--from May 2003 until the release ofthe Senate Intelligence Committee report on July 7, 2004--the mainstream press regurgitated Wilson's fraudulent narrative as if it was true.
Here was Pincus on July 6, 2003, the first on-the-record interview with Wilson about his Niger trip. "Joseph C. Wilson, the retired United States ambassador whose CIA-directed mission to Niger in early 2002 helped debunk claims that Iraq had tried to obtain uranium there for nuclear weapons, has said for the first time publicly that U.S. and British officials ignored his findings and exaggerated the public case for invading Iraq.
Wilson, whose 23-year career included senior positions in Africa and Iraq, where he was acting ambassador in 1991, said the false allegations that Iraq was trying to buy uranium oxide from Niger about three years ago were used by President Bush and senior administration officials as a central piece of evidence to support their assertions that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program."
The New York Times, too, assumed that Wilson's version of events was true: "The agent is the wife of Joseph C. Wilson 4th, a former ambassador to Gabon. It was Mr. Wilson who, more than a year and a half ago, concluded in a report to the CIA that there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein tried to buy uranium ore in Niger in an effort to build nuclear arms. But his report was ignored, and Ambassador Wilson has been highly critical of how the administration handled intelligence claims regarding Iraq's nuclear weapons programs, suggesting that Mr. Bush's aides and Vice President Dick Cheney's office tried to inflate the threat."
More troubling, though, is the credulous reporting that came after the Senate Intelligence Committee report had discredited Wilson. The New York Times, in an editorial on July 19, 2005, argues as if the Senate report had never been issued:
"In July 2003, Mr. Wilson wrote an Op-Ed article in The Times that described how he had been sent by the C.I.A. to investigate a report that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Niger. He said he had found no evidence to support the claim of a uranium purchase, or even a serious attempt to negotiate one, and that he had reported this to Washington. That is entirely accurate."
Or, more recently, the July 27, 2005, Washington Post: "In a 2002 trip to Niger at the request of the CIA, Wilson found no evidence to support allegations that Iraq was seeking uranium from that African country and reported back to the agency in February 2002. But nearly a year later, Bush asserted in his State of the Union speech that Iraq had sought uranium from Africa, attributing it to British, not U.S., intelligence."
But those were not Wilson' findings. And he wasn't sent by Vice President Cheney. And he was recommended by his wife. And he never did see the forgeries. And his report never was circulated to senior Bush administration policymakers. And on and on it goes.
The only debate about Joseph Wilson's credibility is the one apparently taking place at the Washington Post and the New York Times.
Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.