There has been a new development in the story which I described this weekend in
Did the NYTs Out a CIA Agent to Help the NeoCons Invade Iran? http://journals.democraticunderground.com/McCamy%20Taylor/247 Recall that the New York Times gratuitously printed the name of a CIA agent who participated in the interrogation of Al Qaeda members
for no good reason except to show that it could get away with doing so.
On this point Karl Rove and I agree.
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/06/25/rove-nyt-cia-agent/http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/06/25/karl-rove-lashes-out-at-nyt-for-identifying-cia-agent/ ROVE: Well, I read their explanation. And basically, it sounded to me like they were saying we put his name out there because we decided we could. And I mean, they didn’t have a good explanation for it.
You don’t need a college education to figure that much out. Good thing, too, since Rove doesn’t have one of those. What he does have is a tendency to underestimate the public. He thinks that people look at appearances only---and ignore results. So, they will see Karl Rove condemn the New York Times for outing a CIA agent (actually a former agent, now a contract employee). And they will decide that the New York Times staff which has been trashing the CIA for the last six months while simultaneously making a case for war with Iran must not be affiliated with the Bush administration. Because if they were, someone else affiliated with the Bush administration
like Karl Rove would not criticize their own moles in the New York Times now would they?
Like hell they wouldn’t. When the media whores at the newspaper of record slip up and slip into Judy Miller/Michael Gordon mode, what better way to prove their independence from the Office of the Vice President and Paul Wolfowitz than to have Bill O’Reilly and Turd Blossom attack them on air at Fox?
Ignore appearances. Look at results. The NYTs found a way to out CIA agents legally, quasi-ethically and yet still put them and their families in danger. Everyone who associates with them now (or in the past) is also compromised. And who knows what kind of contact a non covert individual may have had with covert agents.
Whoops! says the NYTs.
We had no way to know! So far, the story has gotten only a tiny bit of press. The right has complained that this is the so called liberal media making us soft for the terrorists. You know what I think. The Office of the Vice President and Paul Wolfowitz are up to their old tricks, trying to paint the CIA as liars, torturers, law breakers so that last year’s Iran NIE can be ignored while threatening CIA agents with exposure, ostracism and death to keep the agency quiet while the NeoCons push forward their plans for the invasion of Iran.
Unfortunately, if the story appears to have come from the White House, then this becomes Plame II and Cheney looks even more like the Prince of Darkness. And it makes reporters at the New York Times shy about becoming the next Judy Millers/Michael Gordons.
That is where Rove comes in. By attacking the story, he can protect the media whores at the NYTs from charges of being in collusion with the NeoCons, and he can protect his bosses at the WH. Plus, he gives the story more exposure. Since it was on Fox News, it will inevitably creep onto the other news networks. That means more ostracism and more danger for the targeted agent. In talking about this with O’Reilly, Karl Rove exploits his own notoriety in the Valerie Plame affair in order to draw even more attention to this controversy than the Great Wind Bag alone could give it. He doesn’t mind if people call him guilty. The self style Rove-Rasputin loves being seen as the man who gets away with murder.
On Fox, Rove
creates the appearance that the administration’s surrogates opposed this outing. He
creates the appearance that the administration does not get along with reporters from the New York Times---even though the NYTs sat on the “Bush Spied” story for a solid year, until well after the 2004 election (Rove doesn’t mention that). He tries to convince someone (surely not Fox viewers, why would they care?) that the newspaper of record is not trying to sell this country another war of choice for oil in the Middle East by regurgitating propaganda from administration sources whom they will not name.
Good try, but appearances do not count for much, not when there is such an enormous body of work to study at the so called newspaper of record---or is that
newspaper of electronic recording device ?
Readers, I present Michael Gordon, affectionately known to other journalists as the world's only human voice activated tape recorder.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003798525 NEW YORK Michael Gordon, the military writer for The New York Times who contributed several false stories about Iraqi WMD in the runup to the U.S. attack on Iraq in 2002, has written several articles in the past year about Iran’s alleged training of Iraqi insurgents -- or supplying them with weapons to kill Americans. He produced another major report on this subject for today’s Times – based solely on unnamed sources -- which is at odds with an account from McClatchy’s Baghdad bureau.
Snip
Here is a list of Gordon’s sources in his Times article:
-- “An American official”
-- “But the Americans say”
-- “American officials”
-- “American officials”
-- “The Americans “
--“American officials”
--“An American official”
-- ditto, and so on
Remember why the New York Times said that it absolutely positively had to out the CIA agent
by name ? Here, I will give you the full quote. From their editor’s note:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/washington/web22ksmnote.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1214467313-Z4cd9wFC4xq95Y/c6nKT7g After discussion with agency officials and a lawyer for Mr. Martinez, the newspaper declined the request, noting that Mr. Martinez had never worked under cover and that others involved in the campaign against Al Qaeda have been named in news stories and books. The editors judged that the name was necessary for the credibility and completeness of the article.
The Times’s policy is to withhold the name of a news subject only very rarely, most often in the case of victims of sexual assault or intelligence officers operating under cover.
So, does that mean that all of the unnamed sources in the article who talked about the CIA employee Martinez behind his back were either covert agents or the victims of sexual assault? I guess Michael Gordon only speaks to covert agents and rape victims, too, since he never names any names.
The New York Times has a serious ethics problem. That is the appearance. The result is even worse. They have produced a body of work which can have only one goal---weaken the CIA while attempting to strengthen the NeoCons’ case for the Invasion of Iran. Starting with the peculiarly timed “Two Torture Tape” leak to Mark Mazzetti that came of the heels of the Iran NIE last fall, through all the stories about Iran arming this group and funding that group and having this and thinking that alongside the never ending stories about the CIA which are designed to do just one thing----trash the intelligence agency----they have proven that Bill Kristol is not an aberration, he is the norm.
And Karl Rove needs to get an acting coach. His lying skills are adequate, but watch the video at the Crooks and Liars link above. The "outrage meter" did not even move. Except for a little smirk of smug self satisfaction, the man had the emotion of a blancmange.
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