Eight Years Later, Washington Post Still Defending The Saddam-Niger-Yellowcake Story ("Fair Game")

[Hissyspit]

http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2010/12/04/eight-years-post/

Eight Years Later, Washington Post Still Defending The Saddam-Niger-Yellowcake Story
December 4th, 2010 at 11:45 AM by Matt Duss.

I’ve not seen the new film Fair Game, the story of how CIA agent Valerie Plame was outed by the Bush administration by way of discrediting her husband Joe Wilson’s public contradiction of one of the administration’s multiple false claims on Iraqi WMD, so I can’t speak to how much it does or doesn’t play with the truth of what happened.

This, however, from the Washington Post’s editorial “review” of the film, is pretty clearly dishonest:

The movie portrays Mr. Wilson as a whistle-blower who debunked a Bush administration claim that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from the African country of Niger. In fact, an investigation by the Senate intelligence committee found that Mr. Wilson’s reporting did not affect the intelligence community’s view on the matter, and an official British investigation found that President George W. Bush’s statement in a State of the Union address that Britain believed that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger was well-founded.

“Well founded,” I suppose, in the sense that (some in) Britain “believed” it. But as we now know, and as the Washington Post itself has reported, our own intelligence agencies, as well as those of other countries, were highly skeptical of the claim.

Maybe the Washington Post’s editors should try reading their own paper. From April 2007:

Dozens of interviews with current and former intelligence officials and policymakers in the United States, Britain, France and Italy show that the Bush administration disregarded key information available at the time showing that the Iraq-Niger claim was highly questionable.

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[TexasObserver]

1. Cheney and his boys created the entire yellow cake myth.

[glitch]

2. What's really sad is allegedly intelligent people don't realize how ludicrous they look

parroting lies long since disproved. That beltway fog must be some powerful narcotic...

[social_critic]

3. The official british investigation used an internet search engine as a source

It was hogwash. The yellow cake story was cooked up in Italy, by US neocons linked to the Bush administration and pro-war lobbyists. Judith Miller at the NY Times, and William Kristol at the Weekly Standard were linked closely to the campaign of lies leading to the Iraq war.

[Uncle Joe]

4. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, Hissyspit.

[RufusTFirefly]

5. I'm with WaPo on this. I mean, we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud!!

:sarcasm:

[ThomThom]

6. saying that Britain believed what we told them is true

what is not true is that Iraq tried to by yellow cake from Niger

[struggle4progress]

7. Well, that's fun! The WaPo editorial says "Hollywood has a habit of making movies about historical

events without regard for the truth; "Fair Game" is just one more example. But the film's reception illustrates a more troubling trend of political debates in Washington in which established facts are willfully ignored" -- and the webversion of the editorial hyperlinks to a WaPo movie review as evidence

Well, then, what does the movie review say? It says: "The movie holds up as a thoroughly researched and essentially accurate account -- albeit with caveats"

:rofl:

WaPo's editorial board seems to have a reading comprehension problem

Hollywood myth-making on Valerie Plame controversy
Friday, December 3, 2010; 8:54 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/03/AR2010120306298_pf.html

'Fair Game' gets some things about the Valerie Plame case right, some wrong
By Walter Pincus and Richard Leiby
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 7, 2010
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/04/AR2010110407989.html?sid=ST2010110407718

[annabanana]

8. They get away with it because most

Americans don't pay attention beyond todays headline and have forgotten yesterdays.