Fitzgerald's
decision in the Rove case was a black eye for Shuster as
well as another black eye for Joseph Wilson, the former
Ambassador and John Kerry adviser who had been calling
for or predicting Rove's indictment. In 2003, Wilson said, "it's
of keen interest to me to see whether or not we can get
Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs." A
media favorite who wrote a book ironically titled The
Politics of Truth, Wilson looks even more foolish
than he did before.
Remember
that Wilson had gone to the African country of Niger in
2002 to inquire about claims that Saddam Hussein had attempted
to purchase uranium yellowcake, a form of uranium that
can be used for nuclear weapons. Wilson claimed his trip
had been instigated by Vice President Cheney's office and
wrote a July 2003 op-ed in the New York Times attacking
the administration for suggesting that Saddam was interested
in obtaining the nuclear fuel.
In 2004,
however, the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a report
that showed that Wilson had misrepresented certain aspects
of his trip to Niger. It said that Wilson in fact had obtained
information suggesting that Saddam was seeking to purchase
uranium there. The Butler Report, released in England a
year after Wilson's New York Times column, stated that
the British government still believed Saddam was seeking
uranium from Africa, which was President Bush's statement
about the matter, and that it had intelligence about this
from several sources.
Strangely,
the New York Times article about
the announcement that Rove would not be indicted continued
to focus on speculation that he was about to be indicted. "The
lawyers [in the case] said the prosecutor seemed at times
to be at the brink of bringing charges against Mr. Rove," wrote
the Times, "over his failure to volunteer early in the
inquiry a conversation about Ms. Wilson with the Time magazine
reporter, Matt Cooper."
The Times
pointed to a discredited left-wing blog, ironically called "truthout.org," that
had earlier claimed that Rove had already been secretly
indicted. The Times said this "truthout" group "still believed
its initial report—that there was a sealed indictment against
Mr. Rove—was accurate…" I guess that depends on the meaning
of the word "accurate."
Performing
a tremendous public service, the Washington Times took
a look at the coverage of the story by MSNBC and noted
Keith Olbermann's show "Countdown" had discussed the topic
26 times. It noted Shuster's faulty prediction of a Rove
indictment, as well as NBC correspondent Norah O'Donnell's
questionable claim that Rove "has come within a whisker
of being indicted." She didn't explain how she knew this.
Perhaps she had some of the same sources as "truthout."
When
Rove was cleared, she still maintained that it was bad
news for the White House because he was still working there!
She said that it might have been better for them if he
had "gotten nipped with some minor level indictment, so
that you could just get rid of these people [Rove and indicted
former Cheney chief of staff Louis Libby] today."
The charge
constantly repeated by the media is that the White House
leaked Plame's name to retaliate against Wilson for his
accusations against the administration, though they never
explain how revealing her name, if in fact they did, got
back at him. This claim is plausible only if the media
accept the fact, which they repeatedly tried to dispute,
that his wife Valerie Plame did play a key role in getting
him to go on his junket to Africa. And that gets to the
immediate issue that should have been under investigation-a
possible violation of federal nepotism laws when Plame
helped arrange for her husband to make the trip. And that
led to a bigger problem still in need of investigation-the
role of rogue elements in the CIA in a plot to undermine
the Bush Administration's Iraq policy.
The real
truth still needs to come out. CRO
The America Show
