Who's Lying Now?

L'Affaire Plame continues to get sillier and sillier. Day after day, the lamestream media continue to fawn over serial liar Joseph Wilson, willfully ignoring evidence that he has intentionally misled both the press and the American public time and time again.

Brit Hume has the latest evidence of the utter ridiculousness of Wilson's outrage over the outing of Val Plame's "secret identity". Retired General Paul Vallely is among several people who claim Joe Wilson bragged to him about his wife's secret identity long before she was "outed" by columnist Bob Novak:

Retired Army General and FOX News contributor Paul Vallely says he knew former ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife Valerie Plame was a CIA agent long before she was outed in a newspaper column in 2003 because Wilson told him so. Vallely says Wilson volunteered the information in at least three separate conversations while both men were waiting to appear on FOX News programs during the fall of 2002.

Wilson's lawyers are demanding a retraction and an apology and in an e-mail received by the World Net Daily, Wilson himself called the claim "slanderous." Vallely, however, is refusing to back off his story.

It wasn't long before the mud-slinging began:

Former CIA officer and one time FOX contributor Larry Johnson is calling retired general and FOX military analyst Paul Vallely a "right wing [hack] making up facts,” after Vallely said former Ambassador Joseph Wilson told him his wife worked at the CIA as both waited to appear on FOX programs.

This as liberal Websites say they have proof Vallely is lying, saying research service LexisNexis shows Vallely and Wilson never appeared on FOX on the same day. But in fact, Vallely and Wilson appeared on the same day nine times in 2002, and on the same show twice — on September 8 and September 12, when both men appeared within 15 minutes of one another.

This rather reminds me of the liberal WMD argument: "Ooooh! If I can't find evidence of WMDs, they must not exist". Yes, and I can't find my car keys some days too, but that doesn't mean they've vanished from the face of the earth. Even 6 month-old babies are quick to flash on this basic truth - it's why peek-a-boo is one of the first games we teach infants. One doesn't prove the non-existence of something via the absence of evidence. Apparently Vallely isn't the only one who knew of Plame's oh-so-secret identity:

Meanwhile, NBC's senior diplomatic correspondent Andrea Mitchell now says she never meant to say that it was "widely known" that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA before the fact was publicized by columnist Robert Novak. Mitchell says online bloggers took her words out of context, telling a talk show host that she merely said people knew that a secret administration envoy, which turned out to be Wilson, had been sent to Niger.

But in a 2003 interview, Mitchell was asked specifically about how many people knew that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA. Mitchell answered, "It was widely known among those of us who cover the intelligence community and who were actively engaged in trying to track down who among the Foreign Service community was the envoy to Niger."

But when it comes to lies, the most pernicious one of all is the one being spread by the media and Congressional Democrats that the White House somehow "fooled" them into going to war by lying or manipulating the available intelligence. Despite Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's plain English statement that "this case is not about the war", Senate Democratic Minority Leader Harry Reid lost no time in spinning the indictment of Scooter Libby:

t]his case is bigger than the leak of classified information. It is about how the Bush White House manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to bolster its case for the war in Iraq and to discredit anyone who dared to challenge the President.

Really Mr. Reid? Have you forgotten the conclusions of the bipartisan SSCI report, which:

...did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence, or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq’s weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities.

Or the British Butler Report, which said:

We conclude that, on the basis of the intelligence assessments at the time, covering both Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the statements on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa in the Government's dossier, and by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons, were well-founded. By extension, we conclude also that the statement in President Bush's State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003 that: The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa was well-founded.

Or perhaps the bipartisan Robb-Silverman commission, commissioned to investigate intelligence failures, which in March of 2005 also found:

...no evidence of political pressure to influence the intelligence community’s pre-war assessments of Iraq’s weapons programs. . . . [A]nalysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments.

Why is it that after all these investigations, all of which concluded that there was no manipulation of intel, you still, on no evidence that I've been able to see, accuse the President of the United States of lying to send this nation to war? That would seem to me to be, not the action of a dedicated public servant, but that of someone who is trying to help our enemies win this war.

As the wife of a career Marine officer, the daughter of a career Naval officer, the granddaughter of an Army officer, as someone whose ancestors have served in this nation's armed forces in a proud line stretching all the way back to the Revolutionary War; as a mother who has seen far too many good men and women die for a cause I still believe in, I bitterly resent your groundless accusations and your constant efforts to undermine our foreign policy.

Either back up your allegations with some facts, or shut up. I suggest to you sir, that on the available evidence both you and Joseph Wilson owe this nation a big apology for all the damage you have done.