Beware of the Armitage Red Herring
August 27, 2006
Associated Press Report
BuzzFlash would caution readers of LibbyDefenseFund.com to be
skeptical of the Armitage red herring regarding PlameGate.
Whether Armitage was the "first" to tell Bob Novak
about Valerie Plame is an interesting piece of the puzzle, but
it doesn't
in anyway change the fact that the White House, with the knowledge
of Bush and Cheney, sought to expose a CIA operative and endanger
the national security of the United States as a result. Indeed,
as Cheney does Round II of assembling Weapons of Mass Destruction
data in order to justify another war, it should be recalled that
Valerie Plame was a specialist in tracking Weapons of Mass Destruction.
There has, indeed, been speculation that she knew a good deal about
WMDs and Iran.
The forthcoming book, "Hubris," by David
Corn and Michael Isikoff, may be a good read. But the Newsweek
excerpt this coming
week and Corn's own account of the Armitage leak may mislead people
into thinking that somehow the White House wasn't behind the whole
thing.
Libby, if we recall, met with Armitage the week before his
meeting with Woodward -- and it was Libby that requested a State
Department
backgrounder as to how Joe Wilson came to be sent to Niger.
Finally,
Corn, in his own web account of the Newsweek excerpt, notes "Iran-contra
independent counsel Lawrence Walsh subsequently accused him [Armitage]
of providing 'false testimony' to investigators
but said that he could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that
Armitage's misstatements had been 'deliberate.')
So, the fundamental
facts and betrayal of the nation at the heart of PlameGate have
not been altered one iota.
And we doubt that Armitage is the
naive innocent that Corn and Isikoff appear to make him out
to be.
In fact, no one has accused Armitage of being anything but
a combat-tested kind of guy.
When a firing squad is assembled
to execute someone, does anyone care whose bullet hit first?
For ongoing updates on the PlameGate investigation, please read
http://www.buzzflash.com.
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