Cheney and Bush; McClellan spinning; Plame & husband.
Where are the Headlines?
Michael Collins
Scoop Independent Media
Washington, D.C.
Former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan accused George W. Bush and Dick Cheney of deceiving the public about a devastating blow to the national security and safety of United States. The revelation concerns the leak of Valerie Plame's identity as one of the government's top intelligence agents. Revealed in the Chicago Sun Times on July 14, 2003, this breach of national security was the topic of intense coverage in the mainstream print and television news media.
This deliberate leak abruptly ended Plame's intelligence activities, her career, and placed Plame and her contacts in serious jeopardy.
The charge appeared in an excerpt from McClellan's upcoming book "Inside the Bush White House and What's Wrong with Washington." Publication is set for April 2008. The critical passage was released on Tuesday Nov. 20. It described a conspiracy to deceive the public by Bush and Cheney, which included White House chief of staff Andrew Card, Scooter Libby, and Karl Rove.
Valerie Plame was a top CIA agent, one of just a few to hold the distinctionnon-official cover (NOC). These advanced intelligence professionals operate with assumed identities. Plame was cloaked as an energy consultant with the firm of Brewster Jennings and Associates. Her role in the CIA's Counterproliferation Division was to identify and track the international black market of nuclear weapons intended for use against citizens of the United States. as an agent with
In a brief passage from the upcoming book, McClellan comments on his 2003 denial of charges that Karl Rove and "Scooter" Libby were involved in the leak of Plame's identity:
"The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.
"There was one problem. It was not true.
"I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice President, the President's chief of staff, and the President himself." Public Affairs (McClellan's Publisher) Web Site
Where are the Headlines?
White House involvement in compromising a top intelligence agent was a matter of great concern in 2003. Why the indifference in 2007?
The response of the mainstream media has been barely noticeable. The following searches of Google and Yahoo "news" make this perfectly clear.
A Yahoo News search for "top story" using "McClellan" produced just nine articles. Three were from the Boston Globe, four from local television web sites, two from AlterNet, an alternative, left leaning web site, and one from "Real Time Traders," a Dow Jones financial news service. Of the mainstream media, just one newspaper, the Boston Globe, and only four television stations saw this as 'top story" from 12:00 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 20 through 3:00 a.m. EST Friday, the 23rd (the timing for all the searches mentioned in this article).
