On Feb. 18, 2007, as jurors were about to begin deliberations in Libby's obstruction case, the Post ran a prominent Outlook article by Toensing, who had been buzzing around the TV pundit shows decrying Libby's prosecution. In the Post article, she wrote that "Plame was not covert. She worked at CIA headquarters and had not been stationed abroad within five years of the date of Novak's column."
A Tendentious Argument
Though it might not have been clear to a reader, Toensing was hanging her claim about Plame not being "covert" on a contention that Plame didn't meet the coverage standards of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Toensing's claim was legalistic at best since it obscured the larger point that Plame was working undercover in a classified CIA position and was running agents abroad whose safety would be put at risk by an unauthorized disclosure of Plame's identity.
But Toensing, who promoted herself as an author of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, wasn't even right about the legal details. The law doesn't require that a CIA officer be "stationed" abroad in the preceding five years; it simply refers to an officer who "has served within the last five years outside the United States."
That would cover someone who -- while based in the United States -- went abroad on official CIA business, as Plame testified under oath in a congressional hearing that she had done within the five-year period. Toensing, who appeared as a Republican witness at the same congressional hearing on March 16, 2007, was asked about her bald assertion that "Plame was not covert."
"Not under the law," Toensing responded. "I'm giving you the legal interpretation under the law and I helped draft the law. The person is supposed to reside outside the United States." But that's not what the law says, either. It says "served" abroad, not "reside."
At the hearing, Toensing was reduced to looking like a quibbling kook who missed the forest of damage -- done to U.S. national security, to Plame and possibly to the lives of foreign agents -- for the trees of how a definition in a law was phrased, and then getting that wrong, too.
After watching Toensing's bizarre testimony, one had to wonder why the Post would have granted her space on the widely read Outlook section's front page to issue what she called "indictments" of Joe Wilson, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald and others who had played a role in exposing the White House hand behind the Plame leak.
Despite Toensing's high-profile smear of Wilson and Fitzgerald, Libby still was convicted of four felony counts. In response to the conviction, the Post reacted with another dose of its false history of the Plame case and a final insult directed at Wilson, declaring that he "will be remembered as a blowhard."
With Plame's CIA career destroyed and Wilson's reputation battered by Hiatt and his Post colleagues, the Wilsons moved away from Washington. Their ordeal was later recounted in the 2010 movie, "Fair Game," starring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn. Though Libby was sentenced to 30 months in prison, his sentence was commuted by President Bush to eliminate any jail time.
A Pattern of Dishonesty
While perhaps Hiatt's vendetta against Joe Wilson was the meanest personal attack in the Post's multi-year pro-war advocacy, it was just part of a larger picture of complicity and intimidation. Post readers often learned about voices of dissent only by reading Post columnists denouncing the dissenters, a scene reminiscent of a totalitarian society where dissidents never get space to express their opinions but are still excoriated in the official media.
For instance, on Sept. 23, 2002, when former Vice President Al Gore gave a speech criticizing Bush's "preemptive war" doctrine and Bush's push for the Iraq invasion, Gore's talk got scant media coverage, but still elicited a round of Gore-bashing on the TV talk shows and on the Post's op-ed page.
Post columnist Michael Kelly called Gore's speech "dishonest, cheap, low" before labeling it "wretched. It was vile. It was contemptible." [Washington Post, Sept. 25, 2002] Post columnist Charles Krauthammer added that the speech was "a series of cheap shots strung together without logic or coherence." [Washington Post, Sept. 27, 2002]
While the Post's wrongheadedness on the Iraq War extended into its news pages -- with the rare skeptical article either buried or spiked -- Hiatt's editorial section was like a chorus with virtually every columnist singing from the same pro-invasion song book and Hiatt's editorials serving as lead vocalist. A study by Columbia University journalism professor Todd Gitlin noted, "The [Post] editorials during December [2002] and January [2003] numbered nine, and all were hawkish." [American Prospect, April 1, 2003]
The Post's martial harmony reached its crescendo after Secretary of State Colin Powell made his bogus presentation to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, accusing Iraq of hiding vast stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. The next day, Hiatt's lead editorial hailed Powell's evidence as "irrefutable" and chastised any remaining skeptics.
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