I just love how the neo cons are able to frame things so that they are always right, and the main issue is a non -issue. It is always about distraction, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. They treat us all (the Am public) like we have the attention of a 4 yr old. In this regard, sadly, they are often correct.

“BRIT HUME: Did you call Rove or did he …

ROBERT NOVAK: I called Rove.

HUME: And did you call for the purpose of getting this confirmed or did this come up in passing?

NOVAK: I called him for several reasons. I wanted to talk about the column I was writing about the mission to Niger. Almost all of my conversations with Rove were not for attribution and in the course of that I told him. I asked him about Wilson’s wife at the CIA, working with the CIA and initiating this visit and as I remember the conversation very distinctly, Karl said to me, “Yes, I know that, too.”

HUME: “I know that too?”

NOVAK: Yes.

HUME: He didn’t say, “You know that, too?”

NOVAK: No. He said, “Oh, you know that, too?”

HUME: And what did you take that to mean? Did you take that to mean he talked to other journalists who knew that?

NOVAK: No, I took that as a confirmation that she worked with the CIA and initiated it. He said, “Oh, you know that, too?”

HUME: You said you talked to Bill Harlow at the CIA, the public information officer. A lot of this has been out for a long time around town. What was the nature of this? You called him expressly to confirm this?

NOVAK: I called him, he said, “I’ll get back to you” and he talked to somebody — I just guessed he talked to the CIA director, George Tenet, I had no idea if that’s true. He came back to me and he told me yes, she worked for the CIA in the Office of Weapons of Mass Destruction and he told me that Mrs. Wilson did not suggest the mission by her husband, but she was asked to get him to do it by other people in the CIA.

HUME: Which said she suggested it.

NOVAK: Said she suggested it and there were no Democratic dissenters.

HUME: So you didn’t call him about that specific thing; you called him about something else?

NOVAK: I called him about the mission to Niger, but in the course of asking about the mission to Niger, I said, “I understand that his wife works at the CIA and she initiated the mission.”

HUME: And he said, “You know that, too?”

NOVAK: We were talking about specifics. I feel constrained not to say about exactly what was discussed — because it hasn’t come out — in the conversation I had with both Mr. X and Karl Rove about some of the details of the mission in Niger, which I put in the column because I still consider that was given to me on a background basis.

HUME: Let me ask you a question others are sure to want to know the answer to: Why did you consider this — and I think I know the answer, but I’d rather hear it from you — why did you consider this to be newsworthy? What was the story here that made Joe Wilson’s wife’s job relevant?

NOVAK: The column was about the mission, what he found. Some of the things in the column indicated were contrary to what Mr. Wilson said. For example, — this was specifically asked for by Vice President Cheney — I wrote that there was never a real report written about it, that it was not a conclusive report. When I asked my original source, I asked him, “Why in the world did they send Joe Wilson on this? Why would it be somebody who was not a CIA person, was not familiar with this situation? Why would they send him?”

And I thought it was interesting that his wife suggested it. It was a throwaway line in the middle of the column.

HUME: Of course, it turned out to be — when the Senate Intelligence Committee investigated — an important reason why he was sent, according to the committee’s findings.

NOVAK: Absolutely. They have a document that they put in the committee report that got very little attention. I wrote about it later, that she suggested it at the CIA, that her husband was well-plugged in and she suggested he be sent there. I still think it was an extraordinary decision to be made, but that was the decision that was made.

Bottom line: the administration didn’t send Joe as much as he might wish it so, he lied, case closed…..

Comment by liberal idiot
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Hmm.

I don’t agree with all of my fellow liberals regarding every issue on this site.

Your thesis is flawed.Sorry.

Comment by Cloak & Swagger
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One can only hope!

Bush and Company have teed-up America to be humiliated by it’s enemies, it’s allies, its creditors and even the ungrateful brown people we’ve invaded, raped and murdered as a lesson in free-market benevolence.

There’s no escape for Bush and the Pubbies now. For the next three years, they’re going to feel like Jamie Lee Curtis in”Halloween.” It’s just a damn shame we had to lose another war in order to bring down another corrupt Republican administration. That’s becoming a cliche.

Comment by Seixon — July 11, 2006 @ 11:01 pm

not a truth one in that statement seixon

Move along folks it’s establishment hyperbole, move along nothing to see the same scandal, just thawed out, move along, no talking in the free speech zone…

Comment by Seixon — July 11, 2006 @ 11:01 pm

The good news, thankfully, is that Joe Wilson has been vindicated by the facts-on-the-ground.

We invaded Iraq on a Presidential whim, we found nothing and turned an entire nation into Beyond Thunderdome.

This is your brain. This is your brain on bullshit Republican war-pimping. Any questions?

The dark creepy ones…if you have them.

Armitage would have mentioned it because Wilson was lying to the press about the State Department (he was Deputy Secretary of State at the time) knowing all about his mission. Check this from the Kristof May 6, 2003 column:

In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged.

The envoy reported, for example, that a Niger minister whose signature was on one of the documents had in fact been out of office for more than a decade. In addition, the Niger mining program was structured so that the uranium diversion had been impossible. The envoy’s debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted — except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway. “It’s disingenuous for the State Department people to say they were bamboozled because they knew about this for a year,” one insider said.

This, of course, was completely false. Wilson never reported anything about the forgeries for his mission. Yet Wilson had no problem lying to Kristof in claiming this, which is what probably got Armitage upset enough to talk about it.

Wilson lied, Armitage was mad, inadvertently outed his wife, the rest is history.