Counterfeiting in the news

From the "and they wonder why we don't trust them" files ...

I neglected to mention this past Sunday's revelation that Richard Armitage, Colin Powell's number two man at the State Department three years ago, apparently was the accidental leaker who let Valerie Plame's identification slip in his conversations with reporters, most notably Robert Novak.

Interestingly, Armitage confessed immediately to his boss, Powell, and shortly thereafter both the Justice Department and the FBI were notified that Armitage had confessed to leaking Plame's name and that it was done without malice:

Armitage acknowledged that he had passed along to Novak information contained in a classified State Department memo: that Wilson’s wife worked on weapons-of-mass-destruction issues at the CIA. (The memo made no reference to her undercover status.) Armitage had met with Novak in his State Department office on July 8, 2003—just days before Novak published his first piece identifying Plame.

At this point, according to his own explanation, Novak simply picked up his copy of Who's Who and noted that Joseph Wilson was married to the former Valerie Plame.

Obviously the mainstream media (and I am thinking specifically of the New York Times) with their extensive network of deeply-ensconced governmental "anonymous sources" had to have known about Armitage since the fall of 2003, yet they refused to publish anything -- the same people who squealed like giggling schoolgirls about the NSA data mining program and the SWIFT bank monitoring program.  To them, obviously, it was more important to hamstring the Bush administration over the Wilson-Plame affair and to let Joe Wilson continue to smear Karl Rove than to print the truth.

ADDED: Remember Judith Miller?  She was the New York Times reporter who spent three months in jail for refusing to answer questions about conversations she had with Scooter Libby.  Her case adds an even odder dimension to this story -- could the New York Times have spared her the embarassment of going to prison simply by publishing what it obviously had to have known about Richard Armitage?  But again, such a blockbuster story would have neutered the indepent investigation into the Plame leak, and would have vindicated Karl Rove.  So Judith Miller did jail time instead.  Pitiful.

Sister Toldjah rounds up the flaccid end to the Wilson-Plame story here and here.  Christopher Hitchens writes the epitaph.

(PS- I hear that Johnny Depp probably won't be starring in a movie about John Mark Karr.  Maybe he'll be available to play Joe Wilson now ... though it's too bad we won't be seeing Sharon Stone as the beautiful Valerie Plame.)

Mary Katherine Ham's latest Townhall.com piece is a comprehensive roundup of shoddy mainstream media reporting from Lebanon, complete with a treasure trove of links.  Read it and weep.

Meanwhile, Myrtus, Dan Riehl, and others have been examining the crisp, new $100 bills handed to Lebanese citizens by Hezbollah and are wondering ... is it "funny money"?  Not surprisingly, TV footage of Israeli bomb damage in Lebanon (you'll need Internet Explorer 6 and Media Player 10 in order to watch it) accidentally revealed a room filled with stacks of paper that looked suspiciously like sheets of uncut US $100 bills.  Naturally MSNBC couldn't be bothered to investigate.

It's all about counterfeiting, folks.  And they wonder why we don't trust them anymore.

...

Here's an interesting postscript to the whole Wilson-Plame affair.  Remember this quote from President Bush:

There are too many leaks of classified information in Washington. If there's leaks out of my Administration, I want to know who it is, and if the person has violated the law, the person will be taken care of.

Liberals went nuts, demanding that Karl Rove be "frog-marched" out of the White House in handcuffs, stuffed into a police car, locked away in prison, and tried for treason.  Maybe blindfolded and shot before dawn.

But notice the awful silence now that someone has been named, and that person is not Karl Rove or Dick Cheney -- in fact he is a staunch critic of Bush administration foreign policy.  Anyone calling for Richard Armitage to be "frog-marched"?  Tried for treason?  Obviously this scandal was not about 'justice,' it was simply about sacking the Bush administration.  Don't look for liberal "porn" like this to appear on Daily Kos anytime soon: