Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Rogue CIA leakers continue to spin WaPo

Captain's Quarters:

Walter Pincus extends his conflict of interest in covering Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame in today's Washington Post, continuing his role as a purveyor of misinformation. He and Jim VandeHei write that Patrick Fitzgerald has widened his investigation, but still hasn't come up with much....

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Pincus tries to add more to the issue of Plame's role in sending her husband to Niger. Now the CIA supposedly claims that Plame did that three years earlier, but that she had nothing to do with the 2002 trip:

Using background conversations with at least three journalists and other means, Bush officials attacked Wilson's credibility. They said that his 2002 trip to Niger was a boondoggle arranged by his wife, but CIA officials say that is incorrect. One reason for the confusion about Plame's role is that she had arranged a trip for him to Niger three years earlier on an unrelated matter, CIA officials told The Washington Post.

If so, why didn't the CIA mention that to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence? They deduced -- through testimony and the revelation of a memorandum Plame wrote -- that Plame had indeed pushed for Wilson to get the 2002 assignment, a finding that the CIA did not dispute at the time. It's hard to dispute when the date on the memo makes the timing clear (emphases mine):

Some CPD officials could not recall how the office decided to contact the former ambassador, however, interviews and documents provided to the Committee indicate that his wife, a CPD employee, suggested his name for the trip. The CPD reports officer told Committee staff that the former ambassador's wife "offered up his name" and a memorandum to the Deputy Chief of the CPD on February 12, 2002, from the former ambassador's wife says, "my husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity." This was just one day before CPD sent a cable DELETED requesting concurrence with CPD's idea to send the former ambassador to Niger and requesting any additional information from the foreign government service on their uranium reports. The former ambassador's wife told Committee staff that when CPD decided it would like to send the former ambassador to Niger, she approached her husband on behalf of the CIA and told him "there's this crazy report" on a purported deal for Niger to sell uranium to Iraq.

Really. How hard was it to dispute the "new" information that Pincus and VandeHei got from their unnamed CIA contacts? Memos from Plame recommending Wilson's involvement written in 2002 cannot have any application to the 1999 trip. It doesn't take a genius to figure that out, but apparently it takes a non-journalist to understand linear time.

More interesting stuff on how the newsies are spinning the Plame story here.

For a while it looked like Porter Goss had reeled in the rogues who were trying to undrmin US war policy, but they appear to be slipping back into their pattern of providing misinformation about the administration to willfully ignorant reporters.