politics

MSNBC Drops Plame Bomb, Blogosphere Ignites

A correspondent for the network reports yet another sensitive thread of the Valerie Plame story, bringing forth much chatter from bloggers.
May 3, 2006

Last night on Chris Matthews’ show, Hardball, MSNBC correspondent David Shuster reported that former CIA officer Valerie Plame was working at the Counterproliferation Division of the CIA, looking at Iran’s procurement of material to move their nuclear program forward at the time that she was outed by Robert Novak. “Sources” tell Shuster that “part of the administration’s ability to track Iran’s nuclear ambitions was damaged as well.”

Bloggers: have at it!

The story is just too big for Stephen Spruiell of the National Review‘s Media Blog to ignore, and he breaks the report down. His first criticism is that Shuster introduces former counterterrorism advisor Rand Beers in the piece, without informing the audience that “Beers resigned from his job in protest over Iraq, subsequently joined the Kerry campaign and has been a vocal critic of the Bush administration ever since.”

Score one for Spruiell. But moments later, he shoots himself in the foot, when he takes issue with Schuster’s closing statement that “it’s because of jobs like agent Wilson’s that President Bush’s father, President George H.W. Bush once declared that those who expose CIA sources are the most insidious of traitors.”

Spruiell writes that “This last sentence is one of the most obnoxious statements I’ve ever heard on television … Shuster twisted Bush’s words so that — in the guise of an objective reporter — he could personally express the opinion that Scooter Libby and Karl Rove are traitors.” That’s Spruiell putting thoughts into Schuster’s head, not anything that Schuster said. Spruiell has no crystal ball that allows him to ascertain Schuster’s intent, nor do any of the rest of us.

The All Spin Zone thinks that the latest revelations should be the final push out the door that Vice President Cheney needs, writing, “So if you’re the VP and you’ve been haunting the halls of the CIA wouldn’t you know (or shouldn’t you ask if you didn’t know) that the Counterproliferation Division was responsible for monitoring the flow of WMDs around the world? And if you knew that Mr. Wilson’s wife worked in the Counterproliferation Division of the CIA, you’d also know that she wasn’t there just cleaning the toilets, wouldn’t you? And if you didn’t, shouldn’t you ask?”

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Two Political Junkies ask, “Wait? Isn’t Iran now a HUGE NUCLEAR DANGER according to the Bushites? … Then why would they out someone who was actually trying to track proliferation of nuclear weapons material into that country? … Why do they hate America?”

Which brings us to Christopher Hitchens, who pays the rent by taking people down, from Mother Teresa to Henry Kissinger. Now he has added Juan Cole, professor at the University of Michigan, to his hit list. In his latest Slate column, Hitch calls Cole “a minor nuisance on the fringes of the academic Muslim apologist community,” and accuses him of denying that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently called for the destruction of Israel by offering a toned-down translation of what Ahmadinejad said.

Cole responds on his blog today that Hitchens “owes me a big apology,” for reprinting — without permission — things Cole wrote in a private email discussion group that “has a strict rule that messages appearing there will not be forwarded off the list.” It’s a complicated story, but Cole defends his translation of Ahmadinejad’s anti-Israeli statements, accusing Hitchens of imagining “a whole discourse of mine (which mostly never took place) that he now sets out to refute — from English translations! But I was saying that the wire service translations were the problem in the first place. Hitchens seems to think that he can over-rule my reading of a Persian text by reference to some hurried journalist’s untechnical rendering into English.” He also says that Hitchens is “making [his criticism of Cole] up out of whole cloth. He should retract.”

Somehow, we feel that the always-combative Hitchens isn’t done with this.

Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.