WaPo editorial contradicts front page story-- in same issue

Joseph Wilson is still a target for Bush's supporters. In case you've forgotten, he's the Middle East expert sent to investigate the 'Niger documents' that the White House wanted to use as evidence of Saddam Hussein's quest to build nuclear weapons. When Wilson reported that they were forgeries, the White House retaliated by exposing his wife's status as a covert CIA agent-- giving us Plamegate, the indictment of Scooter Libby, and the revelation that this personal attack came from Bush himself. The administration's continued attempts to discredit Wilson have also been debunked. Yes, the documents were without a doubt fakes (evidence is still emerging on that front, too). And their claim that Wilson lied about being sent there was a smokescreen dependent upon misrepresenting his story of why he was sent to investigate. (Wilson: "I was told by the CIA that Cheney had approached them about it, and they asked me to go." White House: "Wilson falsely says Cheney sent him." Pitiful, but it's played for years in Foxland.)

Yesterday, the Washington Post had two pieces about Wilson. One was a news article that included the following passages:

As he drew back the curtain this week on the evidence against Vice President Cheney's former top aide [Lewis Libby], Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald for the first time described a "concerted action" by "multiple people in the White House" -- using classified information -- to "discredit, punish or seek revenge against" a critic of President Bush's war in Iraq. (. . .)

United Nations inspectors had exposed the main evidence for the uranium charge as crude forgeries in March 2003, but the Bush administration and British Prime Minister Tony Blair maintained they had additional, secret evidence they could not disclose. In June, a British parliamentary inquiry concluded otherwise, delivering a scathing critique of Blair's role in promoting the story. With no ally left, the White House debated whether to abandon the uranium claim and became embroiled in bitter finger-pointing about whom to fault for the error. A legal brief filed for Libby last month said that "certain officials at the CIA, the White House, and the State Department each sought to avoid or assign blame for intelligence failures relating to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction."

It was at that moment that Libby, allegedly at Cheney's direction, sought out at least three reporters to bolster the discredited uranium allegation. Libby made careful selections of language from the 2002 estimate, quoting a passage that said Iraq was "vigorously trying to procure uranium" in Africa.

The othe WaPo piece was an editorial (titled "A Good Leak") that defends the White House's campaign to blame Wilson, sell the public on phony intel and the decision to leak the name of a secret agent to the press for political payback. It included the following sentence:

After more than 2 1/2 years of investigation, Mr. Fitzgerald has reported no evidence to support Mr. Wilson's charge.

I don't know what's going on at the top in the WaPo offices, but on the heels of their right-wing blogger debacle, you'd think they might be a little more cautious in their dissemination of debunked right-wing talking points. Or at least read their own paper. The idea that they're going all Fox News to boost circulation is still a bit too cynical for me, but I'm coming around.