Eating a bit of crow along with that yellowcake

.  How long will it be until the BBC corrects the record on the Iraq-Niger yellowcake story? It must be hard when the ‘Bush lied’ subtext crashes like Joseph Wilson’s house of cards.

It is not surprising that Paul Reynolds, in his ‘analysis’,  fails to mention the discredited Wilson/Plame story, so gladly trumpeted by the BBC.

Uranium: Here the report stands by the SIS report that Iraq had indeed sought uranium from Niger. It adds in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as well. It even says that the inclusion of the statement in President Bush’s State of the Union address was “well founded,” a finding which is at variance with that of the CIA.

Not a peep about Wilson. It must be a bit embarrassing now to have published stories like the following when the basis of them is so undermined.

Bush Questioned Over CIA Leak

US Diplomat Raises Iraq Dossier Doubts

Profile: Joseph Wilson

Since you are unlikely to hear of this from the Beeb, here, in part, is Robert Novak’s op/ed:

Like Sherlock Holmes’s dog that did not bark, the most remarkable aspect of last week’s Senate Intelligence Committee report is what its Democratic members did not say. They did not dissent from the committee’s findings that Iraq apparently asked about buying yellowcake uranium from Niger. They neither agreed to a conclusion that former diplomat Joseph Wilson was suggested for a mission to Niger by his CIA employee wife nor defended his statements to the contrary.

Wilson’s activities constituted the only aspects of the yearlong investigation for which the committee’s Republican chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts, was unable to win unanimous agreement. Peculiarly, the Democrats accepted the evidence building up to the Wilson conclusions but not the conclusions themselves. According to committee sources, Roberts felt Wilson had been such a “cause celebre” for Democrats that they could not face the facts about him.

For a year, Democrats have been belaboring President Bush about 16 words in his 2003 State of the Union address in which he reported Saddam Hussein’s attempt to buy uranium from Africa, based on official British information. Wilson has been lionized in liberal circles for allegedly contradicting this information on a CIA mission and then being punished as a truth-teller. Now, for Intelligence Committee Democrats, it is as though the Niger question and Joe Wilson have vanished from the earth….[emphasis added]

Novak concludes by quoting Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts:

“While there was no dispute with the underlying facts,” Chairman Roberts wrote separately, “my Democrat colleagues refused to allow” two conclusions in the report. The first conclusion merely said that Wilson was sent to Niger at his wife’s suggestion. The second conclusion is devastating:

“Rather than speaking publicly about his actual experiences during his inquiry of the Niger issue, the former ambassador seems to have included information he learned from press accounts and from his beliefs about how the Intelligence Community would have or should have handled the information he provided.”

The normally mild Pat Roberts is harsh in his condemnation: “Time and again, Joe Wilson told anyone who would listen that the President had lied to the American people, that the Vice President had lied, and that he had ‘debunked’ the claim that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa . . . [N]ot only did he NOT ‘debunk’ the claim, he actually gave some intelligence analysts even more reason to believe that it may be true.” Roberts called it “important” for the Intelligence Committee to declare much of what Wilson said “had no basis in fact.” In response, Democrats were silent. [emphasis added]

The BBC can spout off all it wants about ‘international reaction’ to the Butler report and Dyke can claim what he will. It would do better to just get down to eating a bit of crow.

UPDATE: Joseph Wilson continues to spin like a top but the major news outlets tend to either bury it (as with the New York Times and Washington Post) or ignore it altogether (as with the BBC). Michael Barone, political reporter for US News and World Report points out how reckless an approach this is.

All this is significant because for the past year most leading Democrats and many in the determinedly anti-Bush media have been harping on the “BUSH LIED” theme. Their aim clearly has been to discredit and defeat Bush. The media continue to fight this battle: contrast the way The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times front-paged the Wilson charges last year with the way they’re downplaying the proof that Wilson lied deep inside the paper this year.

Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis has argued that George W. Bush has transformed American foreign policy, in response to the threat of Islamist terrorism, more than any president since Harry Truman transformed our foreign policy in response to the threat of aggressive communism.

But there is one big difference. In the late 1940s, Truman got bipartisan support from Republicans like Arthur Vandenberg and Thomas Dewey, even at a time when there were bitter differences between the parties on domestic policy, and received generally sympathetic treatment in the press. This time, George W. Bush has encountered determined opposition from most Democrats and the old-line media. They have charged that “BUSH LIED” even when he relied on the same intelligence as they did; they have headlined wild and spurious charges by the likes of Joseph Wilson; they have embraced the wild-eyed propaganda of the likes of Michael Moore.

They have done these things with, at best, reckless disregard of the effect their arguments have had on American strength in the world. Are they entitled to be taken seriously?

Whilst Barone’s column is focused on “old media” based in the USA, it underscores the invisible footnote underlying a significant amount of the BBC coverage of the Iraq War — that ‘Bush (and Blair) lied’. Little wonder that the Beeb’s ‘value for money’ quotient continues to drop.