A Times' "Key Judgment" Turns Out Erroneous
Posted by: Clay Waters
4/12/2006 11:25:53 PM
A correction is needed to a Friday front-page story on the Lewis Libby leak case by David Sanger and David Barstow, “Iraq Findings Leaked by Cheney’s Aide Were Disputed.”
Much of the thrust of the article, it turns out, is based on an embarrassing mistake by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s office that made Bush, Cheney, and the prosecutor’s target, Cheney’s former chief of staff Lewis Libby, appear deceptive.
Sanger and Barstow wrote on Friday: “A review of the records and interviews conducted during and after the crucial period in June and July of 2003 also show that what the aide, I. Lewis Libby Jr., said he was authorized to portray as a ‘key judgment’ by intelligence officers had in fact been given much less prominence in the most important assessment of Iraq's weapons capability.”
That false “key judgment” spread by Libby, according to Fitzgerald’s initial court filing, was that Saddam Hussein was “vigorously trying to procure uranium” from Africa.
The Times, using the Fitzgerald filing, accused Libby of being misleading about the importance of that claim: “But if the new court filing is correct, the next day, Mr. Libby, on behalf of Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, provided an exaggerated account of the intelligence conclusions.”
But the court filing was incorrect, as it turned out, and the Hussein uranium finding wasn’t a “key judgment” in the intelligence after all. As Byron York noted at National Review Online, Fitzgerald later corrected his court filing:
“We are writing to correct a sentence from the Government's Response to Defendant's Third Motion to Compel Discovery, filed on April 5, 2006. The sentence, which is the second sentence of the second paragraph on page 23, reads, ‘Defendant understood that he was to tell Miller, among other things, that a key judgment of the NIE held that Iraq was 'vigorously trying to procure' uranium.’ That sentence should read, ‘Defendant understood that he was to tell Miller, among other things, some of the key judgments of the NIE, and that the NIE stated that Iraq was 'vigorously trying to procure' uranium.”
In other words, Libby was not out falsely claiming that the intelligence about Hussein seeking uranium in Africa was a “key judgment” by intelligence officers. That was a mistake by Fitzgerald’s office.
The Washington Post ran a story on Fitzgerald’s error -- but will the Times?
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