Omigawd! Debbie's at it again

Deborah Howell, ombudsman cum apologist at WaPo, is at it again, this time defending the fact-free Hiatt editorial. It's appalling and Jane Hamsher patiently smacks her down again in a post called Fact-free and loving it. Jane speculates on whether Debbie is "ignorant or craven" and quotes Upton Sinclair:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

Jane heaves a sigh and begins thusly:

Do we have to go through this again? I guess so. Joe Wilson’s oped appeared on July 6, 2003. Five days later, on July 11 2003, George Tenet had to admit Wilson was right and there was no credible reason to believe as of January, 2003 when the President gave the State of the Union address that the 16 words had any validity; indeed, that’s why Tenet said they never should have been included in the first place.

Only this last week we learned what they knew then, but what we didn’t know – the National Intelligence Council had delivered a definitive judgment in January of 2003 that the claims weren’t credible. It appeared in the Post on the same day Hiatt’s editorial did. Lil’ Debbie claims Hiatt had not read Gelman and Linzer’s piece at the time he wrote his editorial, not that it would have made any difference (her words not mine — facts obviously have no place within the bubble world of the Post’s editorial page). But by the time Howell was scribbling her excuses for Hiatt she most certainly had read it. What it said:

Tenet interceded to keep the claim out of a speech Bush gave in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002, but by Dec. 19 it reappeared in a State Department "fact sheet." After that, the Pentagon asked for an authoritative judgment from the National Intelligence Council, the senior coordinating body for the 15 agencies that then constituted the U.S. intelligence community. Did Iraq and Niger discuss a uranium sale, or not? If they had, the Pentagon would need to reconsider its ties with Niger.

The council’s reply, drafted in a January 2003 memo by the national intelligence officer for Africa, was unequivocal: The Niger story was baseless and should be laid to rest. Four U.S. officials with firsthand knowledge said in interviews that the memo, which has not been reported before, arrived at the White House as Bush and his highest-ranking advisers made the uranium story a centerpiece of their case for the rapidly approaching war against Iraq.

How could even she write something so staggeringly dishonest as "the president had reason to believe that Iraq was seeking uranium" when she admits in the same piece that this was staring her right in the face? I mean, WTF? What does it take to get through to these people? There were no attempts to purchase uranium from Niger and the President knew it, even by the Post’s own reporting. How much simpler can we possibly make it?

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The attempt by the Administration to smear Joe Wilson was a pure Rovian effort to distract from the fact that he was right.