Debunking another FauxNews lie

Think Progress does it for us:

Today on Fox News Sunday, Brit Hume continued his campaign to smear Valerie Plame Wilson. Previously, he had falsely said that it was “unlikely she was” covert.

Instead of apologizing this morning, he launched a new attack against Plame, claiming that she had lied under oath when she testified on Friday about whether she recommended her husband be sent to Niger to investigate Iraq’s supposed nuclear ambitions.

Hume said Plame’s testimony “flies in the face of the evidence” adduced by the “bipartisan” Senate Intelligence Committee, which said that “she very much did have something to do with it, that she recommended him and that she put it in a memo.”

Plame testified that she never suggested her husband for the Niger trip. “I did not recommend him, I did not suggest him, there was no nepotism involved — I didn’t have the authority,” she said.

Hume’s false claim originated from a statement attached to the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Iraq that was released in 2004. In an addendum to that report, Sens. Pat Roberts (R-KS), Christopher Bond (R-MO), and Orrin Hatch (R-UT) wrote definitively, “The plan to send the former ambassador to Niger was suggested by the former ambassador’s wife, a CIA employee.” The right-wing, including columnist Bob Novak, have taken the statement written by three Republican senators and falsely attributed it as the “unanimous” conclusion of the Senate report.

The three conservative senators based their claim on testimony by a CIA employee who appeared before the Senate Intel Committee. Plame revealed on Friday that the CIA employee later apologized to her “with tears in his eyes” because he said “his words had been twisted and distorted” by the senators. And in fact, the unnamed employee drafted a memo, asking that he be re-interviewed by the Senate to correct the record. His attempts to set the record straight were denied. On Friday, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) asked to retrieve a copy of that memo.

To which Digby adds:

Considering that Fox is rightly seen as a right leaning propaganda arm of the Republican party, if only because of its pundits' conservative leanings and Republican advocacy, you'd think that Hume and Wallace would go out of their way to get the facts straight in these partisan battles if they cared even the slightest bit about their credibility.

Not only don't they bother, they take it to another level and accuse Wilson of lying under oath, based upon slick, misleading GOP talking points: they always say that all the Democrats and Republicans signed the "report" but they always fail to mention that the accusation against Wilson was not part of that report but rather a separate statement. It is that very slickness that gives their game away --- they are being much too careful with their words not to know what they are saying.

I am exceedingly tired of rightwingers telling me I can believe them or believe my own eyes. Fox is a Republican propaganda network, pure and simple, and they should be acknowledged and dealt with on that basis. The insistence that they are "fair and balanced" is insulting to the intelligence of every informed viewer in the nation.