Skewed Scarborough Country aired numerous leak falsehoods, distortions without rebuttal

The November 28 edition of Scarborough Country presented a skewed panel to discuss the media leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity and the recent revelation of the CIA's alleged secret prisons in Eastern Europe. The group consisted of host and former Republican Rep. Joe Scarborough, MSNBC host Tucker Carlson, and Media Research Center president L. Brent Bozell III, each of whom made false or misleading claims.

Writing in a November 28 post on the weblog TPMCafe, former CIA analyst Larry Johnson reported that he had been "contacted by an MSNBC booker" to appear on that evening's edition of Scarborough Country, but was ultimately not invited to appear on the program. In recent weeks, Johnson has written about and discussed those topics and would presumably have addressed the numerous dubious claims made by Scarborough and his guests.

For example, Scarborough twice claimed that it was "a liberal who hates this war" who "leaked the existence" of the secret prisons. No one offered a contrary view. But in his TPMCafe post, written before Scarborough Country aired, Johnson wrote: "[T]he leak to [Washington Post staff writer] Dana Priest came in part from CIA officers who were concerned that the effort by the Vice President and [CIA] Director [Porter] Goss to allow a torture loophole would discredit and destroy the CIA's future effectiveness." On November 2, Priest first broke the story of the secret prisons.

Similarly, Johnson would have likely challenged Carlson on his claim that "the CIA in fact did an internal assessment of the damage done" by outing Plame and "found not very much at all." Appearing on the October 26 edition of CNN's The Situation Room, Johnson told host Wolf Blitzer that while the CIA has "not delivered any written report to Congress," he had heard that the CIA's "postmortem" determined that "serious damage did occur":

BLITZER: I think what everyone wants to know is, was there serious damage done to U.S. national security? And I have been trying to find out if the CIA actually did a postmortem, a damage assessment. You have been looking into that as well.

JOHNSON: Now, CIA did a postmortem. There's no way that they could not have. They have not delivered any written report to Congress, to the House or Senate Intelligence Committees. But what they had done with this report, they had to do it internally.

[...]

BLITZER: Do you know whether or not they concluded that serious damage did occur?

JOHNSON: I have heard that serious damage did occur.

BLITZER: In terms of lives lost, agents, foreign agents, U.S. allies?

JOHNSON: To that extent, I don't know. But what I do know for certain is, we're not just talking about Valerie Plame. We're talking about an intelligence resource, a United States national security resource that was destroyed by these White House officials that went out and started talking to the press about this. Reckless. And they have -- they have harmed the security of this country. They're trying to pretend no harm, no foul, and find lots of excuses.

When Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward, on the October 27 edition of CNN's Larry King Live, made the same claim as Carlson -- that a CIA internal investigation had concluded that little or no damage resulted from the disclosure of Plame's identity -- Media Matters for America noted that his assertion was contradicted by an October 29 Post report that the CIA had not performed a formal damage assessment, which the Post reported is not typically done until the conclusion of legal proceedings. In addition, according to a report by CNN national security correspondent David Ensor on the October 25 edition of The Situation Room, the CIA has in fact conducted an initial examination of the leak and determined that it had damaged intelligence operations:

BLITZER: I know you've been looking into this question. The CIA -- does the CIA believe that there was damage done to U.S. national security as a result of Valerie Plame Wilson's name being leaked?

ENSOR: I'm told that in the day when it was leaked, there was a quick look done, as there routinely would be, at whether there was damage. Officials simply won't go into the details. But I did speak to one official who said, yes, there was damage. This woman had a long career. And she was posing as someone else. And all those people who saw her now know she wasn't the person they thought they were dealing with. So there was damage, yes.

For his part, Bozell contradicted himself on whether the secret prisons leak was significant. After stating that the leak about the prisons wasn't a real "story" because we already knew "since the beginning of this war" that "these places existed," Bozell argued that the leak was "far more serious" than the Plame leak, and bemoaned the "deafening silence" of the media for not sufficiently covering the prison story.

Next, Bozell chastised former President Jimmy Carter for suggesting that the revelation about the secret prisons was "a story detailing the corruption and the torture of the CIA, when none of that was reported at all in the story." In fact, Priest wrote in her November 2 Post article that CIA interrogators in such overseas prison facilities are legally permitted to use interrogation techniques that would otherwise violate international statutes on torture:

Host countries have signed the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, as has the United States. Yet CIA interrogators in the overseas sites are permitted to use the CIA's approved "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," some of which are prohibited by the U.N. convention and by U.S. military law. They include tactics such as "waterboarding," in which a prisoner is made to believe he or she is drowning.

As the Scarborough Country segment was coming to a close, Bozell issued one more oft-repeated conservative talking point: that a since-retracted Newsweek article in May (which alleged that U.S. interrogators had flushed a Quran down a toilet at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba) had caused widespread violence in the Arab world. But as Media Matters for America has noted, that claim was disputed by Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said that the violence in question was "not at all tied to the article in the magazine," and by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who said that the violent demonstrations were "not related to the Newsweek story."

From the November 28 edition of MSNBC's Scarborough Country:

SCARBOROUGH: [F]irst, Brent, we have been bombarded, bombarded for months, for years, regarding the CIA leak investigation on a desk jockey in Langley [CIA headquarters]. And, yet, when you have somebody, a liberal, I'm sure, that hates this anti-terror program in Eastern Europe, what kind of response do we get from the media?

BOZELL: It's just remarkable. You know, the Valerie Plame story broke when it was revealed that the CIA had referred the matter over to the Justice Department for a criminal investigation. That was, what, a couple weeks after Bob Novak's story, whenever it was. Then everything exploded. And since September of '03, it has been Valerie Plame all day long, as far as the media were concerned, because they thought it was such a egregious act and such a violation of a CIA operative's covert identity.

Now you have got this case where The Washington Post runs another leak story about prisons around the world. And, by the way, let me stop for just a second. Since when was that a story? Haven't we heard since the beginning of this war that Al Qaeda and even Saddam Hussein himself were being held in undisclosed locations outside of Iraq? We know these places existed. But, anyway, the story comes out, OK, there are prisons around the world, CIA prisons around the world. That's not the point. The point is, it was another leak. Now the CIA turns around and refers this again to the Justice Department for another criminal investigation, because this one is far more serious. The head of the Senate, the speaker of the House, [J. Dennis] Hastert [R-IL], the majority leader of the Senate, also called for their various -- their two houses to conduct investigations into this. And you know what? There is just deafening silence from the press.

[...]

CARLSON: Look, I think both leaks are defensible. I like leaks. I want to know what my government is doing. I don't necessarily trust my government. I'm helping to pay for it. I think I have a right to know. So, I'm not against leaks. And the reporter who wrote this piece, Dana Priest, is a terrific journalist. And I'm glad I got to read the story. The point is one of logic and standards. And if you're going to make all this noise about the Valerie Plame leak being damaging to national security -- and, incidentally, there is evidence that it wasn't -- the CIA in fact did an internal assessment of the damage done and found not very much at all.

[...]

BOZELL: But even this story didn't talk about anything wrong. The only person who didn't understand that was, by the way, Jimmy Carter, who referred to this when it broke as a story detailing the corruption and the torture of the CIA, when none of that was reported at all in the story.

[...]

SCARBOROUGH: Here, you have now the head of the EU [European Union] talking about punishing countries that stuck their neck out on the line to support the United States in our war against terror. They are now going to be punished because some liberal -- and it is a liberal who hates this war, I'm sure -- some liberal leaked the existence of this program. And because they help us, they are now going to be punished. Doesn't that send a chilling, chilling message to other allies: Don't step out and don't stick your neck out for the United States of America, because it's going to get chopped off by a leak?

[...]

BOZELL: [T]he second point that needs to be made -- and no one is talking about this one -- where is the responsibility of The Washington Post? You know, when Newsweek ran a story about flushing Qurans down the toilet, and it turned out to be false, look at the mayhem and the death -- the death -- that story caused.