Get Me Rewrite!

The Associated Press has issued a new story on Valerie Plame’s testimony, this one under Matt Apuzzo’s byline. It’s an improvement over the “glamorous blond [sic]” article by Julie Hirschfeld Davis, in that it focuses on Plame’s testimony and not on her looks, the news media’s attention on her, and the fatuous things Republican Congressmen said to her.

It even acknowledges the reason for the hearing:

“If our government cannot even protect my identity, future foreign agents who might consider working with the Central Intelligence Agency and providing needed intelligence would think twice,” Plame said in response to a question.
 

[...]
 

“It’s not our job to determine criminal culpability, but it is out job to determine what went wrong and insist on accountability,” Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said at the outset of the hearing.

But it repeats disinformation to contradict Plame’s testimony.

In fact, the reason I find this article so interesting is that, although it’s under Matt Apuzzo’s byline, it repeats the disinformation in the exact same words as in the earlier article by Jennifer Hirschfeld Davis.

Apuzzo:

Plame also repeatedly described herself as a covert operative, a term that has multiple meanings. Plame said she worked undercover and traveled abroad on secret missions for the CIA.
 

But the word “covert” also has a legal definition requiring recent foreign service and active efforts to keep someone’s identity secret. Critics of Fitzgerald’s investigation said Plame did not meet that definition for several reasons and said that’s why nobody was charged with the leak.

Davis:

Plame repeatedly described herself as a covert operative, a term that has multiple meanings. Plame said she worked undercover and traveled abroad on secret missions for the CIA.
 

But the word “covert” also has a legal definition requiring recent foreign service by the person and active efforts to keep his or her identity secret. Critics of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation said Plame did not meet that definition for several reasons and that was why nobody was charged with the leak.

Apuzzo:

Plame said she had no role in sending her husband on a CIA fact-finding trip to Niger. Wilson said in a newspaper column that his trip debunked the administration’s prewar intelligence that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium from Africa. “I did not recommend him. I did not suggest him. There was no nepotism involved. I did not have the authority,” she said.
 

That conflicts with senior officials at the CIA and State Department, who testified during Libby’s trial that Plame recommended Wilson for the trip.

Davis:

Plame said she did not select her husband for a CIA fact-finding trip to Niger. Wilson later wrote in a newspaper column that his trip debunked the administration’s prewar intelligence that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium from Africa. “I did not recommend him. I did not suggest him. There was no nepotism involved. I did not have the authority,” she said.
 

That conflicts with senior officials at the CIA and State Department, who testified during Libby’s trial and told Congress that Plame recommended Wilson for the trip.

What’s happening here? Was Apuzzo lazy, copying and pasting a colleague’s words rather than typing his own? Did an editor insert the rebuttals into Apuzzo’s article, or for that matter into both articles, to make sure the report was “fair and balanced”? Who at the Associated Press decided to impugn Valerie Plame’s testimony? And on whose orders?