News Flash: The Press Omits, DistortsBy Thomas E. BrewtonNo surprise, here's another example of left-wing liberal media  presenting only a selected part of the facts in order to mislead  readers, when all of the facts are a matter of public record.An Associated Press article headlined McClellan to testify before  House in CIA leak case ( http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080609/ ap_on_go_co/cia_leak_probe ) includes the following sentence:"Plame's CIA identity was leaked to the news media by several top  Bush administration officials in 2003, including Libby and former top  White House political adviser Karl Rove."In as much as the story first was published by Robert Novak, who had  first hand knowledge about the supposed revelation of Valerie Plame's  involvement, let's let him tell the full story.The background is that CIA agent Valerie Plame's recommended her  husband for an intelligence gathering mission, that the husband used  in a New York Times op-ed piece to assert that the Bush  administration had lied about Saddam Hussein's efforts to obtain  materials for nuclear weapons.Later Congressional investigations demonstrated that both Valerie  Plame and her husband Joe Wilson had lied about the story in several  critical particulars.Here's what Mr. Novak has to say ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2008/06/01/AR2008060101915.html ) about the  affair and about Scott McClellan's best-selling work of fiction:"In Scott McClellan's purported tell-all memoir of his trials as  President Bush's press secretary, he virtually ignores Deputy  Secretary of State Richard Armitage's role leaking to me Valerie  Plame's identity as a CIA employee. That fits the partisan Democratic  version of the Plame affair, in keeping with the overall tenor of the  book, "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's  Culture of Deception.""Although the media response has dwelled on McClellan's criticism of  Bush's road to war, the CIA leak case is the heart of this book. On  July 14, 2003, one day before McClellan took a press secretary's job  for which many colleagues felt he was unqualified, I wrote a column  asserting that while at the CIA Plame had suggested her Democratic  partisan husband, retired diplomat Joseph Wilson, for a sensitive  intelligence mission. That story would make McClellan's three years  at the briefing room podium a misery, leading to his dismissal and  now his bitter retort."In claiming he was misled about the Plame affair, McClellan mentions  Armitage only twice. Armitage being the leaker undermines the  Democratic theory, now accepted by McClellan, that Bush, Vice  President Cheney and political adviser Karl Rove aimed to  delegitimize Wilson as a war critic. The way that McClellan handles  the leak leads former colleagues to suggest he could not have written  this book by himself."