Last week it sounded like former White House press secretary Scott McClellan decided to make a cheap buck or two by claiming that President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Karl Rove were "involved" in "leaking" Valerie Plame's name to the media. By the end of the holiday weekend, however, it seemed that not only did McClellan not do so, but rather the mainstream media may have quoted McClellan's book excerpts - released by his publishing company - without knowing whether or not the topic was Plame.

Even so, for a moment, let's assume that he did. Regardless, the logic, as always, would be tortured and Orwellian.

"I had unknowingly passed along false information [about Plame]," McClellan wrote. "And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president's chief of staff and the president himself." ...

But White House sources have long said that Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice president's chief of staff, allowed McClellan to suggest day after day that they had no involvement in the publication of the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Later testimony showed that they did, although neither was the original source of the leak.
Whoa, whoa... "although neither was the original source of the leak."

Question: how does one "leak" something that has already been leaked? Answer: you can't. You can't lose your virginity twice either. So there's nothing false about saying one had no involvement in a leak if the leak in question had already sprung.

This whole thing is smoke and mirrors. The Bush teams' only fault is their pathetic attempt in playing defense. And it's also obvious that no law was broken by the "leaking" of Plame's name. How do we know this? Because the the guy who admitted to leaking Plame's name to columnist Bob Novak -- Deputy Sec. of State Richard Armitage -- the guy who started this whole mess, isn't in a jail cell beside Scooter Libby.

Armitage has never been charged. Never been investigated. Indeed, one never even hears the Plame-lovers mention Armitage's name, let alone vilify him with the same voracity they did Libby, who is currently serving prison time for committing perjury about a crime he didn't commit!!

It's pretty difficult to argue that a crime has been committed when there's no prosecution of the person who committed the supposed crime.

Beyond the previously ruined credibility of Plame and hubby Joe Wilson, then, this is about one thing: making money.

If it turns out that McClellan is pointing the finger, one could wager he simply saw how much Plame and Wilson have gained while jetsetting across the country for book deals, Vanity Fair covers, a movie deal, television interviews, etc., and naturally wanted a share.

Labels: CIA, media bias, PlameGate, Wilson

Who outed Valerie Plame? Her employer: the CIA.

Here's an interview CNN had with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who previously admitting "leaking" Plames name to reporter Bob Novak. Gotta love how this important detail is only now revealed.

BLITZER: You will hear it. I want you to listen to what she said.

VALERIE PLAME WILSON, AUTHOR, "FAIR GAME": (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) Mr. Armitage did a very foolish thing. He has been around Washington for decades. He should know better. He's a senior government official. Whether he knew where exactly I worked in the CIA, he had no rights to go talking to a reporter about where I worked. That was strictly off-limits. (END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: Those are strong words from Valerie Plame Wilson.

ARMITAGE: They're not words on which I disagree. I think it was extraordinarily foolish of me. There was no ill-intent on my part and I had never seen ever, in 43 years of having a security clearance, a covert operative's name in a memo. The only reason I knew a "Mrs. Wilson," not "Mrs. Plame," worked at the agency was because I saw it in a memo. But I don't disagree with her words to a large measure.

BLITZER: Normally in memos they don't name covert operatives?

ARMITAGE: I have never seen one named.

BLITZER: And so you assumed she was, what, just an analyst over at the CIA?

ARMITAGE: Not only assumed it, that's what the message said, that she was publicly chairing a meeting.

BLITZER: So, when you told Robert Novak that Joe Wilson, the former U.S. ambassador's wife, worked at the CIA, and she was involved somehow in getting him this trip to Africa to look for the enriched uranium, if there were enriched uranium going to Iraq, you simply assumed that she was not a clandestine officer of the CIA.

ARMITAGE: Well, even Mr. Novak has said that he used the word "operative" and misused it. No one ever said "operative." And I not only assumed it, as I say, I've never seen a covered agent's name in a memo. However, that doesn't take away from what Mrs. Plame said, it was foolish, yeah. Sure it was.
How the heck is someone a "covert agent" if their name is appearing on unclassified public CIA memorandums? Answer: she wasn't.

The bottom line is if Plame were covert or classified or however you want to term it her employer went to no lengths to keep her status unknown (and neither did the camera-hogging Plame or Joe Wilson for that matter). The CIA dropped the ball, and once they did, once her name got out, they used every resource to shift the blame of their own incompetence. Meanwhile Scooter Libby sits in jail for "lying" about a crime he didn't actually commit and the Wilson-Plame family makes several million in publicity circuit book tours.

Labels: CIA, intelligence, Iraq, PlameGate, Wilson

Christopher Hitchens comments in Slate the absurdity of jailing Scooter Libby for a victimless "crime" for a leak he actually never made:

If Scooter Libby goes to jail, it will be because he made a telephone call to Tim Russert and because Tim Russert has a different recollection of the conversation. Can this really be the case? And why is such a nugatory issue a legal matter in the first place?

Before savoring the full absurdity of the thing, please purge your mind of any preconceptions or confusions.

*Mr. Libby was not charged with breaking the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
Nobody was ever charged with breaking that law, designed to shield the names of covert agents. Indeed, the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, determined that the law had not been broken in the first place.

*The identity of the person who disclosed the name of Valerie Plame to Robert Novak—his name is Richard Armitage, incidentally—was known to those investigating the non-illegal leak before the full-dress inquiry began to grind its way through the system, incidentally imprisoning one reporter and consuming thousands of man hours of government time (and in time of war, at that).

*In the other two "counts" in the case, both involving conversations with reporters (Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time), Judge Reggie Walton threw out the Miller count while the jury found for Libby on the Cooper count.

*The call to Russert was not about Plame in any case; it was a complaint from the vice president's office about Chris Matthews, who was felt by some to have been overstressing the Jewish names associated with the removal of Saddam Hussein. Russert was called in his capacity as bureau chief; any chitchat about Wilson and Plame was secondary.

*The call was made after Robert Novak had put his fateful column (generated by Richard Armitage) on the wire, and after he had mentioned Plame's identity to Karl Rove.

Does it not seem extraordinary that a man can be prosecuted, and now be condemned to a long term of imprisonment, because of an alleged minor inconsistency of testimony in a case where it is admitted that there was no crime and no victim?
Yes, it does. Read the rest.

Labels: folly, justice department, Libby, PlameGate, Wilson

The case of Lewis Scooter Libby, aka PlameGate, has been one of the most surreal political events in recent memory, and without a doubt is proof positive that the mainstream media isn't just partisan, but basically just an extension of the Democratic Party.

The Bush administration is guilty of one thing in this: stupidity. Once again they are too stupid to make the right play in what should have been a very, very easy defense. As for the fall guy, Scooter Libby is guilty of lying about a leak he did not even make which was a supposed crime THAT NEVER EVEN OCCURED.

Valerie Plame was not a "covert" agent. Period. We know this for several reasons. First, they've never actually asserted it. They skirt around it and bait and switch - "covert" becomes "classified," (the latter a domain that like it or not the president of the United States has one hundred percent Constitutional authority over, yet the press chooses to ignore this). Second, the prosecution in the Libby case, lead by Patrick Fitzgerald, stated, "we have not made any allegation that Mr. [Scooter] Libby knowingly, intentionally outed a covert agent. We have not charged that. And so I'm not making that assertion." In other words, given every opportunity to support his prosecution by formally announcing that Plame was covert, Fitzgerald chooses not to. Finally, were Plame truly a covert agent, as opposed to her identity only being classified, then there would have been charges filed against former Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage -- the man who actually leaked her cover to the Chicago Tribune's Robert Novak. This fact was known by the Justice Department BEFORE they charged Libby but conveniently left out of the public's knowledge until it was separately reported in September 2006.

Democrats have followed suit of course. That Plame wasn't actually covert matters not to them. Who needs facts when you have the media repeating your exaggerations, half-truths and lies. There will be no investigation as to why someone as unqualified on WMD as Joe Wilson was appointed the role of investigating Iraq's Niger-uranium connection, nor how unprofessional it was for the CIA to allow nepotism to trump intelligence work. That Joe Wilson thrice lied to the Senate intelligence committee about how he was chosen for the job, what he found in Niger, and what Bush administration did with it matters not to the media. That a former prime minister of Niger, Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, told Wilson that Iraq did attempt to purchase 400 tons of uranium in 1998 matters not to Nancy Pelosi. That this was exactly what the United Kingdom intelligence services shared with the Bush administration, and exactly what Bush stated in his 2003 state of the union speech is, for Democrats like John Murtha, insignificant. And that to this day the United Kingdom has never withdrawn its claim is, one supposes, just an inconvenient truth in the liberal surrealist world.

The Bush people had every reason to question Joe Wilson's partisanship during his so-called fact finding tour. That they have been inept in this defense underscores how important public speaking skills are when you're the president -- and how not having them can lead to approval ratings in the gutter.

Worst of all, that Joe Wilson and his wife can shamelessly play a victim card while simultaneously enjoying more limelight and free dinners from the Vanity Fair Elitist Left than they would have otherwise ever known in their life is absurd wrapped in asinine surrounded by crazy. "We're so the victim!" they scream as they enjoy night after night of well-paying public speaking engagements, a proposed multi-million dollar book deal, a planned Warner Brothers movie about them, and photo shoots for a variety of popular magazine covers. Cry me a river! Somebody, please, out me as a CIA agent!!! I'm begging ya!

To conclude, I leave you with the quote that best summarizes the sham that has been PlameGate, by Mark Steyn:

But nevertheless an anti-war deputy secretary [Armitage] of an anti-war department [State] leaking to an anti-war reporter [Novak] the name of an anti-war analyst [Plame] who got her anti-war husband [Wilson] a job with an anti-war agency [CIA] is supposedly an elaborate “conspiracy” by Cheney, Rove and the other warmongers.

Labels: Libby, PlameGate, Wilson