Corn continues to blow smoke
Meanwhile, liberal columnist David Corn- the man who actually "outed" Valarie Plame to the American people as a supposedly "undercover" agent in a column falsely accusing Robert Novak of having done so the previous day (Novak had merely described her as a "CIA operative-" a fact he says he learned by combining Richard Armitage's repetition of common Washington knowledge with the content of Joe Wilson's entry in Who's Who in America) continues to try to salvage the lie that Plame was in fact an undercover agent, and that evil Bushies illegally revealed her identity to get back at Wilson for his slipshod and inaccurate report denying Saddam Hussein's efforts to secure yellow cake uranimum in Niger.
It is not illegal to reveal the identity of a CIA operative who is not a covert operative- and by the legal definition, Valarie Plame was not, even though she had in the past run isolated covert missions.
In rebuttal, Tom Maguire lays out the facts in a properly magisterial fashion. Case closed.
Quoth Maguire's Just One Minute:
David Corn is full of beans. There. I've asserted it. Let the New York Times therefore publish the matter as established fact.
In the meantime,here's an oldie but goodie for you music fans out there.
One more thought: Fred Thompson is right. The first act of George W. Bush's Republican successor should be to pardon Scooter Libby, the victim of a purely political prosecution which was the fruit of an investigation which should have been dropped the moment it became clear that the person who was supposedly "outed" was never "in" in the first place.
HT: Real Clear Politics
It is not illegal to reveal the identity of a CIA operative who is not a covert operative- and by the legal definition, Valarie Plame was not, even though she had in the past run isolated covert missions.
In rebuttal, Tom Maguire lays out the facts in a properly magisterial fashion. Case closed.
Quoth Maguire's Just One Minute:
Well. If the new Times policy is to free-associate and print random speculation, they might try telling their readers that:
(a) Joe Wilson's critics think that his wife was involved, in some fashion, in sending him to Niger. As Libby said in his grand jury testimony, the implication is that Wilson is not an impartial judge of the White House - CIA intel dispute, a point on which the press should have picked up.
(b) Valerie Wilson did not have "covert" status as defined by the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. A reasonable special counsel would have at least disclosed that to the court and clarified that he was simply looking for perjury charges before having a reporter locked up for 85 days.
Hey, it has been asserted - we meet the Times standard.
David Corn is full of beans. There. I've asserted it. Let the New York Times therefore publish the matter as established fact.
In the meantime,here's an oldie but goodie for you music fans out there.
One more thought: Fred Thompson is right. The first act of George W. Bush's Republican successor should be to pardon Scooter Libby, the victim of a purely political prosecution which was the fruit of an investigation which should have been dropped the moment it became clear that the person who was supposedly "outed" was never "in" in the first place.
HT: Real Clear Politics
Comments
Also, "outing" someone as a method of getting them back, whatever your legal standard, is pretty shady behavior and unbecoming of the White House.
The sad thing is that you are even defending this.
At least on Cranach and other blogs, they simply are ignoring it and talking political philosophy instead of trying to make what happened with Valerie Plame sound like it was a good thing to do.
That, I think, is the sad thing here. That, and your the woeful degree to which you seem to be misinformed about the basics of the case- and apparently willfully so.
First, nobody was "outed." There were no secrets revealed here, the oft-repeated lie to the contrary. Valarie Plame was not an undercover agent, and in no way was she harmed or her effectiveness in her job compromised by the revelation that she was an employee of the CIA- a matter of public record. Nothing "happened with Valarie Plame." Rather, a partisan attempt has been made to smear the Bush administration (with the help of the one-sided reporting of the MSM)with Plame and her husband- political opponents of that adminsitration- taking the point. It is based entirely on lies. THe prosecution of Scooter Libby was merely one more ploy taken in support of that smear campaign.
It is true that Joe Wilson abused his official position to conduct a purely half-baked "investigation" (again, see the article)of the yellowcake issue. As the article pointed out, despite the fact that the document upon which intelligence reports about the yellowcake were based turned out to be a forgery, it has subsequently been demonstrated that the assertion made on the basis of that document- that Saddam sought yellowcake uranium in Niger turned out to be true. The notion that Scooter Libby or anyone else in the Bush administration retaliated against Wilson by revealing something that was never a secret to begin with is ludicrous on its face- and, like
most of the over-the-top attacks on the Bush Administration made by its opponents over the course of the past six years- a wholly insubstantial slander created out of whole cloth.
If there is one thing Scooter Libby could not possibly have obstructed here, it's justice.
No laws were broken here, no secrets were revealed, and even if Libby did reveal the information (his conviction was based entirely on the fact that the jury assumed that Libby could not have nad a lapse in memory- a rather flimsy excuse for a conclusion reached beyond a reasonable doubt) he revealed nothing that wasn't a matter of public record. And (as the article you didn't read points out)at no point did the prosecutor seek a legal opinion on the rather significant point that- again, as the article pointed out- Valarie Plame was simply not, as defined very specifically by law, an undercover agent.
If the prosecutor had not been out to embarrass the Bush administration, the case against Scooter Libby would never have been brought. It was a malicious prosecution. That- together with the shaky nature of the evidence in question- provides strong grounds for a likely reversal of Libby's conviction.
Best to save the taxpayers' money and issue a pardon to the real victim here, Scooter Libby.
David, don't let political differences with the administration lead you to confuse slander for substance. There's been entirely too much of that over the past two administrations.