CIA Says Plame Was Covert Agent
Hey everybody, Valarie Plame was indeed a covert CIA agent [via JustOneMinute]. Shows what I knew. It would have been nice if the CIA released the unclassified summary sooner.
Outing a spy is deplorable. These people put their lives on the line in their secret defense of the the United States. However, there is a degree of culpability. Did Karl Rove and Scooter Libby know she was covert? When Joe Wilson leaked his Niger story to reporters and wrote his NY Times op-ed the Bush administration had every right to defend itself. They didn’t have the right to break the law and put a covert agent in danger. Last year, the Washington Post editorial board chastised members of the Bush administration for, at worst, being “careless about handling information that was classified.” They realized then that hardball politics isn’t illegal.
It’s obvious from Peter Fitzgerald’s actions that he didn’t think he could prosecute anyone for knowingly outing the covert Plame. We still have no evidence Rove or Libby knowingly outed the covert Plame. The closest we have to a culprit is Richard Armitage who interestingly isn’t mentioned in the NBC News story.
In the same set of briefs that contains Plame’s status Bryron York found:
“In August 2003, Ms. Wilson was assigned to a senior personnel position in CPD [Counterproliferation Division], where she supervised staffing, recruiting, and training for CPD,” the document says. “She had been selected for this position prior to the leak.”
Let’s tie this into how the CIA kept Plame’s status a secret. Or I should say attempt to keep:
Plame drove into the office in Langley. She traveled abroad under her own name. She helped arrange for her husband to do some fact-checking on a sensitive intelligence matter. Her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, then came home and leaked his observations to two nationally-known journalists, and then wrote his own op-ed in the New York Times under his byline.
And her husband managed to list her in Who’s Who, where any journalist could look up the entry — and where Robert Novak did just that.
If that’s keeping an agent covert, it speaks volumes about the agency’s competence during the George Tenet years.
If Rove, Libby, or any other administration official deliberately disclosed Plame’s covert status they should be in jail. That’s Fitzgerald’s job, and he hasn’t accomplished it yet. Only disclosing Plame’s employment status at Libby’s sentencing underscores his failure.
To find blame for this whole Plame Game mess let’s return to the Washington Post editorial:
Nevertheless, it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame’s CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming — falsely, as it turned out — that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush’s closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It’s unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.
“Plame was ‘Covert’ Agent at Time of Name Leak”
This is a classic pattern i’ve seen in your posts, Sean–after you’re proven wrong, you work backwards from the conclusion you want to continue to rationalize your fervent belief that Bush and Co. did nothing wrong.
FACT: Plame’s outing was committed by Armitage, Rove and company. Whether or not it was deliberate, yes, is difficult to prove, which is why the law is written the way it is. It’s supposed to be a difficult law to break. But if the outing wasn’t deliberate, that means it was merely incompetent. And the blame for incompetence still falls on the people who were eager to discredit Wilson’s story (which wasn’t false as the Post claims–gimme a break).
To say that Plame’s outing is her husband’s fault because “he should have known it would lead to his wife” is not far removed from “blame the victim,” which is apparently ok to do if it serves Republican ends.
Oh, and i’ll repeat something Chet and i pointed out the first time you used the “Who’s Who” argument, Sean–using assumed names and purposely omitting her from publications she’d normally be in were she not covert would only draw suspicion to her. The idea that her existence would be erased from the public record to keep her covert is simply ludicrous.