Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Revisit the Valerie Plame “controversy”

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Not that I intend to post an I-told-you-so (ok, maybe I will), but many electrons gave their lives on BMG in pursuit of assumed-covert-CIA-agent Valerie Plame’s “leakers.”  Much psychic energy was expended demanding justice for this national security outrage: frog-marching Rove, Cheney. Libby, the neo-cons, Bush-lied-people-died, blah, blah, blah.

Turns out that the only prevaricators seem to have been various and sundry print and electronic media reporters, a million Kos enthusiasts, and Joe Wilson himself.

Well, now that the story has finally been colluded not with a bang but a whimper, I’m wondering what the BMG faithful have to say about all this.  Certainly we can expect the Wilson’s lawsuit to slink away quietly.

I, for one, exactly predicted this outcome (yes, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.) 

But I’d like to hold to account all the BMG bloggers who were so certain that a serious crime had been committed (none had) which endangered national security (it hadn’t) and had been hatched in the White House (it hadn’t.)

Does anyone have anything to say about this, or are most simply content to sweep their Bush-hating hysteria under the carpet?

Anyone?

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Comments

  1. As soon as I saw that the Slate piece you link to (I fixed the broken link, by the way) was by Christopher Hitchens, my eyes instantly glazed over.  That said, if Armitage was the original source of the info, sure, that gets Rove off the hook.  (Libby, however, is still under indictment, and I haven’t seen anyone credibly claim that Patrick Fitzgerald is anything other than an entirely honest prosecutor.)

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    I wrote a lot about Plame, as a search of this site’s archives will show.  A lot of what I wrote about was how stupid the NY Times and other media organizations were being about not revealing their sources.  If they had done so, instead of mindlessly standing on an imagined principle, a lot of the hue and cry could have been avoided.  Hopefully, lesson learned.  Realistically, I seriously doubt it.

  2. Is just that. He writes:

    As most of us have long suspected, the man who told Novak about Valerie Plame was Richard Armitage, Colin Powell’s deputy at the State Department and, with his boss, an assiduous underminer of the president’s war policy.

    But he is not very specific about his evidence for this statement. Later in the piece he writes, “Armitage identified himself to Colin Powell as Novak’s source before the Fitzgerald inquiry had even been set on foot. The whole thing could—and should—have ended right there.” I’m not clear what he bases that statement on either. The book by Isikoff and Corn? He spends much of the piece deriding the latter’s abilities, so why does he have so much confidence in his conclusions. More generally, why would Libby obstruct justice to protect Armitage, what motive would Armitage have to blow Plame’s cover (Hitchens suggests shifting attention from his alleged failure to share information about the Minnesota flight schools, which seems quite a stretch). Most generally, a crime was still committed here, aided in my opinion by Novak, and it will be interesting to see if Plame adds Armitage to her lawsuit against top officials in the Bush administration.

  3. I don’t see your point at all.  We’ve known all along that Rove confirmed something Novak had already received from another source.  So we knew we were missing part of the story, but that doesn’t change the fact that Rove & Cheney & allies were corrupt and misused their power with disregard for the national security they claimed to be defending.  As it turns out, the way Armitage found out that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA in the first place, was a document distributed by them, and the fact that it wasn’t clear to him that this was secret information only underscores their misdeeds: they were trying to leak the information and they succeeded in multiple ways.

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    Rove was obviously “involved”, so Bush should’ve fired him like he said he would.  And Rove should’ve had his security clearances pulled, crime or not.

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    Cheney’s machinations to spread the information all over the place had no legitimate motivation, other than to cast doubt on Wilson’s accurate information because it was threatening support for Bush & Cheney’s disastrous policies.

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    Exposing Plame led to a serious weakening of our intelligence capability on specifically the issues where we need it most: nuclear proliferation, and Iran.  That’s what Plame was working on, and that’s what Cheney, Libby, and Rove had so little regard for.

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    We’ve no got another piece of the puzzle, but it doesn’t change what we already knew.  These three men are morally traitors, even if technically they have committed no crime (and I’m not sure they haven’t).

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    And no, Bush absolutely cannot be trusted with national security.  His failure to fire Rove, and to get Rove’s clearance pulled, is yet more solid evidence that with Bush, personal loyalty trumps everything else.

  4. David Corn and Michael Isikoff have a book coming out, Hubris, which says that Armigage is the leaker. In his blog, Corn says this about the meaning of this new information:

    The Plame leak in Novak’s column has long been cited by Bush administration critics as a deliberate act of payback, orchestrated to punish and/or discredit Joe Wilson after he charged that the Bush administration had misled the American public about the prewar intelligence. The Armitage news does not fit neatly into that framework.

    But Corn goes on to say:

    The Armitage leak was not directly a part of the White House’s fierce anti-Wilson crusade. But as Hubris notes, it was, in a way, linked to the White House effort, for Amitage had been sent a key memo about Wilson’s trip that referred to his wife and her CIA connection, and this memo had been written, according to special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, at the request of I. Lewis Scooter Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff. Libby had asked for the memo because he was looking to protect his boss from the mounting criticism that Bush and Cheney had misrepresented the WMD intelligence to garner public support for the invasion of Iraq.

    I think a lot of weight was placed on the Plame case by those of us in the anti-war camp because we were hoping for a smoking gun that would lead directly to impeachment. That Armitage was the leaker doesn’t seem to me to let the Bush administration off the hook for its chicanery. But it does show that the hope for the Plame affair to lead to a quick end to the Bush presidency was more than a tad optimistic.

  5. Wow, the first 2 of 4 comments question the veracity of the new information because it sounds like maybe Hitchens just made it up…

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    The third completely buys the lame and logicless Corn retort that regardless of the fact that the leak came from a nonpartisan, it still ended up supporting a republican smear campaign to precisely what armitage did..  (huh?  how lucky for Cheney that Armitage just happened to do exactly as the republican plotters also wanted to do?  Lalala, Corn is not listening to you)

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    I know its hard to let go of the Bush lied conspiracy theory, but you must.  You really must.  It ruins you. 

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    The assertion that Plame was specifically outed in revenge for Wilson’s whistleblowing was never anything more than a theory, a suspicion, spread around the left and for that matter, the mainstream media, as fact.  It was never fact.  Now we know it was never true.

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