Media Admits Rove is Innocent
Posted by: Dale Franks
The QandO Blog
July 13, 2005
You probably won't hear this anywhere in the mainstream media, so I might as well do it. I hate to beat this Rove thing to death with a stick, but, I'm seeing all these reporters at White House Press Briefings, and in the papers, and on TV all hinting—without actually saying it, but strongly implying—that Karl Rove is guilty. But what you may not know is that the legal position of the organizations they work for is that Karl Rove has committed no crime. In fact, their position is that no crime has been committed at all, in reference to the Valerie Plame case.
"Dale," you're undoubtedly asking, "how can you say such a thing? It's just wacky!"
Well, it would be, usually, except for one thing.
An amicus brief has been filed in the US Court of appeals for the DC Circuit by the following media organizations:
Media Organizations
ABC
Dow Jones & Co.
The New York Press Club
Advance Publications
Scripps Company
The Newspaper Association of America
Albritton Communications
FOXNews
The Newspaper Guild
The American Society of Magazine Editors
Gannett Co.
Newsweek
AP Harper's Magazine Foundation
NYP Holdings
Belo Corp.
Hearst Corp. T
he Reporter's Committee for Freedom of the Press
Bloomberg
Knight-Ridder Newspapers
Reuters
CNN
LIN Television
The Society of Professional Journalists
CBS
Magazine Publishers of America
Tribune Company
Copley Press
McClatchey Co.
The Washington Post
Cox Newspapers
McGraw-Hill
White House Correspondents
Daily News
NBC
So, have I left anybody out? No? Well, that's pretty much a who's who of the Old Media. And what, exactly, is their legal position?
There is ample evidence on the public record to cast
considerable doubt that a crime has been committed...
At this point, the brief repeats the elements of the crime I wrote about yesterday, and continues:
Congress intended only to criminalize only disclosures
that "clearly represent a conscious and pernicious effort
to identify and expose agents with the intent to impair
or impede the foreign intelligence activities of the
United States..."
They then bring up another aspect that I mentioned, which is whether or not Ms. Plame was even a covert agent at all.
Public information casts considerable doubt that the
government took the "affirmative measures" required by
the Act to conceal Plame's identity.
At the threshold, an agent whose identity has been
revealed must trule be "covert" for there to be a
violation of the Act. To the average observer, much less
to the professional intelligence operative, Plame was not
given the "deep cover" required of a covert agent. See 50
USC § 426 ("covert agent" defined). She worked at a desk
job at CIA headquarters, where she could be seen
traveliong to and from, and active at, Langley. She had
been residing in Washington—not stationed abroad—for a
number of years. As discussed below, the CIA failed to
take even its usual steps to prevent publication of her
name...
This goes to whether or not the element of the government taking "affirmative steps" to keep Ms. Plame's identity a secret applies. And, according to the brief filed in Federal Appeals Court by the Old Media, even that is doubtful. Indeed, they hint the CIA might even have been complicit in publishing Ms. Plame's name.
Novak's column can be viewed as critical of CIA
ineptitude: The Agency's response to a request by the
State Department and the Vice president's office to
verify whether a specific foreign intelligence report was
accurate was to have "low-level" bureaucrats make the
decision to send a non-CIA employee [Joseph Wilson]
(neither an expert on Niger nor on weapons of mass
destruction) on this crucial mission at his wife's
suggestion...Did no one at Langley think that Plame's
identity might be compromised if her spouse writes a
nationally distributed Op-Ed piece discussing a foreign
mission about a volatile political issue that focused on
her subject matter expertise?
The public record provides ample evidence that the CIA
was at least cavalier about, if not complicit in, the
publishing of Plame's name. Moreover, given Novak's
suggestion of CIA incompetence plus the resulting public
uproar over Plame's identity being revealed, the CIA had
every incentive to dissemble by claiming it wash shocked,
shocked" that leaking was going on...
So, let's review.
The official, legal position of the Mainstream media is that no crime was committed in the release of Valerie Plame's name. The media asserts
a) that even if Plame was a covert agent, the release of her name doesn't meet the required elements to charge anyone under § 421,
b) that Ms. Plame wasn't a covert agent anyway, as §426 defines it, so even if the CIA didn't want her name published, publishing it isn't a violation of the section, and
c) the CIA didn't try to keep her name from being published.
So, the media admits, White House Press Corps hound-baying aside, that Karl Rove is legally innocent of any wrongdoing.
And, while we're on the subject, what is the deal with the New York Times? One of the things about their mouth-breathing editorial this morning is that the editors of the Times know who Judith Miller's source was. They already know the truth. Ms. Miller doesn't, after all, work in a vacuum. Presumably, her editors know who her source is. That's they way journalism works.
Think about it: They wasted a significant amount of newsprint this morning demanding that Karl Rove publicly tell the truth. But, one wonders why—since the editors of the Times already know the truth, and since they, you know, publish a newspaper—they don't simply publish what they know? After all, it might have been a more interesting use of space than the anti-Rove editorial they printed this morning. And karl rove has had a waiver of confidentiality on file for 18 months.
If the public has a right to know the truth, and the editors of the Times already know what the truth is, then why don't they print it?
I merely ask for my own information.
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