Monday Sept. 29, 2003; 10:22 a.m. EDT
Joe Wilson Vowed Vengeance Against Karl Rove
The man at the center of the storm over whether the White House leaked the name of his CIA-analyst-wife to the press swore vengeance against the Bush administration just one month ago, telling a Seattle audience that he'd wanted to "to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs."
With the Washington Post doing his dirty work on Sunday, former ambassador to Iraq, Joseph Wilson seems to be gathering a few allies in his mission, with Democrats like Sen. Charles Schumer proclaiming yesterday, "Whoever [leaked Wilson's wife's name] should go to jail."
Wilson is the man tapped by the CIA, reportedly at his wife's recommendation, to travel to Niger to investigate reports that Saddam Hussein had sought to purchase yellow cake uranium, one of the country's chief exports.
Because Wilson came up empty in terms of finding any evidence of a uranium transaction, the press has taken it as an article of faith that Bush's reference in last year's State of the Union message to British intelligence on the Iraq-Niger uranium deal was a deliberate attempt to mislead.
The CIA's request late Friday that the Justice Department investigate whether the White House leaked Mrs. Wilson's name to columnist Robert Novak has set off media smoke alarms.
But what hasn't gotten much attention is Novak's original report, which made it clear that the White House wasn't the only one who spilled the beans about Wilson's wife.
Here's what Novak wrote on July 14:
"Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him."
So it wasn't just the White House who blew Mrs. Wilson's cover. In fact, the cavalier manner which the CIA seems to have confirmed her role in the imbroglio suggests there was nothing particularly secret about her identity in the first place.
Despite complaints from Democrats like Schumer that the leak compromised both national security and Mrs. Wilson's safety, the agency told the Post for its Sunday report, "No further harm would come from repeating Plame’s name."
In fact, it's an open question as to whether Mrs. Wilson's identity was supposed to be a secret in the first place, with the Post noting far down in its report that the "CIA has declined to confirm whether she was undercover."
If Mrs. Wilson wasn't undercover, then this is a non-story ginned up by her husband, a unabashed Bush-hater who wrote in the notoriously left-wing Nation magazine earlier this year that under Bush, "America has entered one of it periods of historical madness."
White House critics want to paint a picture of Mrs. Wilson as a super secret spy working abroad whose life was endangered because of a White House vendetta, while in reality she was apparently safe and sound working stateside as a CIA weapons analyst at the time of the Novak report. |
