"But Plame's undercover status at the time was and is a
little questionable in any case. How undercover could she
have been when her name was published at the time as part
of Joseph Wilson's own biography online"
SCANDAL IMPLOSION
John Podhoretz
NEW YORK POST
July 12, 2005
I WROTE a column on Oct. 10, 2003, about the strange case of Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame.
Wilson was the former ambassador sent by the CIA to investigate whether Saddam Hussein had sought to purchase uranium in Africa; Plame, his CIA agent wife.
In that column, I offered my speculation of what an administration official might have said to a journalist to explain just how Wilson — a Clinton administration official — got the assignment in the first place:
<<<
"Administration official: 'We didn't send him there. Cheney's office asked CIA to get more information. CIA picked Wilson . . . Look, I hear his wife's in the CIA. He's got nothing to do. She wanted to throw him a bone.' "
>>>
Hate to say I told you so, but . . .
According to this week's Newsweek, Karl Rove said something very similar indeed to Time magazine's Matthew Cooper:
In the Cooper e-mails just surrendered by Time to the prosecutor looking into the Plame case,
"Cooper wrote that Rove offered him a 'big warning' not
to 'get too far out on Wilson.' Rove told Cooper that
Wilson's trip had not been authorized by . . . CIA
Director George Tenet . . . or Vice President Dick
Cheney. Rather, 'it was, [Rove] said, Wilson's wife, who
apparently works at the agency on WMD [weapons of mass
destruction] issues who authorized the trip.' "
There's no mistaking the purpose of this conversation between Cooper and Rove. It wasn't intended to discredit, defame or injure Wilson's wife. It was intended to throw cold water on the import, seriousness and supposedly high level of Wilson's findings.
While some may differ on the fairness of discrediting Joseph Wilson, it sure isn't any kind of crime.
Rove was suggesting to Cooper that that folks lower down in the CIA than its own director commandeered the process so that the husband of one of their own could get the gig. And the husband in question then went and misrepresented his findings to various journalists (The Washington Post's Walter Pincus and The New York Times's Nicholas Kristof) and then in his own now-famous Times op-ed.
This Rove-Cooper conversation discredits Wilson, not Plame.
In fact, nothing we know so far was done either with the purpose of exposing or even the knowledge that these remarks would be exposing an undercover CIA operative.
But Plame's undercover status at the time was and is a
little questionable in any case. How undercover could she
have been when her name was published at the time as part
of Joseph Wilson's own biography online (see
cpsag.com
So if the offense wasn't against Plame, what of the offense against Wilson? There was no offense. As many of Joe Wilson's own hottest defenders would no doubt argue in relation to President Bush, exposing a liar is not only not a crime, it's a public service.
And Wilson lied. Repeatedly.
First off, Wilson long denied he was recommended for the job by his wife: "Valerie had nothing to do with the matter," he writes in his book. "She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip."
But the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence actually found the memo in which Valerie Plame recommended her husband for the job.
There were other lies as well. Wilson's own report was far from definitive in any way on the question of whether Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger — thus giving the lie to his later bald claim that he came back insisting there was no link.
"The report on the former ambassador's [Wilson's] trip to
Niger, disseminated in March 2002," said the Senate
Select Committee, "did not change any analysts'
assessments of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal. For most
analysts, the information in the report lent more
credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) reports on the uranium deal, but the State
Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR)
analysts believed that the report supported their
assessment that Niger was unlikely to be willing or able
to sell uranium to Iraq."
Thus, Rove was telling Cooper the truth. According to one of Cooper's e-mails;
"not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[d] suspect
but so is the report. He [Rove] implied strongly there's
still plenty to implicate Iraqi interest in acquiring
uranium fro[m] Niger . . ."
A few days later, for reasons that remain unexplained, the United States said it could no longer stand by the claim in the 2003 State of the Union that Saddam was seeking uranium in Africa.
But that retraction of Bush's words remains hotly controversial. As a 2004 British inquiry chaired by Lord Butler put it:
"We conclude that, on the basis of the intelligence
assessments at the time, covering both Niger and the
Democratic Republic of Congo, the statements on Iraqi
attempts to buy uranium from Africa in the Government's
dossier, and by the Prime Minister in the House of
Commons, were well-founded."
What isn't controversial is this: Karl Rove didn't "out" Valerie Plame as a CIA agent to intimidate Joe Wilson. He was dismissing Joe Wilson as a low-level has-been hack to whom nobody should pay attention. He was right then, and if he said it today, he'd still be right.
And if Valerie Plame wants to live a quiet spy life, she should stop having her picture taken by society photographers and stop getting stories written about her on the front page of the Times.
E-mail: podhoretz@nypost.com
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