J-Po Throws Down

I've read a lot of dissections of the Plame/Wilson crisis.

None are as good as John Podhoretz' take in today's Corner.

Podhoretz:

Matthew Cooper of Time wrote yesterday, and said on television yesterday, that Karl Rove told him Joseph Wilson's wife was in the CIA and that's how Wilson got the gig to go to Niger in 2002. He also said he told the grand jury that when he brought the matter up to Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Libby said, "Yeah, I heard that too."

So in one respect, and one respect only, we have one perplexing new detail. Rove also used the phrase "Yeah, I heard that too" when talking to Robert Novak about Plame. Maybe there's something in the fact tha they both said "Yeah, I heard that too." On the other hand, maybe Rove's or Cooper's or Novak's memory has been tainted somehow by the knowledge that somebody said "Yeah, I heard that too" first.

A game of "Telephone" on a national scale?

Anyway, Podhoretz finds the chase, and cuts directly to it:

In any case, what all this means is...absolutely, absolutely, absolutely nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Rove did nothing wrong. Libby did nothing wrong. That is, unless you think it's wrong to call into question the bona fides of Joseph Wilson and his trip to Niger, which certainly a lot of Leftists think is wrong but which the law of the United States certainly does not.

There is nothing criminal whatever in saying, "Joe Blow works for the CIA" unless Joe Blow works for the CIA under highly covert conditions at some point in the preceding five years, and unless you say so expressly for the purpose of blowing Joe Blow's ocver.

That's the part of this whole flap that is so transparently...silly.

(And when I say it's "silly", I don't mean in cases where real undercover agents on operations get their cover blown. That's treachery - although I hear none of the people caterwauling about "Rove's treason!!!!!" mentioning that incident. Wonder why?)

The language of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 -- which is the legislation under which somebody might get in trouble for revealing Valerie Plame's identity -- is pretty clear. Rove and Libby would have had to have known that the CIA was taking "affirmative measures to conceal [a]covert agent's intelligence relationship to the United States" and then "knowingly" revealed that identify to be subject to criminal penalty.

The fact that Cooper learned that Plame worked for the CIA from Rove isn't a crime. It isn't even a matter worthy of five seconds of discussion. She was working at headquarters on a policy issue, and therefore any human being could have seen her driving from her house into the George HW Bush CIA Campus in Langley, Virginia across the Chain Bridge. Whoo. How secret.

If Plame were a "covert agent", she would not be at the Langley office at all. She'd be an employee of "Van Hoeven Import/Export" in Rotterdam, or as a "journalist" for an organization that swaps favors with the CIA, or a third assistant attache for economic interests at the US Embassy in Cameroon. Anything but a woman who drives a Jaguar to her office in Langley, and, I'd suspect, anyone but a woman married to a publicity-seeking apparatchik.

So the press doesn't get intelligence. Fair enough. Do they get journalism?

The headlines today based on Cooper's written and spoken words yesterday are an effort to "define criminality way way down." There was concern there might have been a crime committed two years ago. That crime was not committed. But rather than the headlines making this fact clear, instead the headlines hint that the non-crime was really committed. This is appalling.

It is conceivable that Rove or Libby or somebody else may have not testified honestly about this to the grand jury, in which case maybe somebody will be indicted for perjury. But not for anything involving Valerie Plame and the knowing publication of the fact that she was a covert operative-- unless, of oourse, your name is Joseph Wilson and you had a conversation with a leftist journalist named David Corn and you made it clear your wife had been a covert agent and you wanted the fact made public so you could accuse the administration of having revealed it criminally when in fact you were the one who revealed it. For more on this head-spinning angle, read my pal Cliff May.

Do they get thorough journalism?

Plus, don't forget about Judith Miller of the New York Times and what she knew and when she knew it and who told her (and whether the one who told her has really ridiculous salt-and-pepper hair and likes to make appearances in Vanity Fair and with Air America Radio's Randi Rhodes but really "leads a quiet non-social life").

Cue the next scandal. Unless they really have evidence of a crime, like, say, perjury, this one is all over but the fat ladies typing.

Posted by Mitch at July 18, 2005 08:06 AM | TrackBack