Just when we thought the Bush Administration had outed covert CIA agent Valerie Plame-Wilson in a deliberate effort to retaliate against her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson for his Times Op-Ed article showing the falsity of Pres. Bush's State of the Union, 2004, claim that Saddam had been buying Yellowcake from Niger, which was a big part of the reason for us to invade Iraq, it turns out it wasn't the White House, after all, who did the dirty leaking.
It was the State Department. Colin Powell's right-hand man, Richard Armitage, couldn't keep his big mouth shut. He leaked the covert information on Plame to columnist Bob Novak.
Why have a top job in Washington if you can't gossip about all the secrets you get to know that the others at the high-level receptions don't get to know unless you tell them. How else do you prove that you are on the inside unless you drop some, like, really inside tidbits from time to time, about the day's news.
That, it seems, is what Armitage did. The resulting tidal wave of scandal engulfed the White House, not that it didn't need a little engulfing. We have gone to a war, invading Iraq, as pre-conceived, if not pre-planned very well. The Vice-President's chief-of-staff Scooter Libby did get indicted for the same leak because he knew Plame was covert. Armitage didn't, apparently.
Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has known of the Armitage role from day one of his tenure in office, it appears.
So, the score-card, as I read it, is: Armitage is the first to leak the confidential information about Plame to the press, but because he's ignorant, he's innocent.
Libby leaks the same information to the same reporter, but because he's calculating, he's not ignorant and therefore not innocent.
And now Fitzgerald, the prosecutor, has to stand in front of a jury and explain why he's going after Libby the second leaker and not the real leaker, er, first leaker.
Fitzgerald is like the lifeguard who throws the second leaker out of the swimming pool for leaking on purpose while allowing to remain in the pool the first leaker because he thought it was okay to take a leak.
Stay out of the pool in Washington is the moral of this tale.
The NYT is reporting on this and Fitzgerald, here.
And the Virginia-Pilot editorializes below.
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9-14-06
CBS reports today that reporter Bob Novak, who received the leak from Armitage and first reported that Amb. Wilson's wife was Valerie Plame, a CIA employee, is saying that Armitage did not make the revelation in a casual or accidental manner, but pushed it as a story for some unstated reason. Armitage has been sued by Plame and Wilson along with others sued earlier.
Rough place, that Washington.
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Powell's halo knocked ajar
The Virginian-Pilot
© September 2, 2006
Last updated: 12:23 AM
On July 14, 2003, a Robert Novak column in The Washington Post outed the CIA-agent wife of vociferous Bush administration critic, Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson. Thus was born the "Plame Affair" which quickly became a morality tale of how an out of control Bush Administration would do anything to justify its war in Iraq.
A mere three days later, journalist David Corn, summarized the allegations that would color reporting on the Iraq War for the next three years and eventually lead to the indictment of a top aide to the vice president for lying to a grand jury: "Now there is evidence the Bushies used classified information and put the nation's counterproliferation efforts at risk merely to settle a score. It is a sign that with the [Bush] gang, politics trumps national security."
Now we know the story is much more complicated.
In a book to be released next week, the same David Corn, of The Nation magazine and Michael Isikoff of Newsweek, reveal that the original leaker to Novak was actually a Bush administration insider who was opposed to the war in Iraq, but also suffered an irrepressible urge to gossip, then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.
The reporting duo also reveal that when Armitage realized that he was the source of the leak, he came clean to Secretary of State Colin Powell. Powell however, revealed the minimum amount of information possible to those outside the department. The State Department told the FBI of Armitage's role and informed the White House that they had given information to the FBI about the scandal, but nothing more.
The public learned nothing. And as the investigation dragged on through 2004 and 2005, the Gallup Poll showed that a majority of Americans formed the opinion that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was deliberately outed by the Bush administration as an effort to silence him and discredit his claim that intelligence was twisted to justify the war. Reflecting that view, Wilson wrote, "The conspiracy to destroy us was most likely conceived - and carried out - within the office of the vice president."
All along, Secretary of State Colin Powell knew that the facts were more complicated, yet he said nothing. And he had rather unflattering reasons for silence. At the time, the relatively dovish State Department and CIA were struggling with the office of the vice president and the secretary of Defense for the primary role in shaping Iraq and Middle East policy. Every day that the vice president was smeared with the Plame allegations strengthened Powell's hand in the Bush administration's internal struggle.
None of this changes the fact that the public presentation of intelligence was shaped to fit the decision to invade Iraq. Nor does it preclude the possibility that Bush administration officials went too far in trying to punish Wilson. However, the previously hidden role of Armitage does reveal that, in Washington, easy morality tales - where the good guys and bad guys come prepackaged and clearly labeled - are often myths.
© 2006 HamptonRoads.com/PilotOnline.com
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