Last year I saved this article. Rather than bury paraphrases within my ranting, I'll just post the article here and let you read it courtesy of Ron Kessler and Newsmax.com. Note: The red lettering is my idea...not Ron's.
Reprinted from NewsMax.com
Ronald Kessler
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
WASHINGTON -- Now that Karl Rove has been told he won't be indicted in the CIA leak case, it's useful to recall who the real culprit was.
On July 14, 2003, columnist Robert Novak named Valerie Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, as an "agency operative" as a way of explaining why the CIA chose to send Wilson to Niger to look into claims that Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy uranium from that country. Novak's source, whom he described privately as being in the White House, told him Wilson was sent because he was married to Plame, who worked for the CIA. Another official confirmed her CIA affiliation to Novak.
For months, Wilson had been using his role in the affair to attack the Bush administration. Wilson claimed that he had reported to the CIA that it was "highly doubtful" that Hussein had tried to buy uranium from Niger. That didn't quite square with the facts. On the one hand, he told the CIA that one former Niger official told him in February 2002 that he was unaware of any contract signed while he was in office to sell uranium to any rogue state. On the other hand, Wilson said the former official told him that in 1999, a businessman approached the official urging him to meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations" between Iraq and Niger. The former official believed the overture was to discuss uranium sales.
The CIA considered the report inconclusive. While it was distributed, the report was not given much weight. Contrary to Wilson's claim, the Niger reference was never a major justification for going to war. The CIA never mentioned Niger in briefings to Congress. Colin Powell never referred to it in his presentation to the United Nations. George Tenet, the director of Central Intelligence, had little confidence in the Niger claim and wanted it out of Bush's speeches. The Niger reference made it into Bush's State of the Union address only because it was attributed to British intelligence, which separately obtained information that Saddam was trying to get uranium from Niger.
Contrary to what Novak's source told him, the CIA did not initially decide to ask Wilson to go to Niger because he was married to Plame. She did recommend him when asked about the idea. She was then working at CIA headquarters in an undercover role on weapons of mass destruction. She had previously worked overseas in an undercover role, both under diplomatic cover and without it. When working under non-official cover (NOC), she had sometimes used a phony name. Because she was in a covert role, disclosure of her identity could jeopardize agents she had recruited, leading the countries they had betrayed to investigate them as spies. Moreover, if her name were disclosed, she likely could not continue in covert work.
Novak's source did not tell him that Plame was working undercover and likely was not aware she was. Most people outside the intelligence world are not tuned into the distinction. However, the fact that Wilson made himself a lightening rod for attacks on the Bush administration made it more likely that his wife's employment might start to circulate in Washington.
Before running the story, Novak called a CIA official and said he would be referring in his column to Wilson's wife. The official told Novak that using her name might create "difficulties" if she traveled abroad. He asked him not to name her. Novak did so anyway.
When the column appeared in July, the CIA prepared a report to the Justice Department, as it is required to do whenever classified information is disclosed. About once a week, the CIA makes such a report, prepared by a low-level lawyer in the counsel's office.
Because the report is supposed to include data on how widely known the information was and what impact its disclosure would have, the CIA did not send the Justice Department all the pertinent information until late September. The Justice Department opened an investigation into the leak on Sept. 26. After notification was sent to the intelligence committees on the Hill, Democrats tipped off the press that the Justice Department was investigating a leak from the White House. Democrats and the media then clamored for appointment of a special counsel to investigate the leak.
Now that Plame was outed, Wilson and the Democrats claimed that the White House leaked her name to Novak in retribution for Wilson's attacks on Bush. Democrats said Bush was trying to stifle dissent and compared the leak to Watergate abuses.
Lost in the controversy was that the real culprit was Novak. If asked by the CIA not to use an officer's name, virtually everyone in the media would abide by the request. The CIA makes such a request about a dozen times a year, and only once in recent memory has a journalist — David Wise for his book on FBI traitor Robert Hanssen — failed to honor that request. There was no legitimate reason to use Plame's name. The CIA had not engaged in any wrongdoing or abuse. Nor did using her name add anything to Novak's piece. Yet virtually no one in the media pointed out that, while the source should not have disclosed her name, Novak was the only person who clearly was on notice that identifying Plame would be damaging. In this case, it was Novak rather than the source who was most to blame for the compromise.
Having taken on the Bush White House, Wilson became a media darling. He and Plame showed up at parties given by Campbell Brown of NBC and by Washington Post Vice President Ben Bradlee and his wife Sally Quinn, a Post reporter. At one event, Wilson became emotional when addressing his wife's exposure.
"I'm sorry for that," he said, looking at her and fighting back tears. "If I could give you back your anonymity, I would do it in a minute."
She sat quietly, wiping away a tear, as her husband added, "Frankly, frog-marching is too good for those who decided that their political agenda was more important than either American national security or your life."
It made good copy, but their claims to have been victimized by the Bush White House were destroyed when they agreed to be photographed sitting in their Jaguar for the January 2004 issue of Vanity Fair. Wilson claimed that the fact that his 40-year-old wife wore sunglasses and a scarf disguised her. But anyone she had dealt with overseas could clearly recognize her.
"The pictures should not be able to identify her, or are not supposed to," Wilson told Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post. "She's still not going to answer any questions, and there will not be any pictures that compromise her." The reason, he said, was that "she's still employed" by the CIA and "has obligations to her employer."
In fact, the CIA never would have given her permission to appear in a photograph. No doubt because of that, she never asked. Agency officials were stunned.
The press pounced on Bush over the leak but gave Plame and Wilson a pass. Not only had Wilson and Plame subverted their own posturing as victims of the Bush White House, they had undermined the integrity of the CIA's clandestine program to collect intelligence using covert officers. If a CIA officer took so lightly her duty to remain in a clandestine role, it could make agents leery of risking their lives to provide intelligence to other CIA officers trying to recruit them.
What's more, "They risked undermining any possible criminal prosecution by their public statements and appearances," said John L. Martin, who, as chief of the Justice Department's counter-espionage section, was in charge of supervising leak investigations. "The scarf and the sunglasses worn in the Vanity Fair picture were a sham."
Yet the only editorial criticizing Wilson's and Plame's conspicuous hypocrisy appeared in the Boston Herald.
"They say opposites attract, but former diplomat Joseph Wilson and his wife, CIA operative Valerie Plame, are the exception to that rule," the editorial said. "These two phonies make the perfect couple."
Lights Out,
Mike
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