I haven’t written much about the Plame/Rove affair, mostly because it seems to me much ado about absolutely nothing at all. However, after reading the Washington Post’s Friday lead editorial today, I think there’s something that needs to be said.
What needs to be said is that if newspapers are going to opine on the story, they need to at least be accurate and consistent.
After a brief introduction to l’affaire Plame the paper gets to the heart of the matter. Unfortunately, it gets the heart wrong.
That brings us to this year’s dust-up, which concerns whether Mr. Rove or other administration officials should be held culpable for leaking to journalists the fact that Mr. Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent.
No, it doesn’t. The “dust-up” concerns whether Karl Rove revealed that Valerie Plame was, in fact a covert agent. Those are the people who get the protection of the law in question. Now, perhaps the paper assumes that when it says “agent”, we understand it to mean “covert operative” but the editors should not make that assumption. The law is very precise and this editorial should be also. Saying that Rove possibly “outed” an “agent” implies that a law was broken, which, according to all the public evidence thus far, did not happen. Valerie Plame was not covert for at leat five years, since she moved back to the States and began working every day at CIA Headquarters in Langley, VA in 1997.
I feel confident saying that because the Post itself asserted that very thing.
Does that come as a bit of a surprise? It ought to, considering this editorial, which tells us quite explicitly that Plame’s covert status is in question in their minds.
Whether Mr. Rove or others behaved in a way that amounted to criminal, malicious or even merely sleazy behavior will turn on what they knew about Ms. Plame’s employment. Were they aware she was a covert agent? Did they recklessly fail to consider that before revealing her involvement? How they learned about Ms. Plame also will matter: Did the information come from government sources or outside parties?
It may be that Mr. Rove, or someone else, will turn out to be guilty of deliberately leaking Ms. Plame’s identity, knowing that it would blow her cover.
Note the places I emphasized. The editors are quite sure, here at least, that Plame was, at the time of the “leak”, a covert agent (and why did it take until the next to last paragraph to use the word “covert”, considering what I already noted?). But the paper took quite a different opinion in March of this year when it, alog with 35 other news oarganization, filed an amici brief with the US District Court arguing that no law was violated.
One of the reasons cited in the brief is that no law was broken because Plame had not been a covert operative for the CIA anytime in the required five years. The brief asserts, on Page 7:
She [Plame] worked a desk job at CIA Headquarters where she could be seen traveling to and from, and active at, Langley. She had been residing in Washington – not stationed abroad – for a number of years.
Given that the newspaper made this assertion less than four months ago, why do they assert exactly the opposite thing now? Have the editors changed their minds, and if they have, have they withdrawn the name of their newspaper from the brief?
Or are they just being disingenuous?
Before you answer that, let me point you to an article that appeared in the Post on October 4, 2003 that tells us how Plame outed herself and a CIA-owned “front company” that, to that point, wasn’t known as such. She actually filed an FEC form (available to the public, which is how the paper got it) declaring a campaign contribution on which she used her married name – Valerie E. Wilson – and listed her employer as the “front company”.
Now that was in 1999 which doesn’t quite make the five-year threshold the law requires, but isn’t it something that the editors ought to have known before they made the assertion that Plame was “covert”? I’d certainly think so. They are, after all, the big and important editors there.
Again, I have to ask: what changed their minds about Plame’s covert status, or were they just trying to slick one by us yesterday?
I suspect it is just that they have very little regard for the truth. Everybody talks that way, so they just assume it is so.
And Bush knowing that it wasn’t a crime appointed a special procsecutor and promised retribution because…? He was just so intimidated by those mean ol’ liberal media?
I don’t know that the President appointed Fitzgerald – I think it may have been the Justice Department that did that. I could be wrong about that.
I’m not sure what your point is, Jeff. My post points out that the Post write as if they had no clue whether there was a crime here or not, when they already sworn to an opinion in a court document.
Regardless of your position on this, you have to admit that the paper’s not being very honest.
Guess Who Wrote This?
It’s time to play, “Guess The Author!”, with your host, CQ. Here’s how we play. I will give a quote about the Plame/Rove leak investigation, and readers have to guess who wrote it and when. The prize for guessing correctly…
[...] As I wrote at the time, Plame and her husband were doing a pretty good job in 2003 of making themselves quite known to anyone who was even passingly familiar with accessing public records and searching the Internet even before Novak’s column. Any enemy of this country who wanted to know who Valerie Plame was would have been able to easily figure out that she was doing something secret for the CIA, considering that they could find that she worked for a dummy company, she drove to Langley every single day, and that Aldrich Ames had already burned her as a covert operative in the 1990s. [...]