Dead Horse Alert

Well here we go again.

An unclassified summary of outed CIA officer Valerie Plame’s employment history at the spy agency, disclosed for the first time today in a court filing by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, indicates that Plame was “covert” when her name became public in July 2003.

The summary is part of an attachment to Fitzgerald’s memorandum to the court supporting his recommendation that I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Cheney’s former top aide, spend 2-1/2 to 3 years in prison for obstructing the CIA leak investigation.

The nature of Plame’s CIA employment never came up in Libby’s perjury and obstruction of justice trial.

The reason the subject never came up is because Fitzgerald knew, during the trial, that it wasn’t Libby that allegedly “outed” Plame. It was Colin Powell’s right hand man, and staunch opponent of the President, Richard Armitage.

That was one reason that Fitzgerald couldn’t prosecute anyone for allegedly “outing” Plame. the other reason, as Ed Morrissey points out, is that in order to prosecute someone under the applicable law the VIA had to be affirmatively attempting to protect the person’s convert status. Says Morrissey:

Plame drove into the office in Langley. She traveled abroad under her own name. She helped arrange for her husband to do some fact-checking on a sensitive intelligence matter. Her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, then came home and leaked his observations to two nationally-known journalists, and then wrote his own op-ed in the New York Times under his byline.

And her husband managed to list her in Who’s Who, where any journalist could look up the entry — and where Robert Novak did just that.

If that’s keeping an agent covert, it speaks volumes about the agency’s competence during the George Tenet years.

Folks, that’s not “taking affirmative measures” anything. Plame’s employment was, in the words of Andrea Mitchell” “widely known among those of us who cover the intelligence community”. Let us also not forget that she revealed her employment with the CIA to Joseph Wilson on their third date.

It’s not as if she or the CIA were working hard at all to keep her connection with the Agency secret at all.

But, let’s assume they were. Let’s assume that Valerie Plame was a covert agent whose identity was being actively kept secret by everyone involved. Lewis Libby still could not be prosecuted for leaking her identity because RICHARD ARMITAGE ALREADY CONFESSED THAT HE DID IT. MSNBC does it’s good turn for partisan journalism by mentioning Armitage only as one of a group and by never mentioning that he admitted that he was the leaker to the Department of Justice in 2003.

Anything to keep on stirring a long-empty pot, I guess.

(via memeorandum)

UPDATE: On a related note, looks like Plame may have been doing some industrial-strength perjuring of her own. I wonder if Fitzgerald will get nearly as excited about these allegations.

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Category: Oh, THAT liberal media., President George Bush