How Absurd is the Plame Episode?

2005-11-01 -- The law against "outing" a covert CIA operative requires that the operative had worked covertly (undercover) within the previous five years. Valerie Plame had not worked covertly since 1997, six years before her name was allegedly "leaked" to a reporter. Why, then, was the leak investigation even started, let alone allowed to run for two years? By definition, the violation of law that was supposedly being investigated could not have possibly occurred! Oh, but the mainstream media somehow managed to miss that fact. And that's just the start of the absurdity of this infamous little episode.

Valerie Plame worked a desk job at Langley and is on record having contributed to Al Gore's Presidential campaign. Her husband, Joe Wilson, is a well-known Democratic activist who had contributed regularly to Democratic campaigns. Plame had recommended her husband for a mission to Niger to investigate alleged Iraqi attempts to obtain uranium "yellowcake" there. (Wilson had denied that his wife helped him get the job, but a memo from her recommending him eventually surfaced.) Wilson then went public and wrote a controversial article in the New York Times claiming to have discredited the Bush Administration on the matter and arguing that Bush had lied about it to justify the war in Iraq.

What's wrong with this picture, folks? Well, for starters, isn't the CIA supposed to work for the President? So why did they send someone to Niger and then let him go public with his personal "findings" without approval from the President? Oh, we don't want CIA intelligence to be "politicized" now, do we. So just let partisan Democratic activists run their own private little "family" investigation, then go public with results "discrediting" the President -- without running the results by him privately first! Now that's not "politicizing" anything, is it! Imagine that an activist Republican couple had tried to pull something like that on a Democratic President. That would be the scandal the mainstream media would be focusing on like a laser beam -- and rightly so!

And what a brilliant setup it was! Think about it. When the Administration tried to find out who this guy was who was "discrediting" them in the NYT, they discovered that he had been sent by his wife, who openly drives to Langley everyday to work for the CIA. Now, let's try to figure out what the Administration was supposed to do. Apparently they were supposed to ignore the "elephant in the living room" and simply pretend that Plame didn't exist. The "outing" law, by the way, also requires that the violator know that the operative is covert. And they were supposed to somehow "know" that supposed "fact" even though she hadn't worked undercover for six years!

Is the Plame episode absurd enough yet? Wait, there's more. The mainstream media forgot to mention that Wilson's supposed "discrediting" of the Niger story was itself discredited by a bipartisan Congressional Panel. And what about the famous sixteen words in Bush's 2003 State of the Union Address, in which he had the audacity to mention that British Intelligence had warned of Iraq trying to obtain uranium in Niger. Bush was pilloried in the mainstream media for this supposed "lie," and hysterical extremists went so far as to call for his impeachment over it. The only minor problem for them is that the statement was, and is, absolutely true. British Intelligence later corroborated the veracity of Bush's statement and even said that they still stood by their original claim. But even if their intelligence had been wrong, Bush's reference to it would still have been absolutely true. Have you noticed, by the way, that those who routinely call Bush a liar are usually, if not always, lying themselves?

The Plame saga would be laughable if it weren't being so blatantly exploited by the media to tarnish the Bush Administration. The media spin that Bush's evil henchmen "outed" poor Valerie Plame to exact retribution on her husband is a pathetic joke. Yet stories have appeared all over the mainstream media promulgating this baloney as evidence of Bush's supposedly "dirty" tactics. And most of the general public is so confused by all the misinformation and the lack of real information that an alarming percentage of them are buying into this nonsense.

That is the Democratic and Leftist strategy, of course: a lie repeated often enough may eventually stick. Many of Bush's political enemies were desperately hoping that this absurd little episode would end in their Watergate-style salvation. It is hard to imagine how desperate and misled one must be to cling to such a notion.

RussP.us