The Waterkooler

Novack Curses, walks off set at CNN
The latest: Novack calls ex CIA official liar

The Story: Smoke and Mirrors. The Game: Get Karl Rove

WELL, of course, Karl Rove did it. He may not have violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, with its high threshold of criminality for outing a covert agent, but there's no doubt he trashed Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame. We know this not only because of Matt Cooper's e-mail, but also because of Mr. Rove's own history. Trashing is in his nature, and bad things happen, usually through under-the-radar whispers, to decent people (and their wives) who get in his way.

That is part of the commentary we hear from the Left Wing (a.k.a. Jackass) Party these days... Thank you Frank Rich. Now, it is no secret that the Jackasses like to victimize criminals and n'er do wells and that is exactly how Mr. Rich and the Left want you to view the insidiously deceitful Joseph Wilson - as a victim. Moreover, they want you to believe that this "plot" was "hatched" from the oval office.

"Bad things happen to decent people" ?? Please. (Talk about trashing people).

So, let me get this straight... in this fairy tale of Mr. Rich's, the "bad thing" is that the truth was told and the decent person is the guy who was lying to reporters.

A Pack of Lies
Look, Wilson lied about the administration sending him to Niger and he lied about what he found there by insisting that he found evidence that the President was lying about uranium. But the Senate Intelligence Committee caught him in this lie.

In fact, the Intelligence Committee report said that "for most analysts" Wilson's trip to Niger "lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal."

So he was lying. This is no surprise, since his book is full of partisan lies (want to guess which party Wilson gives his money to, which Presidential candidate he worked for? - by the way, Kerry fired him because he was such a kook!).

Lie #1
Wilson's main lie was that the Bush admininstration knowingly lied, or misled, the public about Iraq's attempts or desires to obtain uranium from Niger. This has been debunked again and again.

Reports by two official investigations -- Britain's Butler Commission and the Senate intelligence committee -- demonstrated that Mr. Wilson's portrayal of himself as a whistle-blower was unwarranted. It turned out his report to the CIA had not altered, and may even have strengthened, the agency's conclusion that Iraq had explored uranium purchases from Niger. Moreover, his account had not reached Vice President Cheney or any other senior official. According to the Butler Commission, led by an independent jurist, the assertion about African uranium included in Mr. Bush's State of the Union speech was "well-founded."

The Butler Report affirmed what the British government had said about the Niger uranium story back in 2003, and specifically endorsed what Bush said as well.

Butler Report: By extension, we conclude also that the statement in President Bush’s State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003 that “The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa” was well-founded.

Lie #2
So, on top of that lie, comes another lie, about who sent Wilson to Niger. Reporters were told that Ms. Plame recommended Mr. Wilson for the Niger trip -- a fact denied by Mr. Wilson but subsequently confirmed by the Senate investigation.

Enter Karl the Rove
This is where Rove comes in. He simply corrected a reporter who Wilson had lied to, by saying that in fact it was Wilson's wife, an employee of the CIA, who sent him to Niger, not Dick Cheney. The Wall Street Journal thinks Rove should be given an award for this.

Instead, the Jackasses want to use the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 to indict Rove. Sorry Jackasses, but we spoke to the author of that law, Victoria Toensing, and she assures us that Rove did not come anywhere near a violation. Meanwhile, the White House waits upon the grand jury to come to their decision. (The smart money is on innocent, by the way.)

In Conlusion - Monty Python
So what do we have here? Rove corrected a reporter who was about to publish one of Wilson's many kooky lies. Wow. What a scandal. Only the hatred of the Left and the blood thirst of the media could dream up something so big out of so little. Even the Washington Post editorial thinks this is much ado about nothing.

You can hardly blame them, though. If I were a brain-damaged fiction writer with an overwhelming hatred of George W. Bush and someone handed me a story with the words "CIA," "Karl Rove" and "lies" in the first paragraph... well, who knows what I might start blathering about.

Doesn't the whole thing sound like some silly put-on from a Monty Python episode?

Don't believe the hype. Read the facts here.

Review the facts about the Senate Intelligence Committee report and the Butler Report here.

Read the actual Butler Report here.

More articles here.

Oh, and there seems to still be all this talk of Valerie being an undercover agent...

For the Record: the myth that the Intelligence Identities Protection Act was violated in the Plame case began to unravel in October 2003, when New York Times scribe Nicholas Kristof revealed that she abandoned her covert role a full nine years before the Novak column.

Wikepedia

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Was Plame a covert agent?

The case is clouded by reckoning on the covert status of Valerie Plame when the leak occurred. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) called for an FBI probe 10 days after the July 13, 2003 column by Robert Novak identified her as an agent. A Chicago native and appointed special prosecutor, Patrik Fitzgerald took over the case 19 months ago. That the case continues today says something in itself.

Critics of the investigation believe the case is overblown because it was widely known in Washington social power circles that Plame worked for the CIA.

A MediaMatters report on the widely publicized quote by Joseph Wilson, who said, "My wife was not a clandestine officer... ", was misconstrued by the press.

BLITZER: But the other argument that's been made against you is that you've sought to capitalize on this extravaganza, having that photo shoot with your wife [in the January 2004 Vanity Fair magazine], who was a clandestine officer of the CIA, and that you've tried to enrich yourself writing this book and all of that.

What do you make of those accusations, which are serious accusations, as you know, that have been leveled against you?

WILSON: My wife was not a clandestine officer the day that Bob Novak blew her identity.

BLITZER: But she hadn't been a clandestine officer for some time before that?

WILSON: That's not anything that I can talk about. And, indeed, I'll go back to what I said earlier, the CIA believed that a possible crime had been committed, and that's why they referred it to the Justice Department.

In the full context of the above CNN Wolf Blitzer Reports televised broadcast, Wilson was responding to mean that after Robert Novak's column ran, his wife was no longer a clandestine officer. The Vanity Fair coverage given Wilson with wife Plame was a result of the publicity that ensued from the column written by Novack. The photo shoots did not occur before the disclosure, they came in January 2004.

The Associated Press reported the Wilson-Blitzer interview as follows:

...CNN Thursday before the latest revelation, Wilson kept up his criticism of the White House, saying [White House senior adviser Karl] Rove's conduct was an "outrageous abuse of power ... certainly worthy of frog-marching out of the White House."

But at the same time, Wilson acknowledged his wife was no longer in an undercover job at the time Novak's column first identified her. "My wife was not a clandestine officer the day that Bob Novak blew her identity," he said.

Federal law prohobits goverment [sic] officials from divulging the identity...

Media outlets followed the AP lead with their own reporting that mirrored AP report.