…why is Judy Miller in jail? She can’t be protecting Rove as a source if Rove has been outed by Time’s Matt Cooper and if he signed a waiver freeing her to talk, which he did. Therefore, whatever source she is protecting isn’t Karl Rove. So who is it?
She knows. Her bosses at the NYT know. And they know that fingering her real source would probably lift some of the burden off of Rove…
A damn good question… One we’re not likely to get the answer to, unfortunately…
Of course, you have to wonder if this really matters at all, seeing as Ms. Plame, who plastered her mug all over any camera that would come near her after the outing that supposedly endangered her life, gave up the goods on what she did for a living to, for all intents and purposes, a stranger during their fourth date in the midst of some teenage petting and fondling.
“Meeting in Paris, London and Brussels, [the relationship between Plame and Wilson] got very serious, very quickly. On the third or fourth date, he says, they were in the middle of a ‘heavy make-out’ session when she said she had something to tell him.”
At that point Wilson told VF that his undercover enamorata interrupted their tryst and came clean.
“She was, she explained, undercover in the CIA,” VF said. Wilson told the magazine that the revelation “did nothing to dampen my ardour. My only question was: Is your name really Valerie?”
Sorry, but something’s rotten in this story, and it ain’t some mythical Rove leak.
Like why is Wilson out there defending Judith Miller’s right to keep her source a secret? Bryan makes a great point in his piece (based on what John Podhoretz wrote) that if someone had endangered your super-secret top-clearance hiding-in-the-bushes CIA operative wife’s life, would you defend their right to not disclose who risked her life?
I’d personally show up at her door with a gun and pound it until she told me, at which point, I’d find the bastard who did it and kick his/her/its ass.
Then there’s the question of why Rove is under heavier fire for telling the truth to Matt Cooper (as recounted in the Newsweek story last week) than Joe Wilson is for being a filthy politically motivated liar…
Democrats and most of the Beltway press corps are baying for Karl Rove’s head over his role in exposing a case of CIA nepotism involving Joe Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame. On the contrary, we’d say the White House political guru deserves a prize–perhaps the next iteration of the “Truth-Telling” award that The Nation magazine bestowed upon Mr. Wilson before the Senate Intelligence Committee exposed him as a fraud.
For Mr. Rove is turning out to be the real “whistleblower” in this whole sorry pseudo-scandal. He’s the one who warned Time’s Matthew Cooper and other reporters to be wary of Mr. Wilson’s credibility. He’s the one who told the press the truth that Mr. Wilson had been recommended for the CIA consulting gig by his wife, not by Vice President Dick Cheney as Mr. Wilson was asserting on the airwaves. In short, Mr. Rove provided important background so Americans could understand that Mr. Wilson wasn’t a whistleblower but was a partisan trying to discredit the Iraq War in an election campaign. Thank you, Mr. Rove.
The WSJ really nails it home here:
The same can’t be said for Mr. Wilson, who first “outed” himself as a CIA consultant in a melodramatic New York Times op-ed in July 2003. At the time he claimed to have thoroughly debunked the Iraq-Niger yellowcake uranium connection that President Bush had mentioned in his now famous “16 words” on the subject in that year’s State of the Union address.
Mr. Wilson also vehemently denied it when columnist Robert Novak first reported that his wife had played a role in selecting him for the Niger mission. He promptly signed up as adviser to the Kerry campaign and was feted almost everywhere in the media, including repeat appearances on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and a photo spread (with Valerie) in Vanity Fair.
But his day in the political sun was short-lived. The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report last July cited the note that Ms. Plame had sent recommending her husband for the Niger mission. “Interviews and documents provided to the Committee indicate that his wife, a CPD [Counterproliferation Division] employee, suggested his name for the trip,” said the report.
The same bipartisan report also pointed out that the forged documents Mr. Wilson claimed to have discredited hadn’t even entered intelligence channels until eight months after his trip. And it said the CIA interpreted the information he provided in his debrief as mildly supportive of the suspicion that Iraq had been seeking uranium in Niger.
About the same time, another inquiry headed by Britain’s Lord Butler delivered its own verdict on the 16 words: “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.”
In short, Joe Wilson hadn’t told the truth about what he’d discovered in Africa, how he’d discovered it, what he’d told the CIA about it, or even why he was sent on the mission. The media and the Kerry campaign promptly abandoned him, though the former never did give as much prominence to his debunking as they did to his original accusations. But if anyone can remember another public figure so entirely and thoroughly discredited, let us know.
As I said, this case stinks. Leftists the world over can hang their hat on Wilson’s honesty and integrity if they want to. I think it does a great job of illustrating their “get Bush at all costs no matter what” attitude. First it was Trent Lott, whose comments about the late Strom Thurmond pale in comparison to some of the whoppers from Patti Murray, Hillary Clinton, and Dick Durbin. Then it was the Tom DeLay “ethics violations,” the investigation of which was halted after congress sheeple realized that every single one of them had a closet full of skeletons (particularly Democrat leader Harry “Bush is a Loser” Reid).
Joe Wilson is an utterly discredited liar. Valerie Plame, for all her distress over her name being outed has done absolutely nothing to lay low since then (witness the Vanity Fair layout with her mug all over it). Odd behavior for someone who realized their life was in danger. Even odder reactions from Wilson. He wanted Rove “frogmarched out of the oval office in handcuffs” because he was so mad. He just “knew” it was Rove who outted his precious “I’ll tell you while I grope you” wife’s identity.
But here’s Miller with the actual information he needs to find out once and for sure who, as he put it, endangered his wife’s life, and yet he defends her right to keep the leaker a secret.
Maybe he’s the one who leaked her name in the first place?