THE PLAME AFFAIR: DAMAGE CONTROL ROUNDUP….I don’t know whether to be surprised at conservative reaction to the Plame affair or not. They’ve definitely circled the wagons, and their main lines of defense seem to be these:
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Lots of parsing of Robert Novak’s original column. However, the entire scandal is now based on more recent evidence. Novak’s column doesn’t matter anymore
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Novak’s statement today that Plame wasn’t a covert operator. But again, we already know that Plame was (is) a “case officer in the CIA’s clandestine service.” What Novak says doesn’t matter anymore.
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Novak again: the White House didn’t call him, he called them. This really doesn’t matter either: the “senior officials” still volunteered the information about Plame, regardless of who made the calls. What’s more, we also know that these officials did call several other reporters.
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Washington insiders already knew that Plame worked for the CIA. Maybe, although that hardly justifies spreading it around to half a dozen reporters in an effort to make sure that everyone in the world finds out. Besides, if it was common knowledge, why systematically call a bunch of journalist insiders to let them know?
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Maybe the leakers didn’t know Plame was covert. I guess that’s possible, and if it’s true it means they were just ignorant rather than felonious. But these are senior people we’re talking about, and they know better. You don’t blab about CIA agents to the press. Period.
(In any case, the general line that maybe this isn’t really such a big deal has already been scuttled from the very top by Scott McClellan, who said this morning that the president believes that “leaking classified information, particularly of this nature, is a very serious matter” and that anyone who did this would be fired “at a minimum.” So it’s a big deal.)
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The whole thing doesn’t make sense. Maybe not, but it seems to have happened anyway.
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Joseph Wilson might not be entire trustworthy. Perhaps, and he certainly has his own agenda. But the facts speak for themselves, so Wilson himself really doesn’t matter.
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Democrats are so gleeful over this that it therefore shouldn’t be taken seriously. Or, alternately, it’s just internecine warfare within the administration, and therefore shouldn’t be taken seriously. Obviously, this is just a desperate ad hominem designed to change the subject.
All in all, this is a pretty disappointing performance from people who claim to take national security seriously.
The bottom line remains pretty much the same: A couple of top Bush administration officials blabbed about a clandestine CIA operative to the press in order to try to discredit her husband, and now they’re covering it up. Either you think that’s OK or you don’t. I don’t.
POSTSCRIPT: So what remains? Two main things: understanding Plame’s real role at the CIA, and figuring out who the two leakers were.
Based on some emails I’ve gotten, I suspect that Plame was a pretty serious undercover operator, although perhaps some years in the past. And there are too many people who know the names of the leakers for that to stay secret very much longer.
It might be a couple of days or a couple of weeks, but both of these questions are going to be answered. When they are, the Bush loyalists peddling the excuses above are going to have to put up or shut up.
