The Plame Game
I've written twice in the last few weeks (here then here) about allegations that "senior" Bush administration officials exposed a covert CIA agent named Valeria Plame in order to intimidate her husband, Joseph Wilson, who was the author of the report that said Iraq hadn't tried to buy uranium from the small African nation of Niger. And I've said that it is "increasingly clear" that it is Wilson who was doing the most to expose his wife, seeing as he was all over the teevee talking about her - and that the original news article by columnist Robert Novak that is being cited as proof that "senior" administration officials outed Ms. Plame in fact neither reveals that she was a covert operative nor says that senior Bush administration officials gave Novak her name and CIA employment information.

Now, it seems, the Left's best blogger is as much as admitting that Plame wasn't all that covert. And, it seems, the Left's best blogger has learned the details of Plame's CIA work from unnamed sources and revealed it. The facts are that Ms. Plame was not a deep-cover CIA operative, and Josh Marshall, author of the Talking Points Memo blog, had no trouble finding out the details of her CIA position.

Marshall, writing in his weekly column in The Hill, a newspaper that covers Capitol Hill:

My sources tell me that Plame formerly worked abroad under nonofficial cover and has more recently worked stateside. Her position today may be less sensitive than it was when she worked abroad. But she still works on WMD proliferation issues. And, at a minimum, any operation that she may once have been involved in is probably now fatally compromised, any company which provided her cover is now exposed.

Of course, that last sentence is Marshall's conjecture - the interesting part is the news that Plame was not a deep-cover agent, and that Marshall was able to get the information easily from "sources" and publish it. Funny - Novak learns of Plame's CIA work from some source - he says it was "government" officials, NOT administration officials - and publishes it, and the Left's scandalbloggers go into full scandal-hype mode. Josh Marshall does it and, nary a word.

Perhaps that's because Marshall repeats the scandal-perpetuating lie in his Hill column, when he says We know that two senior members of the Bush administration intentionally blew the cover of an undercover CIA officer whose job is combating weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferation. And their motivation was pure politics. Marshall repeats the lie that others have by carefully misquoting Novak's original column. Novak never says "senior administration officials" told him where Ms. Plame worked. He simply states the information with no source. He then says "senior administration officials" told him she suggested the CIA send her husband to Niger to determine the truth of the Iraq story.

Novak's words were subsequently twisted by David Corn, a left-wing writer for the very left-wing magazine The Nation, into the charge that Bush administration officials had "outed" Plame. As I wrote here on July 23:

Corn, conspicuously, does not quote Novak's entire paragraph anywhere his piece - and Corn's piece is the foundational article of the entire "scandal." Corn does assert that Novak told him that "government officials" told him of Plame's real job, but it is telling that the words Corn said Novak uses are "government officials," which could be virtually anyone in the government.

Bottom line of this non-scandal: it is Wilson and now Marshall that have done the most to reveal details of Plame's CIA work, and it is Corn who tried to create a scandal by twisting the words of Novak. No wonder the mainstream media hasn't picked the ball up and run with it - there's not much there.