Well, Knock Me Over With A Feather!

by hilzoy

Valerie Plame Wilson was a covert agent all along:

"An unclassified summary of outed CIA officer Valerie Plame's employment history at the spy agency, disclosed for the first time today in a court filing by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, indicates that Plame was "covert" when her name became public in July 2003. (...)

The unclassified summary of Plame's employment with the CIA at the time that syndicated columnist Robert Novak published her name on July 14, 2003 says, "Ms. Wilson was a covert CIA employee for who the CIA was taking affirmative measures to conceal her intelligence relationship to the United States.""

Personally, I never thought that whether Valerie Plame was covert on the day she was outed was really the point, outside of a court of law. She had been a covert agent in the past, and was entitled to assume that the government in whose service she had put herself at risk would not repay her by revealing her identity, especially not to score some cheap political point. Moreover, outing her exposed her, anyone she had had contact with, and any assets or organizations that had been used in creating her cover. It also gave other covert agents, and people they were trying to recruit, grounds to wonder whether our own government would decide to blow their covers if it thought there was something to be gained politically. Outing her was both wrong and profoundly stupid, whether she met the definition of 'covert' under the IIPA.

For some reason, though, other people seemed to think it did matter outside the courts, and went on and on about how if Plame was not actually undercover deep in the wilds of Tajikistan at the very moment she was outed, everything was somehow fine and dandy. Whatever.

The reactions on the right have been interesting. Ed Morrissey, to his credit, accepts that Plame was covert, but claims this just shows how incompetent the CIA was. As far as I can tell, PowerLine, the frontpagers at RedState, Malkin, and Hewitt have yet to mention it. Tom Maguire says this:

"Newsweek has an interesting view of the law, and the usual suspects amongst the lefty bloggers are falling in line behind it - when a prosecutor expresses an opinion in a sentencing memorandum, that is dispositive - case closed, no further questions, move on. (...)

Fitzgerald has "finally resolved" the question simply by stating his opinion! No defense brief has been filed, no judge has ruled, but Fitzgerald has spoken so it is time to move on. (...)

So, is Ms. Plame covert? We now have the belated and uncontested opinion of a prosecutor who was unwilling to argue this point previously to add to the stack of unpersuasive opinions. My official editorial position remains unchanged - we don't know, the legal work to be establish this has not been done, and we are not likely to find out."

I don't know why he says this, since Newsweek and Fitzgerald cite the declassified CIA summary (pdf) of Plame's employment status. It's not just Fitzgerald's opinion.

And then there are the true believers., like Macsmind (spelling mistakes in original):

"What you see her is a complete broadside fabrication from the rogues and nothing more. It might fool the fools of the MSM, but for those who were there and known, it’s crap pure and simple. Fitzgerald is showing more and more the partisen that he is, a poltical hack of the first order. Fact is that if this document had any authenticity to it Fitzgerald could have charged Libby under IIPA. It didn’t and he knew it."

Right.

The only reason I mention this entirely unsurprising development is to note two points. First, publius and I have recently been asked why we regard Fox News as biassed. In my case, the answer was: I click it on every now and again, and almost every time I hear something presented as fact that either isn't so, or isn't clear at all, or lacks some relevant context that would affect what people made of it. Somehow, though, the idea of slogging through a lot of Fox transcripts to try to make this case didn't really seem all that appealing, so I let it drop. Now, however, Glenn Greenwald, who is plainly made of stronger stuff, has slogged through Fox's discussions of Plame. His conclusion:

"If Fox were your principal source of news, you would believe that the proposition that Valerie Plame was not considered "covert" by the CIA was a fact so established that nobody really questioned it (...)

Imagine having risked your life to go undercover for your country as a CIA operative and then having to listen to the likes of Jonah Goldberg, Fred Barnes and company belittle your work by falsely insulting you as a "desk jockey" and acting as though you were nothing but a worthless file clerk, all in order to protect the Leader and assure his followers that they did nothing wrong. "

Second, Christy at FDL notes how often Victoria Toensing et al appeared on various news shows, in print, and before Congress asserting that Plame was not covert. (Sample, from Toensing's op ed in the WaPo: "On Dec. 30, 2003, the day Fitzgerald was appointed special counsel, he should have known (all he had to do was ask the CIA) that Plame was not covert, knowledge that should have stopped the investigation right there.") Christy asks:

"And so today, I'm calling for more honest bobbleheads. I don't think it is too much to ask that if people are going to sling information around like it is so much hash, that at the least they have some rudimentary knowledge of the veracity of its component ingredients. Otherwise, they could just be serving the general public a dish of crap, couldn't they? And, frankly, bobbleheads ought to be held to account as to whether or not the acid that comes dripping so blithely off their overly-whitened fangs is true or false."

She's right. People who get up on TV and say things that just aren't so should forfeit their credibility. TV stations, newspapers, and other media outlets should refuse to use them: the media's job, after all, is to present the facts, not to present the spin offered by all sides regardless of its veracity. If someone can be shown to have said things that were just not so, and that she ought to have known were at least open to question, she can no longer be trusted to convey facts accurately, and the media should have done with her. And we should notice which media outlets do this, since any that continue to invite someone like Victoria Toensing to comment on current events are by that fact showing us that they are not interested in whether or not the people they give a platform to are telling the truth.

Comments

[cleek]

it's bean fun gis, but l'ime having a chard thyme coming up with new puns.

besides, i yam beet.

[Dantheman]

I propose we end all this vegetable punning at a peas conference.

[rilkefan]

Jes: "I could have come up with half a dozen other examples."

You mean, old examples not relevant to the current political situation.

[Gary Farber]

"Have I mentioned lately that I really hate the captcha mechanism? Compose post, hit preview, wait. Revise, preview, wait. Post, wait, wait, squint at squiggles, enter, wait, ..."

Something like 4 out of 5 times when I'm presented with the captcha, I can't make out at least one of the letters correctly. I usually have to then try at least three times before I can post. That's pretty much the optimal reality.

Then there are times, such as a good part of yesterday, when Typepad was simply broken outright, and one could enter the correct combination 20 times, but it didn't matter.

One has to be a very dedicated commenter to comment much to ObWi.

I'm seriously inclined to suspect that it might contribute a tiny bit to the level of general crankiness, but I could be simply projecting on that.