The hornets’ nest has been kicked over
Pejman put together a great post on the Wilson/Plame/Nigerian affair that came out months ago but now has caught the attention of the mainstream broadcast media. (Score another one for the Blogosphere.) Drudge has a statement made by Bob Novak on who didn’t leak the information to him:
Clifford May wrote in the National Review Online that he knew about Plame’s identity before Novak wrote the initial story on the matter.
On July 11, I wrote a piece for NRO arguing that Mr. Wilson had no basis for that conclusion — and that his political leanings and associations (not disclosed by the Times and others journalists interviewing him) cast serious doubt on his objectivity.
On July 14, Robert Novak wrote a column in the Post and other newspapers naming Mr. Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA operative.
That wasn’t news to me. I had been told that — but not by anyone working in the White House. Rather, I learned it from someone who formerly worked in the government and he mentioned it in an offhand manner, leading me to infer it was something that insiders were well aware of.
The Middle East Institute’s page on Wilson has this as its last sentence:
Her name was out there for a while, it seems.
Charles links to Calpundit where you can find numerous posts from the other side of the political spectrum than the White House’s.
Daniel Drezner’s got a good point on a posting on the matter:
CIA lawyers followed up the notification this month by answering 11 questions from the Justice Department, affirming that the woman’s identity was classified, that whoever released it was not authorized to do so and that the news media would not have been able to guess her identity without the leak, the senior officials said.
The CIA response to the questions, which is itself classified, said there were grounds for a criminal investigation, the sources said.
The question is, who did it? Maybe it was a high-ranking White House official, maybe not. At this point, however, there’s no evidence that Rove had anything to do with this.
There’s still a lot of smoke at this point — but I don’t see a fire just yet.
My thoughts: The CIA’s not going to do anything that makes itself look bad. By deflecting attention away from itself to the White House, it looks better. It’s happened before in the current administration. In “Breakdown,” bill Gertz talks about the CIA leak to the media that President Bush received, in a President’s Daily Brief, word that Osama bin Laden might consider airliners as a means of attacking targets. The media runs with it and the CIA’s able to escape serious inspection of its failings pre-September 11.
I think in light of the Agency’s inability to reform itself post-9-11, it should be of no surprise that the CIA and the White House aren’t in step when it comes to questions of the Agency’s actions. It’s my opinion that the attitude attributed to the CIA by Gertz, “We may not always be right, but we’re never wrong,” is coming out in the Wilson/Plane Nigeria affair. I would look at the CIA more than I would the White House. That’s my hunch.
More: Donald Luskin is also thinking the CIA’s the one’s to be looking at. Megan McArdle’s got a great point on it. (Link via Instapundit)
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Me too.