Kuru Lounge subtitle: "Wilson Lied Faith Died"
Betsy of Betsy's Page and Tom Maguire of JustOneMinute are both commenting on today's Washington Post editorial entitled "End of an Affair, It turns out that the person who exposed CIA agent Valerie Plame was not out to punish her husband." Both are of the opinion that the "Washington Post gets it", based mainly on this quote:
Nevertheless, it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush's closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It's unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.
And I agree that quote is both damning and on the money, but what I find more important is this one specific line:
Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials.
It has been said for awhile now that the "Bush Lied" theme of Plamegate has reached the point that it is accepted as fact.. But here we have a major newspaper that has been extremely critical of the administration stating that "Bush Lied" is a lie. That is hugely important.
There are somethings that bothered me about this piece however.
First, it still implies that it was wrong of the White House to respond to a critic, even one who lies:
That's not to say that Mr. Libby and other White House officials are blameless.
Second, it istate that Vice President Cheney was careless in handling classified information, implying that such carelessness led up to the Plame affair:
Mr. Libby and his boss, Mr. Cheney, were trying to discredit Mr. Wilson; if Mr. Fitzgerald's account is correct, they were careless about handling information that was classified.
As I understand events, Vice President Cheney revealed Plame's name only to Libby. The other "classified information (NIE) that was revealed had in fact been declassified by the President.
Overall though the fact that this Op-Ed was written is a huge victory for the people who knew that Plamegate was a phony.
Lorie Byrd of Wizbang has a column at Townhall.com that also looks at this indirectly.
Others:
Previous:
Christopher Hitchen's on Richard Armitage's Plame Leak
tags: Plame, Wilson, Libby, Armitage, Fitzgerald, Rove, CIA, WMD, Plamegate, Bush, Politics
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