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Whiny and Inaccurate Self-Pleading
by Gordon S. Jones
Former Ambassador Joe Wilson, wife of Valerie Plame, subject of a supposed White House leak, has published in the Los Angeles Times an extended attack on indicted White House aide Scooter Libby. Others personally closer to the Wilson/Plame kerfuffle will no doubt write to the Los Angeles Times to correct the factual errors in his diatribe, but since readers in Utah may not have ready access to those letters, I thought I would sketch out just a few of them off the top of my head:
- Valerie Plame’s secret was not “known only to me, her parents and her brother.” If that were the case, one of those four would have to have been the leaker, not Scooter Libby. Actually, Plame’s identity was widely known in Washington to analysts and reporters working in the area of weapons of mass destruction. Several (Hugh Sidey being perhaps the best known) have reported that they knew it.
- President Bush did not claim in his State of the Union speech “that Iraq had attempted to purchase significant quantities of Uranium in Africa.” He said that British intelligence had made that claim. Not at all the same thing. Thus, Bush’s statement was true when he made it and it will always be true, because British intelligence did make that claim. Whether the Brits were correct or not is a separate question. To this day they maintain that they were correct.
- And Mr. Wilson’s initial report to the CIA after his return from Africa tended to confirm the accuracy of the British claim. Though he never filed a formal report, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that what he discovered there was corroborative of the British claim.
- In fact, it was only after he had gone to work for the John Kerry presidential campaign that he published in the New York Times his attack on the president’s (actually the British) position.
- It may be true that the CIA continues to deny that Plame suggested her husband for the Niger yellowcake investigation, but the Senate Intelligence Committee found the documentary evidence that she had done so, and published it.
- In any event, how is it defaming (“character assassination”) to either Wilson or Plame to reveal that she worked for the CIA and that she had recommended him to investigate the yellowcake story? Both statements are true, so Wilson must consider it a bad thing to work for the CIA. Surprising that he married her, under the circumstances.
- While we’re here, let’s deal with the crime Fitzgerald was designated to investigate, the divulgence of the identity of a covert agent. Wilson doesn’t underline the point, but Libby was not indicted for such a crime, and neither was anyone else. Nor is anyone ever likely to be, for the simple reason that Valerie Plame was not a covert agent at the time of the leak and (if Wilson’s own book is to be believed) had not been for the five year period preceding the leak, which is what the law requires.
Wilson may in fact believe that the leak was a “cheap political payback…not just to punish me but to intimidate other critics as well,” but that is an assertion, not a fact. Just as plausible is the idea that the White House was warning reporters not to place too much reliance on a notoriously inaccurate and biased source. Good advice, as it turns out.
I can understand Wilson’s disappointment at not getting the indictment he was so counting on, but it cannot be allowed to justify this whiny and inaccurate self-pleading. Wilson disagrees with the president about the wisdom of going to war with Iraq. So do a lot of us. But our disagreements about the policy cannot justify playing fast and loose with the facts, as Wilson does here, all while accusing Bush and company of the crime he himself is guilty of.
Posted by windley on November 2, 2005 05:35 PM
