Bonfire Of The Insanities

Herewith, a panorama of the latest left-wing coup attempt gone wrong.

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Here's a question that Patrick Fitzgerald is going to have to answer in his prosecution of Lewis "Scooter" Libby: Precisely what justice did Libby obstruct? Or, put another way, why would he lie about a crime that was never committed?

Let us stipulate that impeding a criminal investigation is indeed a serious matter; no one should feel he can lie to a grand jury or to federal investigators. But there is a question to be asked about the end to which the accused allegedly lied. The indictment itself contains no motive. And Mr. Libby is not alleged to have been the source for Robert Novak's July 14, 2003 column, in which Valerie Plame's employment with the CIA was revealed.

Rather, according to the indictment, Mr. Libby did a little digging, found out who Joe Wilson's wife was, and apparently told Judith Miller of the New York Times, who never wrote it up, and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, who put it into print after Mr. Novak's column had run. What's more, he allegedly did not talk to Tim Russert of NBC about it, although he claimed that he had. Mr. Libby then didn't tell a grand jury and the FBI the truth about what he told those reporters, the indictment claims.

If this is a conspiracy to silence Administration critics, it was more daft than deft. The indictment itself contains no evidence of a conspiracy, and Mr. Libby has not been accused of trying to cover up some high crime or misdemeanor by the Bush Administration. The indictment amounts to an allegation that one official lied about what he knew about an underlying "crime" that wasn't committed. And we still don't know who did tell Mr. Novak - presumably, it was the soon-to-be-infamous "Official A" from paragraph 21 of the indictment, although we don't know whether Official A was Mr. Novak's primary source or merely a corroborating one. [emphases added]

Hard to prove a crime without establishing an actual existing, much less plausible, motive. Even more so when the testimony of key witnesses turns suspect. Speaking of Tim Russert, the gentles at Newsmax have turned up some questions about his version of the conservation with Mr. Libby:

NBC Washington bureau chief Tim Russert told Leakgate probers that he had no idea Joe Wilson's wife Valerie Plame was a CIA employee before her name surfaced in Robert Novak's fateful July 14, 2003 column, and that he was stunned upon learning that Lewis "Scooter" Libby claimed he got that information from him.

But an account by senior NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell raises questions about whether Mr. Russert may have known about Plame's employment well before the Novak column.

On October 3, 2003, Mitchell was a guest on CNBC's now-defunct Capital Report, where she was asked by host Alan Murray:

"Do we have any idea how widely known it was in Washington that Joe Wilson's wife worked for the CIA?"

Mitchell replied: "It was widely known among those of us who cover the intelligence community and who were actively engaged in trying to track down who among the foreign service community was the envoy to Niger. So a number of us began to pick up on that."

Mitchell's "widely known" characterization flatly contradicts assertions last Friday by Leakgate Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, who repeatedly insisted that Plame's association with the CIA "was not widely known."

But perhaps more importantly, if Plame's work was an open secret in media circles [according to Mitchell], how is it that her boss, Mr. Russert, who - as NBC Washington bureau chief was presumably monitoring developments in "the intelligence community" as they related to the Wilson story - would have been oblivious to this same "widely known" information?

In fact, according to the text of Fitzgerald's indictment, Libby's version of events more closely matches Mitchell's on the subject of who knew about Plame's employment. [emphasis added]

Don't think for a moment that Libby's defense won't bring all of this up, and send another batch of subpeonas to the same gang of extreme "journalists." Thus will the charge against P.F. Ness of criminalizing politics even in just the indictment of one White House official be inexorably vindicated.

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Say, have you thought about how Scooter Libby is facing the possibility of financial ruin and spending, in effect, the rest of his life in prison for what amounts to defending Administration policy against political attack, but Clintonoid good ol' boy Sandy Berglar, who stole and partially destroyed classified national security documents to cover up the negligent complicity of the Clinton administration in the 9/11 attacks, got off with probation and a fine of ten grand?

How about how Patrick Fitzgerald, despite "only" bringing down Mr. Libby, is now a media/Democrat hero? Wasn't it not too long ago that the Left despised special prosecutors?

CIA leak prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is celebrated by the press and Bush haters everywhere. He is hailed for his no-nonsense style, his down-to-earth Brooklyn accent, his probity, his zealousness upholding the rule of law, and his willingness to hunt down lies no matter how high it takes him in the Washington food chain. “All my friends want to date him,” a young liberal woman tells [Rich Lowry].

But the very qualities that are so endearing about a special prosecutor circa 2005 would have been damnable circa 1995. It goes to show that when you’re a special prosecutor, the quality of your work is not as important as the decade you do it in. Had Fitzgerald suffered the misfortune of being asked to investigate any of the Bill Clinton scandals, he would likely have emerged bruised and battered, with a reputation as an out-of-control fanatic.

Lowry was euphemizing. What is important is the identity and nature of the administration under investigation. As he goes on to explain, for all the lefty abuse heaped upon Ken Starr, he hardly differed in outlook, worldview, or dedication from Mr. Fitzgerald. The only significant difference between the two was that Starr was, in Kate O'Beirne's phrase, investigating the mafia while Fitzgerald was going after the boy scouts.

And we all know how much the maf....um, the liberals hate the boy scouts.

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Fortunately and blessedly, in this "scandal" the Extreme Media owns no monopoly on the "truth" and its depiction.

As Harry Reid pulls his puerile publicity stunts and Democrats try to resurrect for 2006 the very same "BUSH LIED!!!" canard that failed so spectacularly in 2004, mainstream media attention is zeroing in on the real liars in this whole affair: Joe and Valerie Wilson. And not just the whoppers "Yellowcake Joe" keeps dealing to this day about pre-war intelligence, but the very apparent prospect that the whole caper of Mrs. Wilson sending her hubby to "investigate" Saddam Hussein's attempt to purchase uranium from Niger was in reality a covert op directed not at America's enemies, but at the Democrat Party's "enemy" - the Bush White House.

Thomas Joscelyn in the Weekly Standard:

Why was a CIA officer, Wilson's wife, complicit in his lies? The Senate Intelligence Report makes it clear that Valerie Plame orchestrated Wilson's trip to Africa and attended at least part of his CIA debriefing. She was, therefore, most certainly in a position to know that her husband's accusations were false.

Why did she not stop him from spreading his falsehoods?...

[I]f Wilson and his wife were so concerned about her cover, and possibly the cover of other agents, being blown, then why did he publish an editorial in the New York Times discussing a classified intelligence-gathering mission he went on? Why did he then go on to make many media appearances peddling his own fictional version of his mission? Did Wilson think that foreign intelligence services would not do a little background work on him, his family, and all of their ostensible connections?

Washington attorney Victoria Toensing, who co-authored the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, flatly declares in today's Wall Street Journal that Congress should launch a full-blown investigation of the CIA - kind of a right-wing version of the infamous Church Committee from the 1970s - and get to the bottom of the following issues:

• First: The CIA sent her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, to Niger on a sensitive mission regarding WMD. He was to determine whether Iraq had attempted to purchase yellowcake, an essential ingredient for nonconventional weapons. However, it was M[rs. Wilson], not Mr. Wilson, who was the WMD expert. Moreover, Mr. Wilson had no intelligence background, was never a senior person in Niger when he was in the State Department, and was opposed to the Administration's Iraq policy. The assignment was given, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, at M[rs. Wilson]'s suggestion.

• Second: Mr. Wilson was not required to sign a confidentiality agreement, a mandatory act for the rest of us who either carry out any similar CIA assignment or who represent CIA clients.

• Third: When he returned from Niger, Mr. Wilson was not required to write a report, but rather merely to provide an oral briefing. That information was not sent to the White House. If this mission to Niger were so important, wouldn't a competent intelligence agency want a thoughtful written assessment from the "missionary," if for no other reason than to establish a record to refute any subsequent misrepresentation of that assessment? Because it was the Vice President who initially inquired about Niger and the yellowcake (although he had nothing to do with Mr. Wilson being sent), it is curious that neither his office nor the President's were privy to the fruits of Mr. Wilson's oral report.

• Fourth: Although Mr. Wilson did not have to write even one word for the agency that sent him on the mission at taxpayer's expense, over a year later he was permitted to tell all about this sensitive assignment in the New York Times. For the rest of us, writing about such an assignment would mean we'd have to bring our proposed op-ed before the CIA's Prepublication Review Board and spend countless hours arguing over every word to be published. Congressional oversight committees should want to know who at the CIA permitted the publication of the article, which, it has been reported, did not jibe with the thrust of Mr. Wilson's oral briefing. For starters, if the piece had been properly vetted at the CIA, someone should have known that the agency never briefed the Vice President on the trip, as claimed by Mr. Wilson in his op-ed.

• Fifth: More important than the inaccuracies is the fact that, if the CIA truly, truly, truly had wanted M[rs. Wilson]'s identity to be secret, it never would have permitted her spouse to write the op-ed. Did no one at Langley think that her identity could be compromised if her spouse wrote a piece discussing a foreign mission about a volatile political issue that focused on her expertise? The obvious question a sophisticated journalist such as Mr. Novak asked after "Why did the CIA send Wilson?" was "Who is Wilson?" After being told by a still-unnamed Administration source that Mr. Wilson's "wife" suggested him for the assignment, Mr. Novak went to Who's Who, which reveals "Valerie Plame" as Mr. Wilson's spouse.

• Sixth: CIA incompetence did not end there. When Mr. Novak called the agency to verify Ms. Plame's employment, it not only did so, but failed to go beyond the perfunctory request not to publish. Every experienced Washington journalist knows that when the CIA really does not want something public, there are serious requests from the top, usually the director. Only the press office talked to Mr. Novak.

• Seventh: Although high-ranking Justice Department officials are prohibited from political activity, the CIA had no problem permitting its deep cover or classified employee from making political contributions under the name "Wilson, Valerie E.," information publicly available at the FEC. [emphases added]

Clarice Feldman ties all these threads together at today's American Thinker:

Once upon a time, the New York Times and the rest of the American liberal establishment worried about CIA dirty tricks aimed at influencing domestic politics. The more effervescent leftists fulminated about a “secret government” and muttered darkly about a threat to democracy itself, emanating from Langley.

How times (and The Times) have changed! Today, the darlings of the American left and its house organ are a CIA employee and her husband, who set up and implemented a highly irregular operation which, if not explicitly designed to do so, has had the net effect of discrediting an elected leader and his foreign policy. The Wilson Gambit was a stealth operation undertaken outside normal procedures and supervision, used as a political weapon, complete with lies spread by a cooperative media establishment interested in bringing down a leader and his policies which they detest.

Don't kid yourself - of course the "Wilson gambit" was designed to "Nixonize" the Bush presidency and get him chased from office, either last year at the ballot box or via a second term impeachment by a Dem Congress elected in the flames of brainwashed public outrage. It's just one more example of left-wing hypocrisy that teaches, in the finest Leninist tradition, that an action is not inherently good or bad, but is to be evaluated only in terms of how it benefits the socialist cause. So, when the CIA (or FBI) was pulling dirty tricks to influence domestic policy on behalf of FDR, JFK, and LBJ, that was perfectly legitimate (and the media kept mum about it, like they did FDR's disability, JFK's womanizing, and LBJ's alcoholism). But as soon as Dick Nixon did it, suddenly the FBI (and CIA) were "rogue agencies" threatening American democracy itself. And when Donks infiltrate the CIA and turn it against another Republican administration, thus once again, via the Wilsons, employing dirty tricks to influence domestic politics, these two are not excoriated as traitorous storm troopers, but hailed as heroic patriots doing brave, lonely battle against a "neofascist" White House.

Leave it to the last honorable Democrat, Zell Miller, to put the whole thing in perspective:

It’s like a spy thriller. Institutional rivalries and political loyalties have fostered an intelligence officer’s resentment against the government. Suddenly, an opportunity appears for the agent to undercut the national leadership. A vital question of intelligence forms the core justification for controversial military actions by the current leaders. If this agent can get in the middle of that question, distort that information and make it public, the agent might foster regime change in the upcoming election.

But the rules on agents are clear. They can’t purposely distort gathered intelligence, go public with secret information or use their position or information to manipulate domestic elections or matters without risking their job or jail.

But their spouse can!

And if justice is still possible in this whole despicable affair, both members of this cloak & dagger American Gothic will go down.

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One more thing - a question posed by Rush Limbaugh that I think deserves an answer:

There's a front page Washington Post story [yester]day, "CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons - Debate is growing within agency about legality and morality of overseas systems set up after 9/11." What we have here is another CIA leak. Somebody is leaking from the CIA, and it wasn't that long ago - it's been months - the New York Times ran a story about super-secret CIA air charter operation that was run out of Virginia or somewhere that was using chartered jets to fly prisoners to, no doubt, these secret prisons. That was in the New York Times. Now, sources for the story in the Washington Post are identified as "senior and mid-level CIA officers."....Let me give you some details. "The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important Al-Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to US and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement. The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan, and several democracies in eastern Europe as well as a small center at Club G'itmo in Cuba, according to the current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents. The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public."

A-ha! One of those famous black-ops, off-budgets! No written record of this. So it had to be leaked. "The existence and locations of the facilities referred to as black sites in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department, and congressional documents are known to only a handful of officials in the US, and usually only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country." Dana Priest is the writer of the story. Dana, who told you this? We need an investigation. This is leaking from the CIA. This is exposing a CIA operation. This is exposing countless employees of the CIA. This is putting them at risk. We need an investigation! We need an independent counsel. We need to look deep into this and find out who's leaking this to the press. [emphasis added]

The conclusion seems to be that real leaks that undermine U.S. national security to the intended benefit of the Democrat Left are good, and leaks that never happened that can nevertheless be spun with sufficient plausibility to be employed as PR and prosecutorial weapons against the Republican Right are good.

And none still dare call it treason? Why in God's name not?