Putting "Plamegate" In Proper Perspective

The underlying premise of the whole Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame/"Leakgate" uproar was that those two "patriots" "exposed" George Bush's "lies" that "misled the country into war" in Iraq, and the Administration, in the persons of Karl Rove and/or Scooter Libby, "retaliated" by "outing" Plame, a "covert agent," as revenge at both personal cost to the Wilsons and crippling damage to CIA operations and national security itself.

In reality, it was the Wilsons who were and are the liars, George Bush who told the truth, as three separate independent investigations of pre-war intelligence have all long since established, Mrs. Wilson was not a "covert operative" at the time in question, and nobody (and that includes Rove and Libby) "leaked" her name to anybody. And if there was any damage to national security, it's come from the Fitzgerald investigation and the Democrats recklessly cheering it on, and the concomitant reticence of the Bushies in defending the Iraqi campaign against the DisLoyal Opposition's relentlessly dishonest attacks.

I reiterate all of the above to provide the proper context for Time's Matt Cooper, he of some prominence as a witness in the Fitzgerald investigation, and his comments reported by the Washington Times this week:

Key Leakgate witness, Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper, said earlier this week that the recent Washington Post report that outed secret CIA-run terrorist prisons [in nine allied countries] was based on "a good leak."...

In quotes picked up by the Washington Times, however, Cooper told an audience at Princeton University that the "good leak" prison story was "clearly in the public interest."

He lamented the fact that "we're seeing the call for another leak investigation" despite the public service performed by the CIA prison leaker. [emphases added]

Let's get this straight. A leak that never happened of a covert agent that was not a covert agent as a result of a probable CIA sting operation directed not at our enemies but at the Bush White House (a virtual coup attempt) is the crime of the century - and as some Donks have even called it, "treasonous" - but a real leak of a legitimate CIA operation directed at (1) incarcerating jihadis and (2) mining them for intelligence, a critical function to our winning the GWOT, that has endangered the mission and lives of CIA operatives, and potentially American servicepeople and civilians, to say nothing of the allied countries aiding us in this effort, is "a good leak" that is "clearly in the public interest." (Here's another....)

You might have noticed that I have started deploying the term "treason" of late to describe continued Democrat/Left attempts to sabotage the war effort. It's stories like this one that ought to amply explain why.

UPDATE: Brother Hinderaker expressed similar sentiments this morning:

It's interesting, isn't it, that for the last six months, the newspapers have breathlessly repeated the claim that the identification of a single non-covert desk employee of the CIA, Valerie Plame, somehow did great damage to American security interests. Well, if the neutralizing of a single "agent" is so newsworthy as to dominate the papers and the evening news for months, how about firing [by Jimmy Carter's CIA Director, Stansfield Turner, who is suffering from acute Bush Derangement Syndrome] one-quarter of all the CIA agents - the really covert ones, I mean - in the world? Wouldn't that compromise our security to an almost unimaginable extent? How much publicity should that act of folly generate, in comparison to the meaningless Plame farce? And how much did it receive?

Three years ago a friend of mine coined a phrase that perfectly captures the Left's demented mindset: "They put party before country." That is the treason of the Democrat party. It's a variation on the old Samson complex - to them nothing is more important than power, even if it makes them rulers of a poisoned realm. It doesn't matter to them that quitting Iraq means quitting the GWOT of which it is but a portion; it doesn't matter to them that our quitting won't stop the war but simply our resistence to the enemy, who will take full advantage of our weak-assed retreat; and it doesn't matter to them that our quitting this war, unlike Vietnam thirty years ago, will mean attacks on and in our homeland - more 9/11s - and probably worse than that. They don't consider such things, and in the event they do they dismiss them as alarmism that won't happen anyway once they're back in charge and go back to the Clinton-era policies that gave us 9/11 but will surely have Americans and Islamic fanatics holding hands and singing "Kumbayah" eventually.

It's difficult to see all that much daylight between most of today's Democrats and the classic definition of a "fifth column." If that is not their conscious motivation, it certainly would be the practical result if their Joe Murthas got what they wanted.

And if thousands more Americans perish because of these people, I don't think such hairsplitting is going to make a helluva lot of difference.

UPDATE II: AmSpec's Mark Corallo feels the same way.