Did Rove Blow a Spook's Cover? [View All]

[Kolesar]

This is worth reading. It is an old story at DU, but White House spokesman McClelland's handling of it yesterday brings it back into the news.


Did Rove Blow a Spook's Cover?
The White House won't say.
By Timothy Noah
Posted Tuesday, September 16, 2003, at 4:59 PM PT


A minor flap has been brewing since syndicated columnist Robert Novak, citing "two senior administration officials," reported in July that Joseph C. Wilson IV was married to a Central Intelligence Agency specialist on "weapons of mass destruction" named Valerie Plame. Wilson is the former diplomat sent by the CIA last year to check out allegations that Iraq had purchased uranium from Niger. He caused the Bush administration no small embarrassment by stating, in a July 6 op-ed, that he'd reported "it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place." Novak hasn't particularly supported the Iraq war, and his column essentially took Wilson's side. But the fact that Novak blew Plame's cover (in the course of relating that Wilson was sent at Plame's suggestion) gave The Nation's David Corn the opportunity to accuse the Bush administration of compromising national security, in violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. Wilson wouldn't confirm that his wife works for the CIA, but he told Corn that if she did, then

Naming her this way would have compromised every operation, every relationship, every network with which she had been associated in her entire career. This is the stuff of Kim Philby and Aldrich Ames.
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http://slate.msn.com/id/2088471/