July 18, 2005
Your Guide to the Karl Rove Thingy
"What's the big deal with Karl Rove that has everyone's knickers in a twist?"
My wife asked me that question this weekend (ok, I embellished the part about the knickers.) As I tried to provide a coherent answer, I realized that someone needed to create a simple, chronological breakdown of this faux-scandal.
Today...National Review Online's Cliff May to the rescue. Here are your Cliff's notes on RoveGate...
NEWS OF THE WEEKEND IN REVIEW [Cliff May]
1) Bob Novak's column said Valerie Plame worked at the CIA -- but not that she was any kind of secret agent. Novak says he wasn?t told that, didn?t know that and if he had known he would not have named her in the column. .
2) Joe Wilson has now admitted that, in fact, Plame was not undercover when Novak named her.
3) Plame's supervisor at the CIA has now said -- on the record -- that Plame told friends and family she worked for the CIA. She was not hiding that fact, or at least not hiding it well.
4) The first one to say that Plame, Wilson's wife, was a secret agent -- a ?top-secret operative? -- was David Corn in the left-wing magazine, The Nation, based on his conversations with Joe Wilson. Corn also first raised the idea that a crime had been committed, that people in the Bush administration committed the crime, that they did so not because they had anything against Plame but rather as a bank-shot way to punish Wilson.
5) Joe Wilson did not tell the truth when he denied that Plame, his wife and a CIA official, helped him get the Africa assignment; a bipartisan Senate committee has established that.
6) Reporters heard rumors about Plame arranging Wilson?s trip to Africa. Cooper asked Rove about it. Rove said he?d heard the same thing ? perhaps from another reporter.
7) So Rove was telling the truth to a reporter. That may be an unusual event in Washington but it is probably not criminal or scandalous.
8) The real scandal ? ignored by the MSM -- is that on a major issue like whether Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium in Africa, the CIA didn?t have a single spy or experienced investigator to assign. Perhaps they were all busy with sensitivity training or were in Spanish language classes. So the CIA instead assigned a retired career diplomat known for his antipathy toward the administration. It did that based on the recommendation of his wife who had already come to the conclusion that Saddam buying uranium in Africa was ?crazy.?
9) Evidence continues to suggest that Saddam was indeed seeking uranium in Africa, which is why British intelligence stands by that conclusion. In particular, the British expressed concern about a secret1998 Iraqi trade mission to Niger. Why was that suspicious ? not only to the British but also to the Prime Minister of Niger? Because Niger is an impoverished, land-locked desert nation with little to sell ? except uranium. Wilson learned about this trade mission, too., It set off no alarms for him but it did for others at the CIA who disagreed with his analysis of his own information collection.
Posted by David at July 18, 2005 07:46 PM