posted July 14, 2005 09:42 PM              

Posted on Thu, Jun. 12, 2003

White House was warned of dubious intelligence used in speech, official says

By Jonthan S. Landay

Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - Making his case for war with Iraq, President Bush in his State of the Union address this year accused Saddam Hussein of trying to buy uranium from Africa even though the CIA had warned White House and other officials that the story didn't check out.

A senior CIA official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the intelligence agency informed the White House on March 9, 2002 - 10 months before Bush's nationally televised speech - that an agency source who had traveled to Niger couldn't confirm European intelligence reports that Iraq was attempting to buy uranium from the West African country.

Despite the CIA's misgivings, Bush said in his State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa."

Three senior administration officials said Vice President Dick Cheney and some officials on the National Security Council staff and at the Pentagon ignored the CIA's reservations and argued that the president and others should include the allegation in their case against Saddam.

The claim later turned out to be based on crude forgeries that an African diplomat had sold to Italian intelligence officials.

The revelation of the CIA warning is the strongest evidence to date that pro-war administration officials manipulated, exaggerated or ignored intelligence information in their eagerness to make the case for invading Iraq.

"We've acknowledged that some documents were forged and we know now it was a mistake to give them credence," said a fourth senior administration official who defended the White House's handling of the matter. "But they were only one piece of evidence in a larger body of evidence suggesting that Iraq attempted to purchase uranium from Africa."

Noting that Iraq had obtained uranium from Africa in the 1980s, he said the most recent allegations "were not central pieces of the case illustrating Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction and their WMD programs."

The CIA's March 2002 warning about Iraq's alleged uranium-shopping expedition in Niger was sent to the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Justice Department and the FBI the same day it went to the White House, the senior CIA official said.

In the months before Bush's State of the Union speech, the senior CIA official said, agency officials also told the State Department, National Security Council staffers and members of Congress that they doubted that Iraq had been trying to buy uranium from Niger.

One senior administration official, also speaking on the condition of anonymity because the intelligence reports remain classified, said the CIA's doubts were well known and widely shared throughout the government before Bush's speech.

Secretary of State Colin Powell didn't include the uranium story in his Feb. 5 presentation on Iraq to the United Nations Security Council, and senior CIA officials excluded it from their assessments of Iraq's illicit weapons programs and from their congressional testimony.

"The intelligence community had generally discredited the Niger angle well before the Feb. 5 presentation, though the (CIA) had caveated the whole matter with `it's a possibility' type language," said one senior administration official. "The State Department's (Bureau of Intelligence and Research) had footnoted the caveat with a `hardly believable.' . . . It was too bad even to get on the table at the (CIA) by that time."

"However, during the time between the `almost no good' report from the agency and the `unbelievable' footnote from INR, various people tried time and again to resurrect it and use it," the official said.

Among the most vocal proponents of publicizing the alleged Niger connection, two senior officials said, were Cheney and officials in the office of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. The effort was led by Robert G. Joseph, the top National Security Council staff official on nuclear proliferation, the officials said.

Cheney alleged in an Aug. 26, 2002, speech that Saddam "has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons," and this March 16 he went much further, saying: "We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."

On last Sunday's television talk shows, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said the White House was unaware of the CIA's doubts.

"Maybe someone knew in the bowels of the agency, but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery," she said on NBC.

The CIA's March 2002 warning about the Niger connection was just one in a daily flood of diplomatic and intelligence reports on Iraq, and it's possible that Rice never saw it.

However, the inclusion of the uranium story in Bush's speech appears to support charges that some pro-invasion officials ignored intelligence that could hurt the administration's case that Saddam was pursuing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs.

Rep. Henry Waxman of California, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, has demanded that the White House explain why the Niger uranium story was in the president's State of the Union address.

"Contrary to your public statements, senior officials in the intelligence community in Washington knew the forged evidence was unreliable before the president used the evidence in the State of the Union address," Waxman wrote in a letter Tuesday to Rice.

"This is a question that bears directly on the credibility of the United States," he contended.

The report of an Iraq-Niger deal was exposed as a fraud when U.N. nuclear officials determined that the documents on which the allegations were based - reportedly letters between Iraqi and Niger officials - were forgeries.

The signature on a letter purportedly from Niger's President Tandja Mamadou was an obvious forgery; another letter was on the wrong letterhead and signed by an official who had left the post a decade earlier.

The use of the false evidence despite the CIA warning raises questions about why some officials chose to believe the story despite the widespread skepticism in the intelligence community.

One possibility, one senior official suggested Thursday, is that some officials at the Pentagon and in the vice president's office were getting their own intelligence from Iraqi exiles who the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency warned couldn't be trusted.

Exile leader Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress told lawmakers Thursday that his group had turned three Iraqi defectors over to U.S. officials. One of the three, Chalabi said, was an Iraqi scientist who was involved in separating isotopes for Iraq's nuclear weapons program.

Bush cited allegations that Saddam was hiding chemical, biological and nuclear warfare efforts from U.N. inspectors as a main justification for the U.S.-led war.

After more than two months of searching, U.S. troops haven't discovered any illicit weapons stockpiles or any evidence that Saddam had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program.

The deposed Iraqi regime said it had destroyed its illicit weapons.

Bush and his top lieutenants say they are confident that such weapons will be found eventually, although they've recently held open the possibility that the stockpiles were destroyed before the invasion kicked off March 20.

Majority Republican lawmakers so far have spurned a public investigation, but the Senate Intelligence Committee has begun reviewing intelligence assessments of Iraq's illicit weapons programs and will start closed-door hearings next week.

The senior CIA official said the agency first heard about an alleged Iraq-Niger uranium deal in reports from unidentified European intelligence services in late 2001 and early 2002.

"There were people who had questions about the overall story. It didn't make sense. It was sketchy information that was not validated by other means," he said.

Nevertheless, continued interest in Cheney's office, the NSC, the State Department and other agencies prompted the CIA to ask a retired U.S. ambassador to Niger to go there in February 2002 to inquire into the alleged deal, he said.

The CIA kept any reference to the former diplomat's identity out of its March 2002 message to the White House.

The message quoted a CIA "source" as saying he had spoken to people close to the Niger government, former senior officials and people involved in the country's mining industry, who all rejected the reports that Iraq was trying to buy uranium. The former ambassador said he believed what they were telling him.

The message contained the names of people to whom the source spoke, said the senior CIA official.

It wasn't until February 2003 that the CIA obtained the original Iraq-Niger documents on which the uranium story was based, he said.

The documents were forwarded to the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency. The next month, IAEA Director Mohamed ElBaradei told the U.N. Security Council that the documents were forgeries, a determination subsequently confirmed by U.S. officials. http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/news/special_packages/11922512.htm

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posted July 14, 2005 09:47 PM              

********

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
11 July 2003
STATEMENT BY GEORGE J. TENET
DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE

Legitimate questions have arisen about how remarks on alleged Iraqi attempts to obtain uranium in Africa made it into the President’s State of the Union speech. Let me be clear about several things right up front. First, CIA approved the President’s State of the Union address before it was delivered. Second, I am responsible for the approval process in my Agency. And third, the President had every reason to believe that the text presented to him was sound. These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the President.

For perspective, a little history is in order.

There was fragmentary intelligence gathered in late 2001 and early 2002 on the allegations of Saddam’s efforts to obtain additional raw uranium from Africa, beyond the 550 metric tons already in Iraq. In an effort to inquire about certain reports involving Niger, CIA’s counter-proliferation experts, on their own initiative, asked an individual with ties to the region to make a visit to see what he could learn. He reported back to us that one of the former Nigerien officials he met stated that he was unaware of any contract being signed between Niger and rogue states for the sale of uranium during his tenure in office. The same former official also said that in June 1999 a businessman approached him and insisted that the former official meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss “expanding commercial relations” between Iraq and Niger. The former official interpreted the overture as an attempt to discuss uranium sales. The former officials also offered details regarding Niger’s processes for monitoring and transporting uranium that suggested it would be very unlikely that material could be illicitly diverted. There was no mention in the report of forged documents -- or any suggestion of the existence of documents at all.

Because this report, in our view, did not resolve whether Iraq was or was not seeking uranium from abroad, it was given a normal and wide distribution, but we did not brief it to the President, Vice-President or other senior Administration officials. We also had to consider that the former Nigerien officials knew that what they were saying would reach the U.S. government and that this might have influenced what they said.

In the fall of 2002, my Deputy and I briefed hundreds of members of Congress on Iraq. We did not brief the uranium acquisition story.

Also in the fall of 2002, our British colleagues told us they were planning to publish an unclassified dossier that mentioned reports of Iraqi attempts to obtain uranium in Africa. Because we viewed the reporting on such acquisition attempts to be inconclusive, we expressed reservations about its inclusion but our colleagues said they were confident in their reports and left it in their document.

In September and October 2002 before Senate Committees, senior intelligence officials in response to questions told members of Congress that we differed with the British dossier on the reliability of the uranium reporting.

In October, the Intelligence Community (IC) produced a classified, 90 page National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq’s WMD programs. There is a lengthy section in which most agencies of the Intelligence Community judged that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Let me emphasize, the NIE’s Key Judgments cited six reasons for this assessment; the African uranium issue was not one of them.

But in the interest of completeness, the report contained three paragraphs that discuss Iraq’s significant 550-metric ton uranium stockpile and how it could be diverted while under IAEA safeguard. These paragraphs also cited reports that Iraq began “vigorously trying to procure” more uranium from Niger and two other African countries, which would shorten the time Baghdad needed to produce nuclear weapons. The NIE states: “A foreign government service reported that as of early 2001, Niger planned to send several tons of pure “uranium” (probably yellowcake) to Iraq. As of early 2001, Niger and Iraq reportedly were still working out the arrangements for this deal, which could be for up to 500 tons of yellowcake.” The Estimate also states: “We do not know the status of this arrangement.” With regard to reports that Iraq had sought uranium from two other countries, the Estimate says: “We cannot confirm whether Iraq succeeded in acquiring uranium ore and/or yellowcake from these sources.” Much later in the NIE text, in presenting an alternate view on another matter, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research included a sentence that states: “Finally, the claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are, in INR’s assessment, highly dubious.”

An unclassified CIA White Paper in October made no mention of the issue, again because it was not fundamental to the judgment that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, and because we had questions about some of the reporting. For the same reasons, the subject was not included in many public speeches, Congressional testimony and the Secretary of State’s United Nations presentation in early 2003.

The background above makes it even more troubling that the 16 words eventually made it into the State of the Union speech. This was a mistake.

posted July 15, 2005 05:08 AM            

WASHINGTON, July 14 (UPI) -- For the first time since he became president, a major poll shows a plurality of U.S. respondents negative on President Bush in regards to honesty.

A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released Thursday said 45 percent of those asked give Bush low marks for being "honest and straightforward," compared to 41 percent who said he is being honest. The Journal said the poll marked the first time that the president's negatives in this category were larger than his positives.

In addition, poll data showed 52 percent of respondents believe the United States is "off on the wrong track," the Journal said. Thirty-four percent said the country is headed in the right direction.

The negative feelings were not limited to the president. By a 27-point margin -- 55 percent to 28 percent -- respondents disapproved of the job being done in Congress.

The poll of 1,009 adults in the United States was conducted July 8-11 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

posted July 15, 2005 12:21 PM            

I don't know why Republicans insist on heading leftist democrats and the leftist press off from self destructing. Just get the hell out of their way and let them destroy the last shred of their credibility.

In the meantime, it's clear Plame was not a covert CIA agent. It's clear she hadn't been for more than the 5 years the law requires for a violation to have occurred. It's clear Rove committed no crime, broke no confidence and in fact, it was Novak who brought up Plame to Rove...not the other way around. It's clear Rove got the information about Plame from the press itself and not from any search of official government files. It's also clear Miller is covering for someone other than Rove...since Rove signed a waiver long ago releasing anyone from any guarantee of confidentiality.

It's also clear Wilson is a liar..a liar who had to admit before the 9/11 commission..when he was under oath..that he lied...took literary license with what he said publicly and in his writings. It's also quite clear Bush did not lie when he said the British reported that Saddam had sought to buy uranium from Niger. A very thorough investigation by Lord Butler of that matter concluded the British position was well founded and that Bush's statement was well founded..on that matter as well. As a result, 2 very high ranking officers in the BBC had to resign and indeed, the BBC charter is in jeopardy of not being renewed..or it was as of a few months ago. It's also clear Wilson lied about Cheney or the Vice President's office sending him to Niger...also clear Wilson lied about filing a report directed to Cheney or Cheney's office. It's clear Wilson lied about who sent him to Niger and who proposed he be sent to Niger; that's clear from the memo bearing his wife's imprint that she is the one who put forth Wilson's name. What's not too clear is whether there was even a plan to send anyone to Niger before Plame suggested sending her husband. It's clear Wilson's word cannot be trusted...even to stating what day of the week it is.

So, from where I sit, it looks like leftists have a dominant self-destruct gene and I'm perfectly willing to let nature take it's course.

posted July 18, 2005 08:35 PM            

Now, this is what the lying leftist press hasn't been telling you. This is what the lying leftist dimocrats haven't been telling you. They've been telling you just the opposite...but to the court, which has jurisdiction over the matter, the lying leftist press has submitted a friend of the court brief...36 news organizations including the main howlers against Rove, the lying leftist press, along with the major TV howler networks are telling the court that no crime has been committed and they filed that brief 4, that's 4....4.....4, FOUR months ago..while they were telling America just the opposite and speculating, conspiring, aiding, abetting and supporting the dimocrat position that Rove was guilty, should resign or should be fired...they're telling the court no crime has been committed and therefore Judith Miller can't be held in contempt because there's no underlying crime. The crime no one committed. They contend Plame was outed by the CIA itself and by Nation Magazine and this, before Novak even knew she existed or knew she was a CIA employee. Now, what Rove said..that he heard about Plame from the press makes perfect sense. What the lying leftist press has done..telling America one story while telling a federal appeals court exactly the opposite, only makes sense in one context..that they ARE the lying leftist press that I've said they are and that they and lying leftist dimocrats manufactured this entire story for political purposes. This is really special.

NationalReviewOnLine
July 18, 2005, 8:01 a.m.
Did the CIA “Out” Valerie Plame?
What the mainstream media tells the court ... but won’t tell you.
Andrew C. McCarthy

With each passing day, the manufactured "scandal" over the publication of Valerie Plame's relationship with the CIA establishes new depths of mainstream-media hypocrisy. A highly capable special prosecutor is probing the underlying facts, and it is appropriate to withhold legal judgments until he completes the investigation over which speculation runs so rampant. But it is not too early to assess the performance of the press. It's been appalling.

Is that hyperbole? You be the judge. Have you heard that the CIA is actually the source responsible for exposing Plame's covert status? Not Karl Rove, not Bob Novak, not the sinister administration cabal du jour of Fourth Estate fantasy, but the CIA itself? Had you heard that Plame's cover has actually been blown for a decade — i.e., since about seven years before Novak ever wrote a syllable about her? Had you heard not only that no crime was committed in the communication of information between Bush administration officials and Novak, but that no crime could have been committed because the governing law gives a person a complete defense if an agent's status has already been compromised by the government?

No, you say, you hadn't heard any of that. You heard that this was the crime of the century. A sort of Robert-Hanssen-meets-Watergate in which Rove is already cooked and we're all just waiting for the other shoe — or shoes — to drop on the den of corruption we know as the Bush administration. That, after all, is the inescapable impression from all the media coverage. So who is saying different?

The organized media, that's who. How come you haven't heard? Because they've decided not to tell you. Because they say one thing — one dark, transparently partisan thing — when they're talking to you in their news coverage, but they say something completely different when they think you're not listening.

You see, if you really want to know what the media think of the Plame case — if you want to discover what a comparative trifle they actually believe it to be — you need to close the paper and turn off the TV. You need, instead, to have a peek at what they write when they're talking to a court. It's a mind-bendingly different tale.

SPUN FROM THE START
My colleague Cliff May has already demonstrated the bankruptcy of the narrative the media relentlessly spouts for Bush-bashing public consumption: to wit, that Valerie Wilson, nee Plame, was identified as a covert CIA agent by the columnist Robert Novak, to whom she was compromised by an administration official. In fact, it appears Plame was first outed to the general public as a result of a consciously loaded and slyly hypothetical piece by the journalist David Corn. Corn's source appears to have been none other than Plame's own husband, former ambassador and current Democratic-party operative Joseph Wilson — that same pillar of national security rectitude whose notion of discretion, upon being dispatched by the CIA for a sensitive mission to Niger, was to write a highly public op-ed about his trip in the New York Times. This isn't news to the media; they have simply chosen not to report it.

The hypocrisy, though, only starts there. It turns out that the media believe Plame was outed long before either Novak or Corn took pen to paper. And not by an ambiguous confirmation from Rove or a nod-and-a-wink from Ambassador Hubby. No, the media think Plame was previously compromised by a disclosure from the intelligence community itself — although it may be questionable whether there was anything of her covert status left to salvage at that point, for reasons that will become clear momentarily.

This CIA disclosure, moreover, is said to have been made not to Americans at large but to Fidel Castro's anti-American regime in Cuba, whose palpable incentive would have been to "compromise[] every operation, every relationship, every network with which [Plame] had been associated in her entire career" — to borrow from the diatribe in which Wilson risibly compared his wife's straits to the national security catastrophes wrought by Aldrich Ames and Kim Philby.

THE MEDIA GOES TO COURT ... AND SINGS A DIFFERENT TUNE
Just four months ago, 36 news organizations confederated to file a friend-of-the-court brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington. At the time, Bush-bashing was (no doubt reluctantly) confined to an unusual backseat. The press had no choice — it was time to close ranks around two of its own, namely, the Times's Judith Miller and Time's Matthew Cooper, who were threatened with jail for defying grand jury subpoenas from the special prosecutor.

The media's brief, fairly short and extremely illuminating, is available here. The Times, which is currently spearheading the campaign against Rove and the Bush administration, encouraged its submission. It was joined by a "who's who" of the current Plame stokers, including ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, AP, Newsweek, Reuters America, the Washington Post, the Tribune Company (which publishes the Los Angeles Times and the Baltimore Sun, among other papers), and the White House Correspondents (the organization which represents the White House press corps in its dealings with the executive branch).

The thrust of the brief was that reporters should not be held in contempt or forced to reveal their sources in the Plame investigation. Why? Because, the media organizations confidently asserted, no crime had been committed. Now, that is stunning enough given the baleful shroud the press has consciously cast over this story. Even more remarkable, though, were the key details these self-styled guardians of the public's right to know stressed as being of the utmost importance for the court to grasp — details those same guardians have assiduously suppressed from the coverage actually presented to the public.

Though you would not know it from watching the news, you learn from reading the news agencies' brief that the 1982 law prohibiting disclosure of undercover agents' identities explicitly sets forth a complete defense to this crime. It is contained in Section 422 (of Title 50, U.S. Code), and it provides that an accused leaker is in the clear if, sometime before the leak, "the United States ha[s] publicly acknowledged or revealed" the covert agent's "intelligence relationship to the United States[.]"

As it happens, the media organizations informed the court that long before the Novak revelation (which, as noted above, did not disclose Plame's classified relationship with the CIA), Plame's cover was blown not once but twice. The media based this contention on reporting by the indefatigable Bill Gertz — an old-school, "let's find out what really happened" kind of journalist. Gertz's relevant article, published a year ago in the Washington Times, can be found here.

THE MEDIA TELLS THE COURT: PLAME'S COVER WAS BLOWN IN THE MID-1990s
As the media alleged to the judges (in Footnote 7, page 8, of their brief), Plame's identity as an undercover CIA officer was first disclosed to Russia in the mid-1990s by a spy in Moscow. Of course, the press and its attorneys were smart enough not to argue that such a disclosure would trigger the defense prescribed in Section 422 because it was evidently made by a foreign-intelligence operative, not by a U.S. agency as the statute literally requires.

But neither did they mention the incident idly. For if, as he has famously suggested, President Bush has peered into the soul of Vladimir Putin, what he has no doubt seen is the thriving spirit of the KGB, of which the Russian president was a hardcore agent. The Kremlin still spies on the United States. It remains in the business of compromising U.S. intelligence operations.

Thus, the media's purpose in highlighting this incident is blatant: If Plame was outed to the former Soviet Union a decade ago, there can have been little, if anything, left of actual intelligence value in her "every operation, every relationship, every network" by the time anyone spoke with Novak (or, of course, Corn).

THE CIA OUTS PLAME TO FIDEL CASTRO
Of greater moment to the criminal investigation is the second disclosure urged by the media organizations on the court. They don't place a precise date on this one, but inform the judges that it was "more recent" than the Russian outing but "prior to Novak's publication."

And it is priceless. The press informs the judges that the CIA itself "inadvertently" compromised Plame by not taking appropriate measures to safeguard classified documents that the Agency routed to the Swiss embassy in Havana. In the Washington Times article — you remember, the one the press hypes when it reports to the federal court but not when it reports to consumers of its news coverage — Gertz elaborates that "[t]he documents were supposed to be sealed from the Cuban government, but [unidentified U.S.] intelligence officials said the Cubans read the classified material and learned the secrets contained in them."

Thus, the same media now stampeding on Rove has told a federal court that, to the contrary, they believe the CIA itself blew Plame's cover before Rove or anyone else in the Bush administration ever spoke to Novak about her. Of course, they don't contend the CIA did it on purpose or with malice. But neither did Rove — who, unlike the CIA, appears neither to have known about nor disclosed Plame's classified status. Yet, although the Times and its cohort have a bull's eye on Rove's back, they are breathtakingly silent about an apparent CIA embarrassment — one that seems to be just the type of juicy story they routinely covet.

A COMPLETE DEFENSE?
The defense in Section 422 requires that the revelation by the United States have been done "publicly." At least one U.S. official who spoke to Gertz speculated that because the Havana snafu was not "publicized" — i.e., because the classified information about Plame was mistakenly communicated to Cuba rather than broadcast to the general public — it would not available as a defense to whomever spoke with Novak. But that seems clearly wrong.

First, the theory under which the media have gleefully pursued Rove, among other Bush officials, holds that if a disclosure offense was committed here it was complete at the moment the leak was made to Novak. Whether Novak then proceeded to report the leak to the general public is beside the point — the violation supposedly lies in identifying Plame to Novak. (Indeed, it has frequently been observed that Judy Miller of the Times is in contempt for protecting one or more sources even though she never wrote an article about Plame.)

Perhaps more significantly, the whole point of discouraging public disclosure of covert agents is to prevent America's enemies from degrading our national security. It is not, after all, the public we are worried about. Rather, it is the likes of Fidel Castro and his regime who pose a threat to Valerie Plame and her network of U.S. intelligence relationships. The government must still be said to have "publicized" the classified relationship — i.e., to have blown the cover of an intelligence agent — if it leaves out the middleman by communicating directly with an enemy government rather than indirectly through a media outlet.

LINGERING QUESTIONS
All this raises several readily apparent questions. We know that at the time of the Novak and Corn articles, Plame was not serving as an intelligence agent outside the United States. Instead, she had for years been working, for all to see, at CIA headquarters in Langley. Did her assignment to headquarters have anything to do with her effectiveness as a covert agent having already been nullified by disclosure to the Russians and the Cubans — and to whomever else the Russians and Cubans could be expected to tell if they thought it harmful to American interests or advantageous to their own?

If Plame's cover was blown, as Gertz reports, how much did Plame know about that? It's likely that she would have been fully apprised — after all, as we have been told repeatedly in recent weeks, the personal security of a covert agent and her family can be a major concern when secrecy is pierced. Assuming she knew, did her husband, Wilson, also know? At the time he was ludicrously comparing the Novak article to the Ames and Philby debacles, did he actually have reason to believe his wife had been compromised years earlier?

And could the possibility that Plame's cover has long been blown explain why the CIA was unconcerned about assigning a one-time covert agent to a job that had her walking in and out of CIA headquarters every day? Could it explain why the Wilsons were sufficiently indiscrete to pose in Vanity Fair, and, indeed, to permit Joseph Wilson to pen a highly public op-ed regarding a sensitive mission to which his wife — the covert agent — energetically advocated his assignment? Did they fail to take commonsense precautions because they knew there really was nothing left to protect?

We'd probably know the answers to these and other questions by now if the media had given a tenth of the effort spent manufacturing a scandal to reporting professionally on the underlying facts. And if they deigned to share with their readers and viewers all the news that's fit to print ... in a brief to a federal court.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
http://nationalreview.com/mccarthy/mccarthy200507180801.asp