Are we really seeing the end of Plamegate?

If so, where's Wilson and Plames apologies to Rove and others?

from JoeUser Forums
News broke over the last few days in multiple places -- none of which are really that friendly to the Bush administration (or to the right in general) -- that the original leaker in the Valerie Plame case wasn't Karl Rove (no matter how badly Wilson and Plame may have wished so!), wasn't Dick Cheney, and wasn't even Scooter Libby (Cheney's chief of staff).

Nope, the leak apparently came from a completely different area. One that was suspected but never confirmed. One that most certainly wouldn't have been seen as an administration member that was out to get revenge on Wilson or Plame.

As noted in the Slate article I'm quoting more of below, but clipping a segment of here, it was none other than Richard Armitage.
As most of us have long suspected, the man who told Novak about Valerie Plame was Richard Armitage, Colin Powell's deputy at the State Department and, with his boss, an assiduous underminer of the president's war policy.


Armitage -- at least as he has been described in a few articles about the topic -- never meant to harm anyone, or at least not to harm anyone on the left. He may not have been a big supporter of going to war in Iraq, but he was certainly not out to harm Plame in any way, and yet he seems to be the originator of Plame's once secret identity and life.

Have Plame and Wilson dropped their ridiculous lawsuit? Of course not. Even if they did, they'd already have benefited in the ways they wanted to by taking political shots at the Bush administration including Karl Rove, Cheney, and even President Bush himself.

Has the rest of the once foaming-at-the-mouth rabid left come back to apologize over their accusations that this was all politically motivated revenge against Wilson and Plame? Of course not.

Perhaps though the story that I'm clipping some of below does really put an end to this would be scandal. At least one would hope so.


See comments area for more on the issue, as well as a few more clips from the original story.
politics
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Reply #1 from JoeUser Forums Top
Again, information here is clipped from Slate.

Original article:


Plame Out

The ridiculous end to the scandal that distracted Washington.

By Christopher Hitchens

I had a feeling that I might slightly regret the title ("Case Closed") of my July 25 column on the Niger uranium story. I have now presented thousands of words of evidence and argument to the effect that, yes, the Saddam Hussein regime did send an important Iraqi nuclear diplomat to Niger in early 1999. And I have not so far received any rebuttal from any source on this crucial point of contention. But there was always another layer to the Joseph Wilson fantasy. Easy enough as it was to prove that he had completely missed the West African evidence that was staring him in the face, there remained the charge that his nonreport on a real threat had led to a government-sponsored vendetta against him and his wife, Valerie Plame.

In his July 12 column in the Washington Post, Robert Novak had already partly exposed this paranoid myth by stating plainly that nobody had leaked anything, or outed anyone, to him. On the contrary, it was he who approached sources within the administration and the CIA and not the other way around. But now we have the final word on who did disclose the name and occupation of Valerie Plame, and it turns out to be someone whose opposition to the Bush policy in Iraq has—like Robert Novak's—long been a byword in Washington. It is particularly satisfying that this admission comes from two of the journalists—Michael Isikoff and David Corn—who did the most to get the story wrong in the first place and the most to keep it going long beyond the span of its natural life.



There's a lot more in the original article, and it's well worth reading the entire thing.

Again, too bad the political damage is long since done and will never be apologized for. The looney liberal left isn't interested at all in pulling an Emily Latella and apologizing, even to say "never mind" about their baseless charges that the Bush administration was out to get Wilson and Plame.

Meanwhile Libby prepares to go to trial and defend himself over a story that is now dead. How much taxpayer money has been wasted pursuing him and looking into what Rove did, when he did it, etc.?

I'm sure it wasn't really wasted though, as no potential opportunity to embarrass the current President is really a waste of money or time. Nah, if we don't pursue every potential opportunity to go after people in the Bush administration then one of them may possibly escape and they could be the one that was needed to bring down the entire bunch, right?!?
Reply #2 from JoeUser Forums Top
Actually one more section worth clipping here....

It was Corn in particular who asserted—in a July 16, 2003, blog post credited with starting the entire distraction—that:

The Wilson smear was a thuggish act. Bush and his crew abused and misused intelligence to make their case for war. Now there is evidence Bushies used classified information and put the nation's counter-proliferation efforts at risk merely to settle a score. It is a sign that with this gang politics trumps national security.

After you have noted that the Niger uranium connection was in fact based on intelligence that has turned out to be sound, you may also note that this heated moral tone ("thuggish," "gang") is now quite absent from the story. It turns out that the person who put Valerie Plame's identity into circulation was a staunch foe of regime change in Iraq. Oh, that's all right, then.



Again, the sections above help to point out the hypocrisy of the left and their efforts to go after the Bush administration anyway they can. People like Lawrence O'Donnell Jr., Eleanor Clift, a bunch of Democrats throughout Washington and other parts of the country were out for blood from Rove, Cheney and the rest of the "thugs" in the Bush administration. Are they really ready to apologize now or is it all ok because "Bush lied", soldiers died, and we've had thousands of our troops killed in a war we shouldn't be fighting in to begin with?!
Siege of Centauri
Reply #3 from JoeUser Forums Top
No, the only thing that Libby, Rove and cheney are going to get is silence from the Liberal MSM. However this news is food for a lawsuit alright.  I think Libby's lawyers are preparing a Prosecutorial Misconduct suit against Fitzgerald.  He was a fool to think the truth would never come out as he continued a witch hunt for years after he knew the truth.
Reply #4 from JoeUser Forums Top
The funny/sad thing is that the left & the media continue to cling desperately to the "revenge/undermine" theory. Newsweek's language in their current-issue Armitage article presents the revenge argument flatly as accepted fact, while acknowledging that Armitage was the source of the leak, which was apparently unintential.

That absolutely no facts exist to support the revenge/undermine/"get even" theory troubles them not in the least. That motive was wholely invented by the press but has become a liberal article of faith - that's the story they're gonna go with, come hell or high water.

Just one of the many reasons I'm letting my Newsweek subscription expire this month after more than 30 years. I'm no longer willing to pay good money to read their biased BS.