I am glad that everyone is realizing that the Plame story was, as I thought all along, a non-story. It turns out the leaker was Richard Armitage, who was generally skeptical of the Iraq War and also something of an administration oustider. Far from it being a Bush plot to destroy Joe Wilson’s career, the real reason her identity was ultimately exposed was his own very public denunciation of the Bush administration. This whole story was a confluence of Wilson’s vanity, the media’s attempt to engineer a scandal, and hostility to Bush from elements at the CIA. Today the Washington Post finally put this story to rest:
It follows that one of the most sensational charges leveled against the Bush White House — that it orchestrated the leak of Ms. Plame’s identity to ruin her career and thus punish Mr. Wilson — is untrue. The partisan clamor that followed the raising of that allegation by Mr. Wilson in the summer of 2003 led to the appointment of a special prosecutor, a costly and prolonged investigation, and the indictment of Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, on charges of perjury. All of that might have been avoided had Mr. Armitage’s identity been known three years ago. . . .Nevertheless, it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame’s CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming — falsely, as it turned out — that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush’s closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It’s unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.
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