Adam's Apple
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- Apr 25, 2004
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The Plame Facts about Distraction
By Mark Steyn, The Washington Times
July 18, 2005
Karl Rove? Please. I couldn't care less. This week finds me thousands of miles from the Beltway in what I believe the ABC World News Tonight map designates as the Rest Of The Planet, an obscure beat the media can't seem to spare a correspondent for. But even if I was with the rest of the navel-gazers inside the Beltway, I wouldn't be interested in who "leaked" the name of CIA employee Valerie Plame to the press.
As her weirdly self-obsessed husband Joseph C. Wilson IV conceded on CNN the other day, she wasn't a "clandestine officer" and, indeed, hadn't been one for six years. So one can only "leak" her name in the way one can "leak" the name of the check-out clerk at Home Depot or the busboy at Denny's.
Back when Woodrow Wilson ran for president, he had a campaign song called "Wilson, That's All." If only. With Joe Wilson, it's never all. He keeps coming back like a song.
But in the real world there's only one scandal in this whole wretched business -- that the CIA, as part of its institutional obstruction of the administration, set up a pathetic "fact-finding mission" that would be considered a joke by any serious intelligence agency and compounded it by sending, at the behest of his wife, a shrill politically motivated poseur who, for the sake of 15 minutes' celebrity on the cable gabfest circuit, misled the nation about what he found.
This controversy began, you'll recall, because Mr. Wilson objected to a line in President Bush's State-of-the-Union address that British intelligence had discovered Iraq was trying to acquire "yellowcake" -- i.e., weaponized uranium -- from Africa. This made Mr. Bush, in Mr. Wilson's incisive analysis, a "liar" and Vice President Dick Cheney a "lying sonofabitch."
In fact, the only lying sonofabitch turned out to be Yellowcake Joe. Just about everybody on the face of the Earth except Mr. Wilson, the White House press corps and the moveon.org crowd accepts that Saddam was indeed trying to acquire uranium from Africa. Don't take my word, for it; it's the conclusion of the Senate intelligence report, Lord Butler's report in the United Kingdom, the British external intelligence agency MI6, French intelligence, other European services -- and, come to that, the original CIA report based on Joe Wilson's own briefing to them. Only Yellowcake Joe knows why he then wrote an article for the New York Times misrepresenting what senior figures from Daouda Mallam Wanke's Niger regime told him.
As I wrote in this space a year ago, an ambassador, in Sir Henry Wootton's famous dictum, is a good man sent abroad to lie for his country; this ambassador came home to lie to his.
for full article:
http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20050717-094452-4542r.htm
By Mark Steyn, The Washington Times
July 18, 2005
Karl Rove? Please. I couldn't care less. This week finds me thousands of miles from the Beltway in what I believe the ABC World News Tonight map designates as the Rest Of The Planet, an obscure beat the media can't seem to spare a correspondent for. But even if I was with the rest of the navel-gazers inside the Beltway, I wouldn't be interested in who "leaked" the name of CIA employee Valerie Plame to the press.
As her weirdly self-obsessed husband Joseph C. Wilson IV conceded on CNN the other day, she wasn't a "clandestine officer" and, indeed, hadn't been one for six years. So one can only "leak" her name in the way one can "leak" the name of the check-out clerk at Home Depot or the busboy at Denny's.
Back when Woodrow Wilson ran for president, he had a campaign song called "Wilson, That's All." If only. With Joe Wilson, it's never all. He keeps coming back like a song.
But in the real world there's only one scandal in this whole wretched business -- that the CIA, as part of its institutional obstruction of the administration, set up a pathetic "fact-finding mission" that would be considered a joke by any serious intelligence agency and compounded it by sending, at the behest of his wife, a shrill politically motivated poseur who, for the sake of 15 minutes' celebrity on the cable gabfest circuit, misled the nation about what he found.
This controversy began, you'll recall, because Mr. Wilson objected to a line in President Bush's State-of-the-Union address that British intelligence had discovered Iraq was trying to acquire "yellowcake" -- i.e., weaponized uranium -- from Africa. This made Mr. Bush, in Mr. Wilson's incisive analysis, a "liar" and Vice President Dick Cheney a "lying sonofabitch."
In fact, the only lying sonofabitch turned out to be Yellowcake Joe. Just about everybody on the face of the Earth except Mr. Wilson, the White House press corps and the moveon.org crowd accepts that Saddam was indeed trying to acquire uranium from Africa. Don't take my word, for it; it's the conclusion of the Senate intelligence report, Lord Butler's report in the United Kingdom, the British external intelligence agency MI6, French intelligence, other European services -- and, come to that, the original CIA report based on Joe Wilson's own briefing to them. Only Yellowcake Joe knows why he then wrote an article for the New York Times misrepresenting what senior figures from Daouda Mallam Wanke's Niger regime told him.
As I wrote in this space a year ago, an ambassador, in Sir Henry Wootton's famous dictum, is a good man sent abroad to lie for his country; this ambassador came home to lie to his.
for full article:
http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20050717-094452-4542r.htm
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