Seeker Blog

I really don’t see how the press can continue to replay the Joe Wilson story as though it were true history. Christopher Hitchens assembles the case very clearly in his last two Slate articles. For those who want to review the case, a large number of background resource links are included in the two articles. The most recent article from 25 July:

Now that Joseph and Valerie Wilson’s fantasies of having been persecuted by high officials in the administration have been so thoroughly dispelled by Robert Novak (and now that it seems the prosecutor has determined that there was no breach of the relevant laws to begin with), we may return to the more important original question. Was there good reason to suppose that Iraqi envoys visited Niger in search of “yellowcake” uranium ore?

[…]

This means that both pillars of the biggest scandal-mongering effort yet mounted by the “anti-war” movement—the twin allegations of a false story exposed by Wilson and then of a state-run vendetta undertaken against him and the lady wife who dispatched him on the mission—are in irretrievable ruins. The truth is the exact polar opposite. The original Niger connection was both authentic and important, and Wilson’s utter failure to grasp it or even examine it was not enough to make Karl Rove even turn over in bed. All the work of the supposed “outing” was inadvertently performed by Wilson’s admirer Robert Novak. Of course, one defends the Bush administration at one’s own peril. Thanks largely to Stephen Hadley, assistant to the president for national security affairs, our incompetent and divided government grew so nervous as to disown the words that appeared in the 2003 State of the Union address. But the facts are still the facts, and it is high time that they received one-millionth of the attention that the “Plamegate” farce has garnered.

The previous article The End of the Affair: Novak exonerates the Bushies in the Plame case is also available as a podcast:

Robert Novak’s July 12 column and his appearance on Meet the Press Sunday night have dissolved any remaining doubt about the mad theory that the Bush administration “outed” Ms. Valerie Plame as revenge for her husband’s refusal to confirm the report by British intelligence that Iraqi officials had visited Niger in search of uranium. To summarize, we now know that:

1. Novak was never approached by any administration officials but approached them instead.

2. He was never told the name Plame but discovered it from Who’s Who in America, which contained it in Joseph Wilson’s entry.

3. Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald had all along known which sources had responded to Novak’s questions.

When one thinks of the oceans of ink and acres of paper that have been wasted on this mother of all nonstories, one wants to weep for the journalistic profession as well as for the trees. Well before Novak felt able to go public, he had said that his original source was not “a partisan gunslinger,” which by any reasonable definition means that he was consciously excluding the names of Karl Rove or Dick Cheney. And how likely was it anyway that either man, seeking to revenge himself on Joseph Wilson, would go to a columnist who is known to be one of Wilson’s admirers (praise for him and his career was a central theme in the original 2003 article), is friendly with the CIA, and is furthermore known as a staunch and consistent foe of the administration’s intervention in Iraq? The whole concept was nonsense on its face.

As Novak says, the original question was: How did a man publicly critical of the Bush policy get the CIA’s nomination for a mission to Niger? When he asked this question of his first source, he was told in effect, “That’s easy. His wife works there and recommended him for the trip.” This has since been confirmed by the report of the Senate intelligence committee, which quotes a memo from Valerie Plame making the recommendation in so many words (on the bizarre grounds that Wilson already enjoyed warm relations with the people he would supposedly be investigating at the Niger Ministry of Mines).