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What they are not saying is that it was a Repubican CIA and Republican investigators that looked into this and let to the inditement. Republicans want all people who are guilty, charged and convicted. Democrats still defend and undermind what Clinton did, even though they know he deserved impeechment and conviction.

The strange phenomena that you report, i.e. that all responsible news outlets now report that Plame put forward Wilson's name, can be explained by taking note that it is an established fact. Only the serial liar Joe Wilson keeps dissenting from it.

(All emphases below are add by moi)

Here's Stephen Hayes, again:

The promised CIA follow-up came quickly. That same day officials at the agency's Counterproliferation Division discussed how they might investigate further. An employee of the division, Valerie Wilson, suggested the agency send her husband, Joseph Wilson, a former U.S. ambassador to Gabon with experience in Niger, to Africa to make inquiries. In a memo to the deputy director of the Counterproliferation Division, she wrote: "My husband has good relations with the PM [prime minister of Niger] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity." Mrs. Wilson would later say she asked her husband, on behalf of the CIA, if he would investigate "this crazy report" on a uranium deal between Iraq and Niger.Wilson agreed to go.

http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/006/217wnmrb.asp

This (her involvement) has been known for some time, and is not disputed by any other than Wilson. Just so you don't conclude that I can only source right-wing rags, here is Martin Peretz writing last year in The New Republic:

I myself had wondered why the CIA had been so dumb--such dumbness is something to which we should have long ago become accustomed!--as to send a low-level diplomat to check on yellowcake sales from Niger to Iraq when it should have dispatched a real spook. Well, it turns out that a "real spook" had recommended him to her boss, that spook being Valerie Plame, who happens also to be Wilson's wife. He has long denied that she had anything to do with his going to Niger and that, alas, was a lie. It appears, in fact, that this is the sole reason he was sent. Still, in a lot of dining rooms where I am a guest here, there is outrage that someone in the vice president's office "outed" Ms. Plame, as though everybody in Georgetown hadn't already known she was under cover, so to speak. Under cover, but not really. One guest even asserted that someone in the vice president's office is surely guilty of treason, no less--an offense this person certainly wouldn't have attributed to the Rosenbergs or Alger Hiss, Daniel Ellsberg or Philip Agee. But for the person who confirmed for Robert Novak what he already knew, nothing but high crimes would do.

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=express&s=peretz072104

Of course, no treason has been uncovered after twenty two months' worth of fed investigation.

Even the Washington Post has accepted that Wilson is not to be believed on hardly anything at all: And, the piece cited below takes for granted Plame's involvement:

The public record offers no indication that Mr. Libby or any other official deliberately exposed Ms. Plame to punish her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. Rather, Mr. Libby and other officials, including Karl Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff, apparently were seeking to combat the sensational allegations of a critic. They may have believed that Ms. Plame's involvement was an important part of their story of why Mr. Wilson was sent to investigate claims that Iraq sought uranium ore from Niger, and why his subsequent -- and mostly erroneous -- allegations that the administration twisted that small part of the case against Saddam Hussein should not be credited. To criminalize such discussions between officials and reporters would run counter to the public interest.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/28/AR2005102801787.html?referrer=email&referrer=email

Right across the board, including the report last year of the bipartison Senate Select Intelligence Committee (left as an exercise for the reader to unearth), there is "consensus" that a) Plame was centrally involved in the selection of Wison to go to Niger, and b) Wilson has lied about the entire mission since that day he returned from it.

Best regards,

r.

Dear Big and Moi: I don't have a horse in this race. I want the chips to fall where they may, honestly. Listening to Fitzgerald was a breath of fresh air after all the bull and spin. I hope his intellectual rigor and discipline set a higher standard that helps the national debate turn a corner, but the two of you don't make me hopeful.

Big, I think you'd have a hard time proving that Democrats think Clinton "deserved impeechment and conviction" over private sexual behavior. Frankly, I don't believe you.

Moi, your TNR link is over a year old, and serves up dinner-party chatter as evidence. The unsigned Washington Post editorial you quote, and the other essays, are by definition someone's opinion. This vetted WaPo staff news report today goes into far more detail about who knew what, who did what:

The IAEA exposed the documents as forgeries on March 7, 2003. The Bush administration, while acknowledging uncertainty, did not admit its primary evidence had been faked.

There's some more detail from this below, but WMD expert Plame suggesting that her husband had good contacts seems unremarkable, since he was Ambassador to Iraq during the first Gulf War. (My bosses listen to me, but I don't make their decisions.)

Wilson got his say here today, as did Matt Cooper, because they are involved in the indictments. If the Wilsons pursue a civil suit, his notions will get a further airing.

Joe Wilson's hypothesis about why she was outed seems a minor sidebar compared to White House officials selling a war to Americans with evidence known to have been forged on stolen letterhead.

That said, itt's not clear whether all the shoes have yet dropped from Fitzgerald's investigation.

...Even so, the grand jury's 22-page indictment fleshes out a saga that has been largely shrouded for almost two years by grand jury secrecy. While Friday's disclosures allege no wrongdoing by Cheney, they place the vice president closer than has been known before to events at the heart of the case.

One notable disclosure is that Libby and Cheney made separate inquiries to the CIA about Wilson's wife, and each confirmed independently that she worked there. It was Cheney, the indictment states, who supplied Libby the detail "that Wilson's wife worked . . . in the Counterproliferation Division" -- an unambiguous declaration that her position was among the case officers of the operations directorate. That conversation took place on June 12, 2003, a month before the Norfolk flight and nearly two weeks before Libby first told a reporter about Plame's CIA affiliation.

Wilson was a former ambassador who traveled to Niger in February 2002 after Cheney requested elaboration on a Defense Department report -- based on erroneous information originating from the Italian security service -- that Iraq had an agreement to buy processed uranium ore, or "yellowcake." Upon his return, Wilson reported to CIA and State Department analysts that he had found no support for the allegation and had reasons to believe it was untrue. When the Bush administration nonetheless launched a public relations campaign that highlighted the uranium report -- most prominently in the president's State of the Union speech on Jan. 28, 2003 -- Wilson began raising questions among friends in government. In March, when the International Atomic Energy Agency exposed the documents as forged, a fact Wilson had not discovered, he began telling journalists in not-for-quotation interviews that the White House propounded a deliberate lie.

New evidence may emerge that challenges some of the facts the Washington Post investigative reporters published today, and I trust that in this post-Fitzgerald climate, the corrections will be prominent.

These reporters' job -- and that of others in the nation's capitol -- is to find out the truth at the highest levels of government. (This is why Judith Miller's "My sources were wrong" is no excuse, and is so disturbing to her colleagues.)

What's in it for you to serve up yet more partisan pedantry as "truth"? Is it head sport? The pleasure of debate usually pales when debaters realize that selective research makes it easy to espouse either side of an argument, as high school coaches insist they do:

"Though boys throw stones at frogs in sport, the frogs do not die in sport, but in earnest." -- Solon, c. 640-560 BC, poet and "mayor" of Athens.

On edit: Someone sent me this post (at Talking Points Memo, the site of Josh Marshall, who spent time here at Brown Graduate School and presumably likes these debates). Here, Larry Johnson notes that right-wingers have spread out to attack Wilson. (Moi, meet Larry.) So there's a lot of repubishing of Wilson's earlier explanation of how he came to go to Niger. FWIW:

In fact, Valerie was not in the meeting at which the subject of my trip was raised. Neither was the CPD Reports officer. After having escorted me into the room, she departed the meeting to avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest. It was at that meeting where the question of my traveling to Niger was broached with me for the first time and came only after a thorough discussion of what the participants did and did not know about the subject. My bona fides justifying the invitation to the meeting were the trip I had previously taken to Niger to look at other uranium related questions as well as 20 years living and working in Africa, and personal contacts throughout the Niger government. Neither the CPD reports officer nor the State analyst were in the chain of command to know who, or how, the decision was made. The interpretations attributed to them are not the full story. In fact, it is my understanding that the Reports Officer has a different conclusion about Valerie's role than the one offered in the "additional comments". I urge the committee to reinterview the officer and publicly publish his statement.

It is unfortunate that the report failed to include the CIA's position on this matter. If the staff had done so it would undoubtedly have been given the same evidence as provided to Newsday reporters Tim Phelps and Knut Royce in July, 2003. They reported on July 22 that:

"A senior intelligence officer confirmed that Plame was a Directorate of Operations undercover officer who worked `alongside' the operations officers who asked her husband to travel to Niger.

"But he said she did not recommend her husband to undertake the Niger assignment. `They (the officers who did ask Wilson to check the uranium story) were aware of who she was married to, which is not surprising,' he said. `There are people elsewhere in government who are trying to make her look like she was the one who was cooking this up, for some reason,' he said. `I can't figure out what it could be.'

"We paid his (Wilson's) airfare. But to go to Niger is not exactly a benefit. Most people you'd have to pay big bucks to go there,' the senior intelligence official said. Wilson said. he was reimbursed only for expenses." (Newsday article Columnist blows CIA Agent's cover, dated July 22, 2003).

You wouldn't be throwing sand in the umpire's face, would you, "Moi"?

Good afternoon Sheila,

> Moi, your TNR link is over a year old, and serves up dinner-party chatter as evidence.

TNR converts the link to a secure (https) one, and perhaps your network restrictions don't allow you to browse to such a thing? But to let you know that the page does exist, I have put it up here. If you desire the full text of the article just let me know and I will promptly get it to you.

> The unsigned Washington Post editorial you quote, and the other essays, are by definition someone's opinion.

Yes indeed, editorials are "opinion." That is the exact reason I included that snippet, to demonstrate that even iconic liberal establishment news organizations no longer question Ms. Plame's active involvement in her husband being tapped for the Niger mission. Hayes' article, however, is not an editorial, or an op-ed, or an "opiinion" piece at all; it is a work of "straight reporting." If you read it, you would have been saved from the embarassment of falling into the "Rome forgeries" canard:

> This vetted WaPo staff news report today goes into far more detail about who knew what, who did what:

> The IAEA exposed the documents as forgeries on March 7, 2003. The Bush administration, while acknowledging uncertainty, did not admit its primary evidence had been faked.

Those documents were not the administration's "primary evidence." They were suspected to be fakes virtually as soon as they arrived at our embassy in Rome. The reporting that formed the basis for Wilson's trip did not include those documents. And, those documents trapped Wilson into the first of his many, many lies.

I can put forward many more sources besides Hayes' article, but frankly I only have so much time to put into this thing.

Besides, you have the curious habit of only honoring the sources you provide, and, in a display of questionable manners, revert too quickly to simple insult. While I am a "partisan pedant" not too far removed from high school debating contests, you are....what?

Be nice Sheila, be nice!

Best regards,

r.

Mea culpa re the link to the Peretz article TNR screenshot.

This should be more better:

Click Me

Best regards,

r.

We actually have a narrative investigated by the FBI inside an indictment of a senior member of the White House staff for lying.

You're trying to foist a partial screenshot while calling the author, Martin Peretz, a liberal? He signed this letter from PNAC to Bush. ( Project for the New American Century is a neocon think tank) What's in it for you to lie to my readers?

It's not "my links" vs. "your links," it's that you seem unaware of the difference between news reporting done with no benefit to those who report and write it except that their charge is to find out the truth, and rhetoric in pursuit of an agenda.

You make no distinction made between paid political announcements in the guise of "news stories" and a former ambassador's public letter to a senate committee, or the vetted, cross-examined "what actually happened?" going on in the Washington Post newsroom. It's sloppy thinking.

In your first comment, you wrote,

Are you familiar with The Corner, National Review Online's blog? No?

Who answered "No" for me in your head, "Moi"? You? How patronizing.

Why didn't you identify it as Jonah Goldberg's blog? Jonah Goldberg-Lucianne Goldberg-Linda Tripp etc... Consider the source.

This is the same kind of crap Jon Stewart told the Crossfire guys is tearing the country apart. My blog won't sink there with you.

Go start your own blog. Mine isn't available as a free outlet for intellectually dishonest propaganda. You've convinced me comment moderation is necessary. Congratulations.