Shameless

I couldn't let Valerie Plame's House testimony flow into the sewer of the Bush administration's forgotten crimes without comment. And they do tend to become forgotten, since each one is so quickly supplanted by two -- or three, or four -- more. Trying to keep up with the sordidness reminds me of that old 'Lucy Show' clip in which she tries to keep pace with the accelerating chocolate-factory line. It just ain't possible. There's too much. But we try.

While the 'Plame Incident' was routinely similar to others in the administration's bulging bag of ultimately prosecutable felonies, it also demonstrated -- and continues to demonstrate -- with a certain uniqueness just how aggressively shameless the White House and its dreary band of supporters can be.

Forget for a moment the duplicity involved, the underhandedness engaged, the personal retribution unleashed, and most of all the conversion of national security into a political play thing. Forget all that, and ponder for a moment only the shamelessness of the right's ongoing semantic denials.

In her testimony Plame made ringingly clear -- under oath -- the sensitive status of her position at the CIA. "I am here to say I was a covert officer of the Central Intelligence Agency," she told the oversight committee. And what she did on the job, she said in rebuttal to the right's reputation-smear machine, "was not common knowledge on the Georgetown cocktail circuit."

Clear enough? Maybe not. So let's give it another go for the perpetually thickheaded.

"Saying she could reveal only limited information about her former job, Plame testified that, just before the Iraq war, she was 'still a covert officer' working to 'discover solid intelligence for senior policymakers on Iraq's presumed weapons-of-mass-destruction program' and that she 'traveled to foreign countries on secret missions to find vital intelligence.'"

Let's see. She couldn't reveal all. She worked at the CIA. She focused on uncovering usable intelligence regarding Iraq's WMD. Her work filtered up to senior policymakers. She went on secret missions.

Now let's put our thinking caps on. What does one normally call this kind of work?

You got it. Covert.

As if all that wasn't enough, "the covert nature of her job was buttressed by a statement that [the committee chairman] read at the hearing's opening which, he said, was approved by Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the CIA's director. The statement said that Plame worked in a covert capacity at the time of [Robert] Novak's column and that her employment status was classified under an executive order."

OK, let's review. If a CIA agent says her work was covert, and the CIA director confirms that her work was covert, what do we call it?

That aside, speaking for the vast right-wing nincompoopery, here's what the House "committee's ranking Republican" called it: a CIA screw-up.

Rep. Thomas Davis III of Virginia "sought to deflect blame from the administration," charging that "this looks to me more like a CIA problem than a White House problem." Quoting now the WP's coverage: He said "the agency should have made sure that White House officials who inquired about Plame knew that her position was classified."

And notice he didn't add, simply couldn't bring himself to add, "covert."

Shameless.

And the right will keep right on being shameless, quibbling about her status with the most lawyerly semantic hairsplitting imaginable and making what Bill Clinton's "meaning of is, is" look like an Oxford Dictionary entry of rectilinear precision. Why?

Because they're shameless.

Comments

[A Librarian]

Even more shameless has been the media coverage of Valerie Plame's testimony:

I don't have cable TV--I listened to it on C-Span Radio on my computer. While listening, I thought NOW all this talk about "well, she wasn't REALLY covert" would be put to rest. So I was eagerly awaiting the evening news shows to bring this out.

Well, it got less than 2 min coverage on each of the 3 channels, all of them leading with a Plame quotation that expressed her shock that her OWN government--as opposed to a foreign one-- was responsible for blowing her cover. Okay. But NONE of the 3 channels made it clear that, according to her testimony, under oath, SHE WAS COVERT AND HAD WORKED OVERSEAS WITHIN THE LAST 5 YEARS, which would mean that, unless she perjured herself--as Victoria Toensing and Brit Hume have since suggested--her identity WAS covered under the espionage law Ms. Toensing claims to be such an authority on.

NBC, hosted by Campbell Brown (wife of Paul Bremer's Ambassador of TRUTHINESS, Dan Senor) went on to show (in the report by Chip Reid) the Republican Congressman asking her whether she was a Democrat and her shocking admission that YES she was.
End of story on NBC.

ABC's report by David Kerley included the tidbit of her denial that SHE had sent her husband to Niger, then noted that Plame is is likely to benefit from her situation: “While Plame may have lost the undercover job she loved, the blown cover is allowing her to find a new career. She signed a book deal for more than $1 million. And oh, about all those ingredients for a Hollywood movie, there will be one of those, as well.”
End of story on ABC.

CBS was preempted here by a basketball game. But a report I read said, CBS's Gloria Borger ended her report with “When asked whether she'd gotten an apology from the President, the Vice President, Karl Rove or Scooter Libby, she said no.”
End of story on CBS.

Of all the Sunday news shows, only FOX discussed Plame's testimony at all. And although Bob Scheiffer had ended last Sunday's FACE THE NATION with a commentary lamenting that, even though poor Scooter was found guilty, we still don't know whether Valery Plame was really COVERT or whether a law had ACTUALLY been broken. Well, now he knows--unless, of course, he believes she committed perjury--but, no comment from him.

I just think the lack of (non-cable) interest in setting the story straight is shocking.

[Bill Mac Bean]

How many atrocoties must the bush crime cartel commit before it's brought to justice? How the hell have they gotten away with it to date, when there's a mountain of irrefuteable documented evidence pointing to their evils? What's it going to take before an aroused citizenry and Congress bring down the hammer?