Still waiting for it
It's been nearly a week since The Nation's David Corn and Newsweek's Michael Isikoff revealed that the original leaker of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity was Richard Armitage -- and that said leak was not part of an effort by the White House at payback for her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, blowing the whistle on false intelligence.
Today, The Washington Post editorial page finally weighed-in on the matter, placing the blame for the Plame outing squarely where it belongs -- on Wilson himself.
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. [emphasis added]
We still have no response from The New York Times editorial page which not only trumpeted Wilson's lies, but led the charge for an investigation into the identity of the leaker. The Times' misguided crusade resulted -- predictably -- in more bad PR for the press, not to mention landing one of their own reporters in the hoosegow.
This one's going to be tough for the Times editiorialists to explain without doing a major mea culpa on a lot of their earlier editorials. I imagine they're just having a hard time getting their spin machine generating enough RPMs to do the job.
For more from the Plamegate expert, check out Tom Maguire's take.
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