John Hinderaker, at Power Line, comments on the latest attack by Pouting Spooks upon this Administration.

During the halcyon early years of the Bush administration, it still seemed possible that the President and his appointees could prevail over the inertia and, often, outright hostility of the almost-entirely-Democratic federal bureaucracy. One instance of the administration’s effort to get beyond the bureaucracy’s stale thinking was the Defense Department’s Office of Special Plans, which was overseen by Douglas Feith, who was then Undersecretary of Defense for Policy.

Feith’s group became known for challenging the CIA’s dogmatic belief that Iraq’s “secular” dictatorship couldn’t possibly collaborate with radical Islamic groups like al Qaeda. The Office of Special Plans argued that the CIA consistently played down its own raw evidence of relationships between Iraq and al Qaeda because such evidence didn’t fit the agency’s theoretical framework. That act of lese majesty must naturally be punished.

So tomorrow, the Pentagon’s own Inspector General will present a report to the Senate Armed Services Committee on whether–I’m not kidding–it was illegal for the Defense Department to independently analyze the data gathered by the intelligence agencies.

You can breathe a sigh of relief, though; the Inspector General concluded that disagreeing with the CIA is not a crime.

From the Friday New York Times, we learn that some of the captured Iraqi documents, recently made available for public scrutiny on the Internet, contained technical details of atomic weapons production whose availability on-line alarmed arms control officials.

The Times published all this as an indictment of the public release of captured Iraqi documents.

The director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, had resisted setting up the Web site, which some intelligence officials felt implicitly raised questions about the competence and judgment of government analysts. But President Bush approved the site’s creation after Congressional Republicans proposed legislation to force the documents’ release…

Some intelligence officials feared that individual documents, translated and interpreted by amateurs, would be used out of context to second-guess the intelligence agencies’ view that Mr. Hussein did not have unconventional weapons or substantive ties to Al Qaeda. Reviewing the documents for release would add an unnecessary burden on busy intelligence analysts, they argued.

But the Times overlooks the fact that this kind of detailed technical information about an Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction Program specifically confirms the Bush Administration’s causus belli, against which elite media (like the Times), and the most influential sectors of the Intelligence Community have so successfully waged a campaign of denial.

Does not the very existence of documents providing factual information of the highest relevance to the most vital public debate of the last three years, concealed by powerful elements of the Intelligence Community, perhaps prejudiced on policy issues, or possibly motivated (as some suspect) by partisanship, demand “second-guessing?”

Hat tip to Matt Drudge.

Whited sepulchre Byron Calame needed to ponder for four months before coming to the astonishing conclusions, that:

1) The Federal Government’s international banking data surveillance program was legal.

2) No abuses of private date have occurred.

3) The program really was secret.

Banking Data: A Mea Culpa

Since the job of public editor requires me to probe and question the published work and wisdom of Times journalists, there’s a special responsibility for me to acknowledge my own flawed assessments.

My July 2 column strongly supported The Times’s decision to publish its June 23 article on a once-secret banking-data surveillance program. After pondering for several months, I have decided I was off base. There were reasons to publish the controversial article, but they were slightly outweighed by two factors to which I gave too little emphasis. While it’s a close call now, as it was then, I don’t think the article should have been published.

Those two factors are really what bring me to this corrective commentary: the apparent legality of the program in the United States, and the absence of any evidence that anyone’s private data had actually been misused. I had mentioned both as being part of “the most substantial argument against running the story,” but that reference was relegated to the bottom of my column.

The source of the data, as my column noted, was the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or Swift. That Belgium-based consortium said it had honored administrative subpoenas from the American government because it has a subsidiary in this country.

I haven’t found any evidence in the intervening months that the surveillance program was illegal under United States laws. Although data-protection authorities in Europe have complained that the formerly secret program violated their rules on privacy, there have been no Times reports of legal action being taken. Data-protection rules are often stricter in Europe than in America, and have been a frequent source of friction.

Also, there still haven’t been any abuses of private data linked to the program, which apparently has continued to function. That, plus the legality issue, has left me wondering what harm actually was avoided when The Times and two other newspapers disclosed the program. The lack of appropriate oversight — to catch any abuses in the absence of media attention — was a key reason I originally supported publication. I think, however, that I gave it too much weight.

In addition, I became embarrassed by the how-secret-is-it issue, although that isn’t a cause of my altered conclusion. My original support for the article rested heavily on the fact that so many people already knew about the program that serious terrorists also must have been aware of it. But critical, and clever, readers were quick to point to a contradiction: the Times article and headline had both emphasized that a “secret” program was being exposed. (If one sentence down in the article had acknowledged that a number of people were probably aware of the program, both the newsroom and I would have been better able to address that wave of criticism.)

What kept me from seeing these matters more clearly earlier in what admittedly was a close call? I fear I allowed the vicious criticism of The Times by the Bush administration to trigger my instinctive affinity for the underdog and enduring faith in a free press — two traits that I warned readers about in my first column.

The Times Public Editor, however, chose not to acknowledge:

4) That surveillance of international financial transfer data is a vitally important tool in combating terrorism.

5) That the unauthorized disclosure of secret information compromising national security in time of war constitutes espionage and treason.

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One really has to admire the monumental arrogance and unmitigated gall of the New York Times in appointing a sycophantic worm like Calame to that bogus and ersatz Ombudsman position. When the Times commits treason, its in-house watchdog slumbers contentedly for four months, then buries an apology at the bottom of his weekly column, grudgingly admitting he was “off base.” Though, it is now, as it was then, in his view, “a close call” whether the Times ought to compromise a vital counter-terrorism program (and betray its country). We readers have to understand, though, that Calame warned us when he started as Ombudsman that he was prejudiced, prejudiced in favor of The New York Times, which Calame has the astonishing mental ability to transform from the sleekest and fattest of all fat cats into “the underdog.”

We commented disfavorably on Calame’s initial support of Times’ treason here referring accurately to Byron Calame as an example of the type of invertebrate that leaves a trail on the sidewalk.

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Michelle Malkin makes the important point (which I happened to overlook) that Calame justifies his prejudice in the Times’ favor on the basis of “the vicious criticism of The Times by the Bush administration,” and she wonders appropriately, just what vicious criticism was that? Then she reviews what the president and other administration officials actually said, exposing the emptiness, the fundamental fraudulence, of Mr. Calame’s rhetoric very nicely.

House Intelligence Chairman Pete Hoekstra suspended an unidentified individual working on the staff of one of the democrat committee members on Thursday, when it was established that the staffer had requested a copy of the National Intelligence Estimate from National Intelligence Director John Negroponte three days before selected leaked portions of the document were published in the New York Times.

It has since been learned that the suspended staffer was Larry Hanauer, employed by California democrat Congresswoman Jane Harman .

Cooperative Research tells us:

After George W. Bush took office in 2001, Larry Hanauer, who has long been at the Israel-Syria-Lebanon desk and who is known to be “even-handed with Israel,” is replaced by David Schenker of the Washington Institute. [American Conservative, 12/1/2003; Mother Jones, 1/2004.

Harman has stated that she is “appalled,” and is demanding Hanauer’s reinstatement.

The suspension is evidently payback for Harman’s unilateral release earlier this week of an independent investigator’s report on the bribe-taking of resigned-convicted-and-imprisoned former Republican Congressman Randy Cunningham.

In order to counter the Pouting Spooks’ weekend leak of highly selective excerpts of last Spring’s National Intelligence Estimate, obviously intended to provide a nice pre-election front page Sunday lead, President Bush will be declassifying key portions of the report.

The Wall Street Journal this morning argued that he ought to release the whole thing (with some reactions).

In the meantime, (the non-Pouting) Spook86 offers some details from the report contradicting the Sunday paper’s spin.

The quotes printed below–taken directly from the document and provided to this blogger–provide “the other side” of the estimate, and its more balanced assessment of where we stand in the War on Terror (comments in italics are mine).

In one of its early paragraphs, the estimate notes progress in the struggle against terrorism, stating the U.S.-led efforts have “seriously damaged Al Qaida leadership and disrupted its operations.” Didn’t see that in the NYT article.

Or how about this statement, which–in part–reflects the impact of increased pressure on the terrorists: “A large body of reporting indicates that people identifying themselves as jihadists is increasing…however, they are largely decentralized, lack a coherent strategy and are becoming more diffuse.” Hmm…doesn’t sound much like Al Qaida’s pre-9-11 game plan.

The report also notes the importance of the War in Iraq as a make or break point for the terrorists: “Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves to have failed, we judge that fewer will carry on the fight.” It’s called a ripple effect.

More support for the defeating the enemy on his home turf: “Threats to the U.S. are intrinsically linked to U.S. success or failure in Iraq.” President Bush and senior administration officials have made this argument many times–and it’s been consistently dismissed by the “experts” at the WaPo and Times.

And, some indication that the “growing” jihad may be pursuing the wrong course: “There is evidence that violent tactics are backfiring…their greatest vulnerability is that their ultimate political solution (shar’a law) is unpopular with the vast majority of Muslims.” Seems to contradict MSM accounts of a jihadist tsunami with ever-increasing support in the global Islamic community..

The estimate also affirms the wisdom of sowing democracy in the Middle East: “Progress toward pluralism and more responsive political systems in the Muslim world will eliminate many of the grievances jihadists exploit.” As I recall, this the core of our strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Quite a contrast to the “doom and gloom” scenario painted by the Times and the Post.

Christopher Hitchens dissects the facile dismissal of Iraq seeking Niger uranium in the Pouting Spooks’ Senate Intelligence Committee report.

And, on page 54 we read, under the heading “Conclusions”:

Iraq had two contacts with Niger after 1998, but neither involved the purchase of uranium. The purpose of a visit to Niger by the Iraqi ambassador to the Vatican, Wissam al-Zahawie, was to invite the president of Niger to visit Iraq. The other visit involved discussions of a Nigerien oil purchase from Iraq.

Since the report does not trouble to supply any reasoning from the evidence to its conclusions, we are left to infer that there is nothing odd about Saddam Hussein’s envoy (to the Vatican) paying a visit to Niger, and nothing unusual about Niger’s desire to buy (“for cash”) crude oil from a country under international sanctions that is much less close and convenient a source of oil than, say, its neighbors Nigeria and Algeria.

That ambassador to the Vatican, it turns out, was none other than Wissam al-Zahawi. Ambassador Rolf Ekéus, head of the UNSCOM inspection team after the end of the first Gulf War, tells Hitchens:

When I first heard that it was Zahawie who had been to Niger, I thought well, then, that’s it. Conclusive.

One of my colleagues remembers Zahawie as Iraq’s delegate to the IAEA General Conference during the years 1982-84. One item on the agenda was the diplomatic and political fall-out of Israel’s destruction of the Osirak reactor (a centerpiece of Iraq’s nuclear weapons ambitions). . . . He was the under-secretary of the foreign ministry selected by Baghdad to represent Iraq on the most sensitive issue, the question of Iraq’s nuclear weapons ambitions. His participation as leader of the Iraqi delegation to the 1995 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference merely confirms his standing as Iraq’s top negotiator on nuclear weapons issues.

Hitchens sums it up.

The Senate report gives two versions of Zahawie’s name without ever once mentioning his significant background. It takes at face value his absurd claim about the supposedly innocent motive for his out-of-the-way trip. It accepts similarly bland assurances made by the government of Niger… It does not canvass the views of our allies, or of tried-and-tested experts like Ambassador Ekéus. It offers little evidence and no argument in support of its conclusions. It is a minor disgrace, but a disgrace nevertheless.

Now that Richard Armitage has been exposed by the Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Bob Novak finally tells his version of how he learned about Valerie Plame, and contradicts Richard Armitage.

I want to set the record straight based on firsthand knowledge.

First, Armitage did not, as he now indicates, merely pass on something he had heard and that he ‘‘thought’’ might be so. Rather, he identified to me the CIA division where Mrs. Wilson worked, and said flatly that she recommended the mission to Niger by her husband, former Amb. Joseph Wilson.

Second, Armitage did not slip me this information as idle chitchat, as he now suggests. He made clear he considered it especially suited for my column.

And Joe Wilson and Valerie have changed their minds, and are adding Richard Armitage as a defendant in the lawsuit.

The merry gang of former John Kerry supporters in control of the US Intelligence Community under the Bush Administration have produced two extremely partisan reports, establishing that they were right all along: Saddam Hussein was perfectly harmless, had no WMDs, and had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or terrorism generally, and Bush lied.

These conclusions are reached by the artful selection of data, and by systematically dismissing the sources of all evidence to the contrary of a preferred reality as unreliable on a variety of questionable bases. This source spoke to the Press, that proves he’s lying. And that source took a job with the Iraqi opposition, obviously he was always peddling propaganda on their behalf. If you throw out every piece of evidence you don’t like, using any convenient rationalization, it isn’t difficult to arrive at the conclusions you desired all along.

The reports were adopted, and amended, in a series of partisan votes, in which so-called Republican Senators Olympias Snowe (Maine) and Chuck Hagel (Nebraska) voted with the democrats.

New York Times story

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The Reports:

Postwar Findings on WMD Programs and Links to Terrorism

Report on Information Provided by the Iraqi National Congress

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AJStrata notes that media establishment journalists can’t read.

Now I know why journalists get their stories so wrong so often – they lack basic reading comprehension skills. With all the hoopla about the Senate Intelligence report supposedly saying there were no ties between Saddam and Terrorists (despite Iraq documents which log the training of thousands of terrorists, and notes regarding meetings with Al Qaeda) it might behoove people to read them for themselves.

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Flopping Aces quotes some sources the reports overlooked:

Like the 2002 Congressional Resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq.

“Whereas members of al-Qaida, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens, and interests, including the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq…

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Macranger

I’m still weeding through this “report”. First impressions I got is that it seems to read as if it were trying to convince me that Saddam had no ties to Al Qaeda as if by repeating over and over again I would descend in to a state of BDS and start a new liberal blog…

Our Senate Intelligence Committee could care less about getting to the truth, for the Democrats on the committee it was just another way to get Bush, nothing more, and nothing less.

Rowan Scarborough sums up the life and career of the now deceased L’Affaire Plame, and arrives at the same conclusion the US Senate did previously: former Ambassador Joseph Wilson is irresponsible and a liar.

The expectation on the left that the Valerie Plame affair would blossom into another Watergate, bringing down a second Republican presidency, has fizzled.

Liberals expected that convictions of one or more persons in the Bush administration for leaking or confirming to columnist Robert Novak that Mrs. Plame, the wife of Bush critic Joseph C. Wilson IV, was an undercover CIA operative. Echoing Mr. Wilson’s claims, prominent liberals and leftists, most of them in the press, accused the White House of orchestrating a smear, and sought to drive Karl Rove either out of office or into prison, or both.

Three years on, none of that has happened, and the “scandal” is played out.

Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald, urged on by the pundits and the mainstream press, delved into the city’s culture of reporters and their confidential sources. He issued subpoenas for all types of e-mails and documents to find out which Bush administration officials were talking to which reporters. He threatened reporters with jail — and imprisoned one of them — which may have set a precedent for future prosecutors to compel reporters to disclose their confidential sources.

But in the end, the exhaustive investigation produced no criminal charges against any official for leaking Mrs. Plame’s name in violation of the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Moreover, it has recently emerged that the official who first revealed her name to Mr. Novak, for a July 2003 column, was not a White House official, but Richard Armitage, who was deputy secretary of state to Colin L. Powell…

David Corn, the Washington correspondent for the left-wing Nation magazine, was one of the first columnists to suggest that the Plame matter was a scandal, orchestrated to punish critics of the Iraq war.

“Did senior Bush officials blow the cover of a U.S. intelligence officer working covertly in a field of vital importance to national security — and break the law — in order to strike at a Bush administration critic and intimidate others?” Mr. Corn asked in the Nation two days after the Novak column appeared. “It sure looks that way, if conservative journalist Bob Novak can be trusted.”

Last week, Mr. Corn, co-author of a new book that revealed Mr. Armitage as Mr. Novak’s original source, took a different view, acknowledging Mr. Armitage’s reputation as an “inveterate gossip” rather than a partisan hit man…

Why were Mr. Armitage, Mr. Rove and others talking about Mrs. Plame? Rather than a smear, the mentioning of Mrs. Plame’s name now appears to have been an attempt to set the record straight on this issue: how it came about that Mr. Wilson, a Bush critic who later joined Sen. John Kerry’s campaign and who was not a trained intelligence investigator, was chosen by the CIA to travel to Niger to investigate an important question for the administration as it planned to go to war in Iraq.

The question: Did Baghdad approach Niger about buying yellowcake, a refined uranium that can be further processed into weapons-grade material?

Mr. Wilson said he found no such evidence and went public with his findings in summer 2003. In an op-ed essay in the New York Times on July 6, 2003, he disclosed his CIA mission and said he found no evidence of a deal… a 2004 report cast doubt on some of Mr. Wilson’s claims.

In 2003-04, the Senate Intelligence Committee spent considerable time investigating why the CIA got the intelligence wrong on Iraq. As part of that mandate, staffers delved into the Niger mission.

First, it reported that, despite Mr. Wilson’s denials, he did get the Niger assignment because of his wife. When her unit, the Counterproliferation Division, got word that Mr. Cheney wanted the yellowcake report investigated, Mrs. Plame recommended him to her boss, and she put it in writing.

The committee, which wrote a bipartisan report, turned up a memo to her superior which said, “My husband has good relations with both the [prime minister] 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.” The report said that the next day her unit arranged for Mr. Wilson’s trip to Niger.

She approached her husband with the remark that “there’s this crazy report” on a deal for Niger to sell uranium to Iraq. Niger had sold yellowcake to Saddam two decades ago, and some of it was still in Iraq when U.S. troops arrived in the Gulf war in 2003.

The Senate investigators reported that Mr. Wilson did, in fact, find evidence that an Iraqi overture to buy yellowcake may have occurred. To Republicans, this meant Mr. Wilson’s op-ed in the New York Times — the essay that triggered the whole affair — was inaccurate, just as Mr. Libby contended to Mrs. Miller that it was.

In an addendum to the bipartisan report, Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, Kansas Republican, wrote that “public comments from the former ambassador, such as comments that his report ‘debunked’ the Niger-Iraq uranium story, were incorrect and have led to a distortion in the press and in the public’s understanding of the facts surrounding the Niger-Iraq uranium story. The committee found that, for most analysts, the former ambassador’s report lent more credibility, not less, to the reported Niger-Iraq uranium deal.”…

At the end of the affair, some liberal voices concede the fizzle. In an editorial last week, The Washington Post observed that “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.”

David Corn, co-author of Hubris, the book which revealed Richard Armitage as Valerie Plame’s leaker, is spinning some more of the background detail in Nation article.

Corn gives this precis of Plame’s CIA career.

Valerie Plame was recruited into the CIA in 1985, straight out of Pennsylvania State University. After two years of training to be a covert case officer, she served a stint on the Greece desk, according to Fred Rustmann, a former CIA official who supervised her then. Next she was posted to Athens and posed as a State Department employee. Her job was to spot and recruit agents for the agency. In the early 1990s, she became what’s known as a nonofficial cover officer. NOCs are the most clandestine of the CIA’s frontline officers. They do not pretend to work for the US government; they do not have the protection of diplomatic immunity. They might claim to be a businessperson. She told people she was with an energy firm. Her main mission remained the same: to gather agents for the CIA.

In 1997 she returned to CIA headquarters and joined the Counterproliferation Division. (About this time, she moved in with Joseph Wilson; they later married.) She was eventually given a choice: North Korea or Iraq. She selected the latter. Come the spring of 2001, she was in the CPD’s modest Iraq branch. But that summer–before 9/11–word came down from the brass: We’re ramping up on Iraq. Her unit was expanded and renamed the Joint Task Force on Iraq. Within months of 9/11, the JTFI grew to fifty or so employees. Valerie Wilson was placed in charge of its operations group.

We have posted some discussion of Valerie Plame’s career here. Corn unfortunately does not identify the location of Valerie Plame’s NOC activities.

It is clear that the purpose of the article is to shore up the central thesis of the Anti-Bush Intel Op, the thesis that Intelligence Community professionals told the Bush Administration that Saddam was innocent, there were no WMDs and an invasion of Iraq would be unjustified, but the wicked Neocons around Dick Cheney ignored the facts supplied by experts and professionals, and led the nation into a ruinous and unnecessary war.

By Corn’s account, rather than a bit player (just a camp follower member of the Enlightened Community of Pouting Spooks Opposing Bush), Valerie Plame was really one of the most important experts and professionals who knew better.

There was great pressure on the JTFI to deliver. Its primary target was Iraqi scientists. JTFI officers, under Wilson’s supervision, tracked down relatives, students and associates of Iraqi scientists–in America and abroad–looking for potential sources. They encouraged Iraqi émigrés to visit Iraq and put questions to relatives of interest to the CIA. The JTFI was also handling walk-ins around the world. Increasingly, Iraqi defectors were showing up at Western embassies claiming they had information on Saddam’s WMDs. JTFI officers traveled throughout the world to debrief them. Often it would take a JTFI officer only a few minutes to conclude someone was pulling a con. Yet every lead had to be checked.

“We knew nothing about what was going on in Iraq,” a CIA official recalled. “We were way behind the eight ball. We had to look under every rock.” Wilson, too, occasionally flew overseas to monitor operations. She also went to Jordan to work with Jordanian intelligence officials who had intercepted a shipment of aluminum tubes heading to Iraq that CIA analysts were claiming–wrongly–were for a nuclear weapons program. (The analysts rolled over the government’s top nuclear experts, who had concluded the tubes were not destined for a nuclear program.)

The JTFI found nothing. The few scientists it managed to reach insisted Saddam had no WMD programs. Task force officers sent reports detailing the denials into the CIA bureaucracy. The defectors were duds–fabricators and embellishers. (JTFI officials came to suspect that some had been sent their way by Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, an exile group that desired a US invasion of Iraq.) The results were frustrating for the officers. Were they not doing their job well enough–or did Saddam not have an arsenal of unconventional weapons? Valerie Wilson and other JTFI officers were almost too overwhelmed to consider the possibility that their small number of operations was, in a way, coming up with the correct answer: There was no intelligence to find on Saddam’s WMDs because the weapons did not exist.

Note the nice try by Corn, identifying one specific trip to Jordan to discuss aluminum tubes, and alluding darkly to very unspecific “occasional trips overseas” (very possibly merely to conferences, conventions, and liaison meetings with allies), intended to provide the essential predicate for the applicability of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982.

The Washington Post concludes that we now know that “the primary source of the newspaper column in which Ms. Plame’s cover as an agent was purportedly blown in 2003 was former deputy secretary of state Richard L. Armitage” the Plame Affair story is over and dead.

Mr. Armitage was one of the Bush administration officials who supported the invasion of Iraq only reluctantly. He was a political rival of the White House and Pentagon officials who championed the war and whom Mr. Wilson accused of twisting intelligence about Iraq and then plotting to destroy him. Unaware that Ms. Plame’s identity was classified information, Mr. Armitage reportedly passed it along to columnist Robert D. Novak “in an offhand manner, virtually as gossip,” according to a story this week by the Post’s R. Jeffrey Smith, who quoted a former colleague of Mr. Armitage.

It follows that one of the most sensational charges leveled against the Bush White House — that it orchestrated the leak of Ms. Plame’s identity to ruin her career and thus punish Mr. Wilson — is untrue. The partisan clamor that followed the raising of that allegation by Mr. Wilson in the summer of 2003 led to the appointment of a special prosecutor, a costly and prolonged investigation, and the indictment of Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, on charges of perjury. All of that might have been avoided had Mr. Armitage’s identity been known three years ago.

And the Post identifies the real culprit:

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.

The Washington Post has joined the United States Senate in identifying former Ambassador Joseph Wilson as a liar.

Michael Issikoff himself reveals in Newsweek, that a forthcoming book he co-authored with the Nation’s Washington editor Davd Cornidentifies Robert Novak’s source for Valerie Plame’s employment as the long-suspected Richard Armitage.

In the early morning of Oct. 1, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell received an urgent phone call from his No. 2 at the State Department. Richard Armitage was clearly agitated. As recounted in a new book, “Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War,” Armitage had been at home reading the newspaper and had come across a column by journalist Robert Novak. Months earlier, Novak had caused a huge stir when he revealed that Valerie Plame, wife of Iraq-war critic Joseph Wilson, was a CIA officer. Ever since, Washington had been trying to find out who leaked the information to Novak. The columnist himself had kept quiet. But now, in a second column, Novak provided a tantalizing clue: his primary source, he wrote, was a “senior administration official” who was “not a partisan gunslinger.” Armitage was shaken. After reading the column, he knew immediately who the leaker was…

Armitage, a well-known gossip who loves to dish and receive juicy tidbits about Washington characters, apparently hadn’t thought through the possible implications of telling Novak about Plame’s identity. “I’m afraid I may be the guy that caused this whole thing,” he later told Carl Ford Jr., State’s intelligence chief. Ford says Armitage admitted to him that he had “slipped up” and told Novak more than he should have. “He was basically beside himself that he was the guy that f—ed up. My sense from Rich is that it was just chitchat,” Ford recalls in “Hubris,” to be published next week by Crown and co-written by the author of this article and David Corn, Washington editor of The Nation magazine.

As it turned out, Novak wasn’t the only person Armitage talked to about Plame. Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward has also said he was told of Plame’s identity in June 2003. Woodward did not respond to requests for comment for this article, but, as late as last week, he referred reporters to his comments in November 2005 that he learned of her identity in a “casual and offhand” conversation with an administration official he declined to identify. According to three government officials, a lawyer familiar with the case and an Armitage confidant, all of whom would not be named discussing these details, Armitage told Woodward about Plame three weeks before talking to Novak. Armitage has consistently refused to discuss the case; through an assistant last week he declined to comment for this story. Novak would say only: “I don’t discuss my sources until they reveal themselves.”

The left has never really yearned for Armitage’s scalp. however, since:

Armitage was a member of the administration’s small moderate wing. Along with his boss and good friend, Powell, he had deep misgivings about President George W. Bush’s march to war. A barrel-chested Vietnam vet who had volunteered for combat, Armitage at times expressed disdain for Dick Cheney and other administration war hawks who had never served in the military. Armitage routinely returned from White House meetings shaking his head at the armchair warriors. “One day,” says Powell’s former chief of staff Larry Wilkerson, “we were walking into his office and Rich turned to me and said, ‘Larry, these guys never heard a bullet go by their ears in anger … None of them ever served. They’re a bunch of jerks’.”

Captain Ed puts all this into the proper perspective, which reflects abysmally on both Patrick Fitzgerald and Richard Armitage:

This means that the Department of Justice knew the source of the Plame leak within four months of its occurrence. It also knew that the leak had no malicious intent. Patrick Fitzgerald, who almost certainly knew of it within the first days of his investigation, never attempted to indict the man whom he knew leaked the information. Why, then, has Fitzgerald’s mandate continued after the first week of October?

Fitzgerald took the case on September 26. If this book is accurate about its dates, the DoJ and Fitzgerald would have known about Armitage’s role as the source of the leak five days later. Instead of either charging Armitage or closing down the investigation, Fitzgerald went on a witch hunt. He didn’t even talk to Scooter Libby until two weeks after Armitage’s confession. A year later, Fitzgerald had reporters Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper imprisoned for contempt of court for refusing to divulge a source about a leaker from whom Fitzgerald had already received a confession.

This shows the danger of independent investigators who answer to star chambers instead of the elected representatives that have electoral accountability. The entire Fitzgerald investigation is a massive waste of money and energy, an ego project for one man, a wild-goose chase without the goose. Up to now, we all thought that Armitage never came forward or did so much later in the process. This time line shows Fitzgerald as a dangerous Cotton Mather with a briefcase. What else should we think of a prosecutor who hauls people into court and jails them for contempt when his culprit confessed at the very beginning?

Addendum: The more I think about this, the angrier I get — and not just at Patrick Fitzgerald. Richard Armitage confessed to the DoJ in October 2003, and then sat on his ass for the next three years as the media and the Left play this into a paranoid fantasy of conspiracies and revenge. I know Armitage dislikes Rove, Libby, Cheney, and Bush, but what kind of man sits around while the world accuses people of a “crime” that he himself committed? Armitage did nothing while the nation spent years and millions of dollars chasing a series of red herrings, never speaking out to remove the mystery and end the witch hunt. Even three years later, Armitage hasn’t mustered the testicular fortitude to publicly admit that he leaked Plame’s identity and status; he has Isikoff and Corn do it for him.