National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley is reported by Raw Story to be the source who informed the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward of Valerie Plame’s CIA employment and her role in arranging Joe Wilson’s trip to Niger.

Raw Story is an unreliable moonbat site, but…

The Washington Post reports that the big secret of Valerie Plame’s CIA employment as an ANALYST, not a spy, was known by leftie journalist extraordinaire Bob Woodward a month before Bob Novak spilled the beans:

Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward testified under oath Monday in the CIA leak case that a senior administration official told him about CIA operative Valerie Plame and her position at the agency nearly a month before her identity was disclosed.

In a more than two-hour deposition, Woodward told Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald that the official casually told him in mid-June 2003 that Plame worked as a CIA analyst on weapons of mass destruction, and that he did not believe the information to be classified or sensitive, according to a statement Woodward released yesterday…

William Jeffress Jr., one of Libby’s lawyers, said yesterday that Woodward’s testimony undermines Fitzgerald’s public claims about his client and raises questions about what else the prosecutor may not know. Libby has said he learned Plame’s identity from NBC’s Tim Russert.

“If what Woodward says is so, will Mr. Fitzgerald now say he was wrong to say on TV that Scooter Libby was the first official to give this information to a reporter?” Jeffress said last night. “The second question I would have is: Why did Mr. Fitzgerald indict Mr. Libby before fully investigating what other reporters knew about Wilson’s wife?”

Fitzgerald has spent nearly two years investigating whether senior Bush administration officials illegally leaked classified information.

Tom Maguire at Just One Minute has been taking point on Blogosphere coverage of L’Affaire Plame.

A former CIA case officer and writer on US intelligence says of L’Affaire Plame”

A serious CIA would never have allowed Mr. Wilson to go on such an odd, short “fact finding” mission. It never would have allowed Ms. Plame potentially to expose herself by recommending such an overt mission for her mate, not known for his subtlety and discretion. With a CIA where cover really mattered, Mr. Libby would not now be indicted. But that’s not what we have in the real world. We have an American left that hates George W. Bush and his vice president so much that they have become willing dupes in a surreal operational stage-play. You have to give credit to Langley: Overseas it may be incompetent; but in Washington, it can still con many into giving it the respect and consideration it doesn’t deserve.

James Lewis, in the The American Thinker, notes Joe Wilson’s various French social and business connections, and speculates upon L’Affaire Plame constituting a French intelligence operation designed to injure the Bush Administration.

The CIA, as much or more than the State Department, didn’t support President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. And to discredit that decision, it appears the CIA first chose an unspeakably unqualified political activist for a sham intelligence mission, structured it so that the results would be utterly public, and then — when the activist resumed his publicity-hound activity — demanded and achieved a high-profile criminal investigation into White House activities that resulted, so far, in the indictment of the Vice President’s chief of staff. It’s time for the Justice Department — or, better yet, for the Senate Intelligence Committee — to investigate the Wilson/Plame sham. Not only was the Wilson mission to Niger a sham, but the CIA’s demand for an investigation of Robert Novak’s outing of Valerie Plame may itself have been a criminal act.

With the sure hand for snatching at defeat we’ve seen working ever since George W. Bush long ago alluded to all the accrued political capital he was going to spend on Social Security reform, the behind-the-scenes political savants of the Bush White House this Sunday gave the Times a story, which undoubtedly brought a smile to the face of every one of the president’s and the administration’s adversaries from Berkeley to Babylon. All members of the Presidential staff are going to be required this week to attend “refresher lectures” on ethics and the handling of classified material.

What could assure a more effective spirit of efficiency, enterprize, and elan in managing the affairs of a great nation than a mandatory corporate training lecture (out of Dilbert) on covering your hindquarters as priority number one?

What more could they possibly do to affirm the legal validity of the preposterous Plamegate investigation, aside from affixing Karl Rove’s head to a stake on the White House fence, and having the president appear on the porch barefoot and attired in sackcloth, wearing a sign around his neck bearing the inscription: Peccavi ?

The lecture on ethics ought to be scheduled for the firing of the CIA officials involved in policy war activities leading to the appointment of a special prosecutor, and the lecture on handling classified information for the arrest of the “intelligence officials” mentioned in last week’s Washington Post as sources for a report alleging the existence of top-secret Eastern European terrorist prison facilities.

Follow-up: The ethics classes begin.

Stephen Hayes has been reporting on the Weekly Standard on the affaire Plame, Joseph Wilson’s mendacity, and the CIA involvement in the press-orchestrated scandal:

The White House, the CIA, and the Wilson 24 October 2005

The Incredibles 25 October 2005

A Spooked White House 29 October 2005

One Good Leak Deserves Another 31 October 2005

While Scooter Libby awaits arraignment on charges threatening 30 years imprisonment and up to a $1.25 million fine for allegedly providing false information to the special prosecutor investigating the leaking of Valerie Plame’s CIA employment to the press, “current and former intelligence officials” operating as part of the internal CIA opposition to the Bush Administration have clearly leaked to the Washington Post intelligence secrets incalculably more important and potentially damaging.

Where is Porter Goss, and what is he doing, permitting opponents of the current administration and its foreign policy within the Agency to cooperate with media partisans and the strategists of the opposition party to gin up a major criminal investigation and political scandal, a scandal artificially contrived to undermine the legitimacy of US military efforts in Iraq, and calculatedly intended to bring down senior administration officials, destroy their reputations, and drive them from office?

Obviously, the Libby indictment of last Friday was the happy outcome of a carefully architected and lovingly tended, partisan operation, modelled on the 1970s Watergate media coup d’etat. It is easy to see that the left hopes to bully Lewis Libby (with all the talk of fantastical 30 years sentences) into a plea bargain involving his implicating the Vice President in some sort of conspiratorial role. In the fondest dreams of the left, Plamegate will succeed in nothing less than firmly delegitimizing the US causus belli for the war in Iraq (promoting the Michael Moore “Bush lied” Big Lie into the realm of established fact). It will also compel the resignation of Dick Cheney, cripple the remaining years of the current administration, and guarantee a democrat victory in 2008. The scary thing is that I am by no means convinced that, however ridiculous the pretext really is, they are certain to fail.

The CIA director works for the president, as does –in theory– the Agency. It is time to have Porter Goss take center stage, and speak for the CIA itself, on Valerie Plame’s non-operative role, the lack of applicability of the law, and the non-consequences to the Agency and its operations of the disclosure of her role as an analyst. It is also time to clean house at the Agency, and to turn the prosecutorial tables on those “current and former intelligence officials” providing today’s headlines in the Washington Post.

Roger L. Simon links a NY Times column of yesterday from former Clinton counsel Lanny Davis decrying the politics of scandal and expressing the Utopian hope (Lanny Davis is a hopeless liberal) that “voters [will] say, ‘A pox on both your houses,’ reject the scandal culture and gotcha politics of both parties and seek new politics of common cause, collegiality and the public interest. ”

I’m afraid I doubt personally that any wave of voter revulsion, combining a major dose of communitarianism, as Lanny hopes, will end prosecutorial politics. My prediction is that the GOP is soon going to demonstrate to democrats the principle of Mutually Assured Destruction. The democrat party is the party of urban political machines, the party of clubhouse pols, and the party of –speaking frankly– populist demagogues. How many important and prominent democrats have legal and ethical vulnerabilities? Could there possibly be any financial issues worth looking into, just for instance, in the background of a Senate Minority Leader who was formerly a Nevada State Gaming Commissioner? Or in that of a House Minority Leader closely tied to the spectacularly free-wheeling one party regime of San Francisco, a city still run with all the rectitude associated with its 19th century Wild West boomtown traditions, and descendant of the Baltimore city machine?

What Republicans have to do to protect major Republican leaders from the continuation of career assassination via opportunistic charges and prosecutions on the flimsiest of grounds is to follow the advice provided by Sean Connery’s Jim Malone to Kevin Costner’s Elliot Ness in Brian de Palma’s The Untouchables (1987):

Connery: lf you open the ball on these people, you must be prepared to go all the way. Because they won’t give up the fight until one of you is dead.

Costner: l want to get Capone. l don’t know how.

Connery: Here’s how you get Capone: he pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to hospital, you send one of his to the morgue! That’s the Chicago way! And that’s how you get Capone. Now, do you want to do that? Are you ready to do that?

Fitzgerald’s rambling and strangely lacking-in-substance press conference performance of yesterday reminded Congressman Billybob of Humphrey Bogart’s star turn in his last film as Phillip Francis Queeg, the Captain of the USS Caine in The Caine Mutiny (1954).

As in the case of Martha Stewart’s alleged insider trading, we encounter in yesterday’s indictment of I. Lewis Libby the bizarre spectacle of a case in which the prosecutor chooses to bring charges alleging that the defendant lied to him and obstructed justice, that he is guilty of having interfered with his investigation, precisely because he is unable to prove that any other crime was ever actually committed in the first place.

It seems plainly wrong to me that it is possible in a free country to throw someone into jail simply by contradicting that person’s testimony in a matter which cannot be established to have involved any actual violation of law or real injury at all. The entire substance of such a proceeding amounts to a cruel and empty ritual inspired by an exaggerated, downright servile, reverence for the State. It is the literal prostration of Justice to Authority. One sees in an instant the veil of modernity and civilization slip aside, and one beholds the spectacle of supposedly intelligent modern men suddenly transformed into pagan priests presiding over a barbarous ritual immolation, an archaic and vicious ceremony venting irrational emotions, and one conducted with mindless indifference to the facts of the situation or the rights of the individual.

Investors Business Daily rightly calls it a witch hunt.