Jumping To Conclusions

Sheesh, leave the blogosphere for a couple of days and you're swamped by some story. The current one is the Plame affair, which went from simmering to boiling when the Washington Post published a big piece on it. The short version, for those of you too lazy to click on a simple link:

1. A rumor appeared that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger. Dick Cheney asked the CIA to investigate. The CIA sent former ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger to do so. He did, and decided it was unsubstantiated. Either his findings were deliberately disregarded, or got lost in the bureaucracy, so the claims made it into the State of the Union. Months later, when Democrats were looking for Bush vulnerabilities and settled on the "16 words" in the State of the Union, Wilson began going around telling everyone who would listen that he had researched it, found it to be false, and that Bush lied.

2. Soon afterwards, columnist Robert Novak reported that someone in the Bush administration had hinted to him that Wilson (an anti-Bush, anti-Iraq war diplomat) had been chosen because his wife, a covert CIA operative, pulled some strings. This didn't get a lot of publicity at the time, but now it has suddenly exploded.

3. The Post is reporting that a bunch of other Washington journalists were also contacted by administration officials leaking this story to them. Now the Justice Department is going to investigate,because it's a crime to reveal the name of covert operatives, for obvious reasons.

My reactions to the scandal (other than "wait and see what an investigation reveals"):

• If the worst -- that Plame is a covert operative who was deliberately outed to retaliate against Wilson -- is true, the
  perpetrators should be shot, not merely for treason or for violating the law, but for criminal stupidity. What on earth did perpetrators have to gain by doing this? Supposedly it's "revenge," but where's the revenge? How is Wilson hurt by this? I suppose the theory is that his wife is hurt -- but how? (People she worked with overseas would indeed be hurt -- their lives would be in danger -- but it's rather perverse to suggest that the Bush administration tried to get overseas operatives killed in order to "punish" Wilson.)

  And if Wilson, through Plame, is indeed hurt, what's the point? To intimidate other critics of Bush, as some have suggested? That doesn't work; nobody was even paying attention to this until Bush's critics -- including Wilson himself -- brought it out in the open and turned it into a scandal. To simply get even with Wilson? For what? He was an insignificant figure before the scandal broke. His 15 minutes of fame about the "16 words" were long over.

• A lesser version of this scandal makes more sense: some in the administration were trying to discredit Wilson, so they leaked the story that the only reason he got the assignment is because his wife pulled some strings. Naturally, the next question a journalist would ask is, "His wife? Who? What strings could she pull?" And then the accurate response: oh, she works for the CIA on WMD. In this scenario, the motive for the crime -- it is still a crime, after all -- switches from revenge to diminishing Wilson's credentials. Also illegal, but inadvertently, rather than deliberately, so. The perpetrators weren't trying to harm Wilson, Plame, or her contacts, but were just trying to make Wilson look like a beneficiary of nepotism.

• If this story is true, it's just not going to be that hard to find out. If the perpetrator called at least six journalists, then there are gong to be phone records. There are only a limited number of people who knew and/or could find out what Plame did for a living, and there will likely be a paper trail of some sort regarding her personnel file. And that leads to my next point...

• There's a second -- and far lesser, don't get me wrong -- scandal here. Namely, what the hell is the media doing? I understand that journalists want to preserve their access, and protecting sources is an important part of that. But supposedly we have _six_ journalists who have firsthand knowledge of a felony on the part of a senior administration official, and yet they'd all rather keep quiet? What is wrong with them? There's a big difference between not revealing who told you that the judge has a secret bank account filled with bribe money, and not revealing who illegally handed you classified information for petty reasons.