"Prince Of Darkness" Sheds Light On Valerie Plame by Bill Press

[jbfam4]

"Prince Of Darkness" Sheds Light On Valerie Plame
July 13, 2006
http://billpress.com/columns.html

When I called my friend and former co-host of “Crossfire” shortly after his column appeared and members of Congress were demanding an official investigation, he jokingly asked me: “Are you going to come visit me in jail?” And there’s no doubt in my mind that Novak would have gone to jail, if necessary, rather than break his reporter’s confidence by revealing his sources.


One other thing we learned: that George W. Bush can’t be trusted to keep his word. This is the same president, remember, who vowed, three years ago, to fire anyone “involved” in leaking Valerie Plame’s identity — anyone involved, not just anyone indicted. Yet, here we are, three years later, and Karl Rove still has his job. Not only that, he just got a big pay raise.

The truth is, Bush didn’t fire Rove because Rove was doing exactly what Bush and Cheney wanted: trying to destroy an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq by exposing his wife’s identity as an undercover CIA agent. In their campaign of disinformation about weapons of mass destruction, the last thing the Bush administration could tolerate was someone like Joe Wilson, who dared tell the American people the truth.

Technically, Bush, Cheney and Rove may not have broken the law. But they did break their pledge to put national security first. By blowing Valerie Plame’s cover, they showed they were willing even to throw national security out the window and put lives at risk, if necessary — anything to help make the case for their immoral, unwarranted and unnecessary war.

[MADem]

1. Love the way he breaks it down into simple concepts!

First, as we’ve suspected for a long time, we learn that Karl Rove was right in the middle of the whole mess. True, he was not, as many thought, Novak’s original source. But he was one of Novak’s two secondary sources, and Rove also talked to Time magazine’s Matt Cooper. To both reporters, he confirmed that Plame was Ambassador Joe Wilson’s wife, worked at the CIA and played some role in Wilson’s being sent to Africa to investigate the Saddam/yellowcake rumors.

This means that when Rove sent Scott McClellan out to tell the media he had nothing to do with the leak of Valerie Plame’s identity, he put McClellan in the awkward position of lying. And when he told CNN last year “I didn’t know her name, I didn’t leak her name,” he was telling a big, fat lie himself.

One other thing we learned: that George W. Bush can’t be trusted to keep his word. This is the same president, remember, who vowed, three years ago, to fire anyone “involved” in leaking Valerie Plame’s identity — anyone involved, not just anyone indicted. Yet, here we are, three years later, and Karl Rove still has his job. Not only that, he just got a big pay raise.