Were Secretary of State Colin Powell and Attorney General John Ashcroft casualties of the Valerie Plame – Joe Wilson affair? Both resigned after the election in November 2004. And, according to a new book by David Corn and Michael Isikoff, both knew, as early as October 2003, that Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage revealed Plame’s role at the CIA to both Bob Woodward and Robert Novak. That is, they both knew that it wasn’t Dick Cheney, that it wasn’t Karl Rove and that it wasn’t Lewis Libby; and yet, they didn’t inform the President — at least not right away. Here is OpinionJournal’s account of what Corn-Isikoff reports:

“Mr. Armitage never did tell the White House or his boss, the President, that he was the leaker. Instead, in October 2003 he told Mr. Powell, who told the State Department general counsel, who in turn told the Justice Department but gave the White House Counsel only the sketchiest overview of what he’d learned and didn’t mention Mr. Armitage’s name. So while Mr. Fitzgerald presumably knew when he began his probe two months later that Mr. Armitage was Mr. Novak’s source, the President himself was apparently kept in the dark, even as he was pledging publicly to find out who the leaker was.”

My question is this: Did President Bush fire Powell and Ashcroft when he learned that they had not told him what they knew about the Plame affair, and thereby allowed misinformation to run rampant for almost three years? The answer is probably no, but the whole affair raises a lot of questions in my mind:

1. Why did Powell and Ashcroft, and their subordinates, keep quiet while the affair mushroomed and people were being falsely accused?

2. Why did Ashcroft’s office appoint a Special Counsel when they already knew who revealed Plame’s role at the CIA?

3. Why did Special Counsel Fitzgerald investigate Cheney, Rove and Libby if he already knew that Armitage revealed Plame’s role at the CIA to Woodward and Novak?

4. How could this whole thing run on for almost three years and millions of dollars be spent for essentially no good reason?

I say this with sadness, but I’m beginning to believe it is due to rampant incompetence. It looks as if the top levels of government are doing a lot of reacting and very little thinking, communicating, planning and managing. I hope I’m wrong.

It’s also clear that many elements of the media performed very badly in regard to this whole affair, especially what is referred to as the ‘main stream media’. There was a time when we could expect better conduct and more objective reporting from them, but it seems those days are over. Apparently government doesn’t have a monopoly on incompetence.