Sweetness & Light has an excellent timeline on the Plame-Wilson fiasco.  It contains evidence that Wilson himself was the first person to publicly disclose that his wife worked for the CIA.  It also shows the inconsistencies in Wilson’s positions and statements regarding the findings from his trip to Niger.

Bush haters are now crowing about the conviction of Lewis Libby. They are saying that it proves the corruption of his administration. Any reasonably intelligent adult knows better. It just means that the liberals won this battle — at least for now. A slick prosecutor and a sympathetic judge can elicit whatever verdict they want from the average jury. If you believe that a jury trial always produces the right verdict, then you are, quite simply, a fool.

Of course the Bush haters know this. But they don’t care. They don’t want to pass up the chance to get in a few good licks. And it would probably be the same if the scenario were inverted.

Bob Novak has a good overview of the case at Townhall.com. His July 14, 2003 column, in which he mentioned that Joe Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA, triggered this whole affair.

But he won’t. He doesn’t have the courage to stand up to the outrage it would elicit from the liberal media. He has already shown that. He failed to resist their call for an independent counsel to be appointed to investigate the supposed leak of Valerie Plame’s identity. He allowed the appointment of Patrick Fitzgerald even though Attorney General Ashcroft knew at the time that Richard Armitage was the ‘leaker’.

I’m not going into all the details again here. I’ve posted on this before. If you’re interested, there is a good summary of the case and reaction to the verdict at National Review Online.

Why Fitzgerald was allowed to proceed with an investigation that focused on White House ‘insiders’ when he already knew that Armitage was the ‘leaker’ is beyond comprehension. In my opinion another independent counsel should investigate that.

Libby’s defense team will petition for a new trial and, failing that, will appeal the conviction. President Bush could spare us from all that by giving Libby a full pardon now. He has botched this whole affair just like he has botched just about everything since he has been in office. He has a chance to do something right. But he won’t.

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald (or Gerald Fitzpatrick; I can never remember which) has spent three years and millions of dollars investigating a non-crime. And he is complaining because today he only has three hours to make his closing arguments to jurors after a month-long trial.

Fitzgerald was appointed to determine if a crime had been committed in the ‘outing’ of Valerie Plame as a covert agent of the CIA. Plame is married to Joe Wilson who, after a trip to Niger to investigate the White House’s claim that Saddam Hussein tried to obtain yellowcake uranium from Niger, wrote an op-ed that said there was no evidence for the claim and that the supposedly supporting documents were forgeries. The media and Democrats insisted that some White House insider (Karl Rove, they hoped) revealed her identity in order to cast doubt on Wilson’s credibility. He was sent to Niger by the CIA and some believe that his wife was instrumental in setting up the trip.

Here is what I find wrong with this case:

• Valerie Plame was not a covert CIA agent at the time she was ‘outed.’ She had not operated covertly for several years before the Niger trip took place. According to her friends and neighbors it was common knowledge that she worked for the CIA. So how can it be a crime to reveal the identity of a CIA employee when it is already commonly known? Fitzgerald apparently believed that it was because her identity was revealed by a government official without the authority to do so and because she was still ‘officially’ considered to be covert. (I’m charging you with theft for taking a mattress from the public dump because the original owner still believes that the mattress belongs to him.)
• Though Fitzgerald apparently felt that a crime had been committed (he pursued it for three years), he was unable to bring charges against anyone for revealing Plame’s identity as a covert CIA agent. But he did charge a staff member of the Vice President, I. Lewis Libby, with lying to a federal investigator about when and what he knew about Plame and when and what he told someone else about when and what he knew (makes my head spin). Libby says that he didn’t intentionally provide false information; that he may have mispoken due to his poor memory of how events unfolded.
• It was discovered — but not by Fitzgerald’s investigation — that someone other than a White House insider was the person who first mentioned to a reporter that Plame worked for the CIA. Richard Armitage, Deputy Secretary of State under Colin Powell, admitted that he was the leaker. Armitage was certainly no insider; he was known to oppose many White House policies. The media and Democrats were surely devastated by this news, but silent. But none of this deterred Fitzgerald; he proceeded as if nothing had happened. Libby was charged with lying to cover up a crime that he didn’t commit. And Fitzgerald took him to court knowing that he nor any of his closest associates were responsible for the leak and he is still vigorously pursuing his prosecution. (Well, I know now that you had nothing to do with the bank robbery but I’m still going to charge and prosecute you for telling me there were only three male robbers when actually there were three male robbers and one female robber.)

The crime in this case is the one foisted on the taxpayers by the media and Patrick Fitzgerald. He’s another out-of-control prosecutor.

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.