Plame's Identity Was Outed Long Before Novak

Although the indefatiguable Josh Marshall attempts to spin, spin, spin the facts as some sort of Republican nefariousness or fear about prosecution, he can't quite spin away the basic fact that Valerie Plame's identity as a "covert" (ahem) CIA paper-pusher mayb have been disclosed as far back as 1990, by Aldrich Aames.

The media seems to have been embargoing this fact. Marshall talks about it as if it's common knowledge, but oddly enough, no one in the liberal media ever before alerted me to this fact. (Marshall apparently mentioned this once, a year ago.)

Funny that a fact with such a seemingly dispositive impact on the investigation would be so woefully underreported by our strictly-neutral, right-down-the-middle media.

This information would seem to clear up a question we've all had for a long time: If this woman was "covert," why the hell was she based apparently exclusively in Chevy Chase, Maryland? (Or wherever she was based.) It turns out she was on the list of agents the CIA believed had been compromised, and thus kept from any missions requiring actual covertness.

Marshall seems genuinely beside himself that Republican evildoers might get off on a "technicality." Well, Josh, requiring that Plame actually be undercover -- not nominally undercover, but actually & factually undercover -- is not a mere "technicality." It is an element of the crime of which you wish to convict her "outer." If she wasn't actually undercover, there is no crime.

posted by Ace at 11:31 PM

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