Informed Speculation

So over that even the New York Times has abandoned hope:

It’s time for Mr. Fitzgerald to provide answers or admit that this investigation has run its course.

That statement of clarity comes only after some typically Times-esque dancing about:

For three years, Washington has been periodically consumed with the question of who unmasked a covert C.I.A. agent to the columnist Robert Novak. It has been a huge distraction for the White House, resulted in the unjustified jailing of one reporter, and led to perjury charges against the vice president’s chief of staff. Last week, it was reported that Richard Armitage, then deputy secretary of state, was the first to mention Valerie Wilson to Mr. Novak, and that the federal prosecutor knew this more than two and a half years ago.

The revelation tells us something important. But, unfortunately, it is not the answer to the central question in the investigation — whether there was an organized attempt by the White House to use Mrs. Wilson to discredit or punish her husband, Joseph Wilson. A former diplomat, Mr. Wilson debunked the claim that Saddam Hussein tried to buy uranium from Niger to make nuclear weapons.

Mr. Armitage, a White House outsider, would be an odd participant in such a plot. He is said to have learned from a State Department memo that Mrs. Wilson had recommended sending her husband to check the Niger story since he had worked there as a diplomat. The memo was prepared for Mr. Cheney, who was eager to prove that there was an Iraqi nuclear weapons program and to silence critics.

It’s conceivable that Patrick Fitzgerald, the federal prosecutor, has evidence that suggests the information in the memo was used in some illegal manner. Or his investigators may have learned something troubling about the second, unknown, source cited in Mr. Novak’s column, or about some other illegal activity. But whatever it is needs to be made public.

Despite the obfuscation, it’s clear that even Gail Collins and Pinch no longer believe Plame to have been the victim of a conspiracy.

David Corn provides some interesting grist for the Plamiac with this revelation:

In 1997 she returned to CIA headquarters and joined the Counterproliferation Division. (About this time, she moved in with Joseph Wilson; they later married.) She was eventually given a choice: North Korea or Iraq. She selected the latter. Come the spring of 2001, she was in the CPD’s modest Iraq branch. But that summer–before 9/11–word came down from the brass: We’re ramping up on Iraq. Her unit was expanded and renamed the Joint Task Force on Iraq. Within months of 9/11, the JTFI grew to fifty or so employees. Valerie Wilson was placed in charge of its operations group.

As I said, interesting, but not really relevant to the charges of conspiracy. Corn is not one to give up easily, however:

Another issue was whether Valerie Wilson had sent her husband to Niger to check out an intelligence report that Iraq had sought uranium there. Hubris contains new information undermining the charge that she arranged this trip. In an interview with the authors, Douglas Rohn, a State Department officer who wrote a crucial memo related to the trip, acknowledges he may have inadvertently created a misimpression that her involvement was more significant than it had been.

“…[H]e may have inadvertently created a misimpression that her involvement was more significant than it had been”? Tut-tut, David, you’ll have to do better than that…Corn saves his best for last, by providing a plausible explanation for how Plame was ‘harmed’ by her ‘outing’:

When the Novak column ran, Valerie Wilson was in the process of changing her clandestine status from NOC to official cover, as she prepared for a new job in personnel management. Her aim, she told colleagues, was to put in time as an administrator–to rise up a notch or two–and then return to secret operations. But with her cover blown, she could never be undercover again. Moreover, she would now be pulled into the partisan warfare of Washington. As a CIA employee still sworn to secrecy, she wasn’t able to explain publicly that she had spent nearly two years searching for evidence to support the Administration’s justification for war and had come up empty.

Valerie Wilson left the CIA at the end of 2005. In July she and her husband filed a civil lawsuit against Cheney, Rove and Libby, alleging they had conspired to “discredit, punish and seek revenge against” the Wilsons. She is also writing her memoirs. Her next battle may be with the agency–over how much of her story the CIA will allow the outed spy to tell.

Well, there’s the rub: Plame is not suing Armitage, the person who truly revealed her identity, no matter how inadvertently, and that speaks volumes. No, the lawsuit is about the book…that seven-figure advance has to be justified somehow, after all…