Carney on the Air

You all can catch me on the radio Saturday morning at around 9:05. The topic: the CIA leak.

The Bruce Elliot show, on WBAL in Baltimore (AM 1090). On the left side of the webpage, you'll find a "LISTEN LIVE" link, in case you're not in Baltimore.

- posted by Carney at 12:59 PM; link

 
Re: An Exercise

I take all of Bob's points--with parenthetical qualifications. Indeed, Novak never claimed that he was told outing Plame wouldn't endanger anyone (but that is an obvious implication of what he supposedly was told). It is certainly also true that Wilson alone didn't make this leak a big deal (I meant to say that he made a big deal of it). And finally, it is undoubtedly true that it is important to discern whether the leakers thought outing Plame would endanger other operatives, whatever the truth may have been. It should have been my third qualification, as you said.

That said, going on what's been reported (which is mostly rumor and anonymously sourced leaks), it looks like Plame's outing was more serious than the CIA indicated to Novak. The real mystery is that none of this makes sense yet.

We have an odd situation where bracketing this complete lack of intelligible motive, everything we know so far points to a genuine and reprehensible crime having been commited. But going on motive alone, the Bush administration had nothing to gain from Plame's outing, and Wilson (Milbank, Pincus, Corn, etc.) seem to have been very well served by it. Not that that proves anything.

[add.: A qualification: I suppose I can imagine some low-level Dartmouth conservative somewhere in the administration might have been spiteful and idiotic enough to have tried to pull this stunt off--perhaps thinking that any damage to a Wilson was worth the trouble.]

- posted by Mark at 9:28 PM; link

 
Hot off the Presses

It looks like John Coetzee has won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

- posted by Mark at 2:42 PM; link

 
re: An Exercise

or: When Character Matters

One can be simple about this. If a.) Novak is not lying when he says that the CIA told him that revealing Plame's identity would not endanger anybody (i.e., that they made only a "weak" recommendation not to run her name) and b.) the CIA was not wrong in telling Novak this, then whatever the legal ramifications this was not really that big a deal. You can get worked up if you like based on technicalities of the law or the general precedent this sets, but in the above scenario, there was never any risk of serious damage Plame or any other operatives.

That is only meant to be a possibility. I think it fits a lot of what the sources you listed say (perhaps she was an operative once, but is not now, etc.) It doesn't fit the third-party account of Novak's conversation with the CIA in the Washington Post, but Carney and Novak himself dispute this.

But if this mere possibility ends up being the truth of the matter, then one might reasonably ask why Joe Wilson has made such a big deal out of all of this. It becomes more a political issue than anything else, and so the political motives of the people in the story become a relevant object of investigation. (Of course, nobody cares about whether Wilson's a pederast. What one could legitimately care about is whether this issue is anything more than a vehicle for Wilson's opportunism.) The possibility worth considering is that Wilson is only upset about this violation of the law because he thinks he can hang the administration on a technicality. "Technicality", you might exclaim, "but this was outing a covert agent!" Again, the only thing that makes any violation of this law significant is that such a violation endangers the lives and work of operatives, but we are here postulating that such a danger did not exist.

- posted by Mark at 2:38 PM; link

 
Groper

Arnold Schwartzenegger just delivered a denial/apology concerning a recent L.A. Times story which accused him of groping six women--one as recently as 2000. He was on the first stop of a campaign tour, and when he arrived he got a hearty welcome. The crowd was very enthusiastic to hear his denial of this story (he said, I think, that the accusations were trash and that you shouldn't believe everything you hear). But he must have surprised his supporters when he transitioned into the apology part of his statement with "but where there's smoke there's fire...", because a few continued to cheer and clap. I wonder what they were imagining would follow from that opening: perhaps "...and this campaign is on FIRE!"

- posted by Mark at 1:33 PM; link

 
Relativism

Says someone at espn.com, "Knuckleballer Tim Wakefield will get the start for the Red Sox in Game 2. He was roughed up in two starts against the A's during the regular season (4.50 ERA), but escaped with two no-decisions."

One man's "roughed up" is another man's "quality start."

- posted by Erik at 1:17 PM; link

 
Re: Victoria Plame, Overt Agent

"Neo-conservatives and religious conservatives have hijacked this administration, and I consider myself on a personal mission to destroy both."–Joseph Wilson in the Washington Times*

Now I don't have any dogs in this fight, but I think as far as repulsiveness and ruthlessness are concerned, it looks like Wilson's a good match for Rove, who he's accused, apparently without any evidence whatsoever, of being behind the leak. However this shakes out, though, Wilson's certainly not mounting anything remotely close to the moral high ground.

And what Wilson has offered doesn't amount to a coherent story yet. How exactly, was outing Plame supposed to "smear" Wilson (which he says)? Why would Rove be calling reporters to "smear" or "out" Plame after the Novak piece was published? Maybe Wilson's carried away with righteous rage, or an admirable sense that he needs to protect his wife from this. But it's starting to look like there's a possibility that he's simply an opportunist–and his wife's outing was relatively inconsequential.

*: Neo-cons and religious conservatives have hijacked the administration? Who, exactly, was flying this plane before the hijacking?

- posted by Mark at 9:08 PM; link

 
Thank God! The First Lady has weighed in!

"My husband wants the very highest ethics in the White House. So, I suspect whenever this washes out, we'll see who did it, if anyone did."

- posted by Ethan at 5:27 PM; link

 
re: Novak

I wouldn't have included the "(!)" after mentioning the Corner's questions about Bob Novak. If you were looking for criticism of Novak, NRO is as good a place as any. In fact, it would be fair to say that it's a better place than any.

Read the relevant paragraphs below from the Washington Post piece and note that the disagreement seems to be between CIA folk who weren't in the conversation and Bob Novak--who was:

When Novak told a CIA spokesman he was going to write a column about Wilson's wife, the spokesman urged him not to print her name "for security reasons," according to one CIA official. Intelligence officials said they believed Novak understood there were reasons other than Plame's personal security not to use her name, even though the CIA has declined to confirm whether she was undercover.

Novak said in an interview last night that the request came at the end of a conversation about Wilson's trip to Niger and his wife's role in it. "They said it's doubtful she'll ever again have a foreign assignment," he said. "They said if her name was printed, it might be difficult if she was traveling abroad, and they said they would prefer I didn't use her name. It was a very weak request. If it was put on a stronger basis, I would have considered it."

- posted by Carney at 4:11 PM; link

 
Novak

It's almost laughable when folks say Novak should have sat on the story that Wilson's wife was an agent because the CIA asked him to. If a reporter squelched a story every time a government asked him to, all we could do was run press releases.

There needs to be a compelling argument why to cover something up. The CIA didn't make that argument, apparently, and so their hush request was disregarded.

And yeah, I concur with Jay.

Finally, Novak will be on with Wolf Blitzer today at 5:05. Yesterday, Wolf made it clear he disapproved of Novak's behavior.

- posted by Carney at 2:39 PM; link

 
Novak's Latest

I think Novak explains why he published the name, as well as much more in his column today.

- posted by Carney at 9:39 AM; link

 
re: Valerie Plame, Overt Wife

According to the Times, Novak "said he checked with the C.I.A., which asked him not to use Ms. Plame's name but gave him no indication that doing so would endanger her or anyone else."

Assuming that's true, I'm curious to know how the CIA "asked" Novak to withhold Plame's identity, and why he didn't. I imagine that if the CIA really wanted to keep Plame's name confidential at that point, it would not have ended up in Novak's column. This only supports Carney's point that this may not have been a "leak" of a covert operative at all, or it may have been the responsibilty of the CIA as much as the Administration.

- posted by Erik at 4:17 PM; link

 
Valerie Plame, Overt Wife

Wilson is just wrong when he says his wife's maiden name is a secret.

Wilson said the series of similar calls he received, which included four journalists from three networks, stopped on July 22, after he appeared on NBC's 'Today' show and said the disclosure of his wife's maiden name could jeopardize the 'entire network that she may have established.'

Wilson's entry in Who's Who in America lists his wife as Valerie Plame.

I have trouble believing this is only thing Wilson's wrong about. He's already retracted what he said about Rove. Will he now retract what he said about the WH calling all sorts of reporters to pitch this story?

- posted by Carney at 1:58 PM; link

 
Classic Classics

Cruxers aware of the “great books” program at St. John’s College, might not realize that the origin of the great books in American popular consciousness was Charles Eliot’s “Five-Foot Shelf of Knowledge” The Harvard Classics, which first appeared in 1909. Aside from being edited by a Harvard President, however, the Harvard Classics had very little to do with Harvard education as it existed then (or at any time). The Classics were part of an attempt to democratize, and market, high culture--Eliot thought that anyone who could read these fifty books could provide himself a liberal education and Collier and Sons saw this as a golden opportunity to make money from middle-class’s sense of cultural inferiority. Which is not to say that the books weren't a good and welcome thing to popularize. Some of my own first acquaintace with the classics came through the Harvard Classics and their much inferior cousin the Britannica Great Books. The Harvard Classics, however, were also the forerunner of less defensible things like the audio-taped lecture series you see advertised in contemporary high-brow periodicals--a typical ad in the current Foreign Affairs serves as a particularly vulgar example: “It took 3,000 years for the debate chronicled in these lectures to reach maturity. Your mind can encompass it by the end of next month”. The market that Collier and Sons identified in 1907 is thus now in 2003, pretty well-saturated. (For a good account of one part of this story, the marketing of the Everyman Modern Library, see Jay Satterfield’s fantastic, absorbing, insightful The World's Best Books.)

The Harvard Classics have never been out of print for long during this time, though they have gone through many revisions. To distinguish itself from this throng of competing culture-purveyors, though, the Classics have recently been reissued in a particularly ostentatious style: premium-quality leather deeply dyed in Harvard crimson, moiré fabric end sheets, accents in 22kt gold, and so on. The most interesting marketing angle, though, is that the “Millenium Edition” is a faithful re-issue of the first set of Harvard Classics as Eliot assembled them, and so includes works that no one in his right mind would include on a contemporary “Great Books” list, like such not-quite-immortal works as Cellini’s Autobiography and Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast.

The idea, I suppose, is that if there’s some snob appeal to having an edition of the classics of Western Civilization, there’s even more snob appeal to having a classic edition of the classics. But the obvious consequence of this is that whatever contemporary relevance the great books had that derived from the selection process is totally gone. The middle-classes are now invited to read the books that would have made them well-read had they lived at the turn of the last century instead of now (though there is, of course, overlap). And for $55 a pop.

It’s enough to make you yearn for the relative sanity of Mortimer Adler.

- posted by Mark at 12:55 PM; link

 
re: Valerie Plame, Overt Agent

Here's the law governing the disclosure of the identity of covert agents. Two points:

1) It applies to covert agents only.

2) It is my understanding that nobody is prosecutable under this law who was not authorized to receive the info. In other words, Novak can't be busted under this.

- posted by Carney at 12:12 PM; link

 
Valerie Plame, Oppressed Woman

Well, Democrats have turned the Senate floor into a political rally against the Administration.

Hearing Barbara Boxer lament just now that women have to deal with a glass ceiling and then complain: "here's a woman, working in a non-traditional field, not getting any recognition..."

Yeah, Barbara, that's why Plame wasn't getting any recognition, because she's a girl.

- posted by Carney at 11:41 AM; link

 
re: Valerie Plame, Overt Agent

It's worth reading closely the relevant graph from Novak's 7/14 column:

Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him.

There are three claims: (1) Plame is a CIA operative; (2) Plame suggested Wilson for the Niger mission; (3) CIA says its people picked Wilson and asked Plame to contact him.

Claim (2) is the only one attributed to "senior administration officials." Claim (1) is the claim at stake, and it is not attributed. Claim (3) implies Plame might be an operative, and is credited to the CIA.

In other words, close reading of this paragraph, and everything else I know about the 7/14 story, in no way pins the "leak" on the administration, pointing to the CIA if anyone.

- posted by Carney at 4:08 PM; link

 
re: Valerie Plame, Overt Agent

CNN is playing up that one of the central characters in the Plame/Wilson story is a commentator for their network and is going on Crossfire today.

Let me just say this: don't tune in expecting any scoops on who the sources are. You'd have better luck phoning Andrea Mitchell, who also spoke with these sources.

Also, note, Scott McClellan repeatedly refers to the punishment that would be appropriate, if anyone in the WH, "leaked classified information." He has never said, to my notice, "leaked this information." In other words, Plame's identity may not be classified.

- posted by Carney at 2:10 PM; link

 
Valerie Plame, Overt Agent

It makes a fun mystery novel to try to guess who outed Valerie Plame as a CIA operative. Sadly, that may be a silly undertaking.

Valerie Plame may have been an overt agent. Cliff May asserts as much in this National Review Online piece.

In other words, it's possible that "senior administration officials" "leaked" something that could have been learned through more open channels.

more later...

- posted by Carney at 12:37 PM; link

 
A New Pearl Harbor

Ed Vulliamy, the Observer's American correspondent of six years is going home, and has written a passionate elegy for the lost America of the late 90's. It reminds me of the line from Mr. Show: "It's the people from your generation, the mid-seventies, who ruined things for my generation, the late seventies." The crux of Vulliamy's argument, though it winds itself through murky suggestions of a vast conspiracy of oilmen to return national sovereignty to Texas, is that America is no longer cool. It's no longer casual about blow-jobs and is really uptight about terrorism. (I warn you, though, that Vulliamy is probably not the best authority on what's "cool" in America; he seems to think it has something to do with listening to the Allman Brothers with George Stephanopoulos). His account of his time in America and the changes America has undergone is glib, flowery and self-satisfied. In other words, it has all the common vices of cultural punditry. But what bothered me was the implication of the following passage (which is merely a repetition of a charge more explicitly made in various leftist magazines):

"For nearly a decade a group of people exiled from power during the Clinton years had been making plans. Their names are now more or less well known: Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, James Woolsey, Douglas Feith. In a series of papers they devised a blueprint for unchallenged and unchallengeable American power, military and political, across the globe, with the Middle East and Iraq as fulcrum. All that was needed to realise that dream - said a document produced by one of their many think-tanks, the Project for the New American Century - was 'a new Pearl Harbour'."

The thinly veiled insinuation here is that September 11th was part of some right-wing plan, blueprint or dream to take over the world. Vulliamy, of course, is careful not to imply (which would be crazy) that Cheney et. al. actually planned, dreamt or drew up the blueprints for September 11th. He suggests instead (and this is merely malicious and ungrounded) that they wanted it or something like it ('a new Pearl Harbor') to happen. Reading the whole sentence he excerpts, which is the only evidence he provides, goes most of the way towards exonerating PNAC from this ridiculous accusation. Here it is:

"Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor"
see

The "process of transformation" spoken of is the move from old military paradigms and weapon designs to new ones which are more responsive to information technology. The sentence can thus be rewritten with no loss of meaning as "The modernization of the military will probably be gradual unless there is some crisis that makes it a public issue."

Still uncool, perhaps, but definitely not evidence that anyone in the PNAC ever yearned for a new Pearl Harbor.

- posted by Mark at 9:54 PM; link

 
The Gerrymander

This week, if Texas Republicans can work out their disagreements over whether to pair Lubbock with Abilene or with Midland, there will be a new congressional map for the Lonestar State.

The legislature failed to pass a map before the 2002 elections and so a court made a least-change map, perpetuating the 1992 Democratic gerrymander. The 2002 map added two GOP districts as reapportionment gave Texas two new seats. This decreased the Democratic majority in Texas down to a 17-to-15 edge.

This is a little odd when you look at Texas politically. In 2000, George W. Bush won Texas by more than 20 percentage points. The state Senate has 31 seats, and the GOP there has a 19-12 edge. The State House of Representatives has a similar almost-two-thirds-GOP breakdown.

Every single statewide office, including both Senate seats, Governor and Lieutenant Governor, is held by a Republican, and none of those races was really close in 2002.

It's fair to say that this new map, which likely will give the GOP a 20-12 edge in the delegation, is far fairer than the current one, which wasn't even drawn by a legislature.

- posted by Carney at 2:09 PM; link