Much ado about nothing: The Valerie Plame Affair

After two years and almost $1 million, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald indicted Vice President Dick Cheney's top aide, I. Lewis Libby, on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. Despite Joseph Wilson's angry declarations of foul play and unfair retaliation, it appears at the moment that there will be no charges brought for the alleged "leak" of his wife's identity, CIA employee Valerie Plame, to several reporters. In other words, Fitzgerald has appeared virtually empty handed.



To understand this story, which as been plagued by misinformation and confusion since the onset, it is important to get several facts straight:



- In the lead up to the War in Iraq rumors that Saddam Hussein was attempting to purchase "yellowcake" became numerous and credible enough for the CIA to send Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador and low-level state department employee, to Niger to investigate.

- Despite Wilson's adamantly repeated statement that Ms. Plame "had not proposed that [he] make the trip", it is clear that he was chosen on the recommendation of his wife, who said Wilson possessed "good relations with both the Prime Minister and the former Minister of Mines [of Niger] not to mention lots of French contacts" when plugging Mr. Wilson in an internal CIA memo.

- Wilson's report upon returning to the U.S. gave credence to the idea that Hussein had indeed been attempting to purchase yellowcake, which conflicts directly with the editorial he published some time after. In addition, several European intelligence agencies, including those of Great Britain, Israel and France--the list continues--confirmed this suspicion.



Mr. Wilson's editorial published by The New York Times in July of 2003, which has since been disproved by the U.S. Senate Committee on Intelligence, was disputed by the White House immediately. The administration's public response questioning Wilson's editorial, in addition to the Robert Novak article that actually published Plame's name, placed Wilson in the spotlight. The exact mechanism of how Plame's identity was released in the first place is unknown at the moment, but it appears that neither Karl Rove nor Libby were responsible for spreading the information. In fact, Matthew Cooper, the Time journalist whom Fitzgerald threatened with jail time for not revealing his sources, has said "did Rove leak Plame's name to me, or tell me she was covert? No."



When the details are examined, a variety of troubling factors arise which cast the nature of this dispute into question. Depending on one's interpretation of these factors, they can either be read as incompetence on the part of the CIA, or as an underhanded attempt to discredit the Bush administration in order to assuage the negative stigma surrounding the CIA's intelligence failures related to the War in Iraq. For instance, Joseph Wilson was not required to sign a confidentiality agreement before his trip, which conflicts with standard CIA procedure, nor was he required to write an official report upon his return, only an oral briefing from his home. Still more troubling is the fact that the CIA's Prepublication Review Board gave its assent for Mr. Wilson's op-ed to be published, despite the fact that it conflicted with his oral statements concerning his trip to Niger. The decision to allow the publication of the op-ed also places the CIA's desire to keep Ms. Plame's identity confidential in question, as it would be naive to think that an explosive piece like Mr. Wilson's would not draw a huge amount of scrutiny to himself, and thus his wife.



This scrutiny came to bear when Robert Novak began researching the claims put forth by Mr. Wilson, and in the process was told, though it is unclear by whom at the moment, that Wilson had been chosen on the recommendation of his wife. Working with this supposition, Mr. Novak contacted the CIA, who confirmed Ms. Plame's status as a CIA employee, and requested that the information not be published, a standard request when dealing with reporters. One would assume that had the CIA truly been concerned about "outing" Ms. Plame, then a concerted effort would have been made to ensure that Mr. Novak did not publish this 'vital information.'



Neither of the statutes that Mr. Fitzgerald was supposed to have been investigating, the Espionage Act of 1917 and the 1982 Intelligence Identities Act, appear to have been violated. The more relevant of the two statues, the 1982 Act, requires that the government be taking "affirmative measures" to conceal the identity of the agent in question, and it appears that the CIA was not doing so in the case of Ms. Plame (not to mention the fact that it has been suggested that her identity was sold by Aldrich Ames as early as 1994). The 1917 Act relates to the disclosure of classified information, though it has rarely been enforced. Indeed, whoever leaked the fact that the CIA had referred the case of Ms. Plame's 'outing' to the Justice Department for investigation, a routine action taken by the CIA several times a year, violated this very law.



The most telling piece of Fitzgerald's indictment of Libby is the fact that he indicted him not for 'outing' Ms. Plame, but for perjury and obstruction of justice, meaning, if convicted, Mr. Libby will be punished for lying about a crime which was never committed. Furthering Libby's case is the fact that he claims to have waived confidentiality for New York Times reporter Judith Miller over a year ago, meaning he has long had nothing to hide. It appears that Mr. Libby is being put on trial not for deliberately committing a crime, but for misremembering exact details of conversations that occurred two years ago, a tiny sampling of the multitude of such conversations Mr. Libby had in his former job as Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff.

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