{"id":11044,"date":"2007-06-07T10:45:30","date_gmt":"2007-06-07T14:45:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/11044.html"},"modified":"2007-06-07T10:45:30","modified_gmt":"2007-06-07T14:45:30","slug":"about-those-conservatives-who-denied-plame-was-covert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/about-those-conservatives-who-denied-plame-was-covert\/","title":{"rendered":"About those conservatives who denied Plame was covert…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Newsweek reported<\/a> about a week ago what most of us have known for years: Valerie Plame was really, truly a covert agent at the CIA when the White House decided to expose her identity. Summarizing what most of us were thinking, Kevin Drum noted<\/a>, “So that settles that. I hope the wingosphere can finally stop bleating about how she wasn’t ‘really’ covert and there was no harm in what Libby et. al. did.”<\/p>\n

But Salon’s Alex Koppelman went a step further and asked<\/a> some of the same people who’ve been insisting for years that Plame wasn’t covert whether they’re prepared to acknowledge their mistakes, run a correction, etc. Consider this rogues’ gallery: Fred Barnes, Sean Hannity, James Taranto, Ann Coulter, Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit), Ace of Spades, Laura Ingraham, and the editorial boards of the Washington Times and the National Review, among others.<\/p>\n

As you’d expect, most of those contacted decided not to respond. Those who did answer Koppelman’s question came up with creative explanations<\/a> to rationalize their errors.<\/p>\n

* Glenn Reynolds<\/b>: Instapundit told readers in 2005 that Plame was a “paperpusher,” but not a “covert spy.” Asked by Salon whether he intended to correct or retract that post, Reynolds said that “normally one retracts original reporting, and I haven’t done any original reporting … My position on this has always been that this is a non-scandal and a non-story, and I’m certainly not going to retract that. I’d like to see investigation of leaks that have damaged national security.”<\/p>\n

* Victoria Toensing<\/b>: She continues to argue that under the language of the IIPA, Plame doesn’t meet the legal standards for “covert agent,” though Koppelman explains that these legal definitions haven’t been litigated and are therefore rather ambiguous.<\/p>\n

* National Review<\/b>: The conservative magazine told readers in 2005, “Despite all the hype, it appears that Plame works a desk job at the CIA. That’s an admirable and important line of work. But it doesn’t make her a covert operative, and it didn’t make her a covert operative when Bob Novak mentioned her in his July 14, 2003, column.” This week, in a pleasant surprise, National Review said, “This is a murky matter with lots of conflicting interpretations, but we were too categorical in how we put it in that editorial.”<\/p>\n

MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson, meanwhile, offered the most colorful response.
\n<\/p>\n

MSNBC host Tucker Carlson, whose father, Richard Carlson, is on the advisory committee for the fund set up to help pay for Libby’s defense, told Salon that he believes the CIA was defining Plame as covert at the time of Novak’s column, but questioned the definition. <\/p>\n

“If it is in fact true that she had served under nonofficial cover and was then working at Langley, the story is why was CIA calling her covert? … I’m covert too, how does that sound? What does that mean?” Carlson said. “CIA clearly didn’t really give a sh*t about keeping her identity secret if she’s going to work at f**king Langley.” <\/p>\n

Carlson also challenged the assertion made in the unclassified summary released by Fitzgerald that Plame had continued to travel under nonofficial cover while working from Langley. <\/p>\n

“I call bullsh*t on that, I don’t care what they say.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Given all of this, I’m afraid the bleating will continue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Newsweek reported about a week ago what most of us have known for years: Valerie Plame was really, truly a covert agent at the CIA when the White House decided to expose her identity. Summarizing what most of us were thinking, Kevin Drum noted, “So that settles that. I hope the wingosphere can finally stop […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11044"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11044\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}