Much Ado About Nothing

It's truly amazing how much attention has been lavished on the controversy over the outing of the CIA operative, Valerie Plame. If ever a story needed some Zero Base Thinking, it is this one. There is so much noise here, and almost no substance at all.

The law, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, was enacted in 1982 and was designed to protect the identities of covert U.S. agents. It was a response to an organized campaign led by former CIA agent Philip Agee to identify CIA and other U.S. covert agents around the world. The law calls for a finding that the CIA employee not only be a "covert operative" but also to have been operating out of the country within the last five years. According to Robert Novak, the columnist who started this mess: "Valerie Plame was an analyst, not a spy, not a covert operator, and not in charge of undercover operatives." So far as I can glean from public sources, Ms. Plame has not been out of the country for the last six years.

Those enemies of the Bush administration who are trying to use this brouhaha to cast aspersions are ignoring these facts. Rather than investigating the truth of her status as a covert operative, they are concentrating on the "leak." It is a sad state of affairs that this nation is in, that the news media are pushing this anti-Bush propaganda as if it was a serious story. It is not. Just as with their behavior in covering the global warming phenomenon, the media can't report the truth and still pursue their agenda. So they report on the Emperor's new clothes, while those with the eyes to see realize that the clothes are not new, there are not any clothes at all.