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"Spy Valerie and the rogue CIA," by James Lewis, The American Thinker, 18 July 2005, http://www.americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=4656 (from private email).

While some parts of the article are over-the-top, Lewis of American Thinker does a good job dissecting the Karl Rove / Joe Wilson / Valerie Plame brouhaha

Is it self-defense by apparatchiks at the Central Intelligence Agency?

 

Behind the scenes, the single most important reason for the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson farce is that CIA Director Porter Goss has finally started to clean house at Langley. Goss's long-overdue shake-up is clearly backed by the White House, the top levels of the Pentagon and State Department, and the new National Director of Intelligence, John Negroponte.

Judging by Director Goss's remarks at his Senate confirmation hearings, those whose jobs are most in danger include the CIA "experts" in WMD proliferation – Valerie Plame's outfit – who completely failed to anticipate the Indian and Pakistani nukes, and just couldn't figure out what was going on with Iraqi WMDs. Valerie Plame's bosses are facing the axe for decades of failures.

 

Self-defense by the remnant of the Iron Triangle?

 

It could be a bloodbath, and the Permanent Establishment knows it.
The farcical Plame/Wilson assault on Karl Rove is a shot across the bow of the White House. The spook bureaucracy is fighting for its perks, hand-in-hand with the Democrats and the media. This is exactly the same iron triangle that destroyed Richard Nixon.

 

Government corruption, that required a whistle-blower?

 

Valerie Plame's CIA bosses took care not to ask Mr. Wilson to sign a confidentiality agreement, routine in such cases, almost as if they wanted him to make a public fuss. They were not surprised, one might think, when Mr.

Wilson promptly took his story to New York Times Op-Ed Editor Gail Collins, one of the great Bush-haters of all time. As Joseph DiGenova, former US Attorney for DC, recently said, "The CIA isn’t stupid. They wanted this story out."

 

Subversion? Or some other form of the CIA trying to control policy?

 

Telling lies to confirm somebody's paranoid beliefs is a classic disinformation gambit, right out of Spy School 101. But such gambits would be far more usefully employed against al Qaeda, our opponent in war. If the United States is attacked again by terrorists, one reason will be that our CIA has wasted time fighting the White House rather than the enemy.

 

"The Real News About Karl Rove," by Mark Safranski, ZenPundit, 14 July 2005, http://zenpundit.blogspot.com/2005/07/real-news-about-karl-rove-i-feel.html.

Mark Safranski on how Joe Wilson and the MSM failed in their political "coup":

 

Karl Rove is a brilliant bare-knuckle political operator and no saint but the likeliest legal outcome of this charade is that he did not, at least technically speaking, break the law by " outing" a CIA clandestine officer engaged in covert operations, which Ms. Plame was not in any event. Given the unlikelihood of Judith Miller doing hard time for Mr. Rove, he's obviously not " the" source, though I can imagine he walked right up to any legal line in speaking to reporters. That's how hardball is played in Washington and hardball is what the incredibly arrogant Joseph Wilson chose to play when the senior staff at Foggy Bottom and at Langely cooked up this gambit in order to torpedo the President's foreign policy and, if they were really lucky, the President along with it.

In some countries, when the unelected insiders engage in secret machinations to oust their elected leaders it is called a coup.

Too strong a word ? Admiral Stansfield Turner, the Left's favorite CIA director and no fan of the Bush administration, felt compelled to speak out in support of housecleaning at Langely:

 

"The CIA has got to be kept out of partisan politics," said Stansfield Turner, who was CIA director under President Carter. "And it appears that they were leaking information to influence the election. Porter Goss has now got a difficult problem."

 

The coup failed because the old oligopoly on public discourse of three major TV networks and two newspapers is broken. Would-be drumbeats orchestrated by elite powerbrokers through their media friends now dissolve into a cacophony of fact-checking, fisking, ridicule and a devastating counterattack if any chicanery is exposed. Chicanery that once would never have been detected, much less thwarted.

 

Thank you, Karl Rove. And thank you, new media.

"Karl Rove, Whistleblower," Wall Street Journal, 13 July 2005, http://opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110006955 (from Drudge Report).

A good editorial on the heroic actions of Karl Rove, who has (apparently) put his own job on the line to correct malicious lies other-than-fully-honest statements during the run-up to the Iraq Campaign

 

Democrats and most of the Beltway press corps are baying for Karl Rove's head over his role in exposing a case of CIA nepotism involving Joe Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame. On the contrary, we'd say the White House political guru deserves a prize--perhaps the next iteration of the "Truth-Telling" award that The Nation magazine bestowed upon Mr. Wilson before the Senate Intelligence Committee exposed him as a fraud.

For Mr. Rove is turning out to be the real "whistleblower" in this whole sorry pseudo-scandal. He's the one who warned Time's Matthew Cooper and other reporters to be wary of Mr. Wilson's credibility. He's the one who told the press the truth that Mr. Wilson had been recommended for the CIA consulting gig by his wife, not by Vice President Dick Cheney as Mr. Wilson was asserting on the airwaves. In short, Mr. Rove provided important background so Americans could understand that Mr. Wilson wasn't a whistleblower but was a partisan trying to discredit the Iraq War in an election campaign. Thank you, Mr. Rove.

Media chants aside, there's no evidence that Mr. Rove broke any laws in telling reporters that Ms. Plame may have played a role in her husband's selection for a 2002 mission to investigate reports that Iraq was seeking uranium ore in Niger. To be prosecuted under the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, Mr. Rove would had to have deliberately and maliciously exposed Ms. Plame knowing that she was an undercover agent and using information he'd obtained in an official capacity. But it appears Mr. Rove didn't even know Ms. Plame's name and had only heard about her work at Langley from other journalists.

 

But his day in the political sun was short-lived. The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report last July cited the note that Ms. Plame had sent recommending her husband for the Niger mission. "Interviews and documents provided to the Committee indicate that his wife, a CPD [Counterproliferation Division] employee, suggested his name for the trip," said the report.

The same bipartisan report also pointed out that the forged documents Mr. Wilson claimed to have discredited hadn't even entered intelligence channels until eight months after his trip. And it said the CIA interpreted the information he provided in his debrief as mildly supportive of the suspicion that Iraq had been seeking uranium in Niger.