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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.