On the one hand, they all wnat to hate the CIA, and everyone in it and everything it does.

But when you get a CIA operative in conflict with a Republican administration, he or she becomes a hero overnight.

So if Valerie Plame was really a secret agent as the left claims (and not nursing the twins in suburban Virginia), then it stands to reason that her book, like virtually every other ex-CIA author, would be subject to censorship. As is agreed by every CIA employee, in writing.

I agree, that much of what the CIA does bureaucratically may be silly. I think Vice President Cheney had his own issue with CIA silliness, and many of the fatcat bureaucrats at Langley hated Cheney and Rumsfeld for shaking them up. That of course is why they concocted the Joe Wilson junket to Niger. And Valerie was part of that.

So where's the real scandal?

Plame was outed becuse she got her hubby the gig in Niger, and because he then used his trip and his position to broadcast his complaint in the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times.

Plame got mixed up in the politics. She wasn't just a harworking innocent analyst studying WMD issues. She was a Playa. She made herself a Playa.

Then explain why the NYT decided to blow the cover on the telecom data collection? I dare say that program was doing more for national defense than Mrs. Plame Wilson was.

This is all such an incredible losing argument for the left...

Let me make this simple enough for you, Elephantman: when people perjure they inhibit investigations. That makes finding the truth, and filing charges, impossible. And protects the guilty.

...

-- Citizen_X

Uh huh. So, according to your theory, Scooter Libby avoided prosecution on charges of treason or some alleged violation of the intelligence services identities act, simply by lying to his interviewers. (Interviews he could have refused, by the way, simply by declining to do them.)

But of course that theory does nothing to explain why Richard Armitage, who admitted to being Bob Novak's original source, and who clearly confessed to having outed Plame in speaking with Novak, was never prosecuted, or even threatened with prosecution.

It also does nothing to explain why Fitzgerald conducted his vendetta against his old nemesis Libby, when he had the facts about Armitage all along.

Before some anal-retentive on Salon corrects me on it, the act is generally referred to as the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA).

You might have a point, if Joe Wilson's reporting on matters in Niger had been accurate. It wasn't.

And if Joe Wilson hadn't publicly claimed that he was "reporting" to the Vice President, and/or implying that the Vice President's office had sent him, you have a point. But that's not the case, either.

Generally, you'd have a point if Joe Wilson weren't a proven liar. But he is.

It really is beautiful.

Shhheeeeeessshhh!!

Let's see. The Times has endorsed every Democrat that came down the road for the last 50 years.

Its editorial page is unfailingly, routinely critical of President Bush.

It gives prominent political space to former Enron adviser Paul Krugman and former theater critic Frank Rich. As well as former writer Bob Herbert.

And it went ahead and did the telecom data-gathering story after the Administration told Pinch Sulzberger, directly, that it would be detrimental to national security.

Oh, and the NYT (virtually) fired Judy Miller.

"Warrantless Wiretapping." That is the headline you've been reading. It's the story that you've swallowed, whole.

Do you think that that is what the NSA program was? "Wiretapping"? I think stuff like that is funny. Liberals assume that all Republican voters are dumb crackers who think that Saddam Hussein invented the plot to fly planes into the World Trade Center, the Capital and the Pentagon.

On the other hand, I have pretty good evidence to conclude that the liberal Salon readers really do think that the Bush Administration is running a program of wiretapping ordinary Americans' telephones.

Who's dumber?

If that means, "When did we start engaging in rendition?", then the answer to that question is: "During the Clinton Administration."

Sorry -- that's not the answer you all wanted to hear, was it?

People asked me for a link:

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=051228161155.nt4rpl2e&show_article=1

Media Matters (not exactly a right-wing organ) doesn't like that story, and what they say is this:

"While the Clinton administration practiced rendition in rare circumstances, usually to send a suspect to a country to face criminal charges, the Bush administration has vastly increased the practice of transferring suspects solely in order to subject them to interrogation in other countries."

MM continually cites reporting from the New York Times and Jane Mayer in The New Yorker, to the effect that while there were some renditions during the Clinton years, there were many more, and much more wholesale exploitation of the practice, after 9/11. And it's hard to disagree. A lot changed after 9/11. Saying that practices changed after 9/11 seems to make a lot of sense to me. We changed a lot of practices after 9/11. Good thing, too, it turns out, insofar as we haven't seen a reapeat yet.