Simple declarative sentence. No hedging.

"Plame was no covert."

Period. Full stop.

And Ms. Toensing said this a mere three months ago.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/16/AR2007021601705.html

THE WASHINGTON POST
Trial in Error
By Victoria Toensing
Sunday, February 18, 2007; Page B01
. . . On Dec. 30, 2003, the day Fitzgerald was appointed special counsel, he should have known (all he had to do was ask the CIA) that Plame was not covert, knowledge that should have stopped the investigation right there . . . Plame was not covert. She worked at CIA headquarters and had not been stationed abroad within five years of the date of Novak's column . . .
- - Victoria Toensing

And then, a week later, Washington Post readers were treated with this lovely column:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/23/AR2007022301726.html

Deborah Howell
Ombudsman
Covert Question, Open Controversy
Sunday, February 25, 2007; Page B06

Was Valerie Plame covert or not? It's hard to tell from reading The Post.

Her identity as a CIA operative has been at the center of a long-running soap opera, culminating in the trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby . . .

. . . So last Sunday's Outlook article by Victoria Toensing, a well-known Republican lawyer, sent many liberal readers up the wall. She criticized special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the media and several players in the case. Toensing said Plame's status wasn't "covert" as defined by the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which Toensing helped write as counsel for the Senate intelligence committee. To fit the law's criteria, Plame would have had to have been on overseas duty at some point in the preceding five years.

A reader in New York wrote: "The Washington Post should do its own investigative report in order to bury once and for all the doubts existing against Valerie Plame's status in the CIA before her identity was disclosed. You have op-ed writers contradicting themselves. . . . Your own David Ignatius called Plame covert in this Feb. 2 op-ed. Now . . . you have Republican Victoria Toensing saying that Plame was not covert."

. . . David Ignatius trusts his CIA sources that she was a covert agent. Ignatius is not a partisan . . .

. . . While Toensing is a partisan . . .

. . . Outlook's purpose is to challenge conventional wisdom and make people think, said Kaiser; he called the piece a "huge success, not least because of the many comments to [the ombudsman] that it provoked," as well as comments on The Post's Web site. "But that's secondary to the piece's success on its own terms: It made people consider Fitzgerald's methods and his case in a fresh light," he said . . .

. . . When the Libby trial is over, readers deserve a Post retrospective with a timeline, graphics and cast of characters, including Post journalists, to help put the case in perspective . . .

- - Deborah Howell

May 30 was nationally observed as Decoration Day, also known as Memorial Day, from 1868 through 1970. The date was established by the G.A.R., which was the largest organization of civil war veterans.

http://www.suvcw.org/logan.htm

Headquarters, Grand Army of the Republic

Washington, D.C., May 5, 1868

The 30th day of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land. In this observance no form or ceremony is prescribed, but posts and comrades will in their own way arrange such fitting services and testimonials of respect as circumstances may permit.

We are organized, comrades, as our regulations tell us, for the purpose, among other things, "of preserving and strengthening those kind and fraternal feelings which have bound together the soldiers, sailors, and marines who united to suppress the late rebellion." What can aid more to assure this result than by cherishing tenderly the memory of our heroic dead, who made their breasts a barricade between our country and its foe? Their soldier lives were the reveille of freedom to a race in chains, and their death a tattoo of rebellious tyranny in arms . . .

- - John A. Logan

Reconciliation
Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again
      and ever again, this soiled world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin - I draw near,
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.
- - Walt Whitman