Operation Coverup: "We Don't Buy It"

by DemFromCT

Who the 'we'? The editorial board of the LA Times. And what don't they buy?

Some folks say that as we learn more, the scandal is getting smaller, not larger. Valerie Plame was a CIA functionary commuting openly to agency headquarters, not a spy working behind enemy lines. The law against revealing the identities of intelligence agents is complicated and probably wasn't broken in this case. And the story line gets muddier: Journalists may have revealed Plame's identity to White House honchos.

We don't buy it. However they came to learn about this juicy factoid, people in the Bush administration misused an intelligence secret to discredit a critic of its Iraq policy. And outing Plame, whether illegal or not, did harm to our national security. Plame may work in Langley, Va., but she worked with others who work in more dangerous locales. You only need to imagine how Republicans would have treated such a leak in the Clinton administration to dismiss their protestations that it's all no big deal.

It's a good bet that there has already been some lying under oath.

So now it's the people and the press that don't sign on to this idea that this is an inside-the Beltway' nothing scandal or that the Iraq war that spawned it is going so well. After all, if it's nothing, why does Bush have a personal lawyer? And ask yourself, if it's something, why do the beltway Einsteins say otherwise?

Comments

[DemFromCT]

Original links found on the internets (LA Times) and at Daily Kos (Dean and FindLaw) today.

[Michael]

Dumbya has a private lawyer because his good buddy Ken Starr got some judicial activists to legislate from the bench that there was no such thing as attorney-client privilege for someone who worked for the government and a government lawyer. He's covering his tender behind.

[Meteor Blades]

You only need to imagine how Republicans would have treated such a leak in the Clinton administration to dismiss their protestations that it's all no big deal.

If somebody in the Clinton Administration had leaked a covert operative's name, the Republicans would have been demanding more lamp posts be installed on Pennsylvania Avenue so everybody down to the sub-assistant deputy to the deputy assistant could be publicly hanged.

[DemFromCT]

from today's LA Times:

"Taken together, the interrogation and base-closing amendments suggest a growing independence among Senate Republicans as President Bush struggles with declining support for the war in Iraq as well as an investigation into the involvement of top White House aides in disclosing the identity of a CIA agent."

No political fallout, eh? Well, someone gets that the two issues are intertwined.

[Mike S]

Perjury is your classic coverup method, and still is used when other methods have failed. Advances in the science of spin since Watergate, however, have made a high-risk, Nixon-style coverup unnecessary in many situations.

That was my favorite line. I rarely read the editorials in the morning but today my only other option was slogging through another Max Bootlicker op/ed. There was also this lte from a Thousand Oaks resident, a town that is either in or right on the border of Simi Valley. It might help clarify the original Rodney King verdict for some.

The Times' coverage helps the insurgency.
The July 25 Column One ("Shots to the Heart of Iraq") describing American soldiers' accidental harming of Iraqi civilians was a brilliant propaganda piece for the insurgency. By describing in prominent detail the failures of our soldiers over there (while ignoring their successes), The Times only encourages the terrorists to continue their efforts, knowing that the Americans, and not terrorists, will be blamed by the Western media for the continuing violence. If I didn't know better, I would think that The Times, at least based on this article, is a branch of Al Jazeera.

The article he is responding to is here.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-fg-civilians25jul25,1,693664.story?ctrack=1&cset=true