The Plame facts about distraction

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Karl Rove? Please. I couldn't care less. This week finds me thousands of miles from the Beltway in what I believe the ABC World News Tonight map designates as the Rest Of The Planet, an obscure beat the media can't seem to spare a correspondent for. But even if I was with the rest of the navel-gazers inside the Beltway, I wouldn't be interested in who "leaked" the name of CIA employee Valerie Plame to the press.

As her weirdly self-obsessed husband Joseph C. Wilson IV conceded on CNN the other day, she wasn't a "clandestine officer" and, indeed, hadn't been one for six years. So one can only "leak" her name in the way one can "leak" the name of the check-out clerk at Home Depot or the busboy at Denny's.

Back when Woodrow Wilson ran for president, he had a campaign song called "Wilson, That's All." If only. With Joe Wilson, it's never all. He keeps coming back like a song.

But in the real world there's only one scandal in this whole wretched business -- that the CIA, as part of its institutional obstruction of the administration, set up a pathetic "fact-finding mission" that would be considered a joke by any serious intelligence agency and compounded it by sending, at the behest of his wife, a shrill politically motivated poseur who, for the sake of 15 minutes' celebrity on the cable gabfest circuit, misled the nation about what he found.

This controversy began, you'll recall, because Mr. Wilson objected to a line in President Bush's State-of-the-Union address that British intelligence had discovered Iraq was trying to acquire "yellowcake" -- i.e., weaponized uranium -- from Africa. This made Mr. Bush, in Mr. Wilson's incisive analysis, a "liar" and Vice President Dick Cheney a "lying sonofabitch."

In fact, the only lying sonofabitch turned out to be Yellowcake Joe. Just about everybody on the face of the Earth except Mr. Wilson, the White House press corps and the moveon.org crowd accepts that Saddam was indeed trying to acquire uranium from Africa. Don't take my word, for it; it's the conclusion of the Senate intelligence report, Lord Butler's report in the United Kingdom, the British external intelligence agency MI6, French intelligence, other European services -- and, come to that, the original CIA report based on Joe Wilson's own briefing to them. Only Yellowcake Joe knows why he then wrote an article for the New York Times misrepresenting what senior figures from Daouda Mallam Wanke's Niger regime told him.

As I wrote in this space a year ago, an ambassador, in Sir Henry Wootton's famous dictum, is a good man sent abroad to lie for his country; this ambassador came home to lie to his.

What we have here is, in effect, the old stand-by plot of lame Hollywood conspiracy thrillers: rogue elements within the CIA trying to destabilize the elected government. If the left's view of the world is now so insanely upside-down that's the side they want to be on, good for them.

But "leaking" the name of Mr. Wilson's wife and promoter within the CIA didn't "endanger her life" or "compromise her mission." Au contraire, exposing the nature of this fraudulent, compromised mission might conceivably prevent endangerment of the American people's lives.

Here's the thing: They're still pulling body parts from London's Tube tunnels. Too far away for you, no local angle? OK, how about this? Magdy el-Nashar. He's a 33-year old Egyptian arrested Friday in Cairo, and thought to be what they call a "little emir" -- i.e., the head honcho in the local terrorist cell, the one who fires up the suicide bombers. Until his timely and temporary disappearance, he was a biochemist studying at Leeds University and the London bombs were made in his apartment. Previously, he was studying at North Carolina State University.