Someone's lying

Douchebag of Liberty, Bob Novak, finally speaks out in Ex-CIA official's remark is wrong. In that column, he makes the claim that he never said that Valerie Plame "authorized" Amb. Wilson's trip to Niger, just that she suggested that he could go. This completely disingenuous argument has nothing to do with the claims that former CIA spokesperson, Bill Harlow, made recently. Namely, that he had urged Novak in the strongest terms possible not to use Ms Plame's name in his article and also that the substance of the claim was incorrect.

Novakula claims (emphasis mine):

So, what was "wrong" with my column as Harlow claimed? There was nothing incorrect. He told the Post reporters he had "warned" me that if I "did write about it her name should not be revealed." That is meaningless. Once it was determined that Wilson's wife suggested the mission, she could be identified as "Valerie Plame" by reading her husband's entry in "Who's Who in America."

Harlow said to the Post that he did not tell me Mrs. Wilson "was undercover because that was classified." What he did say was, as I reported in a previous column, "she probably never again would be given a foreign assignment but that exposure of her name might cause 'difficulties.' " According to CIA sources, she was brought home from foreign assignments in 1997, when agency officials feared she had been "outed" by the traitor Aldrich Ames.

I have previously said that I never would have written those sentences if Harlow, then-CIA Director George Tenet or anybody else from the agency had told me that Valerie Plame Wilson's disclosure would endanger herself or anybody.

The recent first disclosure of secret grand jury testimony set off a news media feeding frenzy centered on this obscure case. Joseph Wilson was discarded a year ago by the Kerry presidential campaign after the Senate committee reported much of what he said "had no basis in fact." The re-emerged Wilson is now accusing the senators of "smearing" him. I eagerly await the end of this investigation when I may be able to correct other misinformation about me and the case.

Meaningless? Harlow couldn't tell Novak that Valerie Plame was covert, that information was classified. Novak, someone who has been around the block a few times, knows full well when someone is sending him a warning. For him to suggest that because Harlow didn't tell him she was covert, or to say that she or others might be placed in danger, that it was meaningless that he used her name simply defies credulity.

Novak confirms the statement that harlow made, that if he used her name in his column that she would have difficulty travelling over-seas. If that isn't a warning, I don't know what is. the fact that Harlow called Novak back afterwards, to emphasize that he not use her name, after himself confirming her covert status, should have been a signal as clear as a bell that he shouldn't have published the story.

Apparently, DBFL has no conscience. He knew what he was doing. His argument, that Harlow's claims are wrong, doesn't hold water. By concluding his column with the canard that "much of what he [Wilson] said 'had no basis in fact'." is completely disingenuous because the whole point here is not what Wilson has said after the fact of Novak's enablement of administration treason, but what Wilson reported back from his trip to Niger. That the claims that Saddam had attempted to purchase uranium from Niger were bullshit... something that the State Department had already concluded (but that Bolton fought furiously to squelch).

The republican talking points try to confuse the issue... but the facts are on the side of what Wilson wrote in his NYT op-ed piece. The administration had to know that the claims that the president made in those 16 infamous words in the 2002 SOTU were bogus, yet they used the claim anyway, because they had to sell us on going to war with Iraq with the bogeyman of a possible nuclear attack.

Fortunately, the drip, drip, drip from the reality-based community is making it patently clear that the substance of the Downing Street Memos is spot on despite the administration's best efforts to have us believe otherwise.