This from Hugh Hewitt at Townhall dot com, quoting from an interview with Christopher Hitchens on Valerie Plame and a humorous ‘correction’ in the New York Times.

Here’s the correction.

Correction

Published: March 13, 2007

A March 7 editorial on the conviction of Lewis Libby said incorrectly that Joseph Wilson IV was sent by the State Department in 2002 to Niger to check out a report that Iraq had tried to buy uranium there. Mr. Wilson was sent by the C.I.A.

CH: As to who sent her…did you notice there was quite a funny…sent him, rather, her lovely husband. Did you see a rather funny correction in the New York Times the other day?

HH: No, I didn’t.

CH: It was on the op-ed page an editorialist correction. They had said he’d been sent to Niger by the State Department, and the correction was, after all this time, only last week, they corrected, he was sent there by the CIA. Yes, we always knew that. That’s what the original allegation was, and they might as well have added, as was found by the Senate committee, that the person in the CIA who wanted to send him was his wife.

HH: Yup, although she denied that.

CH: So it was a slam dunk.

HH: She denied that, did she not?

CH: Yeah, well, we have the letter that she sent recommending him. I haven’t got it in front of me, but it’s very easy to find.

HH: Right.

CH: And recommended him particularly, I might add, on the grounds that he was great friends with the Minister of Mines of Niger, the very man, in other words, who he would have been, if he had been doing an investigation, which he wasn’t, having to investigate. So he gets sent there on the grounds that he’s friends of the person who he’s supposed to be suspecting. It’s extraordinary.

This column at NRO by Byron York asks some interesting questions that frames just exactly how ‘covert’ Valeria Plames really was.

The February 12, 2002 memo that Plame sent to the deputy chief of the CIA’s counterproliferation division (CPD) suggesting her husband for the trip to Niger was quoted in the Senate Intelligence Report. This is pretty significant documented evidence that what she said in front of Congress about her not having a role in sending her husband to Niger simply isn’t true.

Plame and Wilson attended a conference in May of 2003 sponsored by the Senate Democratic Policy Committee. In Vanity Fair magazine, there a short blurb talking about Wilson and his wife meeting with Nicholas Kristof over breakfast is pretty disturbing, considering what he wrote in his column.

Kristof wrote in his May 6, 2003 column that

“In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy [Joe Wilson] reported to the CIA and State Department that the information [of a Niger-Iraq uranium deal] was unequivocally wrong and that the documents [purporting to show such a deal] had been forged.”

In fact, Wilson hadn’t actually seen the documents Kristof claims had been debunked, which Kristof later admitted.

On June 13, 2003, Kristof wrote a column about the Niger-uranium matter. He wrote that he was “piecing the story together from two people directly involved and three others who were briefed on it.”

So it would seem these two had been blabbing long before Nowak’s column, which ‘outted’ the desk-bound Langley employee who hadn’t been covert in at least 10 years.

At the Lewis Libby trial, Judge Reggie Walton said that he did not know if [her] job status was covert, classified, or other on July 14, 2003, the day [her] name was published in a column by Robert Novak.

Why does there seem to be confusion about it? Either she was, or she wasn’t. From what I can see, she WASN’T. Victoria Tonsing was the Senate negotiator for the “Identities Protection Act of 1982″, and helped Congress craft it. In the Wall Street Journal, she said “I also know that covert officers are not assigned to Langley.”

It’s ridiculous. It reaks of setup -her attendance at the Senate Democratic Policy Committee meeting and meeting with Nicholas Kristoff, way before the Nowak column came out.

Nowak has an interesting column at the WaPo: “Was She Covert?”

Hoekstra had tried repeatedly to learn Plame’s status from the CIA but got only double talk from Langley.

That’s because they would have had to admit that they didn’t process the paperwork to have her reclassified from the days when she really was covert.

Had not Plame been outed years ago by a Soviet agent? [in the 90’s by Aldrich Ames] Was she not on an administrative, not operational, track at Langley? How could she be covert if, in public view, she drove to work each day at Langley? What about comments to me by then CIA spokesman Bill Harlow that Plame never would be given another foreign assignment? What about testimony to the FBI that her CIA employment was common knowledge in Washington?

Sweetness and Light points out that probably technically, her status was never reclassified by the CIA’s HR department since she worked overseas as a NOC. This shouldn’t detract from the factual evidence that she was relegated to a desk job at Langley, where no covert agent is ever assigned.