Meatball sure is a demanding idiot; if not completely stupid; He sends me an email with no link about Fitzgerald’s grandstanding and using a document he claims is ‘unclassified’ that isn’t dated, during the sentencing phase of Libby’s farce of a trial:

An unclassified CIA employment summary for Valerie Plame was released yesterday, and it confirms that she was covert at the time her identity as a CIA operative was revealed.

You’ve claimed that she was not covert. Will you be posting a retraction of your claim?

Many thanks…

mb

No, I will not be posting a retraction, particularly since you can google up any number of lefty blogs whose writers think this is news. Here are a few links, anyway…Newsweek (hello, remember the Koran flushing story?), Washington Monthly

But I sincerely doubt that any of these people will ‘post a retraction, either:

Neil Boortz:

1.) Valerie Plame was not a covert agent and revealing her name was not a crime. Sorry, but being a desk jockey at the CIA doesn’t qualify you to be the next James Bond. Besides, there is evidence to suggest her identity was an open secret.

2.) Given #1, telling someone her name was not a crime. So Cheney is off the hook. So much for that.

What you’re likely to see is Fitzgerald indicting Rove or Libby based on their grand jury testimony for perjury or obstruction of justice. Even that is a stretch….the special prosecutor would have to prove that they lied on purpose. Remember, it’s only a lie if you know the statement was untrue at the time you made it.

Or Ben Johnson,

In 2000, Plame used her CIA name (“Ms. Valerie E. Wilson”) – and disclosed her home address – while making a $1,000 donation to Al Gore’s presidential campaign, listing her job as an “Analyst” at “Brewster-Jennings & Associates.” Following the apparently legal “leak,” terrorists may have known her name but not her face. This she quickly remedied. Although Joe Wilson told NBC’s Tim Russert, “my wife…would rather chop off her right arm than say anything to the press, and she will not allow herself to be photographed,” she promptly posed for Vanity Fair, followed by a number of additional poses and glamour shots.

or

Andrew McCarthy

Have you heard that the CIA is actually the source responsible for exposing Plame’s covert status? Not Karl Rove, not Bob Novak, not the sinister administration cabal du jour of Fourth Estate fantasy, but the CIA itself? Had you heard that Plame’s cover has actually been blown for a decade — i.e., since about seven years before Novak ever wrote a syllable about her? Had you heard not only that no crime was committed in the communication of information between Bush administration officials and Novak, but that no crime could have been committed because the governing law gives a person a complete defense if an agent’s status has already been compromised by the government?

or

Ann Coulter

It was not a crime to reveal Valerie Plame’s name because she was not a covert agent. If it had been a crime, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald could have wrapped up his investigation with an indictment of the State Department’s Richard Armitage on the first day of his investigation since it was Armitage who revealed her name and Fitzgerald knew it.

Art Moore or Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely

A retired Army general says the man at the center of the CIA leak controversy, Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, revealed his wife Valerie Plame’s employment with the agency in a casual conversation more than a year before she allegedly was “outed” by the White House through a columnist.

Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely told WorldNetDaily that Wilson mentioned Plame’s status as a CIA employee over the course of at least three, possibly five, conversations in 2002 in the Fox News Channel’s “green room” in Washington, D.C., as they waited to appear on air as analysts.

Or Robert Novak:

Had not Plame been outed years ago by a Soviet agent? 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?

Yes, the Soviet agent’s name was Aldrich Ames, that happened in 1997 (or before see below), yes, Bob, she was on an administrative track at Langley, and yes, Bob, CIA Spokesman Bill Harlow said she’d never get another foreign assignment, and it was common knowledge on the DC cocktail circuit that she was not covert.

SHE WAS NOT COVERT.

Many thanks for what, meatball? Here again, Meatball presents us with another example of his poorly worded, poorly gathered ‘factoids’ which are merely turds from the floor of the conspiracy theorists at the Daily Kos; another argumentum ad hominem (a personal attack on me) when he says ‘you’ve claimed that she was not covert’.

Um, Meatball, do you ever see me post anything without referring to someone else with a link- or some other fact with a link - or without including a link, like you did in your email? You’re all about semantics, hyperbole and linguistics - rhetorical arguments which don’t mean squat. I’m about referring to actual people who know what’s going on, people like Bob Novak and Victoria Toensing.

Let’s go through some more quotes from people more intelligent and well-versed in these matters than I. Plame was outted in 1997 (or before -see below-) by Aldrich Ames. She was moved to a desk job after that, ‘for her own safety’. For meatheads with no brains, that means she was taken ‘out of the field’.

As I said in this post from March 20, read When and Why Joe Wilson IV Outted Valerie Plame at Sweetness and Light, What Joe Wilson’s Lies Have Wrought at Rightwing Nuthouse, numerous articles by Clarice Feldman, an attorney in Washington, at the American Thinker on the Libby affair and its injustice, and do me a favor. Bugger off.

Fitzgerald’s bringing this up during the sentencing phase of Libby’s trial is hardly a ’significant gotcha’. It should be, to the sentient being, an embarrassment to how far the American Courts have turned into a virtual string of Kangaroo courts and the prosecutor get to say anything he wants irregardless of the facts presented.

What was Libby convicted of? It wasn’t for violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, it was for perjury, which is still doubtful considering the surrounding facts and hyperbole by the leftists who are so desperate to take down the administration. Remember, their target was originally Karl Rove and Dick Cheney on this thing, and they must be horribly disappointed in how it’s turned out thus far.

This isn’t the CIA declassifying evidence. This is smoke and mirrors by a desperate attorney who hasn’t scored Libby any jailtime with his hysteria.

Victoria Toensing 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,” as Valerie Plame was at the time this all occurred. Victoria Toensing wrote a piece at NRO, entitled “Does the Libby Verdict Have Appeal? Making Sense of Legal Nonsense” and she says in part:

The court permitted Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to refer to Valerie Plame as being “covert” or having a “classified” job throughout trial and specifically during closing argument. Neither of those highly prejudicial characterizations was proven at trial. Even if Plame’s job were “classified,” as Fitzgerald reiterated in his press conference after conviction, there is no criminal violation in publishing her name. That legal gap is why Congress passed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act in 1982.

Now. With all of that out of the way, Al Johnson has a piece up at the American Thinker dated yesterday, discussing Fitgerald’s lengthy PDf file, and how the ridiculous allegation of ‘outing a covert agent’ who’d been outted already by Aldrich Ames in 1997 - won’t die, and just keeps morphing into new and weird forms.

The document that Fitzgerald came up with alleges that Plame was a “covert” employee of the CIA for purposes of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 (IIPA, 50 U.S.C. §§ 421-426 ). This is manipulation of definitions. Of the 30 pages in the pdf file, all but three are a transcript of Plame’s testimony before Rep. Henry Waxman’s personal dog and pony show–the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

In spite of that, though, Victoria Toensing testified in that circus sideshow under oath.

Victoria Toensing is the attorney who drafted the IIPA. She, too, testified before Waxman’s committee, and she had handy the Senate Report on the IIPA, that spelled out what the Act was intended to cover. Referring to page 16 of the Senate Report Toensing stated (under oath): “Notably, the legislation limited coverage of U.S. citizen informants or sources (agents) also to situations where they “reside and act outside the United States.” Toensing then quoted Joe Wilson’s (self) absorbing autobiography to show that Plame had returned to the US in 1997 and had never “resided and acted” overseas again.

That should be the end of it, but nooooo. These people can’t let it go.

In essence, in the sentencing phase of this trial, Fitzgerald is attempting to turn the tables on the ‘perjury’ conviction, and instead tries very hard to make this seem as though Libby had been found in violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, which he wasn’t able to prove in court, even though he was allowed to use that verbiage in the proceedings, which in itself is outrageous.

Fitzgerald has, not surprisingly, adamantly refused to release the actual Referral Memo, and has instead played a sly “hide the ball” game when it comes to the issue of Plame and the IIPA–seeming to equate “covert” and “classified,” and so forth. (Johnson, 2007)

Read the rest of Al Johnson’s analysis at the American Thinker.

The New York Times Nicholas Kristof explained; “The C.I.A. suspected that Aldrich Ames had given Mrs. Wilson’s name (along with those of other spies) to the Russians before his espionage arrest in 1994.”

Source

bwahahahaha!

Seems as though Fitgerald has changed his tune since 2005 when he said…”"Let me say two things, I am not speaking [in this indictment] to whether or not Valerie Wilson was covert . . . And we have not made any allegation that Mr. Libby knowingly or intentionally outed a covert agent.”