Shame on the MSM for their mendacity. They know the whole sorry issue is as phony as Dan Rather’s memos, but they push it anyway. The matter involves exposing the identify of CIA covert agents. True, outing a covert agent is a crime, but Valerie Plame wasn’t a covert agent, and hadn’t been since 1997. Plame, wife of Joe Wilson, does work for CIA at Langly, but in the nonproliferation section, not in any covert capacity. Her job was no secret, many friends and neighbors knew what she did, and so did many reporters in the DC MSM.

When the question of Saddam’s attempt to purchase yellowcake from Niger surfaced, CIA wanted to investigate, and referred it to the nonproliferation section. There, Valerie Plame suggested her husband to look into it. The CIA accepted her recommendation and Wilson went to Niger, sat around the hotel pool, asked a few questions, returned, and wrote his report. It was inconclusive.

Subsequently unemployed, Wilson then embarked on a new career, attacking the Bush administration on the reasons for the Iraqi war. Joe claimed the Vice President had sent him to Niger on a secret mission. But, the VP never heard of Joe Wilson. So, quite logically, the key question more than suggested itself: if it wasn’t the VP who sent Joe Wilson to Niger, who did?

So, that’s how Valerie Plame’s name came up. Joe Wilson’s lies put her job at CIA in the media spotlight. Not that her desk job was undercover, but since she had been covert 6 or 7 years prior, Joe and the MSM decided to play the “Blame Game.”

Exposing an undercover CIA agent is against the law, but Joe’s wife wasn’t undercover, and hadn’t been for years. Karl Rove didn’t “out” Valerie Plame and neither did anyone else in the Bush White House.

Her involvement in the matter became known exclusively because Yellowcake Joe wouldn’t tell the truth about the origins of his trip to Niger. These facts are well known to the MSM. But their red-hot hate for Bush and his proxy, Karl Rove, goads them to suppress the truth and spew obvious disinformation to the very public they have a responsibility to inform.

(Correction to Brian O’Connell: the nationality term for people from Niger is “Nigerien,” not “Nigerian” which refers to Nigeria.)

One didn’t have to wait for Joe Wilson’s later statements to see that he was a liar. His own summary of his Niger trip flatly contradicts the information contained in his full report.

Joe Wilson himself said that at least one Nigerian said that Saddam sought nuclear materials from Africa. Don’t bother with British intelligence. That Wilson was ever held up as the opposition to the 16 words is astounding.

You may be too young to remember, but “truth” is whatever advances the cause of international socialism, while “a lie” is whatever drives it back.

Thus, David James of Long Beach told only “the truth” — or in Russian, pravda.

Dafydd