Being in the throes of packing for three weeks in the other hemisphere, I shouldn’t be spending time on blog entries. Nonetheless, a few jottings:
■ Andy McCarthy has usefully drawn attention to a succinct precis of the reasons why Valerie Plame Wilson’s employment by the CIA was not a national security secret, to wit,
To the average observer, much less to the professional intelligence operative, Plame was not given the “deep cover” required of a covertagent. . . . She worked at a desk job at CIA headquarters, where she could be seen traveling to and from, and active at, Langley. She had been presiding in Washington – not stationed abroad for a number ofyears. . . .
The public record provides ample evidence that the CIA was at least cavalier about, if not complicit in, the publishing of Plame’s name. Moreover, given [columnist Bob] Novak’s suggestion of CIA incompetence plus the resulting public uproar over Plame’s identity being revealed, the CIA had every incentive to dissemble by claiming that it was “shocked, shocked” that leaking was going on, and thus made a routine request to the Justice Department to investigate.
These passages come from the amicus brief submitted by most of the country’s leading news organizations in support of Judith Miller and the New York Times. As Mr. McCarthy sardonically observes, what media outlets say to their readers and viewers differs toto caelo from what they say to the courts.
The brief makes one interesting point that I haven’t seen elsewhere. Having decided to send Joseph Wilson, husband of a supposedly covert agent specializing in nuclear proliferation to Niger to investigate suspicions of attempted nuclear proliferation, the agency didn’t bother to obtain any sort of confidentiality agreement, nor did it take any steps to prevent him from writing publicly about his activities. If it was important to keep Mrs. Plame Wilson’s role at the CIA secret,
Did no one at Langley think that Plame’s identity might be compromised if her spouse writes a nationally distributed Op-Ed piece discussing a foreign mission about a volatile political issue that focused on her subject matter expertise?
■ Little Green Footballs reprints a predictably stupid apologia by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for its refusal to call terrorists by their proper name. It’s mostly the same old Reuters-cloned nonsense, but one sentence caught my eye:
Rather than calling assailants “terrorists,” we can refer to them as bombers, hijackers, gunmen (if we’re sure no women were in the group), militants, extremists, attackers or some other appropriate noun. [emphasis added]
You really can’t make this stuff up.
■ But you can make up spoilers for Harry Potter. Though I haven’t opened Half-Blood Prince yet, I have it on good authority that the big plot twist, which dismayed my informant, takes place on page 606. I asked not to be told what it is, then fell to speculating. From today’s review in the Wall Street Journal, I know that the book is “kissy”, our young Hogwarts scholars having reached the age for that sort of thing. Extrapolating from these clues (plus a crucial disclosure by Professor Bainbridge about the probable impact Alan Rickman’s career), I infer that Professor Snape knocks up Hermione about halfway through the volume and their offspring, the half-blood prince (Hermione, remember, is of pure Muggle descent), comes into the world on the 606th page. (Was it the 666th before a meddling editor made cuts?) Very daring for an ostensibly young adult novel, I must say – or is my saying that a sign of how out of touch I am with modern youth?
■ Finally, the nomination of Judge John Roberts to the Supreme Court makes me triply happy. First, lawyers whom I respect think highly of his judicial philosophy and intellect. Second, the inevitable Democratic filibuster will look so silly that it will be funny. Third, all of the leaks today named other candidates, furnishing a useful lesson in the unreliability of reporters’ unnamed “inside sources”. I suspect that the President is pleased for the same reasons.
Comments