Corn as Leaker

This post by Tom Maguire speaks to Plame-revealer extroidinaire David Corn's latest book out-take. Tom and a very astute set of commentors float some interesting ideas that challenge what you might think you might know about who outed who:

Ms. Plame was a senior officer in the specific CIA group that had spent the spring and summer of 2003 in a peeing contest with Dick Cheney. Well, I suppose his motive to out her might be greater than we expected. But guess what - Fitzgerald has investigated that for two years and has no case against Cheney.

And of course, her motive to be part of a politically motivated "Gotcha" game played by the CIA at the expense of the Vice-President is also greater than we expected.

Strata-sphere posits that Corn is a) guilty of leaking far more about Plame than anybody else has to date and b) presents a picture of a very incompetent JTFI led by none other than Ms. Plame:

Clearly there were warning signs about Iraq and WMDs. Corn can claim the defectors coming out were unbelievable, but that does not equate to meaning ALL intelligence sources were invalid!

This is were Corn is playing outside his league and is being fed misinformation because he is the useful idiot he is. This is another classic diversionary story. Say the defectors were useless, imply all intel was useless. But it is a truly weak one. Corn says the defectors were not believable, and then assumes, or never bothers to admit, Iraqi defectors are not the only source of intel. AQ Khan, the Pakistani nuke expert, and a top Hussein emissary made their way to Niger in 1999, and you don’t need Iraqi defectors to give you that information. So why did Plame send Joe to Niger twice if there were minimal concerns????

As to the first, I doubt anyone will take that seriously to the point of investigation. To the latter, the inadvertent inclusion of details about Valerie's work and Joe's junkets as far back as 1999 stand to fuel even greater speculation about how this clusterf&^! even happened.