Expert 1, Journalist 0

Victoria Toensing responds today to David Corn's response. The whole argument revolves around meanings...'covert', 'operative'...what does it all mean and who spilled the beans?

To recap, here is Corn responding to Toensing's WSJ piece of Friday: "I am disheartened to see her embracing a rather idiotic conservative talking point and ignoring basic facts to tag me as the true culprit in the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson. It is an argument that defies logic and the record. But it is an accusation that pro-Bush spinners have used to defend the true leakers and columnist Bob Novak, the conveyor of the leak.

"This is a canard that has been previously advanced by other conservatives--all to absolve Novak and the actual leakers (mainly Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, not Richard Armitage). And you see the suggestion: that Joe Wilson told me that his wife was an undercover CIA officer and that I then disclosed this information to the public. I've debunked this before. But for Toensing's benefit, I'll go through this again--though I doubt it will do much good."

Toensing focuses on the question in her response today: Beginning in July 2003 and through today in hyping his book, Corn uses the technique of interchanging various intelligence employee and agent status terms, presumably attempting to make them appear as synonyms to the uneducated in national security. This approach told me that for some reason he was attempting to obfuscate the issue. For example. Corn asks today, “[H]ow can you out a CIA operative who has already been identified as a CIA operative...?” Novak’s use of the term “operative” to describe Plame had nothing to do with revealing a “covert” status, only that she worked for the CIA, two distinct concepts. On September 5, 2006, Corn wrote, “Plame was an operations officer working on a top priority” and that in the “early 1990s, she became what is known as a nonofficial cover officer. NOCs are the most clandestine of the CIA’s frontline officers.” A NOC is not necessarily “covert,” and Corn’s using them as synonyms does not make them the same. Whatever she was in the early 1990s, she was not covert within five years of Novak’s 2003 column. “Covert” is a legal term requiring numerous factors, including a foreign assignment at time of publication or within five years. Another factor is that the CIA had to be taking affirmative measures to protect the covert person’s identity. Hardly the situation here where Plame went daily to Langley, and where the CIA press person admitted to Novak she was employed by the agency.

Corn could have attempted to counter me on the merits but foolishly made up a fact that I had not read his article. I read it and others by him quite thoroughly, thank you.

I find it amazing that Corn argues around this point at all; Toensing has forgotten more about how CIA works than he will ever know. To call her flat out wrong is absurd.

This reminds me of the Bush AWOL meme back in 2004. The left got caught arguing over meaning. Their problem was simply that AWOL didn't apply.

AWOL is a term with specific meaning that applies in specific circumstances. The only problem for the left was that the term had no meaning vis-a-vis a National Guardsman. Bush--as is every other member of the Guard--was required to accumulate a requisite number of points for every 12-month period of service. Something that Bush did during the year in question and something that the left refused to understand, much less acknowledge.

Likewise, they are ignoring the perhaps subtle but distinct differences between 'operative' as mentioned by Novak and words like 'covert' and 'classified'. They have specific meanings and Toensing gets the nod as to which applies to who when.