It wasn't me

So says David Corn in answer to assertions that it was really his July 2003 column that first told the world about Valerie Plame's covert status at CIA:

In the Journal on Friday, Victoria Toensing, the attorney, wrote in a column, "The first journalist to reveal Ms. Plame was 'covert' was David Corn, on July 16, 2003, two days after Mr. Novak's column. The latter never wrote, because he did not know and it was not so, that Ms. Plame was covert. However, Mr. Corn claimed Mr. Novak 'outed' her as an 'undercover CIA officer,' querying whether Bush officials blew 'the cover of a U.S. intelligence officer working covertly in...national security.' Was Mr. Corn subpoenaed? Did Mr. Fitzgerald subpoena Mr. Wilson to attest he had never revealed his wife's employment to anyone? If he had done so, he might have learned Mr. Corn's source."

On his Web site, Corn, the Washington editor of The Nation, writes that he has long been friendly with Toensing, and so, "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.

"The full explanation can be found at www.davidcorn.com. In a nutshell, Corn notes that Novak had already described Plame as a "CIA operative," which essentially means she was covert.

But anybody who understands CIA classifications--say like Toensing--knows that terms such as "classified" and "covert" have specific meanings: Joseph Wilson. In July 2003, when he demanded an investigation of a White House cabal for violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by "outing" his wife, Mr. Wilson knew Ms. Plame did not meet the factual requirements for covert status under the act. She was neither covert at the time of publication nor had a covert foreign assignment within five years. He acknowledged so in his book: "My move back to Washington [in June 1997] coincided with the return to D.C. of a woman named Valerie Plame." As the Senate negotiator for this 1982 act, I know a trip or two by Ms. Plame to a foreign country while assigned to Langley, where she worked in July 2003, is not considered a foreign assignment. I also know covert officers are not assigned to Langley.

Corn's defense works perfectly in the world of sound bytes where people don't bother with understanding what they've heard or read. Couple that with the fact that he apparently still hasn't realized that his disclosures about the leaks destroy the argument he's trying to defend and I'm left wondering why he keeps talking.

Cliff May wonders at the misunderstanding:

To be fair: It is possible that when Corn and Joe Wilson saw the word "operative" in Novak's column they took that to mean Novak was exposing Plame and jumped to the conclusion he was doing so as part of a Bush/Cheney/Rove conspiracy intended to punish Wilson by ruining Plame's career and endangering her life. Far-fetched, I realize, but these guys are susceptible to such conspiracy fantasies. Their hatred for Bush/Cheney/Rove is beyond reason. (Their hatred for me is beyond reason, too, I should note. Corn and I nearly came to blows in the Green Room at Fox this week.)

On that basis Corn (and Wilson) may have thought there was no harm in saying explicitly that Plame was a NOC and providing details on the undercover work she had done-- thereby tipping off all those who had ever dealt with her.

But they were wrong. There was no Bush/Cheney/Rove conspiracy.