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Friday, March 03, 2006

OpinionJournal - Wonder Land

Dan Henninger's column is must reading on Fridays (along with Victor David Hansen's NRO one.)

To grab a quote (and bold face where none had been:

It is not my intent to plumb the possibility of mass psychosis in Washington, but nonetheless we must come to grips with the phenomenon of the world's most powerful capital spending so much of its intellectual energy chasing nightmares of its own imagining. Exhibit A here would be the fascinating case history of Scooter Libby and Valerie Plame.
If memory serves, those of us who expect to find value in tracking public events spent more than two years on an obsessive Beltway press search for who "outed" Valerie Plame. And this was a high crime insofar as Ms. Plame was a "covert agent" for the CIA. In someone's notion of political reality, this was a big deal. Its actual size was revealed in a federal court hearing last Friday, as described by National Review's quite grounded White House correspondent, Byron York:
"CIA leak prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald argued . . . that as far as the perjury charges against former Cheney chief of staff Lewis Libby are concerned, it does not matter whether or not Valerie Wilson was a covert CIA agent. . . . 'We're trying a perjury case', Fitzgerald told Judge Reggie Walton. Even if Plame had never worked for the CIA at all, Fitzgerald continued--even if she had been simply mistaken for a CIA agent--the charges against Libby would still stand. In addition, Fitzgerald said, he does not intend to offer 'any proof of actual damage' caused by the disclosure of Wilson's identity." No damage?



Why hasn't this case been thrown out? No damages? No exposing of a covert CIA agent?

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