(2006-08-30) Plame Leak Really Armitrage

Christopher Hitchens writes as most of us have long suspected, the man who told Novak about Valerie Plame (PlameGate) was Richard Armitage, Colin Powell's deputy at the State Department and, with his boss, an assiduous underminer of the president's War On Iraq policy. (His and Powell's - and George Tenet's - fingerprints are all over Bob Woodward's "insider" accounts of post-9/11 policy planning, which helps clear up another nonmystery: Woodward's revelation several months ago that he had known all along about the Wilson-Plame connection and considered it to be no big deal.) ... Armitage identified himself to Colin Powell as Robert Novak's source before the Fitzgerald inquiry had even been set on foot. The whole thing could - and should - have ended right there. But now read this and rub your eyes: William Howard Taft, the State Department's lawyer who had been told about Armitage (and who had passed on the name to the Justice Department): (writes David Corn) "also felt obligated to inform White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. But Powell and his aides feared the White House would then leak that Armitage had been Novak's source - possibly to embarrass State Department officials who had been unenthusiastic about Bush's Iraq policy. So Taft told Gonzales the bare minimum: that the State Department had passed some information about the case to Justice. He didn't mention Armitage. Taft asked if Gonzales wanted to know the details. The president's lawyer, playing the case by the book, said no, and Taft told him nothing more.