The WSJ
loves traitors, as long as they're Republicans or GOP apparatchiks.
You see, it's not really Robert Novak's fault or that of anyone in the administration for violating federal law by revealing the identity of an undercover operative because:
someone told Mr. Novak that Mr. Wilson had been recommended for the Niger project within the CIA by none other than his own wife, Ms. Plame. Mr. Novak duly reported that fact, which nobody noticed until Democrats and the media began to express outrage that a CIA agent had been "outed," and that this was supposedly a crime under the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
While that "fact" is roundly denied by the CIA, and there has been absolutely no evidence produced in support of it, it's OK, because, you see:
if anything her husband was the one who first compromised her when he went public with accusations about the CIA consulting job that she had recommended him for. Once Mr. Wilson made himself part of a political campaign against the Bush Administration and the Iraq War, his wife's role was bound to become public.
Conservatives like to task liberals to task for seeing things in excessive shades of gray. Well, this liberal can state the issue in simple, right-and-wrong terms:
Someone in the administration commited a crime by revealing the identity of a covert operative who had been in the field, and Robert Novak was party to that crime.
Period. Nothing complicated about it.
All the blame-the-victim claims by the WSJ to the contrary, the fact that Joseph Wilson (a Republican and veteran of numerous administations, Democratic and Republican) stepped up and told the White House the truth it didn't want to hear about what he did not find does nothing to change the fact that a crime was committed. Breaking the law you see, does not depend on whether one is trying to silence a political opponent. The law is simple and black-and-white in that regard.
The WSJ tries the timeless tactic of saying that the lack of evidence that something happened doesn't prove that it didn't happened:
though a year later both a British and a U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee probe found that the White House had been accurate and that Mr. Wilson was the one who hadn't told the truth
As with the purported Plame influence memo, peddled by nother other "Jeff Gannon" (even the memo's messenger doesn't really exist!), there's a stunning lack of real evidence for any Niger yellowcake purchase. And as physicist, I have to bring up the science and engineering issues with the "facts":
It
still takes an entire multi-million dollar American military complex months if not years to refine yellowcake into enough uranium to make even a rudimentary nuclear weapon, much less manage the engineering necessary to make it go kaboom. It's common sense to look carefully for real evidence that someone is making a bomb before sending hundreds of thousands of troops to chase down weapons that don't exist. Yet somehow the treason and crimes necessary to pull the wool over the eyes of America are justifiable because some journos are in a sticky situation now.
If any WSJ editorialists care to learn some physics, I'll be right here ready to explain why atoms (even uranium) don't kaboom by themselves. And if anyone has any doubt that the right is still grasping at straws to justify why we sent our soldiers and reservist to war, just read the column.