In a generally solid and favorable review of Valerie Plame's book, the Washington Post's Alan Cooperman suddenly goes crazily astray two-thirds of the way through and helps perpetuate the smear job.
Cooperman writes that the book makes it irrefutably clear that Plame was a covert operative, not a desk-job analyst, having gone through elite training as a NOC, or non-official cover officer, and spending over 6 years traveling under a variety of aliases and keeping her real job secret from everyone she knew, including family and friends. He does a solid gloss of the outlines of the case. But then he goes for the bait in the trap:
The question remains: Was she behind her husband's trip to Niger? "Fair Game" gives a nuanced answer that is largely, but not entirely, in her favor.
Why on earth does this "question remain"? What possible difference does it make whether Valerie Plame was involved in recommending Joseph Wilson for the fact-finding trip to Niger? On the merits, Ambassador Wilson was eminently qualified to carry out such a trip. His mission produced accurate intelligence: that Saddam Hussein had not tried to procure yellowcake from Niger on the occasion in question. It is perfectly routine for someone to be recommended for a government job by their spouse who works in a related government job. This is utterly unremarkable in State Department assignments overseas, where officers who receive the primary assignment are often involved in finding something productive for their spouses to do. If one were to type out a list of Republicans in government who had recommended their spouses or children for related government jobs, one would need a roll of paper the size of Michael Powell's desk at the FCC. Or perhaps of former assistant under-secretary Liz Cheney's at the State Department.
In any case, it has absolutely no bearing on whether Joseph Wilson's accusations were true; on whether the Administration ginned up a smear job against him and his family, both in retaliation and to undermine the credibility of the accusations; and ultimately on whether or not the Administration deliberately outed covert operative Valerie Plame. The "question" of whether Wilson's trip to Niger resulted in part from his wife's position as a covert operative on WMD at CIA was never anything but an attempt to smear Wilson in public by making him look like he was hanging on to wife's skirts. To discuss the "question" is simply to perpetuate the smear. The subtle schoolyard-bully quality of the insult seems to mark it as the handiwork of Karl Rove; in any case, it was someone's handiwork, or Scooter Libby would not have needed to lie to a grand jury. And it's a sinister enough piece of dezinformatsiya that reasonably intelligent reporters and reviewers continue to fall into the trap of considering it a "question" that needs to be answered.