Plame-Wilson: Novak slams Corn & Isikoff & Hubris

In Robert Novak's September 27, 2006 column,  he takes on David Corn with a bit of a slam at Michael Isikoff as well. Note that he puts to rest the 1x2x6 nonsense the left has tried to sell from the beginning.

CIA Leak: I must remark on the publication of Hubris, the newly released book by Newsweek's Michael Isikoff and Nation magazine editor David Corn, since it glosses over or ignores many relevant questions regarding the Valerie Plame affair, and distorts the facts surrounding my own involvement. The book seems commonplace for a polemicist like Corn but not a careful investigative reporter like Isikoff.

1. Corn, the Washington editor of the left-wing Nation magazine, helped create the Plame "scandal" in the wake of my column that revealed that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson had been sent to investigate Iraqi uranium shopping in Niger at the behest of his wife, Plame, a CIA employee. Now, even though his book has had the effect of killing the story, Corn insists that a parallel conspiracy must have existed, entirely separate from my column, to punish Wilson by revealing his wife's employment.
        
    
2. Isikoff, a skilled investigative reporter, definitively revealed in the book that then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was my source for the Niger column. But because Armitage, an internal critic of the Bush Administration's Iraq policy, did not fit the left's conspiracy theory, Corn has been frantic to depict an alternative conspiracy theory in which Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, and Vice President Dick Cheney attempted independently to do what Armitage purportedly accomplished accidentally. This desperate attempt to resuscitate their story line falls flat, undermining what seems to be the real reason for writing Hubris.
        
    
3. The book not only fails to use what I have written in my columns as my account of the Valerie Plame case but also distorts my position. I faced a dilemma in December 2003 because, in seeking the identity of my source, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald was going to confront me with waivers from every official who conceivably could have told me about Valerie Wilson. "I did not believe blanket wavers in any way relieved me of my journalistic responsibility to protect [my sources]," I wrote last July 11. But the dilemma was resolved when Fitzgerald showed up to interview me with waivers from only my three sources. The prosecutor had learned their names on his own, so there was no use in not testifying about them. Corn and Isikoff sloppily misrepresent me by saying that my dilemma came after Fitzgerald appeared with the three waivers ("crunch time for Novak") and that I gave up their names under pressure from the special prosecutor.
        
    
4. Likewise, Corn never comes to grips with the fact that Armitage could not be prosecuted under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act because Plame was not a covert operative under terms of the law. This 463-page book that is endlessly discursive does not acknowledge this distinction, nor does it seriously consider that she was no longer assigned to foreign missions because her cover already had been broken. It never even mentions the report that Mrs. Wilson had been outed long ago by the traitor Aldrich Ames.
        
    
5. The book's effort to cleanse Wilson stoops to deception, including the omission of Wilson's political activism such as his giving and his campaign activities as an advisor to Al Gore in 2000. This surely was known to the authors, who chose to ignore it. And this kind of omission is typical. Also missing is the July 2004 report by the Senate Intelligence Committee's Republicans, unchallenged by the Democratic minority, which undermined Wilson's conclusions from his African mission and undercut his insistence that his wife did not suggest him to the CIA for that mission. After that report, Wilson disappeared from the Kerry-for-President campaign -- something that also goes unmentioned in this book.
        
    
6. At least the book rejects the canard reported by the Washington Post that the White House had been peddling the Valerie Plame story all over town (to at least six journalists) before it got to me. It also reveals the anonymous source of that bogus Post story – falsely described as a "senior administration official" -- as Adam Levine, an obscure mid-level communications aide who soon left the White House.