What's Fair Game?
Cast in its best light, the Bush Administration’s Karl Rove defense boils down to this: Rove never revealed the NAME of an undercover CIA operative because he didn’t know her name. He might not have even known she was an undercover CIA operative, and you can't prove it anyway. Actually, he were merely spreading false information about the operative in an effort to smear her husband.
Remember during the 2000 Presidential campaign when the Republican mantra was that Preesident Bush was going to “restore honesty and dignity to the White House?” How’s that going? When Vice-President Cheney accepted his party’s nomination for Vice-President in 2000, he boldly declared: “They will offer more lectures, and legalisms, and carefully worded denials. We offer another way—a better way—and a stiff dose of truth.” Is that what we are getting?Today, on its online site, Newsweek magazine breaks some news. Before the publication of the infamous Novak column outing Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA operative appeared in newspapers around the country, Time magazine’s Matt Cooper talked to Karl Rove. The topic: Ambassador Joe Wilson’s now-proven contention that stories about Iraq acquiring uranium from Africa (later touted by the President in his State of the Union address) were pure fiction. According to Cooper’s emails, the following was said:
“Cooper wrote that Rove offered him a 'big warning' not to 'get too far out on Wilson.' Rove told Cooper that Wilson's trip had not been authorized by "DCIA"—CIA Director George Tenet—or Vice President Dick Cheney. Rather, 'it was, KR said, wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd
issues who authorized the trip.' Wilson's wife is Plame, then an undercover agent working as an analyst in the CIA's Directorate of Operations counterproliferation division. (Cooper later included the essence of what Rove told him in an online story.) The e-mail characterizing the conversation continues: 'not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an suspect but so is the report. he implied strongly there's still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro Niger... '"
More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/john-conyers/whats-fair-game_3938.html