Weblog

So this is what the campaign against former ambassador Joseph Wilson is about? In a long editorial yesterday, the hawks of The Wall Street Journal called for Patrick Fitzgerald, the US attorney investigating the Bush administration leak that identified Wilson’s wife as a CIA officer, to “fold up his tent.” The goal of the WSJ conservatives–and perhaps that of the other GOPers who have been bashing Wilson–is to get the Bush White House off the hook for the leak that outed Valerie Wilson (nee Plame). This leak, which appeared in a Robert Novak column a year ago, ruined the career of a government employee who worked to prevent the spread of unconventional weapons. It may have undermined national security by impairing her operations and threatening her contacts. And it was a possible violation of the federal law that prohibits government officials from disclosing the identities of covert government officers.

In other articles, I’ve addressed the campaign against Wilson (see here, here and here). But let’s zero in on the logic–or lack thereof–of the Journal’s editorialists.
They write:

“Mr. Wilson had been denying any involvement at all on Ms. Plame’s part, in order to suggest that her identity was disclosed by a still-unknown Administration official out of pure malice. If instead an Administration official cited nepotism truthfully in order to explain the oddity of Mr. Wilson’s selection for the Niger mission, then there was no underlying crime. Motive is crucial under the controlling statute.”

Much is wrong in this short paragraph….