Robert Parry: Novak's Limited Plame-gate Hang-Out

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/8614

Novak's Limited Plame-gate Hang-Out
by Robert Parry | Jul 10 2007 - 8:40am


Right-wing columnist Robert Novak has played a complex game in advancing the Bush administration’s “Plame-gate” cover-up. Novak was the one who first published the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame; he then answered a few questions before going silent; now, he is making a series of misleading arguments via his columns.

Novak’s deceptions and the complicity of major news organization that publish his column without demanding clarifications may be unprecedented in the history of U.S. journalism. Theoretically at least, news organizations are expected to ferret out government wrongdoing, not act as accomplices in the crime and then abettors of the cover-up.

Yet pieced together, Novak’s hedged disclosures and other evidence, including facts from the trial of former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, shed light on the dark underbelly of this extraordinary scandal, albeit sometimes unintentionally.

Indeed, Novak’s various accounts – when laid one over the other – suggest that the administration conspiracy to “out” Plame was more widespread than is generally accepted in the media circles of Washington.

In particular, the conventional wisdom – that Novak’s primary source, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, was operating on his own when he first told Novak about Plame’s CIA identity – is shattered, if Novak’s earliest account is to be believed rather than his later revised version.

In July 2003, just days after publishing the column blowing Plame’s cover, Novak told Newsday reporters that he was doing the Bush administration’s bidding when he divulged Plame’s CIA identity. “I didn’t dig it out, it was given to me,” Novak said. “They thought it was significant, they gave me the name.”

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