Richard Bennett

It turns out that the Plame leaker wasn’t Judith Miller, it was David Corn:

May notes that in Bob Novak’s column that first outed Valerie Wilson, Novak described her as “an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction.” He argues that this did not reveal Valerie Wilson as a truly undercover CIA officer–what’s known as a NOC (an officer under “nonofficial cover”). He then points out that when I wrote about the Novak column two days later, I referred to Valerie Wilson as “a U.S. intelligence officer working covertly in a field of vital important to national security.” Breathlessly, May writes, “Since Novak did not report that Plame was ‘working covertly’ how did Corn know that’s what she had been doing?” His answer: Joseph Wilson must have told me when I interviewed him after the Novak leak. Thus, Valerie Wilson was really outed by me because Joe Wilson leaked to me.

Larry O’Donnell would be an appropriate cell mate for him.

Cliff May summarizes:

The facts are these: (1) Bob Novak did not say that Valerie Plame was a secret agent; (2) David Corn did; (3) we don’t know who Bob’s sources were; (4) we know David’s source was Joe Wilson.

That’s clear enough.

This Pew Poll is good news:

• Support for suicide bombings and other acts of violence in defense of Islam has dropped since 2002 by 34 percentage points in Lebanon, 12 points in Indonesia and 8 points in Pakistan. The exception to the trend is Jordan, where support increased by 14 points, to 57%.

There are higher levels of support for suicide bombings that target Americans and their allies in Iraq, though they also have dropped. About half of Muslims in Lebanon, Jordan and Morocco said those attacks were justified.

• Confidence in bin Laden has fallen by double-digit margins in Indonesia, Morocco and Lebanon since 2003. In Lebanon, only 2% now express confidence in him.

It puts the lie to the claim that the liberation of Iraq has made more terrorists.

HT Orin Kerr.

In his own words, the murderer of Theo Van Gogh explains why he hates us:

“I take complete responsibility for my actions. I acted purely in the name of my religion,” he told its three-strong panel of judges.

“I can assure you that one day, should I be set free, I would do the same, exactly the same.” Earlier, Bouyeri had insisted that he did not recognise the authority of any non-Islamic court and forbade his lawyer to mount a defence.

Spectators in the maximum security courthouse in western Amsterdam gasped as Bouyeri then turned to the victim’s mother, Anneke, in the public gallery, and told her he felt nothing for her. Mrs van Gogh watched as he read out from what appeared to be a statement: “I don’t feel your pain. I have to admit that I don’t have any sympathy for you. I can’t feel for you because you’re a non-believer.”

He added: “Maybe you could find some consolation if the maximum sentence is given.”

I should think that would clear up the confusion about the terrorists and what we might do to appease them. How many are willing to convert to Islam? Those who criticize the war but aren’t willing to convert are terrorchickens, of course.

HT Daily Pundit

Joe Wilson accidentally tells the truth:

BLITZER: But the other argument that’s been made against you is that you’ve sought to capitalize on this extravaganza, having that photo shoot with your wife, who was a clandestine officer of the CIA, and that you’ve tried to enrich yourself writing this book and all of that.

What do you make of those accusations, which are serious accusations, as you know, that have been leveled against you?

WILSON: My wife was not a clandestine officer the day that Bob Novak blew her identity.

Damn, that has to hurt.

See Instapundit for more, indeed.

This was nice to read:

There have been estimates as high as 1 million civilians killed by Saddam, though most agree on the 300,000 to 400,000 range, making my comparison to 20,000 civilian dead in this war pathetically wrong.

But the old bat had little choice, given that she was the laughing stock of the Western world after claiming that the man she calls “shrub” had killed more Iraqis than Galloway’s (and probably Joe Wilson’s) former employer.

George Galloway is Saddam’s man in England. It turns out that the terror bombers frequented a youth center where he was idolized:

The centre receives funding from the British government and the European Union, as well as charitable funds, and as such is officially secular and non-political. But in practice, it was neither. On its walls were posters from the Respect Party, an extremist pro-Islamic party founded by MP George Galloway, that showed Israeli soldiers pointing rifles at Palestinian children. When some workers complained about these, they were harassed by other staffers.

The hostile, politicized mood at the centre stands in stark contrast to the descriptions of the young bombers made by their relatives and neighbours yesterday.

I wonder if we have youth centers in the US with posters of Joe Wilson on display. If we do, it’s certainly a red flag for terror.

HT Daily Pundit.

Volokhtician Jim Lindgren has some good questions for Lyin’ Joe:

Here it would be good to ask Wilson whether he thought that by lying about what he found in Niger and what he told the CIA and how he was selected, he was gambling with his wife’s safety. How could he be sure that people would know that Plame was a covert agent, or that there was a law against revealing her identity? Perhaps someone might have reasonably believed that they were correcting misimpressions that Wilson himself had created. Did Wilson realize that he had put the Administration in something analogous to a Catch-22?: Wilson can lie about how he was hired but the Administration can’t correct his lie without outing his wife. Did Wilson consciously decide to gamble with his wife’s safety by lying in a way that would be hard for the Administration to correct?

Will the lapdog imperialist media ask them? I doubt it.

This piece by Howard Fineman on The Plame Game provides some vital background on Lyin’ Joe Wilson and his wife’s cronies in the CIA:

Behind the scenes or openly, at war or at peace, the United States has been debating what to do in, with and about Iraq for more than 20 years. We always have been of two minds. One faction, led by the CIA and State Department, favored using secular forces in Iraq—Saddam Hussein and his Baathists—as a counterweight to even more radical elements, from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to the Shiite ayatollahs in Iran to the Palestinian terrorists in the Levant. The other faction, including Dick Cheney and the “neo-cons,” has long held a different view: that, with their huge oil reserves and lust for power (and dreams of recreating Baghdad’s ancient role in the Arab world), the Baathists had to be permanently weakened and isolated, if not destroyed. This group cheered when, more than 20 years ago in a secret airstrike, the Israelis destroyed a nuclear reactor Saddam had been trying to build, a reactor that could have given him the ultimate WMD.

The “we-can-use Saddam” faction held the upper hand right up to the moment he invaded Kuwait a decade ago. Until then, the administration of Bush One (with its close CIA ties) had been hoping to talk sense with Saddam. Indeed, the last American to speak to Saddam before the war was none other than Joe Wilson, who was the State Department charge’ d’affaires in Baghdad. Fluent in French, with years of experience in Africa, he remained behind in Iraq after the United States withdrew its ambassador, and won high marks for bravery and steadfastness, supervising the protection of Americans there at the start of the first Gulf War. But, as a diplomat, he didn’t want the Americans to “march all the way to Baghdad.” Cheney, always a careful bureaucrat, publicly supported the decision. Wilson was for repelling a tyrant who grabbed land, but not for regime change by force.

Perhaps Fitzgerald is investigating whether Wilson was an agent of Saddam, given their close ties.