That said, I find that I really don't care about the core legal issue here: the violation of Plame's identity as a CIA operative. I'm reading her husband Joseph Wilson's book, The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Put the White House on Trial and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity, and it's not very convincing.

I have to preface this by saying that I think Joe Wilson is to be hugely admired. He served his country honorably for many years as a Foreign Service officer, diplomat, and ambassador, under George Bush I and Bill Clinton. He's what you'd expect of an ambassador: handsome, pretty smart, extremely presentable, good judgment.

But Wilson's greatest service was as a talking head in the 18 months leading up to the Iraq war, in taking on what he calls the "neoconservative juggernaut." He knew the territory. He'd been acting ambassador in Iraq during Desert Storm, he knew how deluded the neocons were about democracy and militarism. He said so forcefully again and again. And he performed an important mission when he went to Niger in 2002 at the behest of the CIA to explore the claim that Niger was supplying uranium to Saddam Hussein. Untrue, he reported. But the Administration swept his report aside when President Bush made the opposite assertion in his 2003 State of the Union speech, which laid out the (fraudulent and absurd) grounds for war in Iraq. After the war began, and soon enough the predictable chaos in Iraq, the pre-war intelligence became politicized, and Wilson went public about his role. In a stunning Times Op-Ed piece in July 2003, "What I Didn't Find in Africa," he said that the Bush administration had "twisted" intelligence to justify war. Well, then Vice President Cheney needed to take him on. And someone in the White House—I don't know all the who's and what's and Libby's and Millers, it's too confusing—leaked to Bob Novak that Wilson's wife Valerie Plame was a CIA operative and that she had suggested sending him on the trip to Niger.

In his book, Wilson says that when Novak blew his wife's cover, it meant "Twenty years of loyal service down the drain." And as for the claim that his wife suggested he go to Niger, this is a smear. "The attacks of the past several months have left us dumbfounded... [they have been] a concerted effort to destroy our reputations..." The word "vitriol" is also in there. So is Karl Rove "declaring war on two U.S. citizens." The same thing the Republicans did to John Kerry with the Swift boats.

Sorry, call me daft, I don't see the smear. The Swiftboating of John Kerry was a true smear, a (sadly successful) effort to portray a guy with an honorable record in combat in Vietnam (when Bush and Cheney were dodging service) as a liar. But Wilson says that his wife was involved in the CIA process of sending him to Niger. She conveyed the initial request to him, even wrote up a couple lines about her husband for the CIA. What if she did suggest him? That doesn't undermine his facts.

Also, though I'll rejoice to see the leakers, liars and leaker-hypocrites in the White House indicted, I don't understand why I have to share Wilson's piety about his wife's undercover work. He intones that CIA people go to the grave anonymous, and anonymity is vital. As the otherwise-objectionable warmonger Christopher Hitchens has pointed out on Slate, the left used to be dubious about the CIA. I'm not about to convert now, especially when Wilson offers only mingy info about his wife's work, saying that she went from a cover in Brussels in the energy business in the 90s to some kind of big desk job at Langley when she got outed. Thereupon losing all her friends, he suggests. (I bet she'd have more friends than ever—heck, she was at the White House Correspondents Association dinner.) Or there's this sort of highfalutin vagueness:

There is a kind of personal tragedy in the leak case for Wilson: it unleashed his vanity, and transformed a guy who was doing wonderful public-citizen work for the right side at maybe the most important time in our lives, a guy who understood the international identity crisis that this war was about to plunge our once-great democracy into—transformed him into a big head. Joe Wilson takes Joe Wilson way too seriously. He believes any fawning comment he hears. He treats his appearance on the Jon Stewart show as some kind of affair of state, and chronicles every step he took in this process over 508 pages—while brushing right by a related and truly vicious tragedy, the suicide of British intelligence analyst David Kelly, after he was outed at the same time as Valerie Plame as the source of BBC's allegation of "sexed-up" intelligence. Poor Kelly was a Graham Greene character. Lacking Wilson's standing, or stout temperament, he was in the crosshairs in a different way, grilled by an angry Parliamentary committee. His story is much more wrenching. Or I think of the way Dan Ellsberg, an unquestionable hero, conducted himself after the Pentagon Papers caused him to be a victim of way, way worse than what Wilson has experienced. He has shown more class than Wilson, and more self-understanding: he knew that he had dared to take on the powers, and some of what befell him wasn't about him, it was just politics.

P.S. Since posting this, I got a couple comments that were real smart. One change I've made is to remove the nasty term fathead.

Two other comments force me to reflect that I'm talking out of my hat on Plame's outing—maybe I'm wrong. Wilson's book in unconvincing on that score; maybe Valerie Plame's book will make that case.

Much as I hope this case will take down the vicious Cheney and Rove, and Judith and Scooter, and all the other war cabal-ers, the core infraction has never seemed like a big deal. I wonder how many people knew that (Plame)(Wilson) was CIA. I wonder what she was actually doing, besides commuting to a desk job from her beautiful home in Washington, and reading the Financial Times. Under cover, of course. In what sense was her work compromised? Yes, they were scurrilously trying to undermine Joe Wilson, but how did this leak smear Wilson? He's been dining off it ever since. (Though yes, he was a noble force on the Niger lies.)

I've had brushes with CIA analysts over the years and the sad truth is they're a lot like journalists. They read stuff. They send one another emails. (If you're Ken Pollack on the Iran account, you don't even go to Iran). I know they train to handle guns, but how often do they actually do so? I once visited an embassy compound in the Third World where a friend in State explained to me that the CIA guys just paid off informants to get information about the bad guys. I wonder whether (Plame)(Wilson) even got that far. According to the Vanity Fair profile that launched her blonde meteor, she graduated from Penn State—in the glamour days CIA people did a little better than that—and apparently spent her time in various European capitals, such as dangerous Brussels, working on, among other things, her wifeability. She landed an Ambassador. Good for her. But $2.5 million? There better be a lot of sex.

For
nearly two years, the Bush White House has been repeating falsehoods—to the
press and the public and perhaps to itself—about the role played by Karl Rove
in revealing the identity of C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame Wilson.

On
Sept. 29, 2003, for example, White House press secretary Scott McClellan called
allegations of Mr. Rove's involvement “a ridiculous suggestion” and added, “It
is simply not true …. I've said that it's not true. And I have spoken with Karl
Rove.” There were many more such denials, all of them suddenly worthless in the
light of new documentary evidence. The red-faced flack is no longer taking
questions on this topic.

Now
the question that George W. Bush must face is whether he will fulfill his
pledge to dismiss anyone in his administration who participated in leaking the
name of Ms. Wilson—even though that means firing his chief political advisor
and deputy chief of staff, also known as the “boy genius” who propelled him
into the Oval Office. Should he offer up excuses to evade that promise, Mr.
Bush will void his earlier vows to restore honor and integrity to the
Presidency.

The
proof of Mr. Rove's participation in the “outing” of Ms. Wilson, in an attempt
to harm her and discredit her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV,
was reported in the most recent issue of Newsweek.
Reporter Michael Isikoff obtained the text of an e-mail from Matthew Cooper, Time magazine's White House
correspondent, whose testimony and documents were subpoenaed in the
investigation of the Wilson case by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.

The
Cooper e-mail, sent to his bureau chief on July 16, 2003, describes a “double
super secret” conversation with Mr. Rove about Mr. Wilson. The former
ambassador had stirred national controversy by writing a New York Times Op-Ed article describing a trip he took at the
request of the C.I.A. in early 2002 to Niger, where he investigated alleged
attempts by Iraq to purchase uranium from that impoverished West African
country. Titled “What I Didn't Find in Africa,” his article disputed the
President's reference to that alleged uranium trade in the 2003 State of the
Union address.

Mr. Rove told the Time correspondent that
the former ambassador's Niger trip had been authorized by neither the C.I.A.
director or the Vice President. According to the Cooper e-mail, which I'm
quoting as it was written, “it was, KR said, wilson's wife, who apparently
works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized
the trip.”

The
allegation that Ms. Wilson had “authorized” her husband's trip to Niger was
false: Government regulations and the C.I.A. hierarchy both preclude such
nepotism. It was true, however, that Ms. Wilson worked at the “agency” to
prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction—as she had done for
years, using what is known in the intelligence community as “non-official
cover.” Her friends and neighbors thought she worked as an energy analyst for a
firm called Brewster Jennings Associates.

Mr.
Rove's apologists—including such familiar Washington eminences as Bob Woodward
and David Gergen, as well as the usual right-wing suspects—suggest that he did
nothing wrong by revealing Ms. Wilson's identity. He didn't actually speak her
name (at least not to Mr. Cooper). He didn't violate the Intelligence Identities
Protection Act because she wasn't really an undercover agent (and because he
didn't say her name). He isn't a “target” of the Fitzgerald probe.

Like
most of the Washington wisdom purveyed on cable television, all this knowing
babble is either inaccurate or misleading. The Intelligence Identities
Act—signed into law in 1982, when the current President's father, a former
Director of Central Intelligence, was Vice President— doesn't hinge on whether
someone utters an operative's name. Its text refers to disclosure of “any
information that identifies an individual as a covert agent.” That covers the
phrase “Wilson's wife.”

As
for Ms. Wilson's status, there would be no grand jury, no two-year
investigation and no jailing of reporters who refused to testify if the C.I.A.
didn't deem her undercover. The Justice Department opened this case because the
C.I.A.—after conducting its own two-month probe of the Wilson leak—asked the
department's Criminal Division and the F.B.I. to “undertake a criminal
investigation of this matter.”

Mr.
Rove's attorney says the prosecutor has assured him that his client is not a
“target” of the leak investigation. The prosecutor—whose office and grand jury
are run professionally and don't leak—has not commented. But it's entirely possible
that Mr. Rove, who has appeared before the grand jury three times, is a
“subject” of the investigation—meaning someone whose conduct is being examined
for possible criminal violations.

Whether
Mr. Rove violated the law or not, however, the President has promised to punish
those responsible for the Wilson leak. He now has the facts, and sooner or
later he will have to act.

Last summer, anonymous White House officials ruined the career of Mr. Wilson's wife by exposing her identity as a C.I.A. agent. Their aim was to draw attention away from the former diplomat's revelations about false Bush administration claims trumpeting the supposed nuclear "threat" from Iraq. Perhaps they also hoped to intimidate other potential critics among the intelligence and foreign services, where many knowledgeable public servants are appalled by this President's policies.

The point of exposing Mr. Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, was to suggest that she had engineered her husband's unpaid mission to Niger, the African nation where Iraqi officials were suspected of seeking to obtain enriched uranium for Saddam Hussein's nuclear ambitions. Mr. Wilson denied that his wife was responsible for his return to Africa, the continent where he began his career in the State Department.

The first assault on the Wilsons accomplished little, except to embarrass the Bush administration. In the days after Mr. Wilson wrote an article for The New York Times discussing his secret trip to Niger, the White House was forced to admit that the President should not have brought up the "Niger uranium" story when he summoned the nation to war in his State of the Union address.

But in their zeal to defend the President, the White House leakers may well have violated a federal law that punishes the intentional disclosure of the names of undercover intelligence agents. Since last winter, their actions have been under investigation by a special prosecutor.

Now they have resumed the attack, with the stakes even higher. Republican Senators and spinners are seeking to discredit Mr. Wilson-so that nobody will spend too much time talking about the total implosion of the President's rationale for going to war.

That is why Republican and conservative commentators are spewing so much chaff about Mr. Wilson's alleged lies. From Republican National Committee chairman (and ex-Enron lobbyist) Ed Gillespie to William Safire, Rush Limbaugh and, of course, Robert Novak-the original conduit for the White House's unveiling of Valerie Plame Wilson-their party line is identical. If doubt can be cast on Mr. Wilson's veracity, that somehow absolves the President's errors and misleading exaggerations.

In essence, the accusations against Mr. Wilson boil down to whether Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee believe that his wife actually did play a role in his Niger assignment, and whether he misstated his recollection about forged documents that mysteriously showed up to bolster the Niger uranium tale. Despite the partisan passion of his accusers, the evidence against Mr. Wilson remains thin. From the beginning of this controversy, the C.I.A. has stated categorically that Mrs. Wilson was not responsible for dispatching her husband to Niger, which isn't exactly one of the planet's garden spots. The agency has never revised that statement.

From the Republican perspective, the media's narrow focus on Mr. Wilson does more than inflict vengeance on a political adversary, although that's certainly desirable. It also serves to discredit the investigation of the White House leakers, who may well be responsible for this latest attack on the Wilsons. A Wall Street Journal editorial revealed the game on July 20 when it urged the special prosecutor to "fold up his tent."

Mr. Wilson has ably defended himself and his wife in recent days, displaying the same grit that led the President's father to praise him as a hero more than a decade ago, when he stood up to Saddam Hussein as the U.S. deputy chief of mission in Baghdad. Yet the controversy surrounding him is, in itself, a kind of victory for the White House.

Otherwise, someone might ask about more significant news. Every serious bipartisan investigation so far has found that Iraq was nowhere near possession of the nuclear arsenal that the White House used to terrify Americans. The only existing supply of enriched uranium available to Saddam was under seal at a facility sealed by U.N. inspectors-a facility that was left open to looters by the incompetent leadership at the Pentagon after Saddam's regime fell.

As the Senate Intelligence Committee report explains, Iraq had no "stockpile" of chemical and biological weapons to turn over to terrorists. The intelligence on that question was contradictory at best. As the Senate report and the 9/11 commission have determined, Saddam Hussein's regime had no operational relationship with Al Qaeda.

Those were the reasons that the President offered to support his claim that Iraq posed a grave threat to the United States, and a majority of Americans believed him. Had he and his cabinet honestly and carefully explained the available intelligence, they would not have been able to drive the Congress and the nation into war. Attacking Joe Wilson cannot change that dismal truth.

But at the highest level, in the inner councils, such feudal allegiances often require awful sacrifice and compromise. For those who now work for George W. Bush, loyalty means surrendering professional integrity and accepting public humiliation. Loyalty means uttering words and phrases that nobody can believe. Loyalty means misleading the people and the press about the gravest matters of state.

Loyalty means lying.

Consider the poignant case of Condoleezza Rice, who entered this administration as a respected academic expert on Russian affairs and the former provost of Stanford University. Unlike some of the figures around the President, Dr. Rice had no serious blots on her reputation when she was appointed national security advisor. From a family that suffered the indignities and deprivations of segregated Alabama, she has long been admired as an African-American woman who rose by dint of personal effort and scholarly ability as well as affirmative action. The list of honors, degrees, directorships and other achievements on her official résumé is extraordinary.

After serving in the first Bush White House on the National Security Council, and then a stint in the 2000 campaign as a discreet adviser on foreign affairs, she had come to be regarded by the political clan as among its most reliable members. Sometimes she almost appeared to have been adopted by the President and his family.

But during the past two years of international crisis, Dr. Rice has been dispatched to prevaricate repeatedly in defense of her boss. She was caught spreading a false story about Sept. 11, claiming that Air Force One flew the President to Oklahoma after the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon because "intelligence" indicated that terrorists were aiming for the White House and the Presidential jet. Later she testified that the U.S. government had never anticipated an assault by airliner, when in fact there had been many warnings of exactly such tactics-most notably during the summer of 2001, when Western intelligence services set up anti-aircraft batteries around the Genoa summit to protect the President.

Memories are short in this country, so Dr. Rice escaped those embarrassing incidents with her reputation more or less intact. Then last year, as the determination of the White House to wage war on Iraq became plain, she began to promote dubious stories about Saddam Hussein's regime. As national security advisor, she had access to all of the sensitive intelligence about Iraq, so the press and Congress took her pronouncements seriously.

More than anyone other than the President himself, Dr. Rice stoked fears about a "mushroom cloud" rising over an American city unless the U.S. waged war on Iraq. To promote such dread, she warned that a shipment of aluminum tubes purchased by the Iraqis could only be intended for a uranium-enrichment device. Long after the International Atomic Energy Authority debunked that claim, the national security advisor continued to insist that it must be true.

Still, she had gotten away with those whoppers as well, thanks to the complaisant national press corps. Lately, however, she has engaged in deceptions that are too obvious and too simple to ignore. Not only is she responsible for the false allegation about Niger uranium in the State of the Union address, but she dishonorably forced C.I.A. director George Tenet to say that was his fault rather than hers.

Dr. Rice knew that the C.I.A. had questioned the veracity of the Niger uranium tale. She knew because Mr. Tenet had warned her deputy, Stephen Hadley, of its dubious quality three months earlier. Yet she permitted that sentence to be uttered by the President. Now she tells us that those 16 words were "accurate" because the information was attributed to British intelligence. She wants us to believe that until last month she had never heard about the mission to Niger undertaken by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, who reported back to the C.I.A. and the State Department that the Niger uranium story was a fake.

But neither she nor the President, nor anyone else in authority, ever cared whether that story was true. It merely served a purpose, like the "aluminum tubes" allegation, and the assertion that Saddam was assisting Al Qaeda, and the other prewar "intelligence" myths designed to excite belligerence and undermine the U.N. inspection process.

Dr. Rice played her role in that campaign with consummate loyalty indeed. She continues to do so, and in the process she has damaged herself permanently for an unscrupulous family of politicians. I hope they're grateful.