Final Word on the Plame "Scandal"

Mark Steyn at the ChiSun says all that needs to be said on the matter:

In the real world there's only one scandal in this whole wretched business -- that the CIA, as part of its institutional obstruction of the administration, set up a pathetic ''fact-finding mission'' that would be considered a joke by any serious intelligence agency and compounded it by sending, at the behest of his wife, a shrill politically motivated poseur who, for the sake of 15 minutes' celebrity on the cable gabfest circuit, misled the nation about what he found.

Read all of it.

{Bow to the Instapundit}

Monk

Update: Chefjef asks, "you don't really believe that, do you?"

To which I say, "yes, of course."

Rove's "outing" consisted of "revealing" that Plame was a CIA analyst; there is nothing that points to his having known that she was (at one time, though not at the time of the "outing") a covert operative. Looks now as if Rove heard even this tidbit from the press itself--which seems as likely as any alternative; the President's political strategist hardly has the means or the "need to know" to have any working knowledge of the CIA's covert operatives and his "outing" a spook to a potentially-hostile press would be a stupid move hardly worthy of the dark genius the left ascribes to Rove.

And both Plame and her insect of a husband were blatantly partisan lefties--enemies of the Bush Administration by their own open admission. Which points out one of the principle problems with the Agency today, one that the new DCI is trying to fix--the prevalence of Plame's type of openly partisan, tendentious "analysis" and open "CYA-ing" in place of reliable intelligence gathering and analysis.

I know somehting about this. I have worked with the Agency before as well as with many in the miltary who have much more extensive experience with it. While there are still many fine analysts with deep area knowledge, the Agency as a whole is a laughing stock in the intelligence community and has been for many years because of its problems and insight-ignoring, cover-your-a&& consensus-buidling
approach to analysis.

My own professional intuition, grown over two decades of experience, tells me, even if nothing else does, that Steyn is correct.

Monk