Listening to that obnoxious ass, Henry Waxman, saying in opening statements of his show hearing, that Valerie Plame’s identity was “one of our nation’s most closely guarded secrets.” I’ll bet he managed to say it with a straight face, too.
[Update a few minutes later]
Mark Hyman explains:
Plame had been living in the U.S. for several years when her identity was revealed in Novak’s 2003 column. The Intelligence Identities Protection Act was crafted not to protect Plame and other classified employees from the FedEx driver, the Safeway cashier, or from threats commonly found in the school carpool line. The Act was to protect the identities of classified employees (typically known as “case officers”) and their contacts while overseas.
The first person to bust Plame’s identity was likely Plame herself. In using a commercially available data base it took me less then three minutes to learn that Plame had listed “American Embassy, New York, NY 09255” in 1991 as her official address. This, it turns out, was the APO address for the U.S. Embassy in Athens, Greece. Cover busted.
In addition, Brewster-Jennings & Associates was the name of the fictitious company she used as her cover story that she was a business consultant living and working in Europe. Another three-minute database research revealed that Brewster-Jennings reported annual sales revenues of $60,000 and a work force of only a single employee (presumably Plame). Even the most gullible foreign intelligence service would not swallow the whopper that the so-called Brewster-Jennings company could afford to send its only employee to work in Europe on total revenues of $60,000 a year.
[Update a few minutes later]
Bob Novak is now pointing out the absurdity of a “covert operator of the CIA” who drove to and from Langley every day.
[Update in the late afternoon.]
Tom Maguire, who despite his ongoing desecration of the Instapundit web site, remains the go-to guy on these issues, doesn’t think that the pro-Wilson folks had such a great day. He also thinks that Valerie has some ‘splainin’ to do.
[Update at 4 PM EST]
Cliff May writes that if Valerie Plame did recommend her husband for a Niger trip, it wouldn’t have been the first time she did such a thing.
[OK, one more]
Scott Ott has broken the code.