Valerie Plame

Writing on Editor & Publisher's blog, 'The E&P Pub,' Greg Mitchell directs us to the trailer for Rod Lurie's Nothing But the Truth.

As you may already know, the movie offers a fictionalized retelling of the Judith Miller-Valerie Plame scandal, and stars Kate Beckinsale as a journalist sent to jail for protecting her source in the outing of a C.I.A. operative played by Vera Farmiga. The film features Matt Dillon, Alan Alda, Angela Bassett, and David Schwimmer.

Also appearing in the trailer: MSNBC anchor turned flack Dan Abrams in the role of a journalist.

The Decemberists, that lovable and literary indie rock band from Portland, Ore., and their bookish frontman, Colin Meloy, are known for writing songs with narratives—similar to the ones you read in English class—about subjects like seafarers, pirates, soldiers, chimney sweeps, trapeze artists, etc. Add to that list 'outed CIA operatives.' Yes, the band has written an ode to Valerie Plame, the former CIA agent whose outing by conservative columnist Robert Novak in 2003 sparked the whole Scooter Libby/Karl Rove/Judith Miller affair.

As Stereogum reports, a press release describes the song, simply titled, "Valerie Plame," as being told from "the point-of-view of one of Plame's inside contacts upon discovering her true identity," also stating that its "an amorous tribute to the onetime CIA operative.  read more »

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At the time, it was a wildly unpopular decision. During the summer of 2005, everywhere you looked in American journalism, some prominent writer, publication or media organization was taking a hearty whack at Norman Pearlstine.  read more »

Shortly after noon, on Saturday, June 2, Valerie Plame stood at the front of the stage in a cavernous auditorium at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center and read her “To do” list from the past ten days: Pick up the dry cleaning … Buy her kids stuff from Target for summer camp … Sue the C.I.A.

“All done,” said Ms. Plame.

She was interrupted by applause.

It was lunchtime at the annual BookExpo America, and a large crowd of booksellers, publishers, and publicists had paid $50 each to eat chicken-ala-something and listen to a panel of authors talk about their new books.

Alan Alda had kicked things off. Paul Krugman was on deck. Russell Simmons was closing. Now the podium belonged to Ms. Plame.

She was wearing a blue blazer over a white top. She explained that she and her husband Joseph Wilson had recently relocated from Washington D.C. to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Ever since the move, she had been spending a lot of time unpacking books. “We had 12,000 pounds of household goods,” said Ms. Plame. “And six thousand of them were books.”

Ms. Plame recently finished writing a book of her own, entitled Fair Game, which Simon & Schuster plans to publish in October of 2007
(and for which they reportedly paid $2 million).

“It’s a memoir of my career with the CIA,” said Ms. Plame. “I was proud to serve my country. I was loyal. I loved my career. It was exciting. And I got to do something I thought was meaningful.”

All of which famously came to an end in the summer of 2003 when her name and professional occupation—which turned out to be classified information--was leaked to the media. Just exactly how that leak took place has since become fodder for investigations criminal and otherwise, as well as tens of thousands of news stories, endless talk show punditry, and the eventual felony conviction of vice-presidential advisor I. Lewis Libby.

Ms. Plame told the audience that she had enjoyed the process of writing Fair Game.

“For the first time I got to go through the events that have happened to me and my husband at 120 miles per hour, and actually think about them and absorb it,” said Ms. Plame. “I found that whole part of the process a catharsis in many ways.”

To date, however, the process of publishing the book has been fraught with difficulties.

To wit: This past Thursday, Ms. Plame filed a lawsuit in federal court against the C.I.A, which is blocking the publication of her memoir, on the grounds that some of the information contained therein is classified.

Like all C.I.A. employees, Ms. Plame had previously signed an agreement requiring her to submit any future writing about her career to the agency for review before publication. According to Ms. Plame, she and Simon & Schuster had been working unsuccessfully for months with the C.I.A. in the hopes of reaching an agreement. When that failed, according to Ms. Plame, she had decided to sue the C.I.A. for violating her right to free speech.

“I am not seeking carte blanche to reveal all the details of my government service,” Ms. Plame told the audience at the BEA. “Not at all. I understand my obligation and responsibilities about preserving and protecting classified information. Absolutely. But I am entitled to write about my story.”

She alleged to the audience that the C.I.A.’s actions were politically motivated. “I can tell you, this has nothing to do with national security and everything to do with political interference,” she said.

“This is why this suit matters so much to me and everyone in this room,” added Ms. Plame. “Because just as you have to be vigilant to protect our national security--something I believe in passionately--we have to be vigilant to protect our freedom of speech and first amendment rights.”

There was more applause. Followed by cheesecake for dessert.

Before returning to her seat, Ms. Plame acknowledged that the bulk of her writings throughout her career had been “very very dry.” Composing Fair Game, she said, had been different.

“I enjoyed writing it,” said Ms. Plame. “I hope you enjoy reading it.”

“On the First Amendment,” Judith Miller said, “I am a hard-liner.”  read more »

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To observe the Washington press corps is to wonder why so many people who don’t remember what happ  read more »

Tom DeLay was on Chris Matthews' Hardball last night and boy is he weird looking. Too tan, too slick. I wonder if he's had work done. But he said of Valerie Plame: "She's not a CIA agent, she's not out in the field. She sits behind a desk in Langley." The purpose of the law was to shield people in the field who were in harm's way.

DeLay may be a 3-toed lizard, but he's right about this. There is something so empty about (my side) the left's piety on this issue, something so carney about Joe Wilson's tears, as I've said before. Leaking of secrets happens all the time in Washington, it should happen. I really could care less that Plame was outed. I wonder how much she cares about it, really.

If Bush's side had any intellectual integrity, they would have adopted the DeLay position from the start. But they didn't. Because here Joe Wilson is right: they are viciously sanctimonious. This case became politicized—because of the right, its need to protect its image in the big carnival, "the war on terror," and its willingness to do anything to protect the lies that led up to war. The crime was meaningless; it's the coverup.

On Sunday I left my mom a message, thereby getting essential Mother's Day credit, and when we talked yesterday she said excitedly that she had heard rumors that Karl Rove was about to be indicted in the Valerie Plame leak case. My mother is a stone Democrat, and I'm not, still she and I agree that this would be fine news. If only these bastards—my mother's favorite word in politics—pay something for the lies they told in pushing the country to a disastrous war.

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.  read more »

This is a story about how the internet works. Late at night a few days ago I did a a somewhat nasty item about Valerie Plame Wilson's reported $2.5 million advance for a book telling what she'd done in the CIA. Within a few hours, I got a very thoughtful response from Steve—

paying off informants is not always an easy task. Finding people who are willing to talk to you and give you good information is a job in itself. Besides since her job is classified, we really don't know precisely what she did. So let's give her the benefit of the doubt.

followed by a much tougher comment from Anonymous:

Mr. Weiss, you have no idea what you are talking about. You are clueless

And that was it. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Anonymous was Joe Wilson, Plame's husband, who I mentioned in the post, and that he was alerted to my item by a search service that alerts people who monitor their appearances on the 'net. It's just a guess. But that was the feeling I got from the formal and angry, masculine note.

Two lessons. One, the best part of the internet is highly-specialized conversations, gatherings of experts, or to use Howard Rheingold's expression, Smart mobs. Focused education. I learned more about how the CIA works.

Two, I wish I hadn't been so nasty. We thought the internet was the wild west, full of flaming and irrationality, because it's a "virtual reality" where people go in masks. Well, we had it wrong. It's actually very sophisticated socially, and people who flame get sorted out rather quickly. It's not a virtual reality, it's reality. Put another way, it's only as artificial socially as a dinner party, and maybe less artificial than a dinner party, because people are being more honest. And there's a ton more exchange of views than there is in a newspaper. If you're going to be a jerk, you'll suffer for it on the internet.

Which is to say, I promptly ordered Joe Wilson's book The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity: A Diplomat's Memoir. Looking forward to reading it, Joe.

Time correspondent Viveca Novak, on leave since December after her embroilment in the Valerie Plame Wilson leak case, left the magazine last week. Novak was one of three staffers in Time's Washington bureau to take a buyout in Time Inc.'s most recent round of staff reductions.

"She voluntarily resigned," managing editor Jim Kelly said.

Novak was brought in to talk to special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald in November, after the prosecutor learned that she had discussed the Plame leak with Karl Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin. In those discussions, Novak had told Luskin that Rove was a source for Time's Matt Cooper--a connection that the lawyer had previously not known.

Novak did not alert Time editors to her involvement in the investigation for 10 days, until Fitzgerald called her back to testify under oath. "Nobody was happy about it, least of all me," Novak wrote for Time in December. That was her last Time byline.

Novak could not be reached for comment.

--Gabriel Sherman

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It didn't take 85 days, but Judith Miller was slow enough to cooperate with the New York Times team reporting on her case that some readers ended up missing the paper's long-awaited Miller coverage on Oct. 16.

The paper's two-story Sunday package--a 5,800-word account of Miller's role in the Valerie Plame affair and Miller's own first-person tale of her conversations with vice-presidential chief of staff I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby--missed the deadline to be included in the bulldog edition, 270,000 copies distributed nationally.

Deputy managing editor Jon Landman, who oversaw the reporting team, said the slipped deadline was a result of Miller's delaying. Throughout the previous week, Landman said, Miller gave conflicting signals about whether she would write a story herself or not.

"We didn't have her first-person account," Landman said. "We didn't have her perspective on things. We got it a little before noon [Oct. 14]. It was very frustrating.

"There was lots of off-and-on and on-and-off," Landman added. "And that was frustrating too."

The reporters on the story--Don Van Natta Jr., Adam Liptak, Clifford Levy and Janny Scott--had been working to complete a piece with or without Miller's participation, Landman said. But when Miller turned in her first-person piece late on the morning of Oct. 14, the reporters had to race to re-report details to reflect her assertions, with less than a day to spare before deadline.

Executive editor Bill Keller, who was traveling in China, reviewed a partial draft. Copy editors received the piece by 9 a.m. on Saturday, but it was too late to turn the package around for the noon bulldog close.

--Gabriel Sherman   read more »

Correction: The number of copies in the national bulldog edition was about 270,000, not 100,000 as originally reported in this item.

According to sources involved in the Judith Miller case, lawyers for Miller have turned over an additional, previously unreported batch of notes on the New York Times reporter's conversations with I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby to prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald. The notes, a source said, could significantly change the time frame of Miller's involvement with Libby.

After spending 85 days in jail for civil contempt, Miller testified before Fitzgerald's grand jury on September 30 and turned over one set of edited notes. Those notes covered a pair of conversations she had with Libby, the vice president's chief of staff, in July of 2003--shortly after former ambassador Joseph Wilson published a Times op-ed challenging the Bush adminstration's account of the evidence for Iraq's nuclear ambitions.

The appearance of that op-ed is generally seen as the event that triggered the leaking of the information that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, was a CIA employee, which led in turn to Fitzgerald's investigation. But a lawyer close to the investigation said that the new set of notes details earlier contact Miller had with Libby--possibly in May 2003, two months before Wilson's op-ed appeared.

The existence of the additional notes may be behind the Times' report today that Fitzgerald may call Miller back for additional testimony October 11.

Robert Bennett, a lawyer for Miller, declined to comment. Joseph Tate, the lawyer representing Libby, did not return calls seeking comment. Times lawyer George Freeman would not comment.

The presence of the undisclosed set of notes comes as the Times is seeking to quell internal and external criticism over a lack of transparency in the Miller case. In today's Times, executive editor Bill Keller said Miller's potential return trip to meet with Fitzgerald could further delay the Times' plans to publish an account of the Miller saga. Deputy managing editor Jonathan Landman, who has been tapped to edit the report, declined to discuss the state of the paper's Miller reporting.  read more »

"I'm not going to talk about it," he said.

--Gabriel Sherman

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Yesterday, while Scott McClellan was being jumped by a mob of wilding reporters, it must've felt as if the Bush administration didn't have a friend in the world. Did anyone who worked in the media have anything nice to say about Karl Rove's alleged leaking of Valerie Plame's name? Anyone? Little help?

Thankfully, John "Norman's Son" Podhoretz, the self-appointed ambassador from Bush Country, has come to Rove's defense in today's New York Post. And much like O.J. Simpson, he's going in search of the real perpetrators: As it turns out, The Architect isn't guilty of anything. He's actually a hero!

According to Podhoretz's SCANDAL IMPLOSION, if anyone's guilty of anything here, it's Valerie Plame's husband Joseph Wilson for padding his credentials and lying "repeatedly." In fact, the op-ed shows us, Rove didn't commit a crime—he exposed one:

This Rove-Cooper conversation discredits Wilson, not Plame. In fact, nothing we know so far was done either with the purpose of exposing or even the knowledge that these remarks would be exposing an undercover CIA operative.

But Plame's undercover status at the time was and is a little questionable in any case. How undercover could she have been when her name was published at the time as part of Joseph Wilson's own biography online (see cpsag.com/our_team/wilson.html)?  read more »

So if the offense wasn't against Plame, what of the offense against Wilson? There was no offense. As many of Joe Wilson's own hottest defenders would no doubt argue in relation to President Bush, exposing a liar is not only not a crime, it's a public service.

Can a Presidential Medal of Honor for Rove be far behind? If so, perhaps Podhoretz would volunteer to polish it.

—Matt Haber

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