Coulter's Wilson-Plame Assessment

She does a pretty good job of laying out the facts, and interpreting. There seems to be some controversy about the difference between "classified" and "covert". I read Coulter as saying that "classified" is a lower status, that Plame's employment was "classifed" but not "covert", and that this excluded revelation of her employment from the law in question.

As with the columns by Novak and Hitchens, she asserts that Wilson's assessment about Niger to be non-definative. Bush in his speech only refered to what "British intelligence" had concluded, and the Brits stood by that assessment even after this controversy erupted (or, more precisely, after Wilson created a controversy). I surmise that Bush retracted the statement because after the speech we learned that the Niger issue involved a document later deemed forgery, probably by somebody by the person who sold it to western intelligence officials. The British re-investigation included this fact, but stuck to its original conclusion, which apparently did not turn on that document. Bush's retraction thus may have constituted not an admission of error, but rather a rhetorical consession to the difficulty in standing on this point now associated with a forged document and a shrieking Joe Wilson.

This incident really has amazed me. It's consisted of leftists like Nadir fiercely defending secrecy at the CIA using a law that all the leftists opposed when it passed. It also revealed a long-standing rivalry between the White House and CIA, showing that the White House lacks complete control over the CIA, and that CIA personnel can cause problems for a President at odds with them.