A Strange Case of Selective Outrage

Do you remember when Karl Rove deliberately endangered the life of Valerie Plame by exposing her identity as a top-secret undercover spy in order to punish her husband for his brave dissent against the war in Iraq? It was in all the papers and on all the news shows, and even gave rise to feverish fantasies on the left about George W. Bush’s top advisor being frog-marched off to prison where he would finally get his just deserts.

You might well have forgotten, and quite understandably so, because it all turned to be bunk. A multi-million dollar investigation led by a special prosecutor eventually discovered that it was not Karl Rove but rather Richard Armitage, a close ally of media darling Colin Powell, who had leaked Plame’s affiliation with the Central Intelligence Agency. The revelation wasn’t illegal, since Plame was actually a desk-bound analyst for the CIA, and it didn’t pose such a danger to her life that it prevented her from posing for glamour photos to accompany a fawning article in Vanity Fair. Nor was the leak made in retaliation for her husband’s brave but inconsequential dissent, which was a public pose at odds with the testimony he had secretly given to the government.

We were reminded of the long-ago incident by a comment posted at the essential Instapundit site, which contrasted the outraged media reaction to that phony controversy with the conspicuously scant coverage of case of the al-Qaeda infiltrator who helped thwart an underwear bombing attempt. This involves an actual double-agent, who was actually exposed, and is now in actual danger of his life, seemingly because someone in the administration was seeking political gain.

The initial news reports emphasized that a plan to explode airplanes full of Americans had been averted, and quoted administration officials who clearly hoped it would impress voters with the James Bond-like efficiency of the Obama counter-terrorism effort, but subsequent and less widely-played have stories proved more embarrassing to the administration. First it was revealed that the would-be bomber was in fact a British national of Saudi Arabian heritage who had been planted in al-Qaeda by British intelligence agencies, and the next wave of stories in the British press revealed that the previous revelations had endangered the agent’s life, possibly allowed the escape of al-Qaeda’s most accomplished bomb-builder, and infuriated the British government.

Congressional Republicans have vowed to look into the matter, but soo far there seems to be no cry from the national media for special prosecutors or frog-marched suspects. Perhaps it’s because Plame was a rather comely blonde woman, and the unnamed but unmasked infiltrator presumably is not, but it does seem darned peculiar.

— Bud Norman