Once again, the Liberal media is trying to ramp up hysteria over the "outing" of Ambassador Joe Wilson's wife, CIA employee Valerie Plame. The problem with their frenzy is that there's no substance to the charge, once all the angry flailing and faux outrage are done with.

Liberals are sacrificing what little credibility they have left with the American people in their desperate attempt to destroy the Bush administration at all costs. To that end, they have continually accused President Bush's advisor Karl Rove of giving Plame's name to the media in order to punish Wilson, after Wilson investigated reports of Saddam's attempt to buy Nigerian uranium and lied about his findings.

Wilson filed a disappointingly neutral report upon his return, but published an editorial stating unequivocally that the British-backed claim was absolutely untrue -- and that President Bush was using it anyway, to create a reason to attack Saddam. However, in his 2004 book, Wilson revealed that "It was Saddam Hussein's information minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, often referred to in the Western press as 'Baghdad Bob,' who approached an official of the African nation of Niger in 1999 to discuss trade -- an overture the official saw as a possible effort to buy uranium." So the uranium buy attempt actually did happen, and Wilson knew about it, but lied about it to try and prevent the liberation of Iraq for political purposes.

In the Liberal version of events, Karl Rove -- a consummately clever political operator by all accounts, except in this story -- revealed Plame's role as a covert agent for the CIA out of sheer vindictiveness. I don't know how that makes any sense, or what end it was supposed to achieve, but somehow it seems perfectly reasonable to Liberals that he would do this. Rove did, in fact, mention that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA to Time reporter Matt Cooper, but never indicated that she had once been a spy. Cooper was not the writer who published her identity -- that was columnist Robert Novak. The problem is that in order to prove Rove did anything illegal, an illegal act has to have taken place.

Knowingly revealing the identity of a covert agent is illegal under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. If that's what Rove or anyone else did, he ought to be hung out for the crows. (I wonder whether Liberals will wail about such a violation of the Geneva Conventions, as they do when terrorists get too much or too little air conditioning?) In order for Rove (or whoever the source was) to have broken the law, he would have to know and reveal that Plame was a covert operative for the CIA. The problem is... she wasn't one anymore.

Apparently, Valerie Plame ceased to be a covert agent when her cover was blown years earlier. The CIA believed that Aldrich Ames (CIA agent/KGB spy/traitor) revealed her role, along with many other operatives, to the KGB before his arrest in 1994. Plame's former existence as a secret agent became little more than cocktail party chatter with which to thrill the uninitiated. Since her identity was not classified, not secret, and she had not been assigned to duty outside the US in the last five years, revealing her mundane desk job with the CIA was simply not a crime. Lots of people work for the CIA, after all.

What no one talks about is the reason Wilson was picked to go to Niger... the question that originally nagged Novak. In fact, whoever did uncover Plame's involvement in her husband's selection did the country a favor. Plame wanted Wilson to investigate the British claim because of his vocal antipathy to President Bush and his staunch opposition to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. He was sent not to gather evidence and form a conclusion, but because his conclusion was foreordained. Whoever sent him was attempting to exert an undue influence over America's foreign policy by sending someone who would ignore evidence contrary to his opinion. Do we really want former secret agents playing political games to determine the outcomes of investigations before they're even begun? Investigations the outcomes of which may determine the nation's course in wartime?

Once again, Liberals and their pet Democrats have chosen the wrong hill to die on. While ignoring the real problem we narrowly avoided, they try to whip us into an attack on someone who, even if their accusations are true, commited no crime.