Bob Novak goes public on Plame and Armitage
I never spoke to Armitage again about Wilson. But he acknowledged to me nearly three months later through his political adviser, lobbyist Ken Duberstein, that he was indeed the primary source for my information about Wilson's wife. Shortly thereafter, he secretly revealed his role to federal authorities investigating the leak of Mrs. Wilson's name but did not inform White House officials, apparently including the president.
After Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney in Chicago named as a special prosecutor in the case, indicated to me he knew Armitage was my source, I cooperated fully with him. At the special prosecutor's request and on my lawyers' advice, I kept silent about this -- a silence that subjected me to much abuse. I was urged by several friends, including some journalists, to give up my source's name. But I felt bound by the journalist's code to protect his identity.
So now that the columnist whose column began the whole sordid affair that has resulted in the perjury conviction of Scooter Libby has publicly acknowledged what we've all known to be the truth for months, namely that Richard Armitage, not Scooter Libby, leaked Plame's name, and did so in a meeting that was scheduled before Joe Wilson's Times op-ed criticizing the administration appeared, can we expect the Left to drop the baseless assertion that Plame was outed by the Bush administration to punish Wilson?
Of course not...because this was never about the truth. It was about attempting to destroy the Bush administration at any cost. Never mind that the cost increasingly appears to be defeat in Iraq (a defeat that was not inevitable), if the democrats have their way, and possibly defeat in the war on terror. If that's the way it truly shakes out, the price Libby is paying for the left's obsessive Bush Derangement Syndrome is nothing compared to the price the country will likely pay in the future, in lives lost to Islamist terrorism.
CIA leak: Now it can be told :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Metro & Tri-State