On the August 28th edition of John Carlson's radio show, the host made a series of false statements about the Valerie Plame spy-outing scandal. His central theory is that a recent Newsweek article proves that the entire investigation was a waste of time because Novak's original source wasn't a member of the White House staff.

First of all, the leaker was not Karl Rove and it was not Scooter Libby either. In fact it was not anyone at the White House. They claim it was Richard Armitage, deputy Secretary of State and one of Colin Powell's closest friends.

In order to make his case, John has left out some crucial details of the scandal's timeline. It clearly shows that both Scooter Libby and Karl Rove were actively leaking the story to the press a full two weeks before Novak's column hit the papers:

• 6/23/2003 - New York Times reporter Judith Miller meets with Scooter Libby, and her notes indicate that Scooter wanted to discuss Wilson's trip to Niger
• 7/6/2003 - Joe Wilson publishes Op-ed in NYT: "What I didn't find in Africa"
• 7/8/2003 - Karl Rove confirms Valerie Plame's identity to Novak
• 7/8/2003 - Scooter meets with Judith Miller and tells her about Plame's work at the CIA
• 7/11/2003 - Time reporter Matt Cooper talks with Karl Rove and tells his bureau chief that "it was, [Karl Rove] said, Wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on WMD issues who authorized the trip."
• 7/11/2003 - Novak's column hits the wires
• 7/12/2003 - Karl Rove tells Chris Matthews that Valerie Plame is "fair game"

In other words, if this is all due to Armitage blabbing to Novak, why would there be any reason for White House staff members to push the story to reporters before the Novak column even came out?

In another false statement, John claimed:

By the way, by all available evidence, she did not have covert status. Her covert status had expired by the time of her supposed outing anyway. Had you heard that before now?

In fact, Valerie Plame was a "non-official cover operative" (NOC) who had worked for years in weapons prolifieration. There were existing front-companies that had been set up to provide cover for her in overseas locations. Her outing by administration officials blew all of that out of the water and jeopardized any of the sources or methods she used in the course of her career. As stated by Patrick Fitzgerald in his 10/28/2005 press conference:

Valerie Wilson was a CIA officer. In July 2003, the fact that Valerie Wilson was a CIA officer was classified. Not only was it classified, but it was not widely known outside the intelligence community. Valerie Wilson's friends, neighbors, college classmates had no idea she had another life. The fact that she was a CIA officer was not well-known, for her protection or for the benefit of all us. It's important that a CIA officer's identity be protected, that it be protected not just for the officer, but for the nation's security. Valerie Wilson's cover was blown in July 2003. The first sign of that cover being blown was when Mr. Novak published a column on July 14th, 2003

In yet another false statement about the scandal, John claims that Joe Wilson lied about the circumstances under which he was sent to Niger:

the White House found out and said "who sent this guy" he says the administration sent him, and insinuates it was the Vice President's office and it clearly was not.

Wilson made no such insinuation. In his NYT op-ed, Wilson clearly stated that:

In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report. ... The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office.

Only someone with severe reading comprehension problems could take that to mean that the Vice President's office sent Wilson on the trip. Since John is a smart guy and obviously a competent reader, we're left to make other assumptions about the source of his error.

And finally, John tried to make the claim that the whole issue was only a small part of the Bush administration's case for war with Iraq. Unfortunately that is proven wrong by Scooter Libby's own words to Judith Miller, where he said that the uranium claim was a "key judgement" of the National Intelligence Estimate prepared before the war.

Anyone who looks at the war's prelude honestly knows that the nuclear issue was the most important and frightening part of the administration's propaganda effort. The administration was afraid that chemical and biological weapons weren't going to be scary enough to motivate the American public to support the war effort, so they started a calculated campaign to make a nuclear-armed Saddam the icing on the cake. Week after week we had Condi Rice, Cheney, and even the President himself out repeating "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." And for all that nuclear talk there were only two pieces of disputed intelligence: aluminum tubes for centrifuges (truth: artillery rockets) and yellow cake in niger (truth: fraudulent documents cooked up by Bush-friendly Italian intelligence officials).

The cold hard fact is that the President and his cronies cooked up a fake story about the Iraq nuclear issue to sell the war, and then panicked in the summer of 2003 when their lies started to fall apart. In the course of that panick, they outed an undercover CIA official. John Carlson was a key part of the right-wing media that helped sell that con job, and he's still misleading his listeners away from the truth.