Challenge the Godfather, expect the shiv

Because journalists are almost as prone to flatter their audiences as politicians, the staggering ignorance of the American public about matters crucial to democratic self-governance is discreetly ignored. Get this: According to a Zogby poll conducted early this month, almost half (46 percent) of respondents agreed that "there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 terror attacks." Among Republicans, fully 65 percent believe that Iraq played a role in al Qaeda atrocities.

Sometimes it's tempting to wonder if contemporary Republicanism hasn't turned into a cult. The poll was taken days after President Bush, during a televised press conference, peevishly confessed that Saddam had "nothing" to do with the 2001 attack. Bush then denied anybody in his administration "ever suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq" -- a falsehood so brazen only a politician confident of his supporters' invincible ignorance would risk it.

But why pick on deluded Bush cultists? When it comes to anything touching even remotely on their own prerogatives, there's scant evidence the courtiers of the Washington press are capable of consecutive thought. Consider conventional wisdom about the revelation in David Corn and Michael Isikoff's book "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War," that columnist Robert Novak's initial source in the betrayal of CIA agent Valerie Plame's covert identity was State Department insider Richard Armitage.

Because Armitage is a confidant of Colin Powell's rather than a White House operative, pundits pretended that prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into what's arguably a politically motivated act of treason is overblown. The Washington Post editorialized, "it follows that one of the most sensational charges leveled against the Bush White House -- that it orchestrated the leak of Ms. Plame's identity -- is untrue."

Exactly how it follows is a puzzler. According to the Post's own reporting, Fitzgerald said he'd "collected so much testimony and so many documents that 'it is hard to conceive of what evidence there could be that would disprove the existence of White House efforts to 'punish' Wilson.'"

Armitage only knew about Plame (although NOT her covert status) because of a State Department memo created at the behest of Cheney's office and dated more than a month before her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, went public with his revelations about President Bush's deceptive claims regarding Iraq's mythical nukes.

The Post even blamed the destruction of Plame's 20-year CIA career on her husband. Before challenging a presidential falsehood, see, Joe Wilson "ought to have expected that both those (Bush administration) officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission (i.e. to determine if Iraq had acquired uranium ore in Africa) and that the answer would point to his wife."

Translation: Laws be damned. Challenge the Godfather, expect the shiv. The Post's take was a faithful paraphrase of Cheney's angry notes on a copy of Wilson's offending New York Times column. "Have they (CIA officials) done this sort of thing before? Send an Amb(assador) to answer a question?" Cheney scrawled. "Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?"

One expects the Wall Street Journal and the Weekly Standard to parrot the party line. For the Washington Post to follow is a recent, and shameful, development.

But here's the real news in Corn and Isikoff's book. The biggest mystery in the Plame-Wilson affair has always been why the White House panicked over a newspaper column by a relatively unknown figure like Joe Wilson. And the answer appears to be that far from being the low-level munchkin GOP propagandists have depicted, Valerie Plame's CIA job couldn't have been more sensitive. She headed the agency's "Joint Task Force on Iraq," charged with finding Saddam's WMDs.

Under terrific pressure from the White House, including visits to CIA headquarters by Cheney himself, the task force failed to produce the hard evidence demanded. "Valerie Wilson and other JTFI officers were almost too overwhelmed," Corn writes "to consider the possibility that (they were) ... coming up with the correct answer: There was no intelligence to find on Saddam's WMDs because the weapons did not exist."

So that's how Cheney knew Valerie Plame Wilson's identity, and also why the White House reacted so rashly to her husband's exposing just one of the Bush administration's avalanche of pre-war falsehoods. Both sides were playing a much higher-stakes game than anybody outside the intelligence establishment realized, the difference being that Wilson and Plame were playing inside the law.

In a White House eager to blame its own catastrophic bungling on bad intelligence, discrediting Joe Wilson while intimidating Valerie Plame's CIA colleagues into silence by wrecking her career may have seemed a clever ploy.

Unfortunately, they picked a fight with the wrong couple.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a national magazine award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at genelyons2@sbcglobal.net.