Joe Wilson's War:

Though He and His Wife Valerie Plame Lost Their Lawsuit against Cheney and Others, It's Only One Battle in a Fight that Flushed Out Much Truth

By JOHN W. DEAN

From Findlaw:


Former ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, lost their lawsuit seeking to hold a number of defendants responsible for the personal damage they caused when they revealed her CIA covert status, but they won the battle to get to the truth. Joe Wilson has exposed much more than the bogus claim underlying the efforts to justify an invasion of Iraq. In the larger picture, the ruling dismissing their lawsuit is of little long-term historical significance, compared to the information the Wilsons have forced to the surface. It is only unfortunate that the Wilsons had to pay dearly in order to speak the truth.


Dismissal of the Wilsons' lawsuit, in fact, illuminates yet another oft-forgotten truth: Officials like Vice President Cheney, his former top aide Scooter Libby, White House political adviser Karl Rove, and former State Department official Richard Armitage can easily escape civil legal liability for even highly irresponsible conduct. U.S. District Court Judge John Bates's ruling reminds us that the federal judiciary today, under the dictates of a conservative Supreme Court majority, has a remarkable array of technical rules it can invoke to prevent anyone from holding high-level federal officials civilly responsible for irresponsible or illegal behavior.

Although the Wilsons plan to appeal Judge Bates's decision, it was based on a phalanx of prior holdings denying such relief against high level officials, so do not hold your breath anticipating a higher court reversal. Instead, it seems an appropriate time to tally a few high points of the impact of Joe Wilson's actions. It is easy to forget that his actions were the catalyst to the public's learning how this very secretive White House truly operates, and coming to understand the inadequacy of the law protecting covert agents (even from their own government playing politics), and the propensity of conservatives to play dirty and get away with it.

I'll resist, for now, the temptation to Monday-morning-quarterback the case filed by the Wilsons. Suffice it to say that a narrow action against one or more of the reporters involved in carrying water for Cheney, Libby, Rove, and the White House attack machine might have had a stronger potential of getting past the motion-to-dismiss stage of the lawsuit, which would have enable the Wilsons to undertake discovery - although such discovery, too, would have been confronted with claims of executive privilege. All the roads the Wilsons might have taken were extremely difficult.


More to the point, and much more importantly, is the service the Wilsons have provided to us all by exposing the truths I have set forth above, not to mention many other truths as well. We all owe them a debt of gratitude for a public service that was far beyond any call of duty, and I look forward to Valerie Wilson's book regarding their ordeal - if Bush and Cheney do not block that as well.