Buckley Column Criticizes Outing of Plame By E&P Staff Published: November 03, 2005 3:45 PM ET
NEW YORK A number of conservative columnists have pulled their punches when it comes to criticizing the Bush administration's outing of Valerie Plame. William F. Buckley Jr. is not one of them.
In his current column, Buckley writes: "(T)he sacredness of the law against betraying a clandestine soldier of the republic cannot be slighted."
The Universal Press Syndicate pundit adds that even if Plame has lived in Washington since 1997, "it does not mean that her outing was without consequence. We do not know what dealings she might have been engaging in which are now interrupted or even made impossible. We do not know whether the countries in which she worked before 1997 could accost her, if she were to visit any of them, confronting her with signed papers that gave untruthful reasons for her previous stay... ."
Buckley also recalls being a clandestine CIA agent himself starting in 1951: "In my case, it was 15 years after reentry into the secular world before my secret career in Mexico was blown, harming no one except perhaps some who might have been put off by my deception."
And Buckley alludes to the Chicago Sun-Times-Creators Syndicate columnist who published Plame's name in 2003. "The great question here is Robert Novak," he says. "It was he who published, in his column, that Mrs. Joseph Wilson was a secret agent of the CIA. I am too close a friend to pursue the matter with Novak, and his loyalty is a postulate. What was going on? If there are mysteries in town, that surely is one of them, the role of Novak."