History Forum / General / British History / August 2006

Deeeeeeelightful!

DSH
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The Girl Next Door

Blogger Howard Bashman points to a hilarious ruling in Plame v. Libby,
the civil suit in which "covert agent" Valerie Plame is accusing various
White House officials of "revealing" her "secret identity." Plame filed a
motion asking for an exemption from the usual rule that parties to a civil
action include their "full residential address" in their filings. Judge John
Bates laughed her out of court:

 This Court does not readily grant relief from the ordinary application of
such rules, nor does the Court believe that a plaintiff's mere invocation of
privacy interests and public prominence, without more, warrants an exception
to rules that apply to all other litigants. Moreover, the implicit premise
of plaintiffs' motion -- that their residential address is confidential --
is questionable. In less than thirty minutes, the Court was able to
ascertain plaintiffs' residential address from multiple publicly available
sources, including a database of federal government records. Indeed, an
attorney who filed this motion on plaintiffs' behalf has stated in a
nationally circulated newspaper that he is plaintiffs' next-door neighbor,
and the residential address of that attorney also is readily ascertainable.

Earlier this week the Associated Press reported that in June 2003,
then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage met with the Washington
Post's Bob Woodward.  For reasons too tedious to explicate here, this lends
plausibility to speculation that it was Armitage who first revealed Plame's
identity to the press.

Have you heard any of the Angry Left Plame fetishists denounce Armitage as a
"traitor"?  Of course not, because Armitage is not a particularly partisan
figure, and the Plame kerfuffle was never anything more than a partisan
campaign to damage the White House.

James Taranto
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DSH