For the longest time, there has been this running debate about whether Valerie Plame was really a covert CIA agent. All sorts of people on the right have consistently opined that she was not; to those on the left, you don’t need much more than common sense to see that she clearly was.

Prior to Libby’s sentencing, a court filing by Patrick Fitzgerald weighed in on the matter:

An unclassified summary of outed CIA officer Valerie Plame‘s employment history at the spy agency, disclosed for the first time today in a court filing by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, indicates that Plame was “covert” when her name became public in July 2003.

The summary is part of an attachment to Fitzgerald’s memorandum to the court supporting his recommendation that I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Cheney‘s former top aide, spend 2-1/2 to 3 years in prison for obstructing the CIA leak investigation.

As might be expected, that did nothing to quell the controversy. Just because Fitzgerald says she’s covert, and just because Judge Reggie Walton seems to agree (based on the sentence he handed down), that still doesn’t make it true. It’s still just Fitzgerald’s opinion, and who knows if Judge Walton really bought that part of the argument or not.

Part of the reason for the ongoing debate is that the word covert can be construed in its general colloquial sense of an undercover agent, or as a legal term, as defined under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. The IIPA spells out what kind of intelligence operatives qualify to have their identities protected under the act, and some on the right (notably, Victoria Toensing) have argued that Plame does not appear to qualify as a protected covert agent.

Alex Koppelman, writing in Salon’s War Room, concedes that this can be a matter of opinion. While Fitzgerald had argued that “she qualified as covert under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act”, Koppelman says that “Toensing has a decent, if not airtight, case”. He goes on to reserve his ire for those on the right who claimed/claim Plame was not covert even in the colloquial sense of the term.

It strikes me that this whole branch of the argument is really not very germane to the central issue, which remains the outing of Valerie Plame by White House officials, apparently as the result of a centrally- orchestrated campaign to undermine Joe Wilson’s criticism of the Niger-enriched-uranium rationale for invading Iraq.

The relevant issue is surely not whether people sitting on their thinking stools now can come up with persuasive arguments for why Plame might validly be regarded as not clearly a covert operative.

The relevant issue is surely what Karl Rove and I. Lewis Libby thought at the time that they were revealing her identity to reporters, and then lying about it—first to us through Scott McClellan, and then to investigators. (Rove too initially lied to investigators, before some miraculous act suddenly restored his memory. This act is widely believed to be the miracle of St. Patrick, in which he squeezed the blood of testimony out of the rock of reporters’ memories and files.)

And let’s clearly recognize that the lies to Scott McClellan were told pretty much right away, not much much later when the Fog of Affairs of State had managed to cloud their recollection of these petty events (since it is their own testimony that committing malfeasance and then lying about it were petty events in their scheme of things).

So the fact of the matter is: they lied. People who think they are innocent don’t lie. No matter how many angels can now be made to dance on the head of a pin, they didn’t think at the time there was any innocent spin that could be put on their outing of Plame, and so they chose to lie. It takes a very high degree of credulity married to sophistry for anyone to convince themselves that Rove and Libby disclosed Plame’s identity to reporters in the innocent belief that she was not a covert operative.

And let’s not forget Prick Cheney. If he really thought at the time that Plame was not a covert operative, would we not have immediately been inundated by a loud orchestrated chorus to this effect, from his office, and from elsewhere inside the White House?

Would Judy Miller not have screamed it in print? And Bob Novak? And untold numbers of other media prostitutes too?

That none of this happened is meaningful. In the words of the master, there’s a good reason why these damn dogs (and bitches?) didn’t bark.

The inescapable conclusion is they outed her — Rove, Libby, Cheney, all hand in glove and in bed together (nullus) — despite the fact that they viewed her as a covert operative. The fact that people are able to come along much later, and make a case for reasonable doubt regarding her covertness, does not change that one bit.