Foggy Throat

Josh Marshall has a post up about today's Pincus-VandeHei WaPo article. Josh excerpts the article's mentioning the "secret" classification of the June 17, 2003 memo, and he writes:

What does that mean? First of all, I think this is pretty much what we'd expect in such a memo that contained that sort of information. What this does is knock out one more basis for a defense based on ignorance. Whoever saw this memo knew that the information was not to be revealed.

I certainly agree with Josh's inference.

But I think this WaPo article is both less and more significant than Josh lets on.

Why less significant? Because other discussion of the memo made the classified nature of the memo clear. Consider the lead sentence in yesterday's Squeo-McKinnon WSJ article:

A classified State Department memo that may be pivotal to the CIA leak case made clear that information identifying an agent and her role in her husband's intelligence-gathering mission was sensitive and shouldn't be shared, according to a person familiar with the document. [Note that the story says "familiar with the document", not the investigation.]

If you go read that article and then read today's by Pincus-VandeHei, you'll see that P-V don't really add much, beyond the level of classification (secret, rather than either the lesser classification of confidential or the greater classification of top secret). That's why I think today's WaPo offering is less significant than Josh argues.

Why more significant? Two reasons.

1. It's obvious from each article (as well as Richard Stevenson's Saturday article in the NYT) that someone who is in a position to know a lot and used to be way up the State Department ladder has been talking a lot. If you read these three articles, I think you have to conclude that Foggy Throat is either Powell (doubtful), Armitage (most likely in my book) or Carl Ford (somewhere in the middle); Marc Grossman is a lesser possibility, though it's unclear that he would have known about Armitage's call to Ford at home (mentioned in Sat's Post article). Of course, there's no reason to assume that only one of these folks is talking to journalists -- there could be multiple Foggy Throats.
2. The way this person(s) information is showing up is, I think, highly significant. Drip, drip, drip. Moreover, as I noted above, the volume of today's drip is nearly trivial. But it's in the Post, not the WSJ (or the NYT).

   That's three major newspapers getting little pieces of the same big story, most likely from the same person, in less than a week. Why are these facts significant? Because they mean that Foggy Throat very much wants this story kept alive and kicking.

   The Bushies clearly have been hoping to use the nomination to knock the RoveWarLiesDeathGate off the front page. But today's WaPo story is over the fold, on the front page. Because Foggy Throat wants this story to stay there. And Foggy Throat is expertly leaking one little drip at a time to make sure that happens.

   That's what's really significant about today's WaPo story.

Update: A person who would know confirms my thinking.....