A must read Hitchens: Plamegate's ridiculous conclusion. By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine

He is not easy on David Corn of The Nation. Nor should he be. It was Corn who started the whole 16 words imbroglio so many moons ago, based on Wilson's lies. At best his judgement is suspect, at worst he deliberately misled, as he has accused Bush for many years. Hitchen's explains:

In the stylistic world where disclosures are gleaned and ironies underscored, the nullity of the prose obscures the fact that any irony here is only at the authors' expense. It was Corn in particular who asserted—in a July 16, 2003, blog post credited with starting the entire distraction—that:

The Wilson smear was a thuggish act. Bush and his crew abused and misused intelligence to make their case for war. Now there is evidence Bushies used classified information and put the nation's counter-proliferation efforts at risk merely to settle a score. It is a sign that with this gang politics trumps national security.

After you have noted that the Niger uranium connection was in fact based on intelligence that has turned out to be sound, you may also note that this heated moral tone ("thuggish," "gang") is now quite absent from the story. It turns out that the person who put Valerie Plame's identity into circulation was a staunch foe of regime change in Iraq. Oh, that's all right, then. But you have to laugh at the way Corn now so neutrally describes his own initial delusion as one that was "seized on by administration critics."

The fact that Corn doesn't disclose outright that he was one of the 'adminstration critics' says a great deal about his journalistic ethic.