I was in plenteous, if not necessarily good, company in my ignorance. The media storm over the White House's likely leaking of Valerie Plame's CIA status has mostly been an obfuscating tempest. The question being asked at the clawing, scratching press conferences are all of a kind: Did Karl Rove leak information to Robert Novak and other journalists? This is the wrong question. It asks for who, without clarifying what, why or how. The real question is: What exact information was leaked to the media, and for what purpose?

This is question too many writers are eager to leap past. Take Frank Rich in Sunday's New York Times. He opens his column with a rush of fact-avoidance:

Well, of course, Karl Rove did it. He may not have violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, with its high threshold of criminality for outing a covert agent, but there's no doubt he trashed Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame. We know this not only because of Matt Cooper's e-mail, but also because of Mr. Rove's own history. Trashing is in his nature, and bad things happen, usually through under-the-radar whispers, to decent people (and their wives) who get in his way.

This is all quite effective: Who, other that right-wing partisans, really wants to defend Karl Rove? But it skips over obvious queries: what information did Rove reveal, and what was the point of leaking it?

Let's start with the second question. When I wrote my conclusion last week, I was under the cheerily ignorant certainty that Rove outed Plame as vengeance for her husband, Amassador Joseph Wilson, writing a New York Times op-ed piece questioning the Bush administration's allegations that Saddam Hussein tried to buy "yellowcake" uranium from Niger officials.

But this may be nowhere near the reasons why Rove did it. Consider the argument made by Chris Hitchens in today's Slate:

Thus, and to begin with, Joseph Wilson comes before us as a man whose word is effectively worthless. What do you do, if you work for the Bush administration, when a man of such quality is being lionized by an anti-war press? Well, you can fold your tent and let them print the legend. Or you can say that the word of a mediocre political malcontent who is at a loose end, and who is picking up side work from a wife who works at the anti-regime-change CIA, may not be as "objective" as it looks.

Ignore, for a moment, the anti-Wilson rhetoric. The important thing is the underlying theory: Rove wasn't outing a undercover agent to extract revenge; he was outing her to suggest that her husband was being influenced by the administration's enemies in the CIA. In other words, he wasn't punishing a politician for speaking unpopular truth; he was trying to sneak out the word that the statements weren't even truth, that they were influenced.

However, Robert Novak's original column doesn't exactly prove this point. Novak's column doesn't prove anything, mainly because it's so poorly written. Lousy writing, exceptionally so, reading like a compendium of rumors duly and dully repeated. All it has to say about Valerie Plame is that she helped get her husband the assignment. Novak doesn't bother to contextulize this. "Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report." And that's it. No clues as to why this information matters.

But Time reporter Matthew Cooper's emailed notes do support Hitchens' argument -- and how. "[I]t was, KR said, wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd issues who authorized the trip," Cooper wrote to his editors. "[T]he genesis of the trip is flawed." Unless wifely support negates investigations, the only imaginable reason why Rove leaked in this way was to argue that the CIA was influencing Wilson's comments. (Unless, of course, Rove was lying even in unspoken implications. Which seems a stretch.)

Now, what exact beans did Rove spill? This is also a matter of some confusion. I had operated under the assumption that Valerie Plame was a secret agent, her employment at the CIA deeply confidential.

But this, too, is an shaky contention -- one challenged by a friend-of-the-court brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, filed jointly by "36 major news organizations and reporter's groups" on March 23 to fight the Grand Jury subpoenas of Miller and Cooper. (This coalition included the unlikely bedfellows of CNN, Fox News, the Washington Post and Harper's. Their brief is a fascinating read. I found it here.)

"To the average observer," the brief argues, "much less to the professional intelligence operative, Plame was not given the 'deep cover' required of a covert agent. ... She worked a desk job at CIA headquarters, where she could be seen travelling to and from, and active at, Langley."

The brief -- and keep in mind that this baby was filed by the same news organizations running stories on evil Karl -- goes on to argue that the CIA wasn't even concerned with protecting Plame: "the agency not only verified her employment but also failed to give Novak a serious request not to publish her name." And why, the argument continues, did no one at the CIA vett Wilson's New York Times op-ed piece, the one that sparked the Rove leak? "Did no one at Langley think that Plame's identity might be compromised if her spouse writes a nationally distributed Op-Ed piece discussing a foreign mission about a volitile political issue that focused on her subject expertise?"

These are terrific questions. (So are the brief's further queries into whether Plame's identity had been revealed years before, although these strike me as less certain in their answers.) And if you combine them with the documents suggesting that Rove leaked Plame's name to undermine the credibility of her husband's yelowcake contentions, you're left with a very different story than the one that's filtering into the public consciousness this month. In fact, I'm starting to wonder why Rove didn't publicly declare that Joseph Wilson was being used by his wife -- a Langley desk jockey -- to discredit an administration disliked by her bosses. Why be sneaky about it? The real story here may be a Presidential administration so used to dirty tricks that it forgets to utilize the clean ones.

These are only my initial impressions and a few diggings. I'm still willing to be shown how I'm seeing the story wrongly. But such a story isn't being discussed. It isn't even being considered. Instead, national media organizations are so confidently pursuing Karl Rove's name that they aren't even asking what he's done. This is the mass hysteria of White House reporting: find the criminal, then look for a crime.