Valerie Plame

Did you watch any of the Valerie Plame testimony today? After watching today here are my comments:

1) I thought the whole thing with beautiful spies was just a James Bond fiction.

2) If this had happened to me I would be pissed. Ms. Plame was a very successful covert operative and had advanced to a GS-14 within the CIA. Because she was outed she lost her job.

3) Dick Cheney cares nothing about the US. Plame was outed because her husband, Joe Wilson, published an article in the NY Times saying that the Bush administration claim that Iraq was trying to buy material for a nuclear bomb from Niger was false. Cheney wanted to discredit Wilson so he did some research. During that research he discovered that Wilson’s wife was a CIA spy and shared this information with several people including “Scooter” Libby and Karl Rove. Libby then told a number of reporters about Plame (including Judith Miller at the NY Times) but they didn’t report it. It wasn’t until Richard Armitrage told Robert Novak that it was published.

4) This didn’t just cost Plame her job but exposed citizens of foreign countries who were helping the CIA to exposure and death. From the NY Times: She said the security breach might have endangered agency officials but also “jeopardized and even destroyed entire networks of foreign agents, who in turn risk their own lives and those of their families to provide the United States with needed intelligence. Lives are literally at stake.”

5) The Bush administration including the Justice Department has declined to investigate the leak. This is part of the reason that “Scooter” (what adult calls themselves “Scooter”?) was tried for lying about the leak and not the leak itself.

6) There is a lot more to this story yet to come. And there is going to be a book and a movie!

 

Technorati Tags: , , ,