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The facts of this story are singularly grotesque. Taken at the top layer, you have a White House that appears perfectly willing to go after the family members of its critics. Valerie Plame's career is destroyed, period. The act itself displays a level of viciousness that is dangerous to the functioning of this, or any, democracy.
Peel the second layer and you discover the rank illegality of it all. Section 421 of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 reads as follows:
"Whoever, having or having had authorized access to classified information that identifies a covert agent, intentionally discloses any information identifying such covert agent to any individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship to the United States, shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both."
The third layer is where the darkness truly lurks, and where the deadly importance of this situation lies. Valerie Plame was not simply an analyst or a data cruncher. She was an operative running a network dedicated to tracking any person or nation that might try to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. That sentence deserves to be written twice. She was an operative running a network dedicated to tracking any person or nation that might try to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.
The Bush administration pushed very hard the idea that America is in danger from WMD being placed into the hands of terrorists. This was one of the central arguments behind the war in Iraq. Yet in order to protect Bush's political standing, a couple of "administration officials" blew Valerie Plame, and by proxy her network, completely out of the water in an attempt to shut her husband up. In short, in order to protect Bush from the ramifications of using fake evidence to support his war, this White House destroyed an intelligence network that was protecting us from the threat posed by chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons.
We are less safe now that Valerie Plame is no longer performing this vital task, and the members of her network are in mortal danger of being revealed and destroyed. Beyond that, we are facing a level of hypocrisy that shatters any and all previously known boundaries. This administration ginned up a war in Iraq based upon manufactured evidence and wildly overstated threats, all of which was painted over with rhetoric about defending the country from terrorists and weapons of mass destruction. The fate of Valerie Plame, and her network, shows without doubt that the moral standing of this administration is as empty as Saddam Hussein's WMD cache.
In Ambassador Wilson's words, "Naming her this way would have compromised every operation, every relationship, every network with which she had been associated in her entire career. This is the stuff of Kim Philby and Aldrich Ames."
The current spin from administration defenders within and without the mainstream media is that Valerie Plame was only an analyst, and not an operative. This, somehow, is supposed to lessen the blow of an administration willing to attack the families of its critics. Yet the characterization of Plame as an analyst is factually incorrect. For one, Robert Novak himself indicated that she was an operative in the original report that birthed this scandal. "Wilson never worked for the CIA," wrote Novak, "but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction."
Ray McGovern, who was for 27-years a senior analyst for the CIA, further confirms the status of Plame within the CIA. "I know Joseph Wilson well enough to know," said McGovern in a telephone conversation we had today, "that his wife was in fact a deep cover operative running a network of informants on what is supposedly this administration's first-priority issue: Weapons of mass destruction."
McGovern further elaborated on the damage done when such an agent has their cover blown. "This causes a great deal of damage," said McGovern. "These kinds of networks take ten years to develop. The reason why they operate under deep cover is that the only people who have access to the kind of data we need cannot be associated in any way with the American intelligence community. Our operatives live a lie to maintain these networks, and do so out of patriotism. When they get blown, the operatives themselves are in physical danger. The people they recruit are also in physical danger, because foreign intelligence services can make the connections and find them. Operatives like Valerie Plame are real patriots."
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One last bit of inside baseball. When the Niger scandal erupted, the Bush administration went out of its way to blame the CIA for the mess, despite the fact that the CIA, along with the entire intelligence community, had been cut out of the loop by Don Rumsfeld's Office of Special Plans. The OSP, and its pet Iraqi Ahmad Chalabi, became the source for all of the information regarding Iraq's weapons capabilities, and a number of intelligence insiders have publicly blamed that group for the preponderance of highly erroneous data about Iraq. For the Bush administration to completely usurp the CIA by depending solely on data manufactured by the Office of Special Plans, and then to turn around and blame CIA when the OSPs data did not turn out to be true, is as insane as it is laughable. Yet this is what they have done. The CIA's calling for this investigation is nothing more or less than the Agency defending itself, proving out the oft-repeated warning that one scapegoats the CIA at their mortal peril.
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