Plame Says Administration 'Recklessly' Revealed Her
Valerie Plame, the covert CIA agent outed by the Bush administration in an act of revenge for her husband's declaration that the President lied during his State of the Union address, spoke publicly yesterday whilst addressing Congress.
She said that both her name and her job "were carelessly and recklessly abused" by the government.Although she and her colleagues knew that "we might be exposed and threatened by foreign enemies," she said, "it was a terrible irony that administration officials were the ones who destroyed my cover."
She also destroyed the myth, banded about in many right wing circles, that it was she who sent her husband to Niger.
Much of the way that the Bush administration operates can be seen clearly in the case of Valerie Plame. When her husband exposed the lies being told to justify the Iraq war, the administration quickly moved to punish him. When the punishment meted out - the exposure of his wife as a CIA agent - was discovered to be illegal, the administration then engaged in a well orchestrated mud slinging campaign, where talking points were thrown out claiming that Plame was not covert and that no crime had actually been committed.Rebutting an assertion by White House officials to reporters that she had sent her husband on the trip, Plame said a CIA colleague broached the idea after a call in early 2002 from Vice President Cheney's office seeking information about Iraqi activity in Niger. Plame said she "wasn't overjoyed" at the idea because it would leave her alone at bedtime with their 2-year-old twins.
Still, she said, at the direction of her supervisor, she asked her husband whether he would come to CIA headquarters at Langley to discuss the possible trip and sent a quick e-mail about the prospect to the chief of the agency's counterproliferation division, where she worked.
"I did not suggest him," she said. "There was no nepotism involved. I didn't have the authority."
When "Scooter" Libby was found guilty of obstructing Fitzgerald's investigation into the leaking of Plame's name by telling repeated lies, the right wing pundits immediately and shamefully launched a campaign to have him pardoned for no better reason than, as William Kristol states, "The Democrats would go crazy".
There has been, throughout the whole Plamegate affair, a disgraceful disassociation from any attempt to find the truth. Despite President Bush's initial claim that any person found responsible for the leaking of Valerie Plame's name would be fired, the subsequent trial of "Scooter" Libby has revealed that the person behind the leaking of Plame's name was none other than the Vice President, Dick Cheney, who "declassified" this information. The "declassification" of the information was yet another attempt to imply that no crime has actually been committed.
So we can see quite clearly that this is an administration that regards itself as above the law.
And therein lies the rub. Bush likes to portray himself as above politics, constantly fending off criticism with the phrase, "That's just politics", implying that this is a black art played by his political opponents which he considers beneath himself. The Plame case shows precisely the opposite. The Bush administration is one of the most partisan in living memory and they would go to any lengths to prevent the sheer scale of the lies they told before the Iraq war from being revealed.The panel's chairman, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), portrayed Plame as a hero betrayed by her government. "They made you collateral damage," Waxman said. "Your career was ended. Your life may have been in jeopardy, and they didn't seem to care."
Even to the extent of outing one of their own CIA officers in the middle of the War on Terror.
Given the extent to which they claim to be the party best suited to looking after the nation's national security, that is simply shameful.
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