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Defending Valerie Plame: Who Is This Punk?

By Larry Johnson on December 15, 2007 at 12:18 PM in Current Affairs

Laura Rozen

[From the author's biographical afterword to Plame's memoir, Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House]

When Valerie Wilson was exposed in the summer of 2003, she was contemplating an offer to move from an operational to a more managerial role within the Directorate of Operations Counterproliferation Division. While she had initially turned down the offer to become the CPD’s Chief of Personnel Evaluation Management, she accepted in the fall of 2003, just as the Justice Department was undertaking an investigation of the outing of her identity. “No sooner had I begun to get my arms around a branch . . . than the FBI paid me a visit,” she writes.

At the same time, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was undertaking an investigation of pre-war intelligence. The Republican chair of the committee, Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican with close ties to the White House and in particular Cheney, demanded that the first part of the committee’s investigation on prewar intelligence focus exclusively on the mistakes of the intelligence community. Only after the 2004 presidential election, Roberts insisted, would the committee investigate other factors, including the role of a Pentagon intelligence shop, the Office of Special Plans, Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi, and the Iraqi National Congress in influencing policy makers’ misjudgments and misstatements about what would be found in Iraq. But Roberts stalled the second phase of the investigation for over two years, and argued for releasing it in pieces, diminishing its impact.

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Retired

Jim is a professional politicians worst nightmare–an American who has actually been a few places and done a few things. They prefer to keep the Eloi docile, they don’t want anyone to ask embarrasing questions or point out inconsistencies between word and deed. For the most part, the Eloi seem pretty happy about this arrangement, too, as we keep re-electing them.
Donovan Fraser

I hate this stuff.
there is no justice in our system only the illusion of it. that is UNLESS your poor.. then the wheels of justice grind along at breakneck speed (so damn efficient).

2 million in prison and counting…the majority drug offenders. but if you betray your country……nothing

i can only hope the people “with no names” take their revenge on these scott free treasonous bastards in their own special way.
I suggest water boarding, after all it’s just like doing the backstroke..
TeakWoodKite

Reading Laura Rozen’s artical I still can’t understand why the CIA is so interested in denying Valerie Wilson’s ability to write about the “18 years” of service in her book it is a apart of the public record. I think it would have been fasinating to get at least a general historical perspective.
Yogi-one

I think it’s up to bloggers, the alternative media, and the interested public to keep throwing this thing back in their face until they deal with it properly. If there are people with clout inside the beltway sympathetic to Valerie’s plight, maybe they can also help push to get to the bottom of it. Eventually it will come out, but it would be more helpful to America if it came out now, not as a paragraph in the political history textbooks in the year 2075.
http://noquarterusa.net/blog/ Leslie

This whole thing makes me so angry, from the betrayal of Valerie to the betrayal of our country, the lies and the cover-up. How many people have needlessly died as a result: about 4,000 US troops and maybe a million Iraqis?

The White House chose to use bogus intelligence, which they’d been repeatedly told was bogus at the time. And they relied heavily on the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, Chalabi and Curveball to create that bogus intelligence. Any intelligence the CIA had to the contrary was repeatedly denied, such as the Niger uranium story and the fact that Curveball was a “fabricator”. For example: No matter how many times the CIA tried to have the Niger claims removed from White House speeches, they’d pop up again. Because the White House was determined to go to war on the flimsiest excuse, even if they had to invent them out of whole cloth.

They’re attempting the same thing with Iran. The people who are allowing this to happen, by way of protecting the criminality of this White House, are criminals themselves.

Thank god for the bravery of Marcinkowski, Larry and others who won’t be intimidated! Bless them!
kathleen

If the folks who created and dessiminated false prewar intelligence out of the Office of Special plans had (still have my fingers crossed) been held accountable for their lies the same “cakewalk in Iraq” zealots would not have so easily been able to repeat unsubstantiated claims about Iran. Why the fuck are Douglas Feith and the other zealots still out there making money and instead of serving prison terms?

Think Progress has the best run down on the incomplete Phase II of the SSCI investigation.

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/01/26/cheney-roberts/

http://thinkprogress.org/?s=Phase+II

Larisa Androvna has also helped us with becoming better informed about the still incomplete Phase II
http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Pentagon_investigation_stalls_Phase_II_of_0130.html

Hello Senator Rockefeller will you do any better job than Senator Roberts on completing this investigation? We are pushing, and watching.

The very least you and the rest of our Reps can do for those who have needlessly lost their lives, been injured or displaced by an unnecessary and immoral war is hold those responsible for creating and dessiminating false WMD intelligence ACCOUNTABLE.