Valerie Plame Was Covert
by James Buchanan
Valerie Plame was doing covert work at the CIA at least until Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby dug up her name, passed it around and published it. She was the head of a covert company set up to do covert work employing covert agents operating in foreign lands. Still, some neocon talk show hacks are still trying to push the story that she had nothing to do with classified work.
One of the many lies passed around is that “she boasted about her CIA job at cocktail parties.” If there were any truth to that “Karl Rove” rumor, Ms. Plame would have been subject to discipline within the CIA for talking too much. Some neocon lawyers have jumped into the mix trying to nitpick the definition of “covert.” The one fig leaf that various portly neocons are trying to hide behind is that to be convicted it must be proven that the offending individual knew that Ms. Plame was covert.
Well, that was the whole point of outing her wasn’t it? Valerie Plame’s husband Joe Wilson embarrassed the Bush administration when he exposed the fact that Iraq was not seeking uranium from Niger, contrary to what Bush said in his State of the Union speech. The neocons wanted to punish Wilson so they went after his wife, exposing her identity as a CIA agent and ruining her career. If Valerie Plame worked at Bank of America, would the neocons have told Robert Novak about her? Of course, not.
A few neocons claimed that Valerie Plame assigned her husband to investigate whether Iraq was seeking Nigerian uranium. In recent testimony, Ms. Plame stated she had no authority to choose him for that job. Joe Wilson was a former ambassador with experience in Africa, who was well-qualified for that assignment.
George Bush’s dad once said the most insidious form of treason is the exposure of a CIA agent’s identity. Robert Novak, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and Scooter Libby all deserve to be put on trial for treason for exposing the identity of a CIA agent, who was doing covert work.
The neocons are acting as though outing Valerie Plame was a fraternity boy prank. At the very least, they have ruined the promising career of a CIA agent. The front organization set up by the CIA, which she was running, has been ruined and the agents working for that organization had their lives endangered (especially if they were in foreign countries at the time Plame was outed).
Outing Valerie Plame was an act of treason. If no one is punished for this, our entire foreign intelligence operation has been severely undermined. As Valerie Plame testified recently, her employment by the CIA should have been a “red flag” to anyone who came across this information. Anyone with any common sense should have assumed that she was doing secret work as a CIA employee. Assuming anything else was negligent. People are sent to jail all the time for criminally negligent behavior. In this case, everyone involved from Dick Cheney to Robert Novak should have known better than to out a CIA agent. While it’s true that some CIA agents may have paper-pushing jobs such as accountants, this was NOT the case for Valerie Plame. She was heading a secret CIA front employing secret CIA spies. Her identity needed to be kept secret for national security.