Five years ago

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http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/dc/2008/07/five-years-since-valerie-plame.html


Five Years Since Valerie Plame's Cover Blown

A few days after the White House retracted the famous “sixteen words” from President Bush’s State of the Union address, in which he said Iraq was trying to build a nuclear bomb, CIA operations officer Valerie Plame Wilson’s cover was blown. That was five years ago today.

On July 14, 2003, syndicated columnist Robert Novak wrote that her husband, former ambassador and top U.S. diplomat in Baghdad Joseph Wilson, had turned critical of Bush’s March 2003 Iraq invasion. Novak said Wilson had been sent to Africa by the CIA to see if Saddam Hussein’s regime was buying uranium. Novak said Wilson “never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction.”

The CIA alerted the Justice Department, which appointed Patrick Fitzgerald as a special prosecutor to find the leaker who blew the classified CIA cover of Wilson’s wife. One of the leakers, Vice President Cheney’s top aide, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, was convicted last year of committing perjury in the probe.

“I don’t think we have much to say other than it is now abundantly clear from the Libby trial and (ex-White House spokesman) Scott McClellan’s book that the administration was so determined to destroy me that it was willing to betray the identity of a covert CIA officer to do it,” Wilson told The Mouth.

Wilson said Cheney’s role in outing his wife is not unlike outing a CIA officer to a Russian spy. “It is no different simply because the betrayal is brokered through members of the press, and particularly a bottomfeeding gossip columnist,” he said.