Plame sheds new light on White House criminality

By Libby With her new book just out, Valerie Plame is making the rounds of the media circuit and previously undisclosed and under-reported aspects of her story are coming to light. Crooks and Liars has the entire 60 Minutes interview she did, which I haven't had time to watch myself yet but as Larissa pointed out a few days ago, the piece confirms her own scoop of many months ago. CBS News has confirmed, in advance of a 60 Minutes interview with outed CIA agent Valerie Plame to be run this Sunday, that Plame "was involved in operations to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons." "Our mission was to make sure that the bad guys, basically, did not get nuclear weapons," Plame told 60 Minutes. Plame also indicated that her outing in 2003 had caused grave damage to CIA operations, saying, "All the intelligence services in the world were running my name through their databases" to see where she had gone and who she had met with. Meanwhile, the WaPo's review of her book should lay to rest the false allegations that she wasn't really a covert agent. Before her retirement in 2006, Wilson spent more than 20 years in the CIA, including six years, one month and 29 days of overseas service. We know this because the agency, in a bureaucratic blunder, put it in an unclassified letter about her pension eligibility that it later tried desperately to recall, and that she has included as an appendix to "Fair Game." Not that I expect the remaining 24 percenters to believe or even mention this irrefutable proof of her importance in the intelligence community. But then why should we expect them to, when the White House had so little respect for her safety? In 2004 the FBI received intelligence that Al Qaeda hit teams were enroute to the United States to kill Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Valerie Plame. The FBI informed Valerie of this threat. When the White House learned of these threats they sprung into action. They beefed up Secret Service protection for Vice President Cheney and provided security protection to Karl Rove. But they declined to do anything for Valerie. That was a CIA problem. The CIA wouldn't protect her either. They effectively told her she was on her own, one might suppose because to do otherwise would be to tacitly acknowledge her value as an intelligence asset and would no doubt piss off Cheney, who clearly was hell-bent on destroying her. Plame has more patriotism in her little finger than the entire wrong-wing fringers have in their collective mob. Of all the criminality in the White House that surrounded her outing, perhaps their most egregious crime was this purposeful and systematic endangerment of Plame and her family simply to protect their own worthless, deceitful hides.