Why PlameGate Matters

Why PlameGate Matters

Bigger than Watergate?

"The problem here is that Valerie Plame was the rarest of the rare, a non-official cover agent of the CIA. No one knows how many there are, but the guess is that they would not fill too many tables at a dinner. Training one is more expensive than training a fighter pilot or Delta Force trooper. Revealing her name to anyone without a security clearance was a crime. Even while employed at CIA headquarters, people had no idea she was a NOC. Apologists like Bob Somersby and Richard Cohen just don't get it. This was a crime and one with serious consequences.

But why would they do it, then cover it up. Surely they understood what had happened?

No, they didn't. They tried to write off Joe Wilson's anger as politics. It wasn't. His wife's career was ruined, her friends in various countries had their lives in danger. Their callousness may have killed people, all to show him up. Wilson, who had faced down Saddam as the last US diplomat in Iraq, was not someone who could be intimidated by Beltway bullies.

Bush and his team thought the ends justified the means, even if they wrecked the CIA's single most important program. They never trusted or liked the logic-based CIA. They viewed it as a hinderance to their plans to make the US a dominant power. So anyone who got in their way had to be crushed. "