Plamegate Takes a Shocking Turn

Posted on March 16, 2007

Plamegate took a shocking turn today on Capitol Hill during Senate Judiciary Hearings which are investigating who illegally leaked CIA operative Valerie Plame's name to the press, thereby destroying her cover and her career. The biggest shocker of the day came during the testimony of James Knodell, Director of the Office of Security at the White House. Knodell dropped a bombshell when he testified that President Bush never launched an internal investigation into who outed Valerie Plame as a spy, even though he went on television and promised a full and complete investigation into who the leaker was. The White House blatantly lied about beginning an investigation into this treasonous outing of one of our covert operatives.

Valerie Plame herself testified today and made it crystal clear that her covert identity was leaked to the press by the White House as revenge against her husband, Ambassador Wilson because he refused to lie and say the Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium yellowcake in connection with a supposed WMD program. She also testified how the leak destroyed her career as a spy for the U.S. for which she was highly trained.

Ms. Plame worked in the counter-proliferation division of the CIA. Her job was to try to find solid evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction during the run up to the Iraq War. But the White House had a problem with Ms. Plame and her husband, who was dispatched to Niger to investigate claims of the purcase of yellowcake uranium: the Wilsons refused to lie about the facts. And that led the White House to destroy her career in retaliation. In the Scooter Libby trial, written evidence in Dick Cheney's own handwriting showed that Cheney was obsessed with destroying the Wilsons. In mid-2003, Plame woke up one day to find her cover had been blown in a column written by Bob Novak.

VALERIE PLAME WILSON: I found out very early in the morning, when my husband came in and dropped the newspaper on the bed, and I quickly turned and read the article, and I felt like I had been hit in the gut. And I immediately thought of my family's safety, the agents, the networks that I had worked with, and everything goes through your mind in an instant.
My name and identity were carelessly and recklessly abused by senior government officials in both the White House and the State Department. It was a terrible irony that administration officials were the ones who destroyed my cover.

It is a terribly irony, indeed. And what is most infuriating about this case is this: during wartime, someone in the White House deliberately outed one of our spies for political reasons, exposing her, her colleagues and her contacts to incredible danger and betraying national secrets, yet no one has been charged with treason. Because that is what this is, pure and simple.