A Kos diarist has an interesting alternate take on the Plame case. The conventional view holds that Plame's name was leaked to retaliate against Joseph Wilson, who had helped to expose the yellowcake fraud.
The less-conventional view holds that the Valerie Plame case is about Valerie Plame, who was (in her final assignment) a CIA analyst of Saddam's WMD capabilities. The administration wanted her to deliver the Bush Approved Version of the WMD question, but she (the Kos author contends) stubbornly refused.
In other words, Plame was targeted as part of the CIA-neocon "war" that we've discussed in this column many times. The appalling thing about all this is that the administration has managed to convince most of the American people that the CIA is to blame for faulty pre-war intelligence. In fact, Plame was pilloried precisely because she refused to provide phony intelligence.
Of course, there is no over-riding conflict behind the "get Joe" and the "get Valerie" theories of the Plame outrage. Rove no doubt hoped to kill two birds with one stone.
2 comments:
Novak, as Evans and Novak, also leaked stories for the Nixon Administration. Never broke the law then, or endangered anyones life.
The CIA also had opinions about the Vietnam War that conflicted with official views, and their analyses were ignored. See The Pentagon Papers.
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