archy

What Valerie Plame did at the CIA
We've long known that Valerie Plame worked in the Counterproliferation Division at CIA headquarters at the time that her career was destroyed by Bush administration insiders. These are the people who gather intelligence on other countries' weapons of mass destruction and try to prevent additional countries from gaining WMD capacities. This should have been just the type of specialist that the Bush administration need to protect the American people from the sort of threats that the administration claimed we most needed protecting from. The sheer blindness and stupidity of ending her effectiveness has been mentioned by other bloggers. Now it appears that the crime of the Bush administration might have been even more counter-productive than we originally thought.

According to a new article in The Nation by David Corn, Plame's actual position within the Counterproliferation Division was that of the leader of the team specializing in Iraq. She was one of the people who failed to cook the books for the war party in the administration. I saw it once suggested--and can't find right now who said it--that the whole business about her outing being to punish her husband was misdirection; that punishing her was the actual goal of the outing and her husband was just an extra. This story seems to lend support to that theory.

This should be very big news. We should not let this get lost among much more trivial election year noise.