The Name Plame Wanted To Blame Wasn’t The Same As They’d Claimed

Lee P. Butler

A recent Associated Press report covered the story of ex-CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson’s lawsuit against Vice President Dick Cheney and political advisor Karl Rove by, ‘accusing them and other White House officials of conspiring to destroy her career’.

In the same report they wrote that she, along with her husband, Joe Wilson, ‘accused Cheney, Rove and Lewis “Scooter” Libby of participating in a “whispering campaign” to reveal Plame’s CIA identity and punish Wilson for criticizing the Bush administration’s motives for removing Saddam Hussein from Iraq.

Anybody with even a modicum of knowledge about this story should know that the allegations are totally baseless because it has already been established that Plame’s association with Wilson was only brought into the fray to inform media representatives they were producing inaccurate stories saying that the Vice President had sent Wilson to Niger based on their own interpretation of Wilson’s statement concerning that issue in his controversial New York Times op-ed.

It has also been solidly established that neither the Vice President or anyone from his office had designated there be an investigative trip to Niger and that it was Plame herself who had requested, not once, but twice that her husband be authorized to make the trip and that the CIA alone had authorized Wilson go to Niger.

Wilson’s op-ed was also filled with numerous other questionable accusations against the President and his administration as Wilson spouted off with a war protestor’s glee that ignited an anti-Bush fervor among the liberal ranks like few things ever has and started the fallacious ranting on the Left that ‘Bush Lied’.

Which is ludicrous at best. Wilson’s trip ended up being such a non sequitur that upon his arrival back from his trip to Niger he didn’t even bother to write a summary of the trip and gave only a short oral review to officials.

Yet he somehow felt compelled to attack the President in a mendacious op-ed because according to his assertion he didn’t find any evidence that Saddam had sought to purchase uranium from Niger.

This whole thing has gotten tired, but let’s clarify. Finding ‘no evidence’ doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, it means you didn’t find any evidence. A lack of evidence in a free society where democracy and justice is supposed to rule the day shouldn’t be able to be used to convict a person, yet Wilson indicted, tried and convicted the President in the media’s court anyway.

And for the record, Wilson wrote in his own book that he did discover information that at least one representative from Iraq had been in Niger and it could be assumed what that representative was there for since Niger only had one thing that Iraq would be interested in or could even use.

And an independent British report confirmed the intelligence their agency had reported and the President used in his State of the Union speech that apparently upset Wilson because he thought he had squelched that info from the British Intel and led to his eventual attack op-ed.

This whole escapade continues to be misreported by the mainstream press to this day. The associated Press report stated that Wilson’s trip was to discover the validity of the report that, ‘Saddam Hussein’s government had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger’.

The report never said anything about Saddam trying to buy anything in Niger, but that they ‘sought’ to buy yellowcake. Even a novice on the subject should realize that if someone had ‘tried’ to buy something, there would be some sort of trail to discover, but if they were simply ‘seeking’ to buy something, it would be nearly impossible to prove.

Yet Wilson did find evidence that someone from Iraq was in Niger and that person surely wasn’t on vacation. That is all the evidence one needs to prove that a representative for Saddam had been in Niger and had ‘sought’ something, presumably, uranium. Which is exactly what the intelligence officer Wilson talked to about that information told Wilson the agent thought the Iraqi was doing.

“Without even having had a chance to review the complaint, it is clear that the allegations are absolutely and utterly without merit,” spokesman for Karl Rove, Mark Corallo said referring to what many would call a frivolous lawsuit.

The lawsuit alleges that as punishment the defendants in the case intentionally, ‘destroyed (Plame’s) cover by revealing her classified employment with the CIA to reporters’ and the fact that the officials didn’t go directly to Wilson, they ‘embarked on an anonymous “whispering campaign” designed to discredit... (the Wilson’s) and to deter other critics from speaking out’.

Okay, that’s totally hilarious. According to their own premise, ‘Deep Throat’ should have gone to the Nixon administration instead of taking part in a ‘whispering campaign’ against them with the media, because it was obvious that he wanted to destroy Nixon and his administration!

Not to mention the fact that, again, it has already been established that the revelation of Plame’s connection to Joe Wilson was to warn reporters about false media reports they were producing alleging the Vice President had authorized Wilson’s trip to Niger, not to attack Wilson or his wife.

Plus, it was media representatives who publicly released Plame’s name and connection to Wilson at their own discretion, not because they were told to do so by any member of the Bush administration and members of the press in question already testified to that fact.

Robert Novak has even stated that he talked to CIA officials before he used Plame’s name and there was never any mention by them that releasing her name would be detrimental to her career. The issue of her being ‘outed’ is now a non-starter, so to try and keep that mantra going is nothing short of asinine.

It also seems to many that there is a monumental amount of hypocrisy on the Wilson’s part concerning this issue where they claim that the Bush administration tried to destroy them publicly, when, in fact, it was Joe Wilson who wrote the insidious op-ed that originated the uproar in the first place.

Maybe Wilson and his CIA employed wife, who argued for Wilson to take a trip to Niger in an apparent attempt to discredit the President’s stance against Saddam, should have confronted the President about his feelings towards war instead of publicly attacking him in a way that was viewed by many as effort to paint Bush as a liar.