On MSNBC last night Valerie Plame called the Bush Administration's outing of her undercover CIA status TREASON. Asked if she anticipated that Bush and Cheney would retaliate for Joe Wilson's Op-Ed article outing the Administration's case for the Iraq War by attacking her, she said that that was not on their list of contemplated consequences of speaking the truth to power. Never, she said, did she think that the Administration would compromise national security for domestic political gain.
Parenthetically, we have learned how gigantic the fraud perpetrated by the Administration was. Hans Blix, the weapons' inspector leader whose mission was cut short by the US invasion, said that IAEA knew in a day that the claimed Niger connection was a complete fraud. Blix was astounded that such an obvious fraud nonetheless made its way from Italian intelligence to the British and then to the Americans.
Although we can never be certain, it has been reported without contradiction that Valerie Plame's undercover work at CIA involved tracking weapons programs in Iran. Thus, when Cheney told Libby about her identity, and to reveal that to selected reporters, as a means of retaliating, he was providing aid-and-comfort to enemies of the United States. That's treason.
As egregious as treason may be, doing nothing about it is even worse. The Democrats in Congress have made political calculations (and, wrongly concluded from the Clinton impeachment that it would work against them), rather than standing up to their Constitutional obligations.
The information supporting Plame's assertion emerged from Fitzgerald's investigation and the Libby trial.* Cheney's authority--granted by Bush---to declassify secrets may insulate him from criminal charges of revealing State secrets But, it does not change the treasonous nature of revealing and thus compromising a program key to our national security.
Wilson spoke truth to power, and paid for it, as if he, or the truth, were the villian. So long as Cheney remains unimpeached, the real villain goes unpunished, and the impetus for future whistleblowers to step forward is diminished.
And, so are we all.
*(I first wrote about this at the time of the Libby trial, see here)
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Posted October 26, 2007 | 10:32 AM (EST)