Valerie Plame Wilson Book

So far there is no apparent desire for redemption driving the press to report on the treachery of senior officials. Instead, the mainstream press has compounded its complicity by giving the Bush administration yet another free pass and shifting blame.

With the outing of my covert identity by Robert Novak in July 2003, I went from being a very private person whose entire professional career was devoted to the idea that discretion was paramount, to a public persona in the middle of a media maelstrom literally overnight.

As egregious as treason may be, doing nothing about it is even worse. The Democrats in Congress have made political calculations rather than standing up to their Constitutional obligations.

There has been an increasing trend to allow politics to spill over into the world of intelligence and I believe that it degrades the intelligence mission, its product, and is detrimental to our national security.

A CIA officer must be satisfied that he or she is "clean" before performing any operational act. And so it is on the book tour.

The core mission of the CIA is to provide unvarnished intelligence of national security import to policy makers. General Hayden casts the role of the CIA in paramilitary terms.

What hasn't been discussed in any depth yet is how the CIA fought to censor large portions of my book -- an attempt to demean and diminish me and my responsibilities at the Agency.

My publisher decided to print the blacked out redactions demanded by the CIA and hopefully those passages speak for themselves and the extent to which the CIA thought the material in the book was classified.