With Valerie Plame's testimony before congress essentially disintegrating the Right's talking points --
yes, her status was covert; yes, she had been on overseas missions in the last five years; no, her husband had not paraded his "CIA wife" on the tail circuit; no, she had not recommended him for the Niger mission -- team slander, otherwise known as the GOP, has found themselves without even their own self-iterated fantasies to fend off the obvious. They have as a result turned to the utterly vaporous. We're not culpable for our own actions because the CIA didn't try hard enough to stop us.
"This looks to me more like a CIA problem than a White House problem," spake Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, pointman as one of only two of the seventeen Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee who bothered to show up for Plame's testimony.
"Here was the important thing… Basically, my testimony was Shame on the CIA because if they thought she was actually covert, it was the sloppiest trade craft I have ever seen," spat Victoria Toensing, the creaky Republican operative who followed Plame before the same committee.
This is a particularly astounding rationalization being marketed as a talking point of last defense.
The administration and its mouthpieces knew of Plame's status, knew her background, knew the details of her work in the counter proliferations office of the CIA -- to the extent of noting "CP" on their internal memos -- while it is *common* Capitol Hill knowledge that counter proliferations is the most classified, most sensitive office at CIA, and still made a determined, extensive effort to reveal that information to the world and expose her and her work on behalf of the nation to any and all enemies of America -- and yet we are to believe the onus is not on the traitors who outed her but on the CIA for not trying more diligently to read their minds, determine their motives, and urge them strongly enough to dissuade them??? Wow. That is a workaround of staggering proportions. It's utterly defenseless idiocy to go down that path, and those on the right who take that position would do themselves better to find some other bunghole in which to retreat.
The fact of the matter is that
the CIA did contact Robert Novak, suggest the sensitivity of the information, and ask that it not be printed. Most journalists would take the hint. Most journalists are responsible enough to take the mere fact that the CIA was concerned enough to contact them as reason enough to hold a story and consider its implications. Novak is not stupid. He knew exactly what counter proliferations meant, and he still went forward with it as a scurrilous lackey of the administration.
What is often missed in press accounts is that Novak also named Brewster-Jennings, the CIA cover company under which Plame was "employed." He outed an ENTIRE operation, which even if dormant at the time, still had countless other covert agents and their contacts connected to it.
As Ms. Plame testified before congress, the disclosure "jeopardized and even destroyed entire networks of foreign agents, who in turn risk their own lives and those of their families to provide the United States with needed intelligence. Lives are literally at stake."
This was an act of people whose loyalty resided not with the nation but with their own political machine. Brewster-Jennings slipped loosely on the same tongues that damned Plame. It was known to them, and by that very fact, they were intimate with what their petty political slap meant -- and it didn't matter to them one whit. Now that same political machine wants to defend that act of premeditated betrayal by some pathetic reasoning that it was the CIA's fault for not stopping them??? The most telling thing about such a defense is how much that machine strategizes on an absolute belief in the stupidity of America. It is the central engine of their policy.
The testimony of Valerie Plame extinguished years of the noise machine lying points. It is time for accountability and to silence that machine's last ridiculous refuge. We owe that to Valerie Plame and Ambassador Wilson. We owe it to ourselves. Call the vice president. Put him under oath. Force him to testify. Make him claim the fifth or executive privilege. Expose him either way.
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