Okay, you can start by explaining to me why, when Cheney made a perfectly reasonable request to the CIA to check out the British reports of Iraqi officials looking to buy yellowcake in Niger, didn't the CIA send somebody competent?
Instead they sent bigmouth Joe Wilson, whose only experience (if you discount his wife's employment) was being a minor diplomatic staffer in Niger. No WMD experience at all. He was also an active Democratic partisan already acting as an advistor to the Kerry campaign. When he came back, instead of writing a report according to standard procedure, he did an oral debrief to the CIA and to the Senate Intelligence Committee. He told the latter that he HAD been told of Iraqi officials visiting Niger.
Then instead of being told to keep quiet, again according to standard procedure, the CIA approved him writing up his trip on the op-ed page of the NYT! Where he changed his story and said that he had found nothing, nothing at all, and Cheney knew because Cheney had sent him, etc.
If anybody had been in doubt where Valerie Plame Wilson had been working, Joe's op-ed would have been enough evidence to out her right there and then.
When Cheney's office began asking the natural question - "who the bloody hell sent Joe Wilson to Niger?" and trying to tell reporters than Joe Wilson had not been sent by Cheney and was not the big expert on WMD that he claimed to be, his wife got him the gig; the CIA all of sudden develops a TREMENDOUS concern for Valerie Plames supposedly covert status (still unconfirmed to this day, reaonable people may draw their own conclusions about the actual nature of her status), requested that the Justice Department investigate the crime of her outing!
Tell me it's normal CIA procedure to send a partisan operative of the opposing party whose only qualification is marriage to a CIA analyst on a mission requested by the White House, and then bless him sliming the sitting administration on the pages of the NYT, and THEN demand a criminal investigation when the White House begins asking questions, and I might admit I'm imagining the CIA conspiracy. |
