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Politics : FREE AMERICA -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PartyTime who wrote (2448)	4/8/2006 2:25:56 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Respond to of 14758

:( very sad,puzzling indeed. I believe this country comes first, not some charlatan in the WH.

To: PartyTime who wrote (2448)	4/8/2006 2:34:01 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Respond to of 14758

The spy forced out into the cold by Iraq war battle WASHINGTON, April 7, 2006 (AFP) - Valerie Plame was a glamorous CIA spy who married a former US ambassador who opposed the Iraq war. Her cover was blown, ending her career, but the scandal around her case threatens to drag down some even bigger names. Plame's name was illegally revealed in what her husband, Joseph Wilson, has said was an act of revenge by the White House for his opposition to the Iraq war. Now, a top former White House official, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, faces charges after an inquiry into who was behind the publicising of her name. President George W. Bush is also in trouble, because Libby has testified that the US leader authorized intelligence leaks ahead of the war in Iraq. While the CIA scandal has mounted in Washington, Plame, however, has quietly left the Central Intelligence Agency, saying she wants to look after her children. In mid-2003, after the United States invaded Iraq, Wilson wrote a newspaper commentary which publicly challenged the Bush administration's pre-war assertion that Saddam Hussein had sought to buy uranium from Niger for weapons use. Patrick Fitzgerald, the special investigator in the Plame case, said Libby's disclosure came as a result of "a strong desire by many, including multiple people in the White House," to repudiate the claims in the July 2003 article by Wilson. What Plame did during her career has never been disclosed, though media reports have said she was a specialist on weapons of mass destruction. It is illegal to deliberately name a CIA operative. Wilson has said the case will not stop him speaking out over the Iraq war. "Whatever the final outcome of the investigation and the prosecution, I continue to believe that revealing my wife Valerie's secret CIA identity was very wrong and harmful to our nation," he said when the charges against Libby were announced. "I feel that my family was attacked for my speaking the truth about the events that led our country to war. I look forward to exercising my rights as a citizen to speak about these matters in the future." Wilson was a hero before he married Plame or started attacking the Bush administration's case for the Iraq war. As charge d'affaires in Baghdad before the 1991 Gulf War, he defied Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and harbored hundreds of Americans. He once appeared at a news conference with a hangman's noose around his neck, warning Saddam: "If you want to execute me, I'll bring my own (expletive) rope." Trouble started after the CIA sent Wilson, a former US ambassador to Gabon and National Security Council expert on Africa, to Niger in February 2002 to investigate claims that Iraq tried to buy uranium for nuclear bombs. The mission grew out of doubts expressed by Vice President Dick Cheney's office over CIA intelligence on the alleged shipments -- which, if proven, would have been powerful evidence against Iraq. Wilson concluded it was highly doubtful such transfers took place. But the claim still found its way into Bush's annual State of the Union address in January 2003. The former diplomat hit back with a New York Times opinion piece in which he said, "If information was ignored because it did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq, then a legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretences." On July 7, 2003, the White House admitted the Niger claim rested on flawed intelligence and should not have been in the speech. Conservative columnist Robert Novak then reported that "two senior administration officials" told him Plame was a CIA operative who had suggested Wilson's mission. Libby was charged last year and Karl Rove, the president's key adviser, remains under investigation by the special prosecutor. politicalgateway.com