Valerie Plame left out in the cold by the Bush Administration
Most informed Americans understand that Valerie Plame Wilson was a CIA operative. She was outed by Robert Novak because he wasn’t too bright. Yes, the Bush administration had feed her name to him (Richard Armitage didn’t really feed him her name but that’s a very long story). He had several warnings that intelligence reporters would have known what was up. Novak didn’t.
Anyway, so Valerie’s name is released. We all know the aftermath. She and her husband are smeared by the Right Wing. She does testify before Congress and clearly states that she was covert at the time of her outing. What I didn’t know what that Al Qaeda wanted to kill her. Larry Johnson, an ex-CIA agent, posted a story last night that Al Qaeda wanted to kill Valerie.
From Larry Johnson – In 2004 the FBI received intelligence that Al Qaeda hit teams were enroute to the United States to kill Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Valerie Plame. The FBI informed Valerie of this threat. This was just more “good” news piled on the fact that her intelligence career was in shambles, that intelligence assets she had recruited/managed were destroyed, and that she was unable to rebut publicly false and malicious smears of her character and reputation by a bunch of partisan Republican hacks. As the mother of two pre-school children, her first thoughts were about protecting her kids. She took the threat seriously and asked for help.
When the White House learned of these threats they sprung into action. They beefed up Secret Service protection for Vice President Cheney and provided security protection to Karl Rove. But they declined to do anything for Valerie. That was a CIA problem.
Johnson went on to note that the CIA didn’t do squat. Whatever happened to we protect our own? Oh, that’s the Army. What about we will not leave anyone behind? That’s the Marines. Shouldn’t the CIA have something similar? The Brad blog has some further information here. Still, I find this whole thing amazing.
