Was Valerie Plame a part of this faction? In his column naming her as a CIA employee, Robert Novak describes her as an 'operative on weapons of mass destruction.' Since most of the leaks coming from the CIA faction at war with the White House involved the analysis of the WMD threat from Iraq, it's tempting to connect the dots and say that Plame was part of a group that wished to, at the very least, prove that the CIA was not as wrong about WMD in Iraq as some in the Administration were saying. At worst, Mrs. Wilson may have been a party to an effort to influence an election by trying to embarass the President.
And by connecting the dots between Mrs. Wilson and other agency rebels who sought to take down the President, doesn't this open up a whole slew of questions about Mr. Wilson? The former ambassador has been portraying himself as a whistleblower. What if he was an errand boy instead? Wilson, by virtue of his former employment at the State Department could be the perfect front man for a propoganda campaign by his wife's employer to shift blame for the WMD fiasco from the agency's incompetence to the neoconservative hawks and their rush to war.
Another question raised by this effort of the CIA to discredit the President is about the complaint filed with the Justice Department by the agency when Mrs. Wilson's "cover" was blown.
Having worked at CIA headquarters at Langely for nearly 6 years, the idea that any foreign intelligence service who wanted to find out wouldn't have known of Mrs Wilson's employment at the agency strains credulity. The turnoff from the highway into CIA headquarters is clearly marked. Is it possible that foreign spies could have observed Mrs. Wilson entering the complex at Langely over a six year period? Or, more likely, could they have gotten a hold of a list of agency personnel who work at Langely? Given the number of truly damaging revelations regarding traitors over the years, it seems logical to conclude that a list of employees at Langely could be in the hands of one or more foreign intelligence services. The filing of the complaint over the leak could then be seen in the context of further efforts by the CIA to get back at the Administration.The question of whether or not Saddam wanted to purchase yellow cake uranium to augment his existing supply sitting in the Al—Tuwaitha facility, when viewed in the context of this White House—CIA conflict, becomes not a question of the CIA analyzing Saddam's intentions but rather a question of the CIA attacking the Administration's intentions. The rationale for war given by the President goes far beyond any disputed effort by Saddam to buy uranium. But the only way to attack the President's motives is by concentrating solely and exclusively on the lack of WMD. And since it's been widely reported that most western governments believed Saddam had a large stockpile of chemical and biological weapons prior to the invasion, the only possible line of attack by the President's opponents at CIA was the single reference to uranium found in the State of the Union address given by Bush in 2002.
Did the White House go overboard in its effort to push back against this effort by the CIA to discredit the President? At this point, it's unclear if any laws even were broken by Karl Rove or anyone else in the White House. But however the scandal shakes out, it would be hard to argue that Plame, Wilson, or Rove acted honorably and in the best interests of the United States.
