“Politics and ideology must be stripped completely from our intelligence services or the consequences will be even more severe than they have been and our country placed in even greater danger,” Plame self-righteously announced. She claims that, “in the course of the trial of Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff, Scooter Libby, I was shocked by the evidence that emerged. My name and identity were carelessly and recklessly abused by senior government officials in both the White House and the State Department. It was a terrible irony that administration officials were the ones who destroyed my cover.”
It all sounds pretty sinister. But let’s remember that Libby wasn’t on trial for exposing Plame. He was convicted of perjury, basically because his story disagreed with that told by reporters.
The only genuinely shocking news from the trial is that prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald knew all along that the leaker was former State Department official Richard Armitage. Yet Armitage hasn’t been charged with anything, and apparently won’t be. “I do not expect to file any further charges,” Fitzgerald said. “We’re all going back to our day jobs.”
Also, while Plame decries politics, let’s keep in mind that she and her husband, Joe Wilson, have been playing politics themselves.
They attended a breakfast sponsored by the Senate Democratic Policy Committee in early 2003. What on earth was a supposedly undercover operative doing at such a partisan gathering? Also, let’s recall that her husband wrote a misleading op-ed in The New York Times aimed at discrediting the Bush administration. That piece, titled “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” was debunked by a Senate Intelligence panel in 2004.
Intelligence gathering should indeed be beyond politics. But in this case it was the operatives who made intelligence into a political football.
If lawmakers really want to put politics aside, they should forget about Valerie Plame and U.S. attorneys and pass the emergency-spending bill to fund our military missions in Afghanistan and Iraq. That bill’s been larded with pork (millions for drought relief, peanut storage, etc.) and is sure to be vetoed because it insists all combat troops must exit Iraq by August 2008.
So while they may say they “support the troops,” for some lawmakers it’s apparently more important to score political points than to fund our military. “That’s Washington, D.C., for you. You know, there a lot of politics in this town,” President Bush told reporters recently. That’s for sure. And about all the wrong things.