1 Boring Old Man

For the last year, I’ve taken out my frustration with our government on a sort of daily basis by writing here. The abiding issue for me has been the leaking of undercover C.I.A. Agent Valerie Plame’s identity, and the reasons for doing it [namely the Niger Forgeries, the Administration’s holding on to them and using them to start a war]. I guess I should be worried about the possibility of World War III in the Middle East, or the other insanity of the Republican Administration, but that would be inauthentic. Right now, there’s only this one story that really never leaves my front page.

I know why. It was such a monsterous act to use known false intelligence [the Niger Forgeries and the "Aluminum Tubes"] along with the state of shock after 911 to trump up this absurd, unprovoked war with Iraq. I still cannot believe that they really did it. A group of idealogues actually thought we ought to unseat Saddam Hussein, and made up reasons to do it – destabilizing the Middle East further, alienating our Allies, renouncing the U.N., spending untold amounts of money, killing thousands of human beings, etc. So Plame leads to Niger leads to Iraq and the whole rise of a brand of neo-fascism in the guise of the war on terror. It’s like a row of dominos.

Even if Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame look like a couple from an [aging] James Bond movie, they’ve put the issue on the table and kept it there. I think what they’re doing now is courageous. Whether they win or not is irrelevant. What matters is that this bunch of self-righteous incompetents we call our government gets exposed for what they are – unprincipled, bullies.

Please give to the http://www.wilsonsupport.org site so that they can keep up the good fight…

about the C.I.A.:I hope the suit will be able to amplify a much overlooked aspect of this case – this Administration is very negative about the C.I.A. and has been from the start. I suspect that this leak had as much to do with discrediting the C.I.A. as it had to do with revenge against Wilson. In fact, the whole thrust of the A.E.I. and P.N.A.C. attack on Clinton was that he was being ‘lead astray’ by the C.I.A. And the C.I.A. was one of the early Bush/Cheney attack points, and later the target of several purges. One even wonders, since Plame was in the W.M.D. area of the C.I.A., if she were a primary target, maybe not by Cheney and Libby, but by cronies like Feith and Bolton. I know of no reason for them to be so down on the C.I.A. except that the Agency didn’t agree with them. As nuts as this Administration has been about snooping, it’s amazing how they’ve ignored our professional snoopers…