1 Boring Old Man

Richard Armitage is back on the news [in response to the publication of Valerie Plame’s book]. Crooks and Liars has his Wolf Blitzer interview here and here. For review, he says he knew of Valerie Plame from a memo, one prepared by the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research [INR] on June 10, 2003 after Joseph Wilson began asking questions around Washington. Here’s the memo Armitage had seen:

He told Robert Novak about Valerie and a week later, Novak wrote his now famous story outing Ms. Wilson [Valerie Plame] by name. The outstanding question, Did Armitage know more than simply having read this memo? He says he did not use the name Valerie Plame, yet shortly thereafter, Novak used her name when talking to a friend of Joe Wilson’s on the street. Somewhere, lies have been told – Armitage? Rove? Novak? Scooter? or all the above? The thing that has saved them all is that no one [Fitzgerald included] could prove that any of them knew Valerie was covert.

We’ve all been over this and over this a million times. It’s clear that Cheney, Libby, Rove, Fleischer, and probably Bush were involved in outing Ms. Plame Wilson as a way of discrediting her husband, Joe Wilson. Why? Because he said that they had distorted the Intelligence in order to get us into a war with Iraq, and he said it because it was true. So, this is the known truth:

• The Executive Branch of the United States government distorted Intelligence they knew to be false to justify invading another country without direct provocation.
• The Executive Branch of the United States government released the name of a Central Intelligence Agency employee to discredit her husband who confronted their deceit.

So Armitage is self-effacing, and sticks to his bumbling fool story. I don’t actually believe him. But here’s the rub. What we know the Administration did is monsterous independent of the details of what they did or did not know about Valerie’s C.I.A. classification. They started a war on falsified grounds, and then they tried to cover it up by attacking her husband, the truth-sayer. In the process, they destroyed Valerie Plame’s career, on purpose. Why those things are not grounds for impeachment will forever remain beyond my comprehension. And how they can argue that this incredibly disasterous war was a good idea anyway, even if they lied to get it started, because Hussein was a bad man is equally absurd. It’s the “ends justify the means” in it’s worst form – because the truth is the “ends” and the “means” are both predictable disasters. They are bad men – very bad men.