1 Boring Old Man

Plame seeks to resurrect lawsuit against Bush administration in CIA leak case

Former CIA operative Valerie Plame is trying to resurrect a lawsuit against those in the Bush administration she says illegally disclosed her identity.

A federal judge dismissed Plame’s lawsuit last year, saying there was no basis to bring a case. Plame’s lawyers asked a federal appeals court Friday to send the case back before the judge and force him to consider its merits. Plame and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, sued Vice President Dick Cheney; his former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby; former White House political adviser Karl Rove and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.

Plame’s CIA position was revealed in a syndicated newspaper column in 2003, during a time when her husband was criticizing the march to war in Iraq. Armitage and Rove were the original sources for that story, which Plame believes was retribution for Wilson’s criticism. The article touched of a lengthy criminal investigation. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald never charged anyone with the leak but convicted Libby of obstruction and lying to investigators. During the trial, it was revealed that Libby and former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer also discussed Plame with reporters.

Plame says those leaks violated her constitutional rights. But U.S. District Judge John D. Bates dismissed the case, saying the law requires Plame’s complaints be raised under the Privacy Act. Plame’s attorneys say that law is insufficient. They asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to send the case back to Bates for reconsideration. With the exception of Cheney, those named in Plame’s lawsuit have left the administration.

It’s not over as far as I’m concerned. It’ll never be over, certainly not for Valerie Plame. Ms. Wilson [Valerie Plame] was a couvert C.I.A. Agent, towards the latter part of a career. She’d married a retired Diplomat, Joseph Wilson, and had a set of twins. She was working at Langley trying to keep up with the Administration’s urgent requests for evidence that Saddam Hussein had nuclear  weapons. Her husband wrote an op-ed in the New York Times criticizing the pre-War Intelligence, based on his own experience.

Had the Administration not had plenty to hide, the op-ed would have quickly blown over. But they did have a lot to hide, and so they exposed Valerie Plame’s identity to discredit her husband [and his allegations]. So, in a day, her career was ruined, and the C.I.A. lost a somewhat senior person. The Administration got off scott free because no one could prove that they knew she was couvert when they outed her – ruining her career and jepordizing security aside.

So, she has a more than legitimate beef. But the case itself needs its day in court. It took years to run down the  facts, but finally all of the Administration’s lies and half truths were exposed. They did exactly what it seemed all along – ruined her career to punish and silence her husband for telling the truth.  And the case exposed the fact that the Bush Administration took us into a disasterous, expensive war on no grounds. This case was and is the gateway to the biggest Presidential Hoax in American history – an as yet unending  war of aggression in the Middle East.