Never Hear The Discouraging Word
With danger looming to derail the Bush regime plan for world domination, the chickenhawks in the media are flocking to the rescue.
Clifford D. May, president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former New York Times foreign correspondent, claims that Valerie Plame Wilson persuaded her CIA superiors to send her husband to investigate the Niger Yellowcake claims, a mission for which May declares “[Wilson] was unqualified and … he brought back misinformation that he marketed to the public through credulous journalists.”
Or is it instead that “credulous” journalists - like National Ledger’s Jack Kramer and May - are marketing misinformation? Kramer is asserting “Plame and her husband Joe Wilson are like rock stars to many of the members of congress [sic]. Don’t expect any tough questions from the left…”
Sending the unqualified on missions of great importance and peddling lies are trademarks of today’s Republican power elite. So should we be taking these chickenhawk town criers at their word, or should we allow the hearings to progress and maybe discover that these paid shills are merely attempting to derail the investigation of alleged treasonable actions taken at the highest levels of our government before it can cause - in the words of Associate Supreme Court Justice Antonin “Tony The Fixer” Scalia - irreparable harm to George W. Bush?
To begin with, as the “person of interest” to the wrong-wingers bent on supporting a wannabee world dictator, Plame denies she recommended her husband for the fact-finding trip to Niger, protesting that she did not have that authority. Her job was to counter proliferation of WMD, and included investigating the now discredited claims of Saddam’s weapons programs through managing and operating secret worldwide operations which sometimes meant that she herself “traveled to foreign countries on secret missions to find vital intelligence.”
Plame Wilson knew her identity could be discovered by foreign governments, but as a “non-official cover” agent, she traveled “without the protection of a diplomatic passport.” If caught by a hostile government while on such a mission, she could have been executed. Those who exposed her for partisan political purposes to discredit her husband and his investigation have committed the treason of which Plame Wilson and her husband have been accused by Bush supporters in the media.
It was instead the administration itself, which claims to be defending the nation from the very terrorism it perpetrated against the Wilsons directly and the nation by extension, which is treasonous.
“It was a terrible irony that administration officials were the ones who destroyed my cover,” Plame Wilson testified to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, adding that it was not common knowledge on the Georgetown cocktail circuit that everyone knew where she worked.
“My name and identity were carelessly and recklessly abused by senior government officials in the White House and U.S. State Department,” she said. “They should have been diligent in protecting me, and every CIA officer.”
“They all knew that I worked with the CIA,” Plame said. “They might not have known what my status was but that alone—the fact that I worked for the CIA—should have put up a red flag.”
“I felt like I had been hit in the gut,” she said. “I could no longer do the work which I had been trained to do.”
She put into simple American English what it means to our national security operations that she was exposed as a CIA agent:
“If our government cannot even protect my identity, future foreign agents who might consider working with the Central Intelligence Agency and providing needed intelligence would think twice,” Plame said in response to a question.
It was a fair statement. How can one trust partisan politicians with the defense of the nation when they can’t even defend against a 66-year-old man from jumping the fence at the White House?
The current occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue don’t ever want to hear bad news like this breech in their personal security, nor that of the national security, when such revelations as Joe Wilson’s report that the alleged purchase by Saddam of tons of uranium-oxide “yellowcake” was false and fabricated, become common knowledge. It ruins their self-image, something they laughed about when it was fashionable to belittle Dr. Spock’s theory of developing self-esteem in children. They may have been right, for look at what the children are doing now!
But I digress.
Clearly, the Bush administration knew that the yellowcake claims were lies, for if Wilson’s finding was incorrect, why did the Democratic Senate report on 8 March 2002 that Wilson’s trip provided little or no new information? If it wasn’t already known to the White House and to “trusted” members of the Congress, it would have been a perfect time to prevent the very expensive war that subsequently ensued from this administration claim. There would have been nothing factual for the Oval Office to use in its defense of its casus belli, for they don’t like to investigate anything which doesn’t fit their bald-faced lies. What other motive can be ascribed when the director of the Office of Security at the White House admitted that the White House has never ordered any action as a result of the outing of Plame Wilson?
So for all those chickenhawks out there who are flocking to the nest of the Bawling Eagles, they might want to heed the words of US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. When he announced Scooter Libby’s indictment over the coverup of Plame Wilson’s exposure, he said:
“I think we should conduct this like any other criminal investigation:
charge someone or be quiet.”
They can’t shut up, for they have nothing else with which to condemn the Wilsons without exposing their own flockheads to investigation. They would much prefer that we be focused on something else, for as Taylor Marsh asserts at Huffington Post, “If Democrats weren’t in the majority in Congress, Valerie Plame would never have been heard.”
Would that we have heard the last of the chickenhawks instead.