Collateral Damage

CBS is promoting a 60 Minutes segment: Valerie Plame: Bush Didn’t Keep Word

No one was ostensibly punished directly because of the leak, though Karl Rove, President Bush’s close adviser who was involved, resigned some months later. One high administration official, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, then chief of staff for Vice President Richard Cheney, received a jail sentence for lying to investigators probing the leak.

This irks Plame Wilson. “I don’t know about (President Bush knowing about the leak beforehand). But I, like most other Americans, saw President Bush say on TV that he would fire anyone from his administration found to be involved in leaking my name,” she says. “It turns out the president is not a man of his word.”

Plame Wilson’s 20 years at the CIA put her in touch with many individuals with whom she linked up secretly while pursuing intelligence on her mission to keep rogue nations from obtaining nuclear weapons. Did she ever hear if any of these individuals suffered because of the leak of her identity? “Yes I have. That’s all I can say,” she tells Couric, who then asks if it was bad news. “I have heard — I have had some news,” she replies.

Asked to assess the damage to these individuals, Plame replies, “It would be serious.”

Plame says the morning her identity was made public in the column of conservative newspaper columnist Robert Novak, the world’s intelligence services went to work.

That first paragraph illustrates a major problem with the legacy media™ – they mislead people when reporting about the Hedgemony.

“No one was ostensibly punished directly because of the leak, though Karl Rove, President Bush’s close adviser who was involved, resigned some months later.” Fitzgerald knew Rove talked to Novak in January, 2004 and Rove resigned in August, 2007. I think more than 3½ years rather exceeds the outer limit of the meaning of “some months.”

“Libby, then chief of staff for Vice President Richard Cheney, received a jail sentence for lying to investigators probing the leak” and was promptly pardoned and served no prison time.

There was no real punishment for the crimes. No one has paid for the damage to the nation’s ability to track Iran’s nuclear program, the focus of Ms Plame’s network. Some, or all, of the people she worked with were caught. It is very probable that they ended up in prisons or graves, and the Hedgemony does not give a damn.