Vice President Cheney prsonally directed the campaign to smear Joe Wilson, including authorizing the leaking of a classified document about Wilson’s trip to Niger to the media:
[Cheney] directed his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, on July 12, 2003 to leak to the media portions of a then-highly classified CIA report that Cheney hoped would undermine the credibility of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, a critic of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, according to Libby’s grand jury testimony in the CIA leak case and sources who have read the classified report…
[The] disclosure that Cheney instructed Libby to leak portions of a classified CIA report on Joseph Wilson adds to a growing body of information showing that at the time Plame was outed as a covert CIA officer the vice president was deeply involved in the White House effort to undermine her husband.
Dear Leader was not involved, so don’t even go there:
Both Libby and Cheney have repeatedly insisted that the vice president never encouraged, directed, or authorized Libby to disclose Plame’s identity. In a court filing on April 12, Libby’s attorneys reiterated: “Consistent with his grand jury testimony, Mr. Libby does not contend that he was instructed to make any disclosures concerning Ms. Wilson [Plame] by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, or anyone else.”
Apparently, nobody told Scooter not to reveal Plame’s secret identity:
The previously unreported grand jury testimony is significant because only hours after Cheney reportedly instructed Libby to disclose information from the CIA report, Libby divulged to then-New York Times reporter Judith Miller and Time magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper that Plame was a CIA officer, and that she been involved in selecting her husband for the Niger mission.
So revealing the identity of a spy whose job was tracking the black market for WMDs is not treason when Republicans do it?
Well, Plame was going to descredit the lies that will take us to war against Iran. Remember, this administration thought they would pull out of Iraq with a puppet regime in place a long time ago.
The chimperor and company has repeatedly told us that we were going to be fighting their wars for generations.
Yes, neutralizing Plame did keep these issues out of the MSM during the 2004 election cycle. Perhaps the real intention was to eliminate her and the WMD specialists to enable the same set of lies to be used in Iran.
This is all about transfering wealth from the U.S. Treasury to the military-industrial complex, destroyin the fiscal integrity of the U.S.
This, in turn, will set the fiscal agenda in this country for generations to come. It is a sure thing that they will destroy Social Security after 2006 – chimpy has already proclaimed there is no “trust fund” and he has not intention, despite the U.S. Constitution, of honoring that debt.