Why the Neocons Outed Valerie Plame

It wasn’t because of what Joe Wilson wrote debunking the Niger yellow cake story, even though he was right that the yellow cake deal was BS. They outed Valerie Plame because of what Valerie Plame herself had done.

Valerie Plame headed up the CIA’s WMD interdiction unit. She and her cover company, Brewster Jennings, were responsible for identifying and preventing illicit trafficking in WMDs and related materials around the world. She was the top expert in this.

Remember in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, Rumsfeld said “We even know where they are” referring to WMDs in Iraq. How could he “know” that, especially in view of the fact that there were no WMDs in Iraq. He could only have known that for sure if the neocons were about to secretly plant WMDs in those locations. Then they could “find” them after the invasion. This was their ace in the hole, the ultimate justification for the invasion. This was how they could fix the intelligence and get away with it.

Valerie Plame’s group deprived the neocons of their ace in the hole by preventing the movement of those WMDs into Iraq. That is what so enraged the administration that they would lash out to punish her. Joe Wilson and his op-ed piece only provided unwitting cover for the career assassination of his wife.

If this is true — and it must be, with Rumsfeld claiming to know in advance where the WMDs were located in Iraq, and with Valerie Plame heading up that particular CIA operation — it means the Bush administration has destroyed the ability of the U.S. to monitor and interdict clandestine WMD related activity in the world. All because they were ticked off at Valerie Plame, whose actions prevented the false justification for the Iraq invasion that the neocons were counting on.

That, my friends, is treason.