We are Feeling a Little Bit of "Hubris" Whiplash

September 6, 2006

After the authors of "Hubris" wittingly or unwittingly set off a White House coordinated media effort -- with great success -- to make it appear that since Armstrong was one of the people -- the first perhaps -- to tell a reporter about Valerie Plame, Fitzgerald then was therefore a runaway prosecutor, we had our doubts about what the authors were up to.

In fact, the New York Times followed the lead of the "Hubris" Newsweek book excerpt and wrote a blatantly biased and misleading article in the Times about the Armitage leak. The Washington Post wrote a mystifying and appallingly inaccurate editorial vilifying Joe Wilson and Patrick Fitzgerald by implication.

The fact is that the Armitage leak changes nothing in regards to the current and possible future Fitzgerald indictments. Nor does it exonerate the White House of betraying our national security, particlularly in regards to the illicit trade of WMDs.

It's actually quite mindboggling in terms of being real actionable treason.

Now, David Corn, the co-author of "Hubris, is offering some actually meaningful and revealing information that may shed light on the motives of the White House in outing Valerie Plame. Corn, writing in The Nation and on his blog, discloses that Plame headed a special CIA desk that was looking into the existence of WMDs in Iraq, and also had some responsibilities for Iran. This was just before the invasion of Iraq.

Let us first of all say that we are relieved that Corn, who broke the story on the Novak outing of Plame (and which BuzzFlash immediately picked up upon), has something to offer in "Hubris" besides a diversionary story about Armitage.

But beyond restoring some credibilty to Corn, the information that he details about Plame's Iraq duties at the CIA, relating to WMDs, raises some profound questions about the White House's betrayal of our national security when they conspried to out her, and thus ruin her cover, put in peril her contacts in Iraq and around the world, and impair our ability to track WMDs.

What if the target of the presumed Cheney/Bush led campaign against Joe Wilson was not Wilson himself, but rather had Valerie Plame, his wife, in its sights. This theory would hold that Plame was a dissenter on the Iraq WMD issue at a time that Cheney was personally visiting CIA headquarters and putting pressure on the analysts to confirm the existence of WMDs in Iraq. As head of the Iraq WMD operations desk, Plame would be in a position to know the truth: that there were no WMDs in Iraq -- or that at the very least their existence could not yet be proven, thus meaning that there was no need to rush to war.

Joe Wilson may have just been collateral damage to the betrayal of his wife and her work on WMDs, because Valerie Plame may have known -- in fact was likely to have known -- that the truth was at odds with the White House lies about WMDs in Iraq.

If that is the case, the White House did indeed commit treason. At a minimum, it did grave harm to what it claims is its primary objective: keeping Weapons of Mass Destruction out of the hands of rogue states and terrorists.

If this hypothesis holds, Valerie Plame knew that they were deceiving the nation.

In the infamous words of Karl Rove, she was "fair game."

For ongoing updates on the PlameGate investigation, please read http://www.buzzflash.com.