Plamegate Is Not Over

After all the noise about the bizarre relevation of the non-secret that Armitage was involved in leaking Plame's identity to the press, after a weekend of plaming (sic) blame, The Nation released details about Plame's real job at the CIA.

Valerie Wilson was no analyst or paper-pusher. She was an operations officer working on a top priority of the Bush Administration. Armitage, Rove and Libby had revealed information about a CIA officer who had searched for proof of the President's case. In doing so, they harmed her career and put at risk operations she had worked on and foreign agents and sources she had handled.


But that summer--before 9/11--word came down from the brass: We're ramping up on Iraq. Her unit was expanded and renamed the Joint Task Force on Iraq. Within months of 9/11, the JTFI grew to fifty or so employees. Valerie Wilson was placed in charge of its operations group.


[...]In 1997 she returned to CIA headquarters and joined the Counterproliferation Division. (About this time, she moved in with Joseph Wilson; they later married.) She was eventually given a choice: North Korea or Iraq. She selected the latter. Come the spring of 2001, she was in the CPD's modest Iraq branch. There was great pressure on the JTFI to deliver. Its primary target was Iraqi scientists. JTFI officers, under Wilson's supervision, tracked down relatives, students and associates of Iraqi scientists--in America and abroad--looking for potential sources. They encouraged Iraqi émigrés to visit Iraq and put questions to relatives of interest to the CIA. The JTFI was also handling walk-ins around the world. Increasingly, Iraqi defectors were showing up at Western embassies claiming they had information on Saddam's WMDs. JTFI officers traveled throughout the world to debrief them. Often it would take a JTFI officer only a few minutes to conclude someone was pulling a con. Yet every lead had to be checked.

The WaPo led the charge on Friday with an editorial calling the conspiracy proven wrong and blaming Wilson himself for Plame's outing. Hours later Media Matters refutes WaPo's assertion using very pages of the Post! More at Next Hurrah.
Saturday, the Weekly Standard released it's broadside against Plame and Wilson. But as emptywheel at the Next Hurrah points out, the Weekly Standard has been a mouthpiece for the Administration by repackaging Feith lies about the now debunched connection between Al Qaeda and Sadaam.
The fact is that all this is window dressing in preparation for the election. While Armitage may have leaked it first, the White House's Rove and Libby picked it up from there useing the information to destroy the career of an undercover agent working on weapons of Iraqi mass destruction whom they thought failed in her mission. Her unit could find no WMDs in Iraq. Worse yet, they destroyed one of our only sources of intelligence on Iranian nuclear ambitions by outing the entire cover company she was working for, Brewster Jennings & Associates. Iran has emerged as the second most dangerous threats to world peace. To date there has been no formal criminal investigation for what surely appears to be traitous behavior for political gain.
Fitzgerald had plenty to investigate from FBI reports of suspicious behavior by Rove and Libby. Hopefully, more will come of this. Spin doctor Rove's silence suggests he's still worried.
Can anyone say 'whitewash'?