Months ago, President Bush acknowledged that blowing a secret government agent's cover is a bad thing.
Yet, in federal court last week, Dick Cheney's lawyers argued it was okay for a White House official to blow ex-CIA agent Valerie Plame's cover back in 2003, because Plame's husband Joe Wilson had publicly criticized Bush's approach to the Iraq war. Outing Wilson's wife was just an ordinary part of a hardball policy debate.
Plame and Wilson are suing Cheney and other Administration officials . . . .
In court, Plame's lawyer, constitutional-law expert Erwin Chemerinsky, re-clarified the issue:
"This isn't a case where the government said mean things about Mr. Wilson. This is about revealing the secret status of his wife to punish Mr. Wilson . . . .This is egregious conduct that ruined a woman's career and put a family in danger."
In July 2003, Wilson wrote a New York Times op-ed that asked this question: "Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq?" Wilson's answer:
"Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."
Today, those words don't seem unusual, untrue or even mean. But Wilson spoke out two years before Hurricane Katrina blackened the Administration's eye--a time when criticizing anything Bush brought on shrill accusations of treason or a basball bat to the knees.
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