We Know The Who And The What, But What About The Why?

New information about Valerie Plame and her job at the CIA has come to light.  David Corn of The Nation, gives a sneak peak today into what he and Newsweek’s David Isikoff found while researching their book Hubris.  It turns out Valerie Plame was not so much a “desk jockey” as a critical part of the CIA’s effort to find evidence of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program as she headed up the Joint Task Force on Iraq.  This new revelation adds a new dimension to the story, that up until now has focused on who leaked the information rather than why, but it does seem to create more questions than it answers.

If Valerie Plame was such a significant player in helping the Bush administration prove their case for an invasion of Iraq, how exactly did she fall out of favor?  Was it simply that her husband, Joe Wilson, wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times basically calling the President a liar?  Was outing her status as a CIA operative a way of punishing Joe Wilson, or was it a way to remove Valerie Plame, who must have been viewed by the Bushies as a traitor by that point, from any further work in the CIA as well as ensure that she couldn’t reveal what she knew?

Recently we have learned that Richard Armitage was the original leaker and primary source for Bob Novak’s column that first publicly revealed Valerie Plame as a CIA operative, but as David Lindorf points out today, traditional media seems content to have the mystery solved rather than looking at why it was so important to this administration, particularly to Vice President Cheney, that Valerie Wilson be exposed.  And why no interest by traditional media about the secret meeting that took place in Rome between neo-cons in the Bush administration, Italian intelligence agents and shady characters from the Iran-Contra deal?  It’s not as if this information hasn’t been out there, I wrote about it back in December.  

It is staggering how our corporate owned press has gone out of its way to avoid investigating the shady deals and secret meetings that are the hallmark of this administration.  At the end of each day I come to the same conclusion, that the transformation of the press corps into a sycophantic press gaggle has done more damage to our democratic republic than this scandalous administration ever could.  After all, without their complicity, none of this, a ginned up war, fraudulent elections, illegal surveillance of American citizens, impeachable offenses all, could have happened.  They deserve the level of contempt that most people now have for them, maybe even a little more.