Did Bush Know or Was he Oblivious?
Whoever leaked Valerie Plame’s name to the press has “compromised intelligence sources and methods” and frittered “away the unity of purpose that President Bush has properly invoked as a necessity in combating international terrorism.”
If they destroyed the carefully constructed and expensively maintained persona given to what the CIA calls a NOC — an agent with non-official cover, who lacks the protections afforded by a diplomatic passport — Bush’s political strategist Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis Libby, crossed what should be a bright red line.
Noted in an Editorial in the Boston Globe, today, “Such betrayals might have been expected in the Cold War.”
They should not occur because political operatives in the White House want to tarnish the reputation of a critic or settle scores with a CIA they may regard as too reluctant to tailor its analyses to the talking points of a vice president or a president.
Bush may soon be forced into choosing where he stands on this issue…
Did Bush know that Rove and Libby — or whoever the sources were — betrayed Plame’s cover and with it the CIA front company that supposedly employed her? Or was the president oblivious? Bush may soon have to choose between the role of participant in a coverup or an out-of-the-loop chief executive.
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