The Valerie Plame Affair

From RationalWiki

The Valerie Plame Affair is one of political intrigue and shenanigans.

A brief outline of the events:

1. Valerie Plame was a covert C.I.A. operative working on weapons proliferation.

2. Her husband, Joe Wilson, was sent to Niger by the C.I.A. to investigate the allegation that Saddam Hussein was supposedly trying to obtain "yellowcake" uranium from Niger.

3. George W. Bush referred to the attempts by Saddam Hussein to get uranium from Africa in his State of the Union address after the C.I.A. had already determined that the story was a hoax.

4. Joe wrote a NY Times op-ed piece declaiming the administration's claims regarding the yellowcake - ie, pointing out that the intelligence showed it not to be "fact-based".

5. Now it gets murky. In what appeared to be political retribution for Joe's op-ed piece, Ms. Plame's identity as a covert op was leaked to the media. The suspected pathway is from VP Dick Cheney's office to Robert Novak, among others.

6. The illegal release of this classified information destroys Plame's cover, her work and perhaps career, and the cover of the sham company for whom she "worked".

7. After many machinations and much political opinion-mongering, Cheney aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby is convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in the ensuing investigation of the "outing" of Plame. Many powerful people submitted amicus briefs calling for leniency. He is fined and given a jail sentence. President Bush commutes the jail sentence, but does not pardon him.

Rationalwiki's perspective on this is not the partisan politics so much as the bogus "science" involved in ignoring the evidence uncovered by the US government, in order to pursue the administration's agenda.