Valerie Plame Affair

Too lazy to do this myself right now.

Brief outline:

1. Valerie Plame was a covert CIA operative working on weapons proliferation.

2. Her husband, Joe Wilson, was involved in investigating the "yellowcake" uranium that Saddam Hussein was supposedly trying to obtain from Niger.

3. 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".

4. 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 is leaked to the media. The suspected pathway is from VP Dick Cheney's office to Robert Novak, among others.

5. 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".

6. Right wing bloggers joke about Plame and Wilson being the next expected "perp walkers", for no reason I can understand.

7. After many machinations and much political opinion-mongering, Cheney aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby is convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in the ensuing investigation of the "outing" of Plame. Many suspect powerful people submit 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.