Seven years after top officials in the Bush administration turned their world upside down in an attempt to convince the public to support the war in Iraq, Amb. Joseph Wilson and outed CIA agent Valerie Plame said they still have not received an apology from anyone involved.Apparently Valerie Plame 'deserved' to be outed as a covert officer in the CIA's counter-proliferation division, because her husband's report which followed his investigation of the claim that Saddam had purchased enriched uranium from Niger did not line up with the Bush administration's contention that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, including materials for manufacturing nuclear weapons.
"No, in a word," Plame laughed and told The Huffington Post when asked if she or her husband had heard from any Bush officials. She said the closest thing she has received to an apology is when Richard Armitage, the former No. 2 at the State Department, publicly said it was "foolish" of him to leak Plame's undercover CIA identity.
"One of the things that we have always tried to say is that whatever has happened to us as a consequence of the battles we've been involved in over the last seven years, and however painful it may have been for us, it is nothing compared to what has been done to our country -- and particularly the service people and their families -- by the ill-conceived war in Iraq and by confusion of what the mission was in Afghanistan," Wilson told The Huffington Post in an interview on Friday.Yes, indeed. No good deed went unpunished for those who did not hew to the party line in the feverish atmosphere within the Bush administration as it prepared to invade Iraq.
Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson are patriots in the truest sense of the word. I was outraged by Plames' outing, and I'm still outraged today that this sort of dastardly deed was done in the name of pursuing a war which should never have started, a war that was justified on the basis of lies and misleading information. As Wilson describes the situation in Baghdad today, we will leave behind a sad legacy, which cost us and the Iraqi people dearly, but it's way past time for us to go.
Valerie Plame's picture from Wikipedia. Joe Wilson's picture from Military Religious Freedom Foundation.
Add to that a new report that over $60 billion was lost in those two countries in the last decade to fraud, waste, etc. (not to mention the planeload of bills that simply disappeared as part of the "stimulus" plan for Iraq).
ReplyDeleteWonder if Eric Cantor wants an offset of those losses before we spend any more money in either country?
They served our nation faithfully and were punished for it. Those who were bent on destroying our nation and othernations go free. It is a shame, a scandal, and a sin.
ReplyDeleteMy visceral hatred of W and Cheney has not gone away. I cannot avoid the word "evil" and its anagram "vile."
Rmj, Halliburton, The Shaw Group, and Blackwater were in Iraq with breathtaking speed to steal us blind.
ReplyDeletePaul, I feel the anger well up when I think of the days in the run-up to the Iraq war. Even I knew there were very likely no WMD.
We knew it was most likely falsehood and/or exaggeration because we had been paying attention. Attention must be paid!
ReplyDeletePaul, I knew thanks to bloggers who highlighted stories that the Big Media newspapers were too frightened to place on the front page but buried on the inside pages, while the likes of Judith Miller's misreporting were featured.
ReplyDelete