Anyone remember the Plame affair?

FDL used to be the goto site for Plame stuff, but they got very involved in the Democratic Senate primary in Connecticut and are now focusing on ABC's fictional mini-series about 9/11 which Jane Hamsher refers to as "the wingnut hit piece that ABC is about to release, to quote Digby, without commercials as a "gift to the Republican party" in an election year". Digby has been performing yoeman service on this topic as you can see in his own postings here, here and here which are, as always, well worth reading.

But I want to focus on the Plame affair, especially in light of the hype surrounding the revelation that Dick Armitage was one of two "senior administration officials" who had leaked classified info to Bob Novak. Somehow, the "fact" that Armitage may have leaked information too (though, perhaps, not maliciously) is supposed to somehow mitigate the culpability of Libby, Rove, Cheney, et al. UPDATE: Kevin Drum has thoughts on this too.

One of the essential right-wing defenses of Plame's outing being no big deal, is the claim that she wasn't really undercover, more of a "desk jockey". Well, what Digby calls a "bombshell" in the Nation tells a very different story.

Valerie Wilson was no analyst or paper-pusher. She was an operations officer working on a top priority of the Bush Administration. Armitage, Rove and Libby had revealed information about a CIA officer who had searched for proof of the President's case. In doing so, they harmed her career and put at risk operations she had worked on and foreign agents and sources she had handled.

[...]

In 1997 she returned to CIA headquarters and joined the Counterproliferation Division. (About this time, she moved in with Joseph Wilson; they later married.) She was eventually given a choice: North Korea or Iraq. She selected the latter. Come the spring of 2001, she was in the CPD's modest Iraq branch. But that summer--before 9/11--word came down from the brass: We're ramping up on Iraq. Her unit was expanded and renamed the Joint Task Force on Iraq. Within months of 9/11, the JTFI grew to fifty or so employees. Valerie Wilson was placed in charge of its operations group.

There was great pressure on the JTFI to deliver. [...] The JTFI found nothing.

[...]

As a CIA employee still sworn to secrecy, she wasn't able to explain publicly that she had spent nearly two years searching for evidence to support the Administration's justification for war and had come up empty.

In light of this, Digby concludes:

Now I realize that it would be imprudent of me to suggest that her group's failure to adequately provide the vice president with the information he needed might have prompted him to tell his henchman Libby to burn her, but, you know I'm like that.

Armitage may have just been a gossipy little busybody from way back, but that doesn't explain LIbby and Judy and Rove and Cooper or the "two senior administration officials" who tried to get the Washington Post to print that Wilson's CIA "wife" had sent Wilson on a "boondoggle." Rove said she was "fair game." You simply cannot persuade me that every last person involved in this did not know that the head of the Joint Task Force on Iraq's WMD at the CIA in 2003 was the person they were busy making sure was publicly outed.

Wilson scared the hell out of them because they knew who his wife was and knew what she knew. This is about Cheney and the CIA, whom he and all the neocons have thought were a bunch of liberal appeasers for decades because they have so often failed to back up the wingnuts' most fanciful, paranoid wet dreams about the boogeyman of the day --- wet dreams, by the way, which were always, everytime, proven false in the end.