Valerie Plame is finally going to be given a chance to tell her side of the story. It promises to be interesting testimony. The spin shitstorm from both sides promises to be amazing.

Valerie Plame, the CIA operative exposed after her husband criticized President Bush’s march to war, will testify next week before lawmakers probing how the White House dealt with her identity, the chairman of the panel said Thursday.

Also invited to testify March 16 before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is Patrick Fitzgerald, who this week won conviction of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby of obstruction and perjury in the case, said Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif.

Waxman said Plame has accepted the invitation and Fitzgerald has not responded. In a letter to the prosecutor, Waxman proposed a meeting with ranking Republican Tom Davis of Virginia to discuss the terms of any testimony.

The hearing will be the first public forum at which Plame has agreed to answer questions.

It’s about time. We need to bring everything out into the open.



  1. gquaglia says:

    The question is what is a good looking woman doing with that state department weenie.

  2. doug says:

    the same thing that Jill St. John was doing with Henry Kissinger, one assumes.

  3. Mr. Fusion says:

    I’m not sure what Plame can add to the discussion. It has already been established that she suggested her husband take the trip and Cheney asked the CIA to verify the yellowcake story.

    She won’t be allowed to discuss what she did at the CIA as most of what she did is classified.

    The interesting part will be when Libby gets his invitation. Will he need a subpoena or will he willingly testify? Will Bush hold off on the pardon until after Libby appears? Will Rove and Gonzalas also appear?

    Will Iran-Contra look like an international kissing fest in comparison?

    LET THE HEARINGS COMMENCE !!! Make James Hill proud she is a Bush supporter.

  4. Named says:

    1,

    Some guys have all the luck…

    I’d hit it…

  5. Greg Allen says:

    If a someone can get millions for spilling a cup of McDonald’s coffee in her lap, then surely Plame deserves a few million for having her career trashed by cynical, treasonous neo-cons because her husband dared tell the truth.

  6. JT says:

    #5 Valerie Plame’s career wasn’t trashed by this affair; if anything it’s been enhanced. Would anyone have ever heard of her if this hadn’t happened? She and her husband are celebrities now. I’m sure they’re both quite pleased with the outcome. They’ve got multi-million dollar book deals and speaking engagements in their future.

  7. Smartalix says:

    6,

    I believe that Plame regrets the loss of the intelligence network, contacts, and ongoing investigations destroyed when her cover was blown. I wonder if any of the operatives threatened overseas as a result of this right-wing snipe job will get any compensation?

  8. curmudgen says:

    #1 I could be gauche and ask her ex husband.

  9. Greg Allen says:

    #5 Valerie Plame’s career wasn’t trashed by this affair; if anything it’s been enhanced. Would anyone have ever heard of her if this hadn’t happened? She and her husband are celebrities now.

    Yeah, right!, celebrity is exactly what every undercover CIA agent wants.

    Besides trashing her career, I heard on the radio that the network

    The CIA network these treasonous conservatives brought down cost something like 100 million dollars to create. (I tried to Google it but no luck — but mostly likely untold millions of dollars went up in smoke.)

    Cripes-allmighty these cons are costing our country an arm and a leg.

  10. Walter Sobcheck says:

    What’s pathetic is that if this had all happened under the Clinton administration, the right would be screaming “treason” at the top of their lungs.

    But since it’s a Republican administration, it just an overblown misunderstanding.

    And no, I don’t believe the left would excuse this if it were a Democratic administration doing this crap. This is different from lying about a blowjob.

  11. Mr. Fusion says:

    #6, Actually, her career was trashed. Her ability to work under cover is gone. Everyone now knows what she does (did). Every part of her life will always be under scrutiny now. All her friends and associates will be under suspicion as to what they do. Her career possibilities are extremely limited.

    And worse of all, any friends she has made overseas could very well have their lives threatened.

    Oh yes, her career is trashed. Maybe she could make money from this. That, however is irrelevant. Maybe the neo-cowards and Republicans only see things in terms of money, but most people would really prefer doing something they enjoy over the money.

    And not everyone wants to be a celebrity. Even for 15 minutes. It’s called being “personally secure” or “confident”. Too bad so many neo-cowards and Republicans only know “insecurity”.

  12. Sounds The Alarm says:

    I have just a few words – Playboy layout

  13. GregA says:

    Mr Fusion,

    Its worse than what happened to her. Anonymous unnamed sources claim people are dead because of her outing.

  14. Mike says:

    #13, according to the Weekly World News, Bat Boy was sighted in the NYC subway… and they even have video!

  15. James Hill says:

    You just posted a pictured of a covert CIA agent. Enjoy spending the rest of your life in a fuck-me-in-the-ass federal prison.

  16. Sounds The Alarm says:

    “You just posted a pictured of a covert CIA agent. Enjoy spending the rest of your life in a fuck-me-in-the-ass federal prison”

    Leave your prison fantasies out of this.

  17. Ballenger says:

    The CIA says this isn’t the case, but so what if Plame did recommended Wilson for the Niger trip. Even if it is 100% true, given the importance of this topic evidenced by the resulting 3000+ dead Americans and 23,000+ wounded, the indisputable fact is that Wilson’s findings were ignored and that no attempt to verify or counter his claims with supportable facts. There has never been any question on Wilson being anything but qualified and capable. The “who sent Wilson?” angle is at best a Red Herring. Vague references on Wilson’s findings “being looked into and disputed” don’t cut when the subject is this important. If he was wrong, why he was wrong should have been easily documented. That wasn’t and still hasn’t been done.

  18. catbeller says:

    I detest the spin the post comment threw at us, the idea that there are two “sides” throwing out a “spinstorm”. There aren’t two sides, the “sides” aren’t morally equivalent and the only “SPIN” by definition is from Cheney, Rove, and all the rest of the lawbreakers who outed the agent to punish whistleblowers in the intel community. By definition, the other “side” consists of everyone else in the world besides Cheney, Rove, Libby and Bush. Plame doesn’t have a “side”, and she isn’t spinning a goddamn thing. She and her entire WMD Iran monitoring front company was blown to hell to retaliate against her husband. She didn’t have a “side”, she had a covert job.

    Bush and Fox News are a propoganda machine. It doesn’t logically follow that there is an equivalent and opposite other “side”. Sometimes bad people are just bad, and frame their evil by describing everyone else as an organized enemy.

  19. catbeller says:

    7: I doubt they got any compensation other than a torture chamber and a slow death.

  20. catbeller says:

    15: I believe Cheney and Rove already outed her. They seem to be fine. And the irony of your comment is not obvious to you, I know.

  21. catbeller says:

    13: Remember, dead brown people don’t count. No news organization will mention the covert people Cheney killed by nuking the CIA. Not even the Iranians who were helping us will get a single thought. The news organization have been purged of journalists and filled with “fair and balanced” millionaires.

    Jesus. What would we know today, if there had been no blogverse to keep these facts alive?

  22. catbeller says:

    What the hell does being nominated by your wife for the job have to do with anything? He did it on his own dime, you know. He was a former ambassador to the area, he was expert in nuclear proliferation and the engineering behing it. He was simply the perfect guy to do the job, and Valerie Plame was in a position to know it. AND he did the job — gratis, once more — by actually investigating the claim, an old, long disproved one. He told the White House and the CIA. Bush/Cheney willfully refused to believe the report, when even Tenet was trying to get it removed from the Powell speech. Wilson finally blew the whistle, and Cheney/Rove/probably Bush decided to take him down as an example to all the other CIA agents who also had the goods on the cherrypicked intel the White House shot into the air. Cheney especially wanted everyone to shut the hell up, and picked the most spectacularly evil way to do so: he f*ed up Wilson’s wife, and a hundred million dollar CIA operation monitoring Iran’s nuclear program. Just to make his point. “Shut. Up.”

    I must give context: Cheney hated, hates, the CIA, has since the seventies. He’s part of a Nixonian group of righties that despised the upper cruster spy organization for their patrician airs, and constantly through his career claimed that they were lousy spies, and underestimated the Soviet/South American/Terrorist threat. He’s set up alternative “intelligence” offices in both the Reagan and W. Bush White Houses, alt “intel” run by his cronies who fed him what he wanted to hear. In both attempts and creating his own spy information system, he consistently overestimated and fabricated threats that did not exist.

  23. Smith says:

    Ok, all of you conspiracy theorists who think Plame was really outed by Bush, Rove, and Cheney, how about reading what Novak has to say about the entire affair. I know that some of you wondered why this “neo-con” columnist was never indited over Plame’s outing, perhaps if you actually take the time to review WHAT REALLY HAPPENED . . . oh, never mind. Your heads would only explode if a real fact actually entered.

    http://tinyurl.com/ypwrzh

  24. GregA says:

    #23,

    You posted to a Robert Novak column. Hahaha, you are desperate. I love the smell of neocon desperation.

  25. Smith says:

    #24 LOL, you really haven’t a damn clue as to what the Plame story is about.

  26. GregA says:

    Hahahha,

    I see one glaring factual error in that opinion column by Novak(notice he is still lying about it). He claims that Fitzgerald has concluded that no crime was committed, which is simply incorrect. Fitzgerald has said the matter is still open.

    Mmmmmm, I love that Ode de Desperado!

    Do you have anything mainstream claiming that? Novak is too fringe (nevermind legally entangled) to be credible any more.

  27. MikeN says:

    How about all those newspapers that in the mainstream media that told us that the leaker wasn’t Cheney, or Rove, or Libby, or Bush, it was Richard Armitage. And this guy was against the Iraq war, so it’s not even a neo-con doing the leaking. Also, If yhou care to read the Senate’s report, you’ll find out that Joe Wilson’s trip actually strengthened the case for Iraq’s having WMD, and especially the 16 words that Bush made in the State of the Union.

  28. Mr. Fusion says:

    #27, Armatige admitted that he told Novak who Plame was, after being pressed by Novak. There was nothing sinister in Armatiges mistake. Rove, Libby, and the White House purposefully told journalists. In case you don’t get it, TWO high ranking administration figures told Novak. Who was the second?

    If this had been a more liberal journalist or first published in the NY Times or Washington Post then rest assured that the neo-cons would be screaming how the liberals endangered the CIA and all those still undercover. This is hypocrisy at its worse.

    BTW, the Senate Report isn’t worth the paper it is written on. There were no subpoenas and the WH didn’t fully cooperate or even fully answer when testifying. Very similar to the other Republican Committees for the past six years.


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