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Wednesday, October 1, 2003
Plame name blame game
Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., insists that Attorney General John Ashcroft appoint a special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame case -- and rightly so.
It was at a local Inslee forum that Plame's husband, retired U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, laid the blame for "outing" his wife as a CIA operative at the steps of the White House.
"It's of keen interest to me to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove (Bush's top political operative) frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs," Wilson said.
Conservative columnist Robert Novak reported in July that "two senior administration officials" told him Plame suggested Wilson be sent to investigate reports of Iraq trying to buy uranium from Niger. "Wilson never worked for the CIA," Novak wrote, "but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction."
While Novak's decision to use Plame's name begs a journalism ethics debate, releasing her name to him or any reporter may well constitute a felony.
Sunday, The Washington Post said that White House officials had contacted six Washington reporters to disclose Plame's CIA identity. The presumed motive was retaliation for Wilson's claim that the Niger uranium connection Bush cited as justification for the Iraq war was bogus-- something the White House later conceded.
Republicans called for a special prosecutor nearly every time a paper clip was out of place in the Clinton White House. The allegations in this case reach to matters of national security and criminal acts and deserve vigorous, independent investigation.
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