Here is more background. The core of the campaign to discredit Joe Wilson was the false allegation that his "CIA wife" had arranged to "send him on a junket". In order to do this, they had to reveal the specifics of Plame's CIA employment and publicize that Plame, as a married, public person, was Valerie Wilson, wife of former diplomat, Joe Wilson.
The potential here, in addition for the unwarranted and unnecessary act of putting Plame in the public eye to "get" her husband and weaken his allegations about the "16 words" in the 2003 SOTU address, is the executive branch obstruction of the Plame leak investigation, and the president's commutation of the prison sentence of his co-conspirator, Libby:
Quote:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...NG3NI70TI1.DTL
Special prosecutor links White House to CIA leak
Fitzgerald says many wanted to undermine administration critic
David E. Sanger, David Johnston, New York Times
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
....Even on Monday, Bush found himself in an uncomfortable spot at a Johns Hopkins University campus in Washington, when a student asked him to address Fitzgerald's assertion that the White House was seeking to retaliate against Wilson.
Bush stumbled as he began his response before settling on an answer that sidestepped the question. He said he had ordered the formal declassification of the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq in July 2003 because "it was important for people to get a better sense for why I was saying what I was saying in my speeches" about Iraq's efforts to reconstitute its weapons program.
<h3>Bush said nothing about the earlier, informal authorization that Fitzgerald's filing revealed for the first time.</h3> The prosecutor described testimony from Libby, who said that Bush told Cheney that it was permissible to reveal some of the information in the intelligence estimate, which described Hussein's efforts to acquire uranium.
But Monday, Bush was not talking about that. "You're just going to have to let Mr. Fitzgerald complete his case, and I hope you understand that," Bush said. "It's a serious legal matter that we've got to be careful in making public statements about it."
It is now clear that Fitzgerald's account of what was happening in the White House that summer of 2003 is very different from the Bush administration's narrative, which suggested that Wilson was regarded as a minor figure whose criticisms could be answered by simply disclosing the underlying intelligence upon which Bush relied.
It turned out that much of the information about Hussein's search for uranium was questionable at best, and it became the subject of dispute almost as soon as it was included in the intelligence estimate in 2002.
The answer to the question of whose recounting of events is correct -- Bush's or Fitzgerald's -- may not be known for months or years, if ever. But it seems certain that there will be more clues to come, including some about the conversations between Bush and Cheney.
Fitzgerald said he was preparing to disclose to the defense 1,400 pages of notes -- some presumably in Libby's own hand -- that could shed light on two very different efforts at getting out the White House story.
One of those efforts -- the July 18 declassification of the major conclusions of the intelligence estimate -- was taking place in public; <h3>another, Fitzgerald argues, was happening in secret, with only Bush, Cheney, and Libby involved.</h3>
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Up until now, we have only the testimony of a later convicted perjurer, Libby. This morning, Libby's testimony was publicly corroborated by the man who the white house claimed, spoke for them, officially, as their designtated, chief spokesperson, every day for three years!