Plame (again)

Yesterday David Corn wrote this item for The Nation.
"What Valerie Plame Really did for the CIA".
If you don't care to read it, the summary is that Valerie Plame had a real job there, managing a secret group of people that were investigating WMD in Iraq.

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.

Let's walk back through history once again.
Joe Wilson, Plame's husband went to Niger to find out if Saddam was trying to buy yellowcake from the Nigerians. He returned, wrote a memo saying:

Wilson's reports to the CIA added to the evidence that Iraq may have tried to buy uranium in Niger, although officials at the State Department remained highly skeptical, the report said.

Later he then wrote an oped for the NYTimes essentially saying that Iraq never tried to get yellowcake and that the administration didn't listen to him.

if the president had been referring to Niger, then his conclusion was not borne out by the facts as I understood them.

In and amongst all of this, Wilson also said:

The report also said Wilson provided misleading information to The Washington Post last June. He said then that he concluded the Niger intelligence was based on documents that had clearly been forged because "the dates were wrong and the names were wrong."

"Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the 'dates were wrong and the names were wrong' when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports," the Senate panel said. Wilson told the panel he may have been confused and may have "misspoken" to reporters. The documents -- purported sales agreements between Niger and Iraq -- were not in U.S. hands until eight months after Wilson made his trip to Niger.

Based on all of this, I personally can only conclude that Valerie Plame likes to pillow talk. It seems that Joe returned, briefed everyone, went to bed, came up with different conclusions from his trip, later came up with some dates he shouldn't have known, wrote a new memo for the NYTimes based on his wife's data and caused this whole affair to start rolling.

Richard Armitage should not get the blame for ending Valerie Plame's career. (though he should be blamed for many, many things including wasting my taxpayer dollars)
Valerie's very loose lips should be blamed and she should be sueing herself!