13 July 2006

Round 2















WASHINGTON - The CIA officer whose
identity was leaked to reporters sued Vice
President Dick Cheney, his former top aide
and presidential adviser Karl Rove on
Thursday
, accusing them and other White
House officials of conspiring to destroy her
career.

In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court, Valerie
Plame and her husband, Joseph Wilson, a
former U.S. ambassador, accused Cheney,
Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby of
revealing Plame's CIA identity in seeking
revenge against Wilson for criticizing the Bush
administration's motives in Iraq.

Several news organizations wrote about
Plame after syndicated columnist Robert
Novak named her in a column on July 14,
2003. Novak's column appeared eight days
after Wilson alleged in an opinion piece in The
New York Times that the administration had
twisted prewar intelligence on Iraq to justify
going to war.

The CIA had sent Wilson to Niger in early
2002 to determine whether there was any
truth to reports that Saddam Hussein's
government had tried to buy yellowcake
uranium from Niger to make a nuclear
weapon. Wilson discounted the reports, but
the allegation nevertheless wound up in
President Bush's 2003 State of the Union
address.

The lawsuit accuses Cheney, Libby, Rove and
10 unnamed administration officials or
political operatives of putting the Wilsons and
their children's lives at risk by exposing
Plame.

"This lawsuit concerns the intentional and
malicious exposure by senior officials of the
federal government of ... (Plame), whose job
it was to gather intelligence to make the
nation safer and who risked her life for her
country," the Wilsons' lawyers said in the
lawsuit.

You can read the filed documents, here.

Firedoglake has more from Joe Wilson, here.

Plus, Eric Alterman provides a helpful reminder of why
Robert Novak -- who has now publicly admitted that Karl
Rove confirmed Plame’s identity for his article -- is (still)
a scumbag.