A CIA agent's identity has been leaked in an apparent attempt to silence a Bush administration dissenter, and the only person to be put in jail thus far has been a reporter covering the story -and it isn't even the worm that first published the agent's name. In fact, he hasn't even been indicted. Farewell and ado to you, fair Spanish ladies.
Americans now know that Karl Rove -or Turd Blossom
Bush's nickname for Rove -did indeed reveal to a Time reporter that Joseph Wilson -a man who had written an op-ed piece in the New York Times alleging the White House's claims that Saddam Hussein was attempting to buy uranium from Niger were false -was married to Valerie Plame, a CIA agent. Americans also know that Rove even acknowledged that he had already said too much in the interview. According to a report from The Los Angeles Times, Rove and Scooter Libby, vice president of Dick Cheney's chief of staff, had targeted Wilson for a smear campaign.
After the initial shock, Democrats have been calling for Rove's head on a pike, smothered in BBQ sauce. Yet Republicans claim that Democrats simply are trying to use the controversy as a mud-slinging tactic, and assert that until Rove is charged -if ever -nothing can or should be done to punish him.
Also, President Bush has flip-flopped his first position on the matter -a hard-line promise that he would fire any employee if the individual in question was found to be connected with the leak -to a softer position of firing an individual only if criminal charges were brought against him or her. All the spin aside, every American, regardless of political affiliation, should be outraged.
Once Plame's identity was revealed, all American intellegence efforts were compromised. The intelligence community this president has dedicated himself to revamping after Sept. 11 might have been used to settle a political vendetta ----a vendetta that stemmed from somebody alleging that the administration's reasons for war were false.
Disturbing is only the tamest of words used to describe this scenario. Once government office and its employees begin to silence critical voices through underhanded -not to mention illegal -tactics, it is growing nearer to the fateful hour when the excrement starts slamming into a few spinning blades.
America has been lied to before about its wars, and the current administration knew how it reacted the last time this happened. The result: Someone put a government agent and agency in harm's way, just to settle the score with an individual who had the audacity to try to voice the supposed truth to the American people.
Dissent is what makes America great. I can call Bush an intellectual infantile with eerily puritanical social views and not have my extremities cut off. But if the American public tolerates this kind of behavior, how long before old Turd Blossom is reaching for his figurative machete? 17
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Eric Dryden
