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Bush Too Unruffled
By CIA Leak

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
10-14-3

President Bush seems oddly complacent about the fact that one or two of his top people may have intentionally exposed an undercover CIA agent, compromising that agent's work, safety and undercover contacts.
 
That's an incredibly serious matter, and the continued presence of such a person in the White House ought to worry the president immensely. The fact that the exposure was an act of petty, mean-spirited political revenge against a political opponent ought to outrage him, particularly given his pledge to restore integrity to the White House.
 
But apparently it doesn't. Bush has shown no sign of anger at the leak and, in fact, has publicly suggested that he doesn't think an investigation will succeed in finding the culprit. That doesn't concern him much either. He is trying to treat it as a leak just like any other leak, in a town that leaks like a sieve anyway.
 
This is not any leak.
 
The agent in question, Valerie Plame, has been a CIA operative for almost 20 years, recruiting and running undercover agents overseas to gather intelligence on the spread of weapons of mass destruction. That is a critically important line of work, so important that certain nations have even been known to go to war over WMD.
 
So how did Plame become the target of "two senior administration officials," who exposed her identity to columnist Bob Novak and other Washington reporters?
 
Well, she also happens to be the wife of retired U.S. diplomat Joseph Wilson. And Wilson has become a hated figure within the Bush administration for his role in exposing false claims that Iraq had been trying to buy enriched uranium for use in a nuclear weapon.
 
That act made Wilson fair game for political counterattack by the Bush administration, and he apparently understood that. However, it most assuredly did not make Wilson's wife a legitimate target. Nor can it justify exposing her as a CIA operative, which is classified information.
 
Bush, by his apparent indifference, sends the disturbing message to his staff that such behavior is no big deal. That reveals more about his administration than all the investigators in the world ever could.
 
© 2003 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
 
http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/1003/10cia.html;COXnetJSessio nID
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