Plame Was Working On Iranian Nukes
Posted on | October 21, 2007
It’s helpful to remind ourselves that the Administration’s current hand-wringing about Iranian nuclear power is bogus. We had CIA operations devoted to monitoring and preventing proliferation in Iran, at least until a certain petty and vindictive White House decided to expose them:
CBS News has confirmed, in advance of a 60 Minutes interview with outed CIA agent Valerie Plame to be run this Sunday, that Plame “was involved in operations to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons.”
“Our mission was to make sure that the bad guys, basically, did not get nuclear weapons,” Plame told 60 Minutes. Plame also indicated that her outing in 2003 had caused grave damage to CIA operations, saying, “All the intelligence services in the world were running my name through their databases” to see where she had gone and who she had met with.
CBS states further that Plame “was involved in one highly classified mission to deliver fake nuclear weapons blueprints to Tehran. It was called Operation Merlin, and it was first revealed in a book by investigative reporter James Risen.”
Risen’s book, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, was published in October 2006, eight months after Alexandrovna’s initial reporting. Risen discussed Project Merlin in the book but did not mention that Plame had been part of it.
Whatever the Bush Administration says is important can be ignored—but it doesn’t take much effort to see past their little dramas and get to the heart of what they really want. They’re liars, to a man, but for all their practice they’re still lousy at it.
