Plame in Iran: Cheney's First Friendly Fire Incident

On Saturday, Mr. Cheney shot a hunting friend in the face, a big Bush/Cheney friend and donor named Harry Whittington. [While "covering" the story for CNN, Chris Matthews called "Mr. Whitting... or whatever his name is." Nice and dismissive, Mr. Journalist, of the victim of a serious injury at the hands of the VP] Fortunately for everyone involved, Mr. Whittington is stable and doing well.

Yet well before his friendly fire incident on home territory, Mr. Cheney accidentally engaged in a much more threatening incident of and accidental shooting. Substitute Mr. Cheney's rich lawyer friend Mr. Whittington with The American Public; substitute Mr. Cheney's 28-guage with the building nuclear arms of Iran.

What am I talking about?

The Plame Affair.

You'll remember that last week Scooter Libby disclosed that his boss authorized him to leak classified information to the media about the CIA's WMD intelligence as a way to discredit Ambassador Joseph Wilson.
This directly led to the outing of Wilson's wife Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA agent. Dick, Scooter, and Karl wanted the world to think that Wilson's motivation was his wife's doing- that she had sent him to Africa to uncover the secret traffic of Nigerian uranium to Iraq. Wilson, upon hearing the President's Big Speech, wrote saying that, no, in fact, Iraq was not seeking Nigerian yellowcake.

And Plame's role was exposed. Every case she was working on immediately became threatened- every contact she'd made, every aspect of her job immediately destroyed by her outing. All of the intelligence that Plame's years of work instantly put at great, immeasurable risk by the actions of The Administration.

Well, Iraq wasn't looking for yellowcake when we invaded them, but guess who was? Iran.

And guess what country, it turns out, that Plame had been spending all her time on, and what intelligence, it turns out, has been utterly compromised by the actions of The Administration, and apparently by the Vice President himself?

The unmasking of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson by White House officials in 2003 caused significant damage to U.S. national security and its ability to counter nuclear proliferation abroad, RAW STORY has learned.

According to current and former intelligence officials, Plame Wilson, who worked on the clandestine side of the CIA in the Directorate of Operations as a non-official cover (NOC) officer, was part of an operation tracking distribution and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction technology to and from Iran.

Speaking under strict confidentiality, intelligence officials revealed heretofore unreported elements of Plame's work. Their accounts suggest that Plame's outing was more serious than has previously been reported and carries grave implications for U.S. national security and its ability to monitor Iran's burgeoning nuclear program.

While many have speculated that Plame was involved in monitoring the nuclear proliferation black market, specifically the proliferation activities of Pakistan's nuclear "father," A.Q. Khan, intelligence sources say that her team provided only minimal support in that area, focusing almost entirely on Iran.

Wow. HuffPo's Steve Clemons:

But another dimension of this story has to do with an assessment of the damage that her outing caused this nation. As we now start down a path towards harder-edged threats against Iran, allies will naturally question the quality of our intelligence given our failures on Iraq WMDs.

If Cheney & Co. outed one of the key intelligence operations monitoring the inputs and outputs of Iran's nuclear program -- then Cheney & Co. did vast damage to our ability to know what is real and contrived inside Iran.

Pretty frightening. Looks more and more like our Veep has pulled the trigger and missed what he aimed for- with dramatic and terrifying consequences- more than once since he's been in office.