Valerie Plame Wilson

So I read about half of Fair Game: How a Top CIA Agent Was Betrayed By Her Own Government by Valerie Plame Wilson, played by Naomi Watts in the movie version (incidentally, there was also a movie named Fair Game starring Cindy Crawford in like the 80s or 90s; I presume it’s the same concept like oy, you’re a target and oy, you’re pretty. Hardy har har. Ms. Wilson is a very good-looking spy, so I can see how the movie and marketing people would get very excited over this dramatic story. Like if she were perfectly normal-looking, it’s doubt they’d plaster her face on the cover.

If you don’t remember the Plame Wilson story, here’s a refresher – Valerie Plame’s husband wrote an article in the NY Times that stated that there was no evidence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq (he went to Niger to investigate if Iraq bought a bunch of uranium or something and found none), which was the entire reason why Bush declared war there. After that article, Plame was outed as a covert operative and their lives were ruined (financially, business-wise, etc.) I think Libby Scooter (what was his name?) got charged for the leak and then George Bush pardoned him so he never really had to face consequences (which might be fine, since he might have been taking the fall for someone higher up in the food chain). It’s a pretty chilling story, which paints Karl Rove and his other cohorts as vengeful dudes, because there was no reason to out her other than to punish that family. They really weren’t winning anything except the petty satisfaction of showing who’s the boss. Regarding that whole administration? Good riddance.

But sadly, the book is bloodless. Plame is apparently known as a cool, analytical thinker, not a juicy storyteller so the whole thing doesn’t really have a pulse. The author expresses shock at the reaction to her husband’s actions, and part of me is thinking, Really? You didn’t think there’d be any ramifications of your husband publicly challenging your boss? I am not saying that outing her was right -– the Bush dudes were totally unethical and irresponsible, endangering not just Plame and her family, but all her contacts overseas (Really, Rove? Really?), but to not expect any possibility of fallout strikes me as extremely naïve, because I’m just a worker bee, but even I would wonder when the other shoe would drop…then again, I’m not the whistle blower type (too lazy).

In the end, it was a brave act; it was just incredibly boring in the retelling.