Refresher Course On Why White House Outed Valerie Plame

It occurs to me that those of you who have only recently learned of the Bush White House's outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, may not have seen the New York Times column that started the whole ugly mess.

Plame's husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, had been sent by the Bush administration to Africa in 2002 to verify a suspected purchase of uranium yellowcake by Saddam Hussein and to thus substantiate much of the rationale for the war that was to be launched against Iraq.

Joe Wilson didn't find what they wanted.

"It did not take long [in Niger] to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place," said Wilson in his New York Times Op-Ed piece on July 6, 2003, a couple of months after Bush went to war anyway.

Given that Team Bush was making bold statements in direct contradiction to what Wilson had found – and told them about – they decided to go after Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, to teach him a lesson. It's just that simple.

And it is for that crime that the Bush administration's point men, Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, wait to be indicted.

Please go here to read the rest of Wilson's column, What I Didn't Find in Africa.