Treason at the Top?

Sometimes, the big picture can be best understood by examining a critical detail.

The unspeakable cruelties of the Stalin years in Russia, for instance, came vividly alive in the movie, "Burnt by the Sun," where the focus was on the fate of one man, a military hero who was turned on and eventually murdered by the dictatorship.

In just this way, the arrogance of the current administration in Washington is spotlighted by the fate that has befallen Valerie Plame Wilson, the former CIA agent whose identity was made public by someone at the highest levels of the Bush administration, leaving her—and everybody her career had touched—"twisting slowly, slowly in the wind," in the memorable words of a previously disgraced Republican administration.

George W. Bush is no Josef Stalin—Valerie Wilson is still alive and is embarking on a book tour—but the story of her "outing" is a cautionary tale nonetheless, and she came to Burlington Sunday to tell it, courtesy of the Vermont Woman newspaper. The story is so compelling, and she tells it with such straightforward passion, that perhaps it will make a difference in the public understanding.

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Wilson’s talk sketched the details of a woman from a Republican military family, who accepted a hardworking career in the CIA, volunteering for assignment as a "nonofficial cover" officer, the most dangerous kind of post.

She saw herself as leading a life of public service, and though she is allowed to say little about her early postings, she ended up in a crucial unit trying to determine the extent of Iraq’s nuclear program under Saddam Hussein.

She also happened to be married to retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Wilson was the man who first dramatically exposed a fabrication, repeated both by President Bush in his State of the Union message and later by Sec. of State Colin Powell, at the United Nations. The fabrication involved a suspected shipment of nuclear material from the African country of Niger. Joseph Wilson had gone to Niger to investigate that story, on behalf of the government, and had reported there was nothing to it. When the story showed up as "fact" in the two speeches, he wrote a damning rebuttal in the New York Times.

Publicly, the Bush Administration apologized for including the false statement in the State of the Union address. Privately, it sought revenge against Wilson. That revenge took the form of the exposure of his wife as a CIA agent. Valerie Wilson matter-of-factly discusses in her book the havoc that exposure wrought on her own life, and she hints at the damage it did to American friends and security interests abroad.

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This kind of personal and institutional damage, inflicted so casually against patriotic public servants in the name of revenge, says more than we may want to know about our current leadership. During the end of the question session Sunday, Wilson suddenly put the events into crystal-clear form: If her identity had been exposed to a Russian operative, rather than to an American newspaper columnist, she said, it would have constituted an act of treason.

The traditional punishment for treason, of course, is hanging. In the case of Valerie Plame Wilson, however, the punishment for "Scooter" Libby (himself only a fall-guy) was a couple of years in jail—a punishment promptly commuted by President Bush.

We wish Valerie Plame Wilson all the luck in the world on her book tour. She has a story that needs to be heard, and she’s the right person to tell it.