Fair game

The current movie "Fair Game" (directed by Doug Liman) is a somewhat fictionalized account of a dreadful event in 2003, when the Bush White House used its power to destroy the career of a CIA agent, Valerie Plame (played creditably by Naomi Watts), in order to attempt to undermine the credibility of her husband Joe Wilson (played by Sean Penn). It is a story that is directly relevant to the question of WMDs in Iraq, and whether or not the Bush White House deliberately misled the public in order to justify the invasion of Iraq.

The story begins with an evaluation of the importation of a shipment of specially prepared tubes into Saddam's Iraq. After much analysis the CIA concludes tentatively that the tubes are not intended for centrifuges to purify uranium, but are rather ordinary tubes of the wrong length and diameter for that purpose, and are probably intended to be used in conventional weaponry. However, the Bush White House, evidently intending to find evidence for WMDs in Iraq, issues a report that claims that the tubes are intended for nuclear centrifuges. Valerie Plame, an active CIA agent involved in Middle East intelligence gathering and her colleagues are upset by this altering of their intelligence conclusions.

There is a report, attributed to the British (which they deny) that so-called "yellow cake" or uranium-containing ore is being exported from Niger to Iraq. There is a discussion in the CIA about how to find out if this report is true or not, and Plame suggests sending her husband, Joe Wilson, the former US Ambassador to Niger, who knows it well. The CIA accepts this suggestion and sends Wilson to find out. After meeeting people there and visiting the area himself he concludes that there is no way that 500 tons of yellow cake could have been trucked thru Niger to the border to be shipped to Iraq. When he returns he submits his report to the CIA, but then is chagrined to find that the White House completely reverses his findings and releases a report that indeed the yellow cake was exported from Niger to Iraq. In order to correct the record Wilson writes an op ed in the New York Times titled "What I didn't find in Africa." This undermined the WH story, and the presidential aide Karl Rove and VP aide "Scooter" Libby conspire to discredit Wilson. The scheme they come up with is to "out" his wife Plame, and so they leak a story to the well-known conservative correspondent Robert Novak. The title "Fair Game" comes from their designation of Plame. One of the accusations is that Plame sent her husband to Niger for the money involved, which was not possible since he would have needed higher CIA clearance. Nevertheless, by publishing her name openly, Novak and the WH destroyed Plame's credibility and her career, not to mention putting many of her contacts in the Middle East in jeopardy (a fictionalized story of Iraqi nuclear scientists is included to illustrate this aspect).

What is most striking in this story is that the WH aides, with enormous power, were perfectly ready to destroy the career of a valuable and dedicated CIA agent in pursuit of their "spin" on WMDs in Iraq, in order to justify the subsequent invasion and war. I admit as an ordinary observer that I was taken in by the Bush WH story of WMDs, including Saddam's pursuit of nuclear weapons from the centrifuge tubes and the yellow cake stories. Scooter Libby eventually went to prison for his actions, but was pardoned by Bush. After the Watergate incident, we should have learned not to trust the WH. Power corrupts.

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Note: At the moment the huge conflagration in the Carmel region is still burning out of control. Forty trainee prison staff from all over Israel were incinerated because their bus drove up into the middle of the forest. Many towns and villages have been evacuated. PM Netanyahu has labelled it one of the greatest disasters in Israeli history.