Interesting Take on the Valerie Plame Case 0
Chris Satullo, in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer, takes a realistic, and ironical, look at the insinuation that a trip to Niger was somehow a junket:
When White House leakers tried to discredit Joseph Wilson IV, their method was to insinuate that Wilson’s fact-finding trip to Niger in 2002 had been a junket wangled by his CIA-agent wife. In other words, rank nepotism.
Right. A junket to Niger. Niger?
Yes, sir. If you wanted to exploit your CIA badge to score a nice little perk for your hubby, where else would you send him but a sub-Saharan nation where 85 percent of the land mass is arid, where the annual per capita income is a whopping $230, and the locust swarms come repeatedly? Living large in West Africa, eh? Grounds for divorce is more like it.
(snip)
. . . First, Wilson was a logical choice for the mission. He was a highly praised deputy chief of mission in Baghdad during the first Gulf War (when Hussein really did have weapons of mass destruction) and a former ambassador in West Africa. He was not a sworn opponent of invasion at the time of his trip.
Second, all together now: a junket to Niger? The media may be dumb, but they know what a junket looks like. If they forget, all they have to do is follow Tom DeLay around.
