An "a-ha!" moment

jaylake points to a piece by Sy Hersh in The New Yorker about the various plots and counter-plots in the Bush Administration about Iran. But while interesting, there's a definite "kremlinological" moment that goes by in passing.

“They’re moving everybody to the Iran desk,” one recently retired C.I.A. official said. “They’re dragging in a lot of analysts and ramping up everything. It’s just like the fall of 2002”—the months before the invasion of Iraq, when the Iraqi Operations Group became the most important in the agency." {emphasis added}

Oh.

Really.

"The most important..." you say?

Huh.

Because the head of the Iraqi Operations Group was once described as, "a desk jockey." In fact, while the head of Iraqi Operations Group was a covert officer, then-White House press secretary Scott McClellan suggested that their identity wasn't a secret at all.

Who was the head of Iraqi Operations Group?

Valerie Plame.

"In 1997 (Plame) returned to CIA headquarters and joined the Counterproliferation Division. (About this time, she moved in with Joseph Wilson; they later married.) She was eventually given a choice: North Korea or Iraq. She selected the latter. Come the spring of 2001, she was in the CPD's modest Iraq branch. But that summer--before 9/11--word came down from the brass: We're ramping up on Iraq. Her unit was expanded and renamed the Joint Task Force on Iraq. Within months of 9/11, the JTFI grew to fifty or so employees. Valerie Wilson was placed in charge of its operations group."

So, let's not mince words with what Karl Rove did, when he burned the identity of Valerie Plame in a fit of pique (or at the orders of Cheney, depending on how grim you want it): Not only was she a covert operative. Not only was she working in Counterproliferation. Not only, out of the spectrum of CPD's work, was she in charge of operations for the Joint Task Force on Iraq, the single most sensitive country being monitored by CIA at the time.

She was in charge of CIA's "most important (group) in the agency"!

That was the level of damage Karl Rove did.

This administration keeps insisting we're in a fully legal "war."

If so, the evidence continues to build that Karl Rove violated Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution, and if convicted, should be locked up as the treasonous bastard he is.