Cashing in as a "Secret Agent"

[sirs]

BY JAMES TARANTO
Monday, January 8, 2007

Judge This Book by Its Author's Cover
Scooter Libby is set to go on trial soon for charges tangentially related to the Valerie Plame kerfuffle. Meanwhile, Plame is looking to cash in on her career as a "secret agent," but is running into resistance:

A CIA panel has told former officer Valerie Plame she can't write about her undercover work for the agency, a position that may threaten a lucrative book project with her publisher. . . .

Plame recently hired a lawyer to challenge the CIA Publications Review Board, which must clear writings by former employees. The panel refused Plame permission to even mention that she worked for the CIA because she served as a "nonofficial cover" officer (or NOC) posing as a private businesswoman, according to an adviser to Plame, who asked not to be identified discussing a sensitive issue. "She believes this will effectively gut the book," said the adviser. Larry Johnson, a former colleague, said the agency's action seems punitive, given that other ex-CIA undercover officers have published books. But even Plame's friends acknowledge that few NOCs have done so.

A few years back almost everyone on the left, from the lowliest blogger to the mighty New York Times, was acting as if the mere fact of Plame's employment with the CIA was a huge secret, the breaching of which was a terrible affront to national security. Now she wants to write a "lucrative book" about "her undercover work for the agency"--a book that presumably will include more than one sentence, and thus will go into some detail about what she did there.

Where's the outrage? Browsing the Times editorial page and the Angry Left blogs--Daily Kos, Atrios, Puffington Host and most especially Talking Points Memo--we couldn't find any mention of the big-bucks book deal.

It is sad to realize that many of those who once treated Plame as a put-upon patriot did so merely out of partisanship, not love of country.

Article

[Plane]

Precident?

Yes!


86

Maxwell Smart

The worlds most famous secret agent!

http://www.wouldyoubelieve.com/cone.html

[Brassmask]

So, what you've done here sirs is post definitive proof the Plame WAS indeed undercover and when Libby, Cheney, Bush, Novak and the rest blew her cover.

Thanks.  I hope you now support Cheney and the gang all going to jail.

[Amianthus]

So, what you've done here sirs is post definitive proof the Plame WAS indeed undercover and when Libby, Cheney, Bush, Novak and the rest blew her cover.

Obviously she didn't think so, or she wouldn't have thought to write a book about it.

[sirs]

So, what you've done here sirs is post definitive proof the Plame WAS indeed undercover and when Libby, Cheney, Bush, Novak and the rest blew her cover.

Actually Brass, if you were paying attention at all, it demonstrates precisely the opposite.  If she had been "undercover" this book deal would never have seen page 1.  The fact she is pushing it demonstrates all along how she was never "covert", made all the more so by the FACT that even after Fitzgerald's thorough investigation, at no time was she classified as "covert".  And the lack of outrage by the left also reinforces how bogus the claim was originally as well

Go fish

[Plane]

Does Mrs Plame consider her work to be important? and the secrets and identitys of informants to be important to keep?