Outing Valerie Plame aided our enemies (Ewegen in The Denver Post)

[struggle4progress]

By Bob Ewegen
Denver Post Columnist
Article Last Updated: 07/06/2007 09:57:24 PM MDT

~snip~ I am not angry at the commutation or the pettifogging partisan exchanges it spawned. I am angry at the underlying event - the fact that an American patriot whose only crime was to serve her country in a dangerous and honorable profession had her mission undercut for partisan political purposes. ~snip~

In the intelligence trade, such foreign sources are called "assets." I call them heroes. And they are the ones who were put most at risk after columnist Robert Novak revealed Plame's CIA connection as part of a clumsy Bush administration effort to discredit her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had become a critic of the Iraq war. ~snip~

The outing of Plame may have been technically legal, as the commutation of Libby's sentence undoubtedly was. But our supreme law, the U.S. Constitution, still defines treason as giving aid and comfort to our enemies in time of war.

And in this aging veteran's eyes, that's exactly what Armitage, Cheney, Libby and Novak did.

http://test.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_6316023

[baldguy]

1. Can we impeach the bastards now?

[dennis4868]

2. "The outing of Plame may have been technically legal"

Huh?

[struggle4progress]

3. Why do you think Cheney was babbling about his supposed non-obligation

to control classified information?

Between Armitage's dishonorable act and Novak's dishonorable act were a string of other dishonorable acts, including an executive order by President Bush empowering Vice President Cheney to declassify classified information

[pat_k]

4. which is why impeachment is a POLITICAL not a legal process.

With impeachment, reality can't be trumped by appeals to legalistic "complexity" and technicality. No one can claim it is too complex for the likes of us "commoners." No expert's claim that the emperor is clothed can sway us when we can all see he's naked.

Impeachment is about We the People asserting our sovereign authority to "fire" officials who violate our trust, subvert the Constitution, or otherwise abuse the power of office.

Too bad the numerous lawyers in Congress fail to grasp the simplicity. All too often, it is the "sophisticated" who get taken in. It is the people "in the know" who are sure they can see clothes on a naked emperor.