ok, i have to ask-Is it it possible they wanted to hurt Plame herself

[AlCzervik]

irregardless of her what her husband did? Did she know something was suspect with the Niger thing all along and this was their way of punishing her? If this has been asked and answered please excuse the dupe.

[jim3775]

1. I think it was more about shutting down her front company

Another theory is that it was the ultimate warning to future whistleblowers.

[AlCzervik]

3. that would sense, make her the canary in the coalmine.

i really hope the cia or someone is looking for all the people that worked with when she was undercover to make sure they're all ok.

[savemefromdumbya]

2. something that she was looking into nt

nt

[babylonsister]

4. Totally possible and probable. She worked

covert for Brewster and Jennings, deep cover, and she was outed.
I don't know who if anyone other than Ms. Plame was outed, but
I've heard various stories.
These guys messed up!

[John Q. Citizen]

5. There is the theory that bushco attempted to plant WMDs in Iraq

but got messed up when friendly fire foiled their plot. This theory proposes that the Plame network needed to be discredited/destroyed to minimize interference with the scheme from the CIA and Plame's WMD tracking group in particular.

There is a lot of circumstantial evidence that suggests this in the way of timing, motive, Judy Miller's imbedding and security clearence with the Iraq survey group, but my bet is Fitz is hep to it if there is something there.

[enough]

6. This idea is suggested by Justin Raimondo (Antiwar.com)

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=7743

snip>

Until now, I have never understood why, in the name of all that's holy, Scooter and his cabal went after Valerie Plame, the wife of the man they supposedly sought revenge on. It seems remarkably petty and small-minded, even for a neocon. To begin with, they must have known that such a course was risky, and out of all proportion to its possible benefits to their cause. As much as Scooter and his pals berated the CIA for not taking enough risks, it is unlikely they would have outed Plame without having a very good reason. A hissy fit on Scooter's part doesn't quite qualify. There is, on the other hand, another possible explanation, less emotional and more cold-blooded, one that – in the context of recent developments – makes a certain amount of sense…

Remember, the forgeries were exposed in early March 2003. The New York Times published Wilson's now famous "What I Didn't Find in Africa" op-ed on July 6, 2003 – and we now know that Scooter and the gang were homing in on Wilson even before his piece appeared. We also know that Ms. Plame wasn't the only deep-cover CIA agent outed by Scooter and the Cheney-ites: she worked through a CIA front company, Brewster Jennings & Associates, engaged in anti-proliferation work, whose activities were aborted by Plame's exposure. In one fell swoop, an entire group of undercover CIA experts on nuclear weapons proliferation was neutralized.

The CIA, after all, hadn't even gotten their hands on a copy of the forgeries until February 2003 – a year after the administration began citing them as "proof" of Saddam's nuclear ambitions. It would have been well within the purview of Brewster Jennings & Associates to trace the origins of the Niger uranium documents back to the forgers: surely they weren't sitting on their hands in the months before columnist Robert Novak printed Plame's name and sparked a furor.

Everyone assumes Libby and his co-conspirators were really after Wilson, but this now seems unwarranted, especially in light of Fitzgerald's reported focus on the Niger uranium forgeries. If this question of the forgeries is now within Fitzgerald's purview, it opens up the possibility that the conspirators really were after Plame on her own account. If Plame and her associates were hot on the trail of whoever forged the Niger uranium documents, by neutralizing Brewster Jennings & Associates the Libby cabal closed one possible route to uncovering their schemes – and opened up another one.

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