EDITORIAL - A Valerie Plame moment?

Who among us remembers either Valerie Plame or Joe Wilson, if we ever knew about them?

Well, they happen to be husband and wife, she an ex-spy, he a business consultant and former diplomat, whose names became popular in the United States for a period in the middle of the last decade.

Plame used to work for the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), sometimes posted overseas under cover as a business official. Her husband once served as a diplomat in Iraq just ahead of the first Gulf War.

This wouldn't have been common knowledge until around 2003 when Ms Plame was 'outed', not for some high-minded cause but vengeful petulance.

This, broadly, is how it went.

In the aftermath of the Osama bin Laden-led attack on the US in 2001 and America's invasion of Afghanistan to oust al-Qaida, the neocons were searching for a way to take the war to Iraq to dislodge Saddam Hussein and complete a job they felt should have been accomplished a dozen years earlier.

Weapons of mass destruction

The argument against Saddam was that he was linked to the 9/11 attacks. But more important was the claim that Saddam had amassed weapons of mass destruction and was advanced in developing nuclear arms. One part of the argument was that Saddam was attempting to source uranium from Niger for the nuclear programme.

This is where Joe Wilson enters the picture.

He had once served as the US ambassador to Niger, and so had knowledge of the place and personalities. He was, therefore, informally dispatched by America's security to Niamey to determine whether the information was true.

Wilson's assessment was that this claim against Saddam was untrue. Yet, several months later, then President George W. Bush repeated, in a public speech, the claim about the Iraqi regime's supposed attempt to source uranium.

In a July 2003 article in The New York Times, Mr Wilson, who questioned the evidence on which America was preparing to go to war, wrote: "I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's weapons programme was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."

Taking revenge

The following week, the syndicated columnist, the late Robert Novak, outed Ms Plame as a senior CIA operative, saying that the only reason why Mr Wilson got the Niger assignment was because of his wife's connections in the intelligence community.

In a sense, Ms Plame's personal security, as well as broader natural security for that matter, was compromised out of ideological peeve.

The issue, though, was not that Mr Novak had identified Ms Plame, but the source of the deliberate leak that was designed to embarrass. It came from Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, the chief of staff to the then vice-president, Dick Cheney.

Mr Cheney was later convicted for his action, although one New York Times journalist spent time in jail for declining to reveal her source with regard to the leak and other information. Mr Cheney, ostensibly, was never personally implicated in the scandal.

The Plame affair should give rise to caution for Jamaicans who have such sensitive information.

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