On September 22, ex-CIA agent Valerie Plame tweeted out a link to an Internet article written by another notorious ex-CIA agent, Philip Giraldi. The article was headlined “America’s Jews Are Driving America’s Wars.” The article appeared on the Unz Review website, a dumping ground for anti-Semitic nonsense. Among the article’s odious assertions: Jews discussing foreign policy on television should be identified as such, “kind-of-like a warning label on a bottle of rat poison.”
It wasn’t the first time Plame has retweeted an anti-Semitic rant from the Unz Review, but this time people noticed. Plame publicly apologized and resigned from the board of the Ploughshares Fund (an organization notable for its efforts to help sell the Obama administration’s Iran deal).
It’s been 14 years since Plame was outed as a CIA agent after her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, wrote a New York Times op-ed disputing the intelligence the Bush administration relied on in deciding what to do about Saddam Hussein. Plame and Wilson were instantly embraced as the heroic opposition to the Iraq war. They were featured in countless glossy-magazine spreads. Two movies were made about their brave ordeal. They’ve been dining out on the controversy ever since.
And yet, for all that, the real takeaway from the imbroglio was one relevant to the present moment: It demonstrated, in the conviction of Scooter Libby (who was innocent of outing Plame), how special counsels run amok.
Now might finally be the time to admit that, whatever one thinks of the Iraq war, embracing Plame and Wilson as courageous truth-tellers was a mistake from the get-go. Theirs has been a highly politicized agenda all along. Just last month Plame launched a fundraising effort to buy a controlling share of Twitter stock, so she could kick President Trump off the platform. In the meantime, we suggest that Plame lead by example and get off Twitter herself.
