A neighbor's view of Valerie Wilson's 'outing'

By Christopher Wolf

Joe and Valerie Wilson are my next door neighbors in a hilly neighborhood just west of Georgetown. We moved in within months of each other seven years ago, attracted to our respective houses by the view of the Capitol in the distance and the Washington Monument in the foreground. The patriotic view is stirring. <snip>

On Friday of July 4, 2003, the Wilsons and I walked down Reservoir Road to MacArthur Boulevard for the annual Palisades neighborhood parade. The parade is a very small town kind of affair, with people marching their dogs in red, white and blue costumes and the local fire engines driving by with the crew throwing candy to the kids. As we watched, someone remarked that Karl Rove was down the street watching the parade. Little did I know then the role Rove would play in the Wilsons' lives.

As we walked back from the parade, the war in Iraq came up in conversation. Joe said he wanted to show me something he had just written. When we returned home, he handed me the draft of an article he said was going to be published in Sunday's New York Times entitled, "What I Didn't Find in Africa." When I read it, I knew this was going to be news: the first real challenge to the administration's rationale for war.

That surprise was nothing compared with the shock I experienced 10 days later. On that sunny Monday morning, I was sitting outside at the table on my deck, having breakfast and reading The Washington Post. When I turned to the op-ed pages, I noticed a column by Novak entitled "Mission to Niger," addressing Joe's op-ed the previous week. I was stunned to read that "Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction," citing two administration officials as sources. <snip>

http://www.livejournal.com/users/mparent7777/1372177.html

Something millions of Americans can understand.

....not a president.

<snip>
And we also now know that the only reason Valerie Wilson was mentioned was because, as Time magazine put it, the administration had declared "war on Wilson" for his whistle-blowing. The outing of Valerie seemed intended to send a not-so-subtle message to other potential critics, "Mess with us, and we'll mess with your family."

The purported justification for the "double super secret" leak by the White House was to allege that Valerie was responsible for Joe's trip. Even if true, and it is not true, the allegation makes no sense. There would have been nothing untoward about a CIA expert on WMD arranging an unpaid trip for her husband, an expert on Iraq and Niger, to examine whether there was an Iraq-Niger uranium connection.

The more important point is that the CIA has denied that Valerie was responsible for the trip, a fact Novak has acknowledged. As recently reported in The New York Times, Valerie wanted to set the record straight about how Joe's trip came about and her peripheral role in the arrangements, but the agency will not permit any public comment from her. What a shame that in addition to the personal harm she has suffered, Valerie cannot address the bum rap again being circulated by Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman and his allies now doing the bidding for the no-comment-mode White House.

Though I am a lifelong native Washingtonian, the White House leak episode has been eye-opening. I have witnessed how an abstraction such as political payback has real personal consequences. Real people get hurt and are put in danger. I have seen up close from my window the profound personal effect a very public "outing" has had on the lovely woman next door.

Christopher Wolf is a partner at the law firm Proskauer Rose.
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