Valerie Plame vs. Valerie Plame's book

Mrs. Wilson is making the rounds on "60 Minutes" and elsewhere making the pitch for her new book. There's little point in retracing well-traveled ground since there's no chance of changing the liberal narrative that Plame was "betrayed" by the White House. But you'd think they'd get their story straight within the book:

One other matter begs clarification. As Rozen notes in the afterword, there is "an undeniable irony to Valerie Wilson later being exposed by the White House in a subterranean tussle" over prewar intelligence because "Valerie was not one of the intelligence community dissidents arguing against the threat posed by Saddam Hussein."

Quite the contrary: Wilson makes clear in "Fair Game" that she and her colleagues in the Counterproliferation Division were very worried that Iraq would use chemical or biological weapons on U.S. forces. They were dumbfounded when no weapons of mass destruction were found, and, in a telling passage, she says their spirits were "briefly buoyed" when coalition forces in northern Iraq discovered curious flatbed trailers that the CIA thought, at first, might be mobile bio-weapons labs.

Whoops! So Valerie Plame believed that Saddam Hussein had WMDs and certainly this opinion of the CIA carried weight in the White House. But, if you believe the Left, Plame and Wilson were the beacons of truth standing athwart a Bush Administration that was willing to betray Plame's cover for political gain. However, after the Fitzgerald investigation, the WashPost knew where the real betrayal started:

Nevertheless, it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush's closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It's unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.

Extra - MacsMind recalls Plame's less-than-truthful testimony to Congress.

More - From Tom Maguire: " Was Joe working for the Kerry campaign in the summer of 2003 when he penned his NY Times op-ed? The Boston Globe said so, and Joe admitted as much on NBC News, but that factoid eluded Ms. Plame and her publisher."