Isn't It Ironic? Doncha Think?

Your Plame Update (So Far This Week)

With everyone's attention diverted to the first sitting Vice President since Alexander Hamilton to shoot somebody (actually, Dick came out a bit better in this non-dueling affair), there hasn't been as much focus on the PlameGate revelation yesterday from RawStory:

According to current and former intelligence officials, Plame Wilson, who worked on the clandestine side of the CIA in the Directorate of Operations as a non-official cover (NOC) officer, was part of an operation tracking distribution and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction technology to and from Iran.

Speaking under strict confidentiality, intelligence officials revealed heretofore unreported elements of Plame's work. Their accounts suggest that Plame's outing was more serious than has previously been reported and carries grave implications for U.S. national security and its ability to monitor Iran's burgeoning nuclear program.
[...]
Intelligence sources would not identify the specifics of Plame's work. They did, however, tell RAW STORY that her outing resulted in "severe" damage to her team and significantly hampered the CIA's ability to monitor nuclear proliferation.

Plame's team, they added, would have come in contact with A.Q. Khan's network in the course of her work on Iran.

That's right. The Government That Couldn't Shoot Straight consciously decided to out a CIA operative who was trying to keep nuclear arms from drifting away from founding Axis of Evil member state Iran. I guess, back in 2003, Iran (despite its inclusion in a very select group) didn't seem that much of a threat to BushCo and its subsidiaries, CheneyCorp and Rummylever.

Steve Clemons over at The Washington Note ruminates over where this new thread will lead the overall story:

The first might be that one of the reasons that Plame was outed had to do with bureaucratic and/or political enemies who were predisposed against the intelligence results of her team's Iran WMD-watching efforts. I would have to be further convinced of that case -- as I think that internal pettiness inside the Bush White House over Joe Wilson's public outing of the contrived Iraq-Niger-Uranium gambit is a pretty compelling rationale for Cheney's machine to out Plame.

But another dimension of this story has to do with an assessment of the damage that her outing caused this nation. As we now start down a path towards harder-edged threats against Iran, allies will naturally question the quality of our intelligence given our failures on Iraq WMDs.

If Cheney & Co. outed one of the key intelligence operations monitoring the inputs and outputs of Iran's nuclear program -- then Cheney & Co. did vast damage to our ability to know what is real and contrived inside Iran.

Juan Cole over at Informed Comment brings in another thread that many have probably forgotten--the alleged supplying of information to Iran by Ahmad Chalabi that the US had broken its intel codes. Be warnd--this might be getting a bit into tin-foil territory:

We know that someone among the Neoconservatives also let Ahmad Chalabi know that the US had broken Iranian codes and could read that country's secret diplomatic correspondence. As anyone could have expected, Chalabi immediately told the Iranians about the US spying. The Iranians will have immediately changed their codes.

Note: The crime here was letting the Iranians know we could listen in on them at will. As a third world country, Iran was presumably using fairly primitive encryption then, which our NSA had broken. Once the Iranians were tipped by Chalabi that we were listening, it would have been easy for them either to feed us some disinformation or to just close us out all together. More on the case is in this CBS report from 2004.

So between disrupting the work of Plame Wilson's unit at the CIA and letting the Iranians know about the broken codes, the pro-war party managed to make Iran's actual progress on nuclear research opaque to the US government. It was necessary that it be opaque if there was to be a war. Iran is actually a decade or two away from having a bomb even if everything went well. But US intelligence agencies must be less confident they know what is going on in Iran now than before the Neocons destroyed so much of the effort against Iranian proliferation. It was the US withdrawal of inspectors from Ira[q] in 1998 that created the uncertainties that allowed Bush to invade Iraq. For warmongers, good intelligence on the enemy's capabilities is undesirable if that intelligence would get in the way of launching a war.