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Valerie Plame Wilson will be our guest for a special FDL Book Salon for her book “Fair Game,” hosted by Sidney Blumenthal on Monday, October 22nd, at 10:30am -12:30pm PT/ 1:30-3:30pm ET.  You won’t want to miss it.

What exactly do you call it when your own government screws you and your entire network of covert operatives and assets and damn the consequences?  Just another day in Bushworld.  Via ThinkProgress:

In her first interview since Bush administration officials outed her as a covert CIA agent, Valerie Plame Wilson reveals to CBS 60 Minutes that she was involved in preventing Iran from building a nuclear weapon. In the interview to be aired this Sunday, CBS reports that she was “involved in one highly classified mission to deliver fake nuclear weapons blueprints to Tehran.”

Word is that CBS didn’t bother to credit Larisa Alexandrovna for breaking that story back in February of 2006. But I’ll be watching Valerie’s interview on 60 Minutes this evening just the same — I’d bet that spine of steel of hers makes a bit of a showing during the interview.

This irks Plame Wilson. “I don’t know about (President Bush knowing about the leak beforehand). But I, like most other Americans, saw President Bush say on TV that he would fire anyone from his administration found to be involved in leaking my name,” she says. “It turns out the president is not a man of his word.”

Good on ya, Valerie.

The title, Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House, is drawn from a comment Mr Rove is said to have made about Ms Plame being “fair game”.

“The next time we were in line for Communion,” she writes, “I would pass him the wafer plate and whisper softly, ‘My name’s Fair Game, what’s yours?”‘

I’d like to think that at least gave Karl pause…but I know better.   Larry Johnson has some details on the things that she can’t say out loud (due to court order, not because we haven’t all heard leaks about it from others at this point — how’s that for logic).

And for some reason this morning, this just needed saying again:

…Imagine that one day you wake up to the incessent ping of your beeper. It is still dark outside your window, and you slide out of bed, pad quietly down the hallway and try not to wake up the wife and kids, as you slip into your home office and place a call on a secure phone. You are told that your cover has been blown, that your family may be at risk. You have to make instant decisions for your own safety, that of your family, and of every asset you have in the field – and to do that, you have to prioritize which assets are more valuable and which you can afford to lose, if necessary. You have to decide then and there which of the people you cultivated, the ones you promised safety in exchange for information and cooperation, which of them may have to die because you may not have time to save them all.

Why has your cover been blown? Because you work as a CIA colleague of the wife of a man who dared to question the veracity of the President of the United States on a matter of national security, a matter of an exaggerated claim that was inserted in his State of the Union address to bolster his case for war in Iraq. And the President’s cronies and hatchet men decided to out this man’s wife for political payback, as a lesson to anyone else who would dare to question their decisions and as a means to staunch the bleeding from this initial salvo of criticism. Damn the consequences.

No consideration for all the lives interconnected in this network of agents and field assets, or the years it took to cultivate them. No thought of the impact that this betrayal by highly placed governmental officials would have down the line — how hard it would make it to recruit human intelligence assets in the field at the very time that we need them most to gather information inside the terrorist networks that threaten us more and more each day….

Betrayal isn’t nearly a strong enough word, now is it?  And the people who betrayed you?  One is still the Vice President of the United States.  One was found guilty by a jury of his peers, only to be pardoned by the President as a sop to his 25 percenters.  One just resigned on his own from his cushy WH job, after appearing before a Federal grand jury no less than five times.  And any number of others are still smarming their way around the Beltway.  How’s that for a karma backlash waiting to happen…

UPDATE: T- asked for some of these links in the last post as a prelude to Valerie’s 60 Minutes appearance. Thought others might enjoy them as well: Part I; Part II; Part III. That’s just the start on some of our older Traitorgate posts.