Regarding the recent revelations concerning the Valerie Plame outing, Kevin Drum writes:

So that's whose cover Robert Novak, Richard Armitage, Scooter Libby, Karl Rove, and God knows who else blew. The woman who was in charge of the entire CIA team trying to locate Saddam's WMD.

Of course, this also sheds some light on why Dick Cheney and the entire White House crew seemed so interested in discrediting Wilson: because her team didn't find anything. Cheney was visiting Langley, writing memos, demanding answers, and just generally obsessing over Iraqi WMD programs, and it was Valerie Wilson's team that was failing to find what he wanted. I think it's safe to say that he was displeased with Wilson and her team.

And yet Cheney has the gall to appear on Meet The Press this weekend and state "[Saddam] did not have stockpiles—clearly the intelligence that said he did was wrong." But the UN inspectors repeatedly reported that Iraq was bare concerning WMD, only to have such reports rebuffed and rejected by the likes of Cheney. In addition, we now learn Valerie Plame was conducting similar work at the CIA and coming up with same conclusions -- the kind Cheney didn't like.

We know what happened to Plame after that but just how craven and disingenuous is it to hear Cheney lament about the bad intel? A good deal of the credible intel at the time was dead-on correct, only ignored. And here you have a CIA agent coming up with the "wrong" findings so she was dealt with. Meanwhile, it was the intel Cheney et al chose to focus on strictly that was bad.

Where's the accountability for this purposeful negligence?