Is This a Book?
Sat., April 4, 12:40 PM
Well, it really is a book, I suppose. About four hundred pages are bound together; it has a title — Fair Game — and an author and, most importantly, it has an ISBN number. However, a lot of the text is blanked out, in some places several pages at a time.
The author, Valerie Plame Wilson, worked for the CIA for many years. Prospective employees are required to sign an agreement that anything they write for general (public) readership must be submitted for censoring by the agency. The amount of censorship is so pervasive that the publishers decided to print it just that way. The first thought that comes to mind is, someone is very paranoid!
The blanked out portions are very distracting. I can’t even tell if Ms. Wilson is a good writer, when sentences begin or end in the middle. Removing a portion so small that it is almost certainly just one word leaves one wondering what that word may have been, or at least what part of speech it was. I have trouble understanding what was so sensitive that they had to censor parts of the chapter on postpartum depression.
I’m sure you remember the basic story; it was front page news. A retired ambassador, Joseph Wilson, upset with the misinformation that was being disseminated about the Weapons of Mass Destruction, wrote a newspaper article stating what he knew to be so. In retaliation (it couldn’t have been anything else), “someone” from the White House staff leaked information to the press that Mrs. Wilson, the former Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent. In fact, she had experience as an undercover agent in several different countries — all of which were blanked out of the text.
I have to say that I did not find the information about her early training particularly enlightening, but I also have to admit that it might have been more interesting if there hadn’t been so much of it removed. Here is a sample page.
My attention increased when the author began to talk about the investigations into the existence (or not) of those Weapons of Mass Destruction. Naturally, the CIA censored out its own findings, but they did allow some material from a neutral source. This material stated, for example, that while the Iraqis did possess Source X, which could conceivably be used to form Weapon XY, there was no evidence that such weapons had been manufactured. That is very important: no evidence. And that information was sent to White House people who had requested it.
I can connect with Ms. Wilson’s astonishment when she heard the President announce that he was sending troops to Iraq because there was evidence of WMPs. On a much lower level, of course, I have had similar surprises. I completely understood her next line of reasoning: there must be someone higher up, someone with additional knowledge, who knew what I didn’t know. Do all women have a genetic tendency to explain other people’s deceit by saying we just weren’t smart enough to understand?
Whatever your politics, you are bound to be disgusted with our government in this situation. How come the President didn’t know there weren’t any WMDs? Did someone else decide not to forward the information, or did he get it and not understand it? Who wanted war so badly that they decided it was okay to manufacture plausible facts out of falsehoods? And who decided that the best way to cover his own behind was to throw the blame on a CIA agent?
The CIA itself was despicable, furnishing an attorney to “advise” Ms. Wilson; evidently his job was to protect the agency. Despite its promises to protect its agent in every way, the CIA basically threw her to the wolves. Not only the woman herself, but her husband, her children, and her marriage itself suffered.
Consider this: you know Ms. Plame’ name, but do you remember who was found responsible for outing her? And he’s walking free. You can draw your own conclusions. It took me more than a week to read this book — Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House — and I still have only questions, no answers.
