Bookraft

Fair Game by Valerie Plame Wilson, Simon and Schuster -2007, $30US

John Stewart does a skit on his fake news show - You Don't Know Dick. Its one of those "the truth be told" jokes about the slavish and paranoid extremes that Vice President Dick Cheney takes to ensure the security of all the documents, correspondence, and other communications made by himself and his vice presidential staff. Even Press briefing material gets marked top secret and is kept in a huge safe in Cheney's office if John Stewart's deadpan truth telling is to be believed.

After reading Fair Game - I believe.

This a book about and by the CIA agent, Valerie Plame, outed while she was still under cover as an operative agent by her own government - specifically Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff (who has gotten a subsequent pardon from the Prez hisself). The first thing you notice about the book is that page after page has been heavily censored - whole paragraphs "redacted" - blacked out. And not just a few pages, but just about every page in the book. The CIA gets to do this by law.

Some of the censorship is sheer nonsense - associated with the stricture that agents cannot reveal when and how they signed on to the CIA. But the book begins with adventures in CIA training - so that seems transparent. In fact, the publishers, Simon and Schuster, have added a 105 page "afterword" by correspondent Laura Rozen to get around some of the legal limits - and to fill in the gaps. But one gets unmistakeably the impression that the US is just another 911 away from becoming a Vendetta-like police state. Some very nasty censorship and "crowd control" is done here in the name of National Security.

The book and the person herself is remarkably Nancy Drew - no Confessions of an Economic Hitman here... well any of that has been thoroughly redacted out. Rather, we have an almost Peace Corps mentality applied to the dangerous and sordid world that is "Intelligence Affairs". Much of it simply does not square-up. How can Valerie be surprised and indignant by what the very top of the Executive office did to her given that she saw and reveals even more about how savagely George and Dick and cohorts worked to shape and mould intelligence to their neo-conservative Iraq warmaking ends.

No this is really a Canary in the Mine story - about how badly the Bush administration has distorted by means of National Security and Executive Privilege, the long and hard earned controls, checks and balances on imperial behavior in the Executive Branch and just good government practice. Swiftboating + the politics of fear; gutting of the Departments of Justice, Defense and State; total fiscal irresponsibility as the payola grease to keep it all working; the National Correspondents Dinner as the big joke on a coddled Press - and this is just the tip of the fast melting icebergs of disintegration in civil governing this Republican Administration has set in full motion - making the US Global Warming dysfunction look like just a Spring Shower. No wonder the Change message has caught on like wildfire in the Spring Presidential primaries. Under George Bush Washington has become not part of the solution but the pre-eminent problem - and this book is stunning testament in its own curious Nancy Drew way.