Valerie Plame Leaves the CIA

AP reports:

WASHINGTON – Valerie Plame, the CIA officer whose exposure led to a criminal investigation of the Bush White House, spent her last day at the spy agency Friday. Neither the agency nor Plame’s husband would confirm her departure, but two people who have known Plame for a number of years confirmed she was leaving … Plame had served for many years at overseas postings for the CIA, and her employment remained classified when she took a headquarters desk job, traveling overseas periodically. She was an employee in the CIA’s Counterproliferation Division. “Her career was arbitrarily and whimsically destroyed by a mean political trick,” said Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of operations for the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center … In the preface to the paperback edition of his book, “The Politics of Truth,” Wilson says that he and his wife were the focus of a “Republican smear machine.” … Plame has been cast by Bush administration defenders as “just a desk jockey at the CIA, someone who wasn’t really undercover and a manipulative Mata Hari who aspired to bring down the Bush administration. All of that is false,” said former CIA officer Larry Johnson, a friend of Plame. “At the end of the day, she was betrayed by her own government and they show no signs of remorse.”

This career servant defending our national security leaves her job because of a partisan stunt and I have to wonder – why do Dick Cheney and Karl Rove still have their jobs?