THIS IS NOT A PHOTO OP

Continuing to divert resources from lesser needs to the all important War On Plummeting Popularity, the nation's #1 unindicted war criminal travelled to Covington, Louisiana to flail with a hammer and practice his drilling:



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Firedoglake makes it all too vivid concerning Plamegate -
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.
http://firedoglake.blogspot.com/

Not only was the entire spook network compromised but the work they were doing was destroyed. They were working under the cover of a company called Brewster - Jennings and Associates that monitored weapons in various countries, especially areas of the former Soviet Union. They kept track of nukes and fissionable material where security is lax at best. And the people in this operation were NOC which is spook talk for "non official cover", the most valuable asset for national intelligence. That's why this is so important.