Treason

Valerie Plame Wilson finally had the opportunity to speak at a Congressional hearing.
From the Washington Post:

Valerie Plame, the former CIA officer at the heart of a four-year political furor over the Bush administration's leak of her identity, lashed out at the White House yesterday, testifying in Congress that the president's aides destroyed a career she loved and slipped her name to reporters for "purely political motives."

Plame, breaking her public silence about the case, contended that her name and job "were carelessly and recklessly abused" by the government. Although she and her colleagues knew that "we might be exposed and threatened by foreign enemies," she said, "it was a terrible irony that administration officials were the ones who destroyed my cover."

And despite the completely unsubstantiated right wing blather that her professional identity had been well-known:

"I am here to say I was a covert officer of the Central Intelligence Agency," Plame told House members, a horde of journalists and a few antiwar activists. Her work, she said, "was not common knowledge on the Georgetown cocktail circuit."

And the New York Times adds:

“My name and identity were carelessly and recklessly abused by senior government officials in both the White House and the State Department,” Ms. Wilson testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in a hearing room packed with reporters, photographers and spectators....

She said the security breach might have endangered agency officials but also “jeopardized and even destroyed entire networks of foreign agents, who in turn risk their own lives and those of their families to provide the United States with needed intelligence. Lives are literally at stake.”

That's where the media and the White House defenders have truly revealed their hypocrisy. For all their propaganda about National Security, the Administration, for purely political reasons, deliberately outed the identity of an undercover security agent, jeopardizing lives and entire networks of agents. They did it in petty retribution for her husband's having revealed that one of Bush's claimed reasons for needing to go to war with Iraq was a flat-out lie. The cynicism and irresponsibility cannot be over-emphasized. This was treason, pure and simple. Treason.