All of you, I suspect, know a good bit about the Plame case. Many of you saw or read the
letter from the CIA agents. Many of you have expressed outrage, and rightly so. I just wanted to give you a perspective on what it means to me and my family.
My brother was career USA. Enlisted out of college, Officer Candidate School, Vietnam era, rifle instructor. After that he entered another US agency and was undercover for much of the next 20 years. He and his wife had two kids, my niece and nephew. He did it because he loved it and because he felt it was a reasonably safe, though he would probably have been dead within a week if his identity had been exposed. He lost a couple of comrades along the way. In his last few years he took a graduate degree in counseling because of his concerns for the stresses involved for other operatives and their families. He finally moved into a related field in private industry. He is very hurt and angry now, over this revelation of Wilson's identity.
He would never have exposed his family to the sort of risks that are now inherent in a politicized system, where the lives of career agents and their families are "political capital". Every day that Bush refuses to denounce and punish and remove Rove, is another nail in the coffin of morale of our secret agents, foreign and domestic. You have seen the anger in the testimony of the agents. This was not just some sort of passing staged affectation you saw...this is where these people live.
My daughter is graduating with a degree in linguistics from a major school in California. Her current passion is Russian. She was thinking of entering the CIA language program, the best in the world. That idea is presently dead in the water. She has another job, that isn't really the same quality. She is gonna wait and see, but it is difficult to see clearly that any government position, let alone one potentially involving risk, is a good idea for a young Democrat. Think "Army recruiting failures", but at the highest levels of government.
Bush has absolutely no understanding of what patriotism means, or he would long ago have put a stop to this nonsense. This scandal has now gone on for over two years, and really there is NO end in sight. This is not just an issue of one woman's career, nor even of a valuable front organization, or of a network of operatives, as important as all those things and people are. This is also an issue of families, of bitterness, of demeaning of the concept of dedication to our country, and of the chilling effect this has on recruitment of our brightest young people into what was once an attractive and important life of government service.