Nuclear security

Former covert CIA operations officer Valerie Plame

What became known as the Plame Affair (or sometimes Plame-gate) is intricately woven into the history already being written about the United States’ 2003 invasion of Iraq. At its heart is a simple reality: Though the George W. Bush administration premised the invasion of Iraq largely on an assertion that the Iraqis were pursuing weapons of mass destruction, no significant evidence of continuing WMD programs was found, post-invasion. Plame’s husband, former ambassador and career foreign service officer Joseph C. Wilson, wrote an opinion piece in July 2003 that highlighted the WMD problem in a media venue that could not be ignored, the New York Times. The piece strongly suggested that the Bush administration had gone to war under “false pretenses” by claiming that a supposed Iraqi purchase of uranium “yellowcake” in Africa in the late 1990s showed that Baghdad was pursuing nuclear weapons.¹ Wilson had a reason to know the claim, which President Bush put forward in a State of the Union address, was false; in 2002, Wilson had investigated the supposed yellowcake sale for the CIA, and found it simply had not happened.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2016.1145902