Joe Wilson (Valerie Plame's husband, as he has become known) writes about his career as Ambassador to various African countries and as 'acting' ambassador in Iraq during Saddam's war withKuwait along the the experience of "outing' his wife, a CIA operation. Mr. Wilson's politics changed over his career due to the G.W. Administration and it's foreign policies, along with the disbelief at the lengths this administration went through to discredit Wilson's findings about Saddam's purchase of yellow cake from Niger. I'm intrigued by a rumor that Plame's CIA/cover company actually stopped the Bush administration from bringing WMD's INTO Iraq so our soldiers could find them and thus prove the initial reason for going to war. It would make more sense, since PLace's outing hurt Wilson, but Plame more. Will we ever know? ( )

Joseph Wilson is a great American in my opinion. And he seems to clearly explain that we entered the war on Iraq under false pretenses. When he published an article to that effect, Washington attacked his credibility and eventually exposed his wife as an agent for the CIA, apparently in retaliation. That exposure caused some of her contacts to lose their lives as a result and presented some real security issues for him and his family. Carl Rove, a key adviser to George Bush, described the leak as "Fair Game". And that label eventually became the title of a movie which dramatized these events.
"Fair Game" is exactly the kind of Washington double standard that underlies the tremendous loss of confidence we now witness in the voters, and is among the seeds that led to creation of the so-called Tea Party movement. ( )

Ambassador Wilson presents his story in this extremely written well written memoir. In it he details the experiences of his career as a diplomat. He also expounds on his views of the events that led up to the disclosure of his wife's identity as a CIA agent. At the end of the book is included many of the editorials that he wrote, including his now famous article, "What I Didn't Find in Africa."

Experiments in Reading ( )