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One of the most intriguing US political stories in the last few years is the Plame affair. I’m not going to write a long synopsis here, as newspapers and blogs have it well covered.

Instead, here is my short synopsis.

Last week, on The Plame Affair: Joe Wilson travelled to Niger at the request of the Administration to check the veracity of one of the sources of information used to justify the invasion of Iraq - a document showing that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium yellowcake. Wilson established that the material was a crude forgery and reported back. His findings were ignored, and he doesn’t like being ignored. So Wilson wrote an Op-Ed about what he had found on his trip, embarrassing the Administration. Allegedly, Administration officials retaliated against him by encouraging journalists to write that his wife - Valerie Wilson (nee Plame) - was a covert operative at the CIA, and had used her position to send him on a boondoggle… to Niger. One journalist wrote such a story and the CIA referred the story to the Department of Justice for investigation because leaking the identity of covert CIA staff to someone without apropriate clearance is a crime.

Scooter Libby was recently indicted by a grand jury on charges relating to the leak. In the text of the indictment it is clear that Libby, Karl Rove, and others in the Administration, are still of intense interest to investigators.

The grand jury investigation has provided some interesting sideshows: Sending Judith Miller to jail for refusing to testify, infuriating journalists by not leaking as freely as Kenneth Starr and boring journalists to death at a press conference by making an epic baseball analogy.

None of these sideshows have been quite as interesting as the one that Digby throws light on.

Two interesting neocon operatives - Lt. General Tom McInerney (ret) and Maj. General Paul Vallely, USA (ret) - have recently “remembered” that they met Joseph Wilson in a FOX green room in 2002 where they allege he told them that his wife was a CIA spy. It seems they’re making the case that Joseph Wilson wanted to jeopardise his wife’s life and those of all of her colleagues in a secret front organization, and that this idea that she was covert was a crock. They also appear to be making the case that Joseph Wilson was so eager to share this information with them, he was able to travel in time and space to be with them.

Digby tries to determine how fair and balanced these two characters’ evidence might be, first by looking at a review of a book they wrote Endgame: The Blueprint For Victory in The War On Terror:

As the authors would have it, North Korea must dismantle its nuclear program or face U.S. invasion. Syria, unless it stops supporting terrorism and coughs up the Iraqi WMDs the authors say it’s hiding, should also be invaded. Saudi Arabia should be nudged toward a diversified economy and political reform, but if Islamic radicals take over, it too must be invaded. Iran, too big to invade, should be slapped with an embargo and naval blockade[...]

Then, he looks at some of their earlier work:

But that’s not General Vallely’s claim to fame. He is known for a paper he wrote with a military intelligence officer named Michael Aquino in the late 1980’s called From PSYOP to Mindwar: The Psychology of Victory. Aquino is also the founder of a Satanic cult called “The Temple of Set” which has had many run-ins with the law regarding satanic pedophile rings on military bases. I still kid you not. You can find a copy of this paper on the Temple web-site. He founded the cult in the mid-1970’s more than a decade before he wrote this paper with our friend Vallely. I’m not big on guilt by association — but really.

And the money quote from the paper? The future is like Scanners meets King Arthur meets 1984:

In its strategic context, MindWar must reach out to friends, enemies, and neutrals alike across the globe - neither through primitive “battlefield” leaflets and loudspeakers of PSYOP nor through the weak, imprecise, and narrow effort of psychotronics - but through the media possessed by the United States which have the capabilities to reach virtually all people on the face of the Earth. These media are, of course, the electronic media — television and radio. State of the art developments in satellite communication, video recording techniques, and laser and optical transmission of broadcasts made possible a penetration of the minds of the worlds such as would have been inconceivable just a few years ago. Like the sword Excalibur, we have but to reach out and seize this tool; and it can transform the world for us if we have the courage and the integrity to civilization with it. If we do not accept Excalibur, then we relinquish our ability to inspire foreign cultures with our morality. If they then desire moralities unsatisfactory to us, we have no choice but to fight them on a more brutish level.

Disturbing on so many levels.

These guys need to be given a lot more airtime. I’m sure Joseph Wilson’s lawyers are eager to hear more of their theories.