Who was the real target?

Here is some interesting speculation on the possible motives of the treasonous outing of Valerie Plame. Was it simply a case of Corleone Bush attempting to deliver a horse head to Wilson, thereby sending a more general message of intimidation to the CIA? Or was the CIA operation headed by Valerie Plame -- Brewster Jennings & Associates -- the real target? Their beat was investigating and countering the spread of WMDs and as such this operation would be in perfect position to debunk any false claims intended to mislead the country into war....

I will have to take a closer look at the allegations being pursued against Syria in the Hariri assassination in order to better gauge the validity of the changes and the potential veracity of the scenario discussed below:

Let Justice Be Done- by Justin Raimondo: Everyone assumes Libby and his co-conspirators were really after Wilson, but this now seems unwarranted, especially in light of Fitzgerald's reported focus on the Niger uranium forgeries. If this question of the forgeries is now within Fitzgerald's purview, it opens up the possibility that the conspirators really were after Plame on her own account. If Plame and her associates were hot on the trail of whoever forged the Niger uranium documents, by neutralizing Brewster Jennings & Associates the Libby cabal closed one possible route to uncovering their schemes – and opened up another one.

This drama is playing out in two theaters, one domestic and the other overseas. In Washington, the heavens are falling even before Fitzgerald issues so much as a single indictment, but they're also threatening to take a tumble in the Middle East. The U.S. is ratcheting up its campaign against Syria, even as the principal proponents of confronting Damascus – Libby, Hadley, Hannah, Wurmser, et al. – find themselves in Fitzgerald's sights. In effect, the prosecutor is running a race with the War Party: can they provoke a war with Syria before he brings charges?

OK, so I'm a little late to the party... Others have already identified long before now that there must be something other than mere revenge motivating the Bushites in this matter, something so toxic that they would rather issue mea culpas for insertng the fale uranium claim into Bush's 2003 state of the nation address rather than have things be investigated more thoroughly. And, as Swopa notes below, that is about the only time the Bushites have ever expressed any contrition (unless you count the grudging statements about Katrina, which were still hedged by grumbles about how 'unprecedented' a hurricane in the Gulf was). What could have been so toxic as to have led the Bushites to scream 'Uncle' just in order to change the topic? Perhaps deliberately forging 'evidence' (later referred to as being in the 'British report') intended to mislead the nation into war, a crime that is not only punishable but also treasonous?

As other observers have long since noted, what turned the Niger uranium story into a feeding frenzy in July 2003 wasn't that Joseph Wilson accused Dubya of saying something that wasn't true in his State of the Union speech -- it was that the Orwell Bush administration admitted it, something they had never done before and promptly decided never to do again.

So what prompted that isolated (and promptly orphaned) lapse of apparent honesty?...

Giving in to Wilson's criticism started a media firestorm about how the sentence got into the speech in the first place -- but apparently the Bushites preferred that to having people take a closer look at the "British report."