Playing with Fire

Dave Winer writes about the Valerie Plame case, in which one or two senior Bush officials very likely broke significant laws...

If it's true that Bush Administration is using dirty tricks to silence critics, playing with people's lives for crying out loud (something that as far as we know even Nixon didn't do), doesn't the electorate deserve to know?

There is significant evidence the Nixon campaign in 1968 played with lives by interfering with peace talks held by the Johnson administration that might have ended the war half a dozen years than what turned out to be the case. The Nixon campaign apparently was sending backchannel messages to the enemy that if they held out for a Nixon victory, the new administration would cut them a better deal. There is also evidence that Johnson and Humphrey were onto the covert operation, but perhaps did not have enough evidence to go public before the election.

Nixon probably played with about 20,000 American lives with this one since the adminstration found it more profitable to continue rather than end the war. Who knows how many Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, and others would not have died had the peace talks ended the war in 1968.

Should anyone complain I am just an ardent Democrat (I'm not even a registered Democrat!) I will also state the obvious that Johnson also played with tens of thousands of lives (at a minimum), through events the least of which was not the Gulf of Tonkin.