Valerie Plame Wilson suddenly went from being a CIA covert operations officer to a household name in the summer of 2003, when the Bush administration outed her to the press in retribution for her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, dismantling its shaky claims about Saddam Hussein's nuclear ambitions. After unwillingly becoming a public figure, Plame laid low for a couple of years. But now she's lent her expertise as an expert on nuclear proliferation to Countdown to Zero, the new documentary from the makers of An Inconvenient Truth that aims to jumpstart a post-Cold War movement to ban the bomb. (See David Corn's recent article on the making of the film.) The film will leave you wondering why one of the world's 23,000 nuclear bombs hasn't already gone off—and how much longer it is until one does. (One expert explains that smuggling nuclear material into the U.S. is as simple as hiding it in a box of kitty litter.) Plame Wilson talked to Mother Jones about appearing in the film, how we can tackle a problem so big, and the upcoming movie about her, in which Naomi Watts plays the reluctant celebrity spy.

Mother Jones: At the CIA, you specialized in nuclear counterproliferation; Countdown to Zero is largely about how easy it would be to buy, steal, or build a nuclear weapon. Did you learn anything new from the film?

Valerie Plame Wilson: I've seen it several times now, and I was surprised at points. They talk about the flight over the Carolinas in the early '60s where a plane crashed with a nuclear weapon on board. I didn't know about that. I was not familiar with that incident in NORAD where the $1computer chip made everyone think it was the real thing instead of a training exercise. As the film talks about, there's always the potential for accident, miscalculation, or madness. Along with the terrorist threat, those are, unfortunately, very real possibilities. 

MJ: The movie identifies the three main nuclear threats as madness, accident, and miscalculation. Which do you think is the greatest?

VPW: I would not want to assign numbers to any one of them. Ask BP executives how often low-probability events happen. I think really the only rational, sane way of proceeding is to set as your objective zero [nuclear weapons] and move toward that. 

MJ: One of the things that really struck me is the wide range of people interviewed—you've got liberals like President Jimmy Carter, you've got conservatives like former Secretary of State James Baker. Is nuclear proliferation really a non-partisan issue? 

VPW: I think it is; it certainly should be. I think Lucy Walker, the director, went to great lengths to demonstrate that. As you noted, you have people of all political stripes who speak in the film. The well-known liberal, Ronald Reagan, started this. And I think that's a really poignant scene with Gorbachev's interview, speaking about his 1986 meeting in Reykjavik with Reagan. These were two men who genuinely wanted to see a world free of nuclear weapons,and they genuinely wanted to achieve it. Gorbachev speaks with tears in his eyes with great sadness about what they weren't able to accomplish. These two men really wanted to do that.

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[For more on the WikiLeaks Afghan document dump, read posts by Kevin Drum here and senior editor Dave Gilson here.]

Here's a cliche for you: A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. And here's a fact: A little knowledge is precisely what Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks cohorts have given us in the "Afghan War Diary." The intimation by Assange (and the media outlets he cherry-picked to preview the data) is that these are the Pentagon Papers of the Afghan war. Certainly there are a few eyebrow-raising details in the bunch, as Mark Mazzetti, Chris Chivers & Co. at the New York Times point out. But in truth, there's not much there. I know, because I've seen many of these reports before—at least, thousands of similar ones from Iraq, when I was a contractor there last year.

I haven't been through everything yet, but most of what you see on WikiLeaks are military SIGACTS (significant activity reports). These are theoretically accessible by anyone in Iraq, Afghanistan, or the Tampa, Florida-based US Central Command—soldiers and contractors—who have access to the military's most basic intranet for sensitive data, the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet). Literally thousands of people in hundreds of locations could read them, and any one of them could be the source for WikiLeaks' data. I regularly went through the daily SIGACT reports in Iraq, not because my job required it, but because my colleagues and I were curious. We heard mortars or car bombs explode in the distance at night, and we couldn't help but wonder: What the hell was that? Every time a US unit engaged the enemy, encountered munitions, saw or heard something go boom, caught a criminal, or located a weapons cache, a report was filed. So, each morning when I entered my office on Camp Victory, I fired up my SIPR terminal and checked the SIGACTS for interesting stuff. 

The first time I did it, my pupils dilated. A vein in my throat warmed. The reporter in me did backflips. I was about to breathe pure oxygen.

By day three or four, I was bored to tears. Here's what I learned:

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Today marked the end of the biennial International AIDS Conference in Vienna, where one crucial group remained absent from news headlines but not silent at the event. This is where Peninah Mwangi fits in. Mwangi's been a sex worker in Kenya for 15 years. During that time, she's also worked with the Bar Hostess Empowerment and Support Programme and the African Sex Worker Alliance to get sex work recognized as a job and to improve access to health and social services. For several years, both of Mwangi's groups have applied for HIV/AIDS prevention funding through the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and been denied. "We couldn't understand why we were denied. Many women were dying," Mwangi tells me on the phone. Then three years ago, a PEPFAR rep told her the reason: "We cannot fund you unless you get out of sex work."

PEPFAR's condemnation of sex work is why Mwangi is currently in Vienna for the AIDS conference. During the week-long summit, amidst discussion of new HIV prevention strategies and the lack of money to disperse them, about 100 sex workers from all walks of life and their advocates marched through the IAC conference center chanting "sex worker rights are human rights." The workers were not only making their marginalized presence known, they were protesting the PEPFAR anti-prostitution clause that keeps them from receiving US HIV/AIDS prevention funds.

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New York Rep. Charles Rangel plans to vigorously fight the ethics charges lodged against him Thursday evening by the House ethics committee. But the public ethics trial Rangel has insisted upon, which will likely start in September, is set to collide with this fall’s midterm elections season and could damage Democratic prospects as a result.

Rangel could have settled with the House ethics committee and ended the investigation behind closed doors, a resolution his party likely would have preferred. But this quieter fix would have forced Rangel to admit that he accepted four rent-controlled apartments in Manhattan and misused office stationary to solicit donations for the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at New York’s City College, among other allegations. Though he was willing to accept responsibility for some violations, Rangel would not budge on others, the Associated Press reported.

When asked by a New York Daily News reporter if he would defend himself at trail, Rangel responded, "You bet your sweet ass. If I can testify, I will." Rangel also told reporters that he has been waiting for a chance to speak publicly and clear his name since his ethics investigation began two years ago: "Now the facts are going to get out and I think that's good. I don't have any fear at all politically or personally what they come up with."

But Rangel may not need to clear his name in Harlem, where he is the only congressman many of his constituents have ever known. Residents told NY1 that they were in no rush to judge Rangel. "I deal with the facts, so until all the facts come out, I don’t want to say, because right now it’s all speculation," one resident said. "Other people are doing the same thing, but they're after him," said another. And for those New Yorkers old enough to remember life before Rangel got elected, many recall him as a Korean War hero with a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star, accolades he campaigned on decades ago.

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