Bluesman

No replies, huh? Everybody losing intrest in this subject?

Well, personally, I'm fascinated. I'm looking forward to the next chapter of this story.

__________________
"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory."
- George Orwell

dalem

Hey B-man-

Read your email, boyo!

-dale

Confed999

I'm still interested. Gotta' see how this one turns out...

__________________
No man is free until all men are free - John Hossack
I agree completely with this Administration’s goal of a regime change in Iraq-John Kerry
even if that enforcement is mostly at the hands of the United States, a right we retain even if the Security Council fails to act-John Kerry
He may even miscalculate and slide these weapons off to terrorist groups to invite them to be a surrogate to use them against the United States. It’s the miscalculation that poses the greatest threat-John Kerry

Broken

You guys are still interested?

The latest tidbit is that two of Rove's assistants were called before the Grand Jury just last Friday. Looks like Karl is still on the hot seat:

ABC: the Note

Confed999

Maybe his assistants are.


I like this source better: "At press time, The Note was not able to satisfactorily source our reporting on the topics that Ralston and Hernandez were asked about, so that must wait for another day"

mtnbiker

Why Did Joseph Wilson Lie?
By Cliff Kincaid | August 2, 2005

One of the fascinating questions about the Valerie Plame affair is why Joseph Wilson lied about his wife's role in sending him on that mission to investigate the Iraq-uranium link. In his own book, ironically titled, The Politics of Truth, Wilson admits that if she played such a role, that might be a violation of federal nepotism laws. Of course, the special prosecutor is not investigating that. But Herbert Romerstein, a former professional staff member of the House Intelligence Committee, says there is another reason. And that is that her involvement in sending her husband on a CIA mission to Africa meant that when Wilson went public about it, foreign intelligence services would investigate all of his family members for possible CIA connections. Those intelligence services would not simply assume that he went on the mission because he was a former diplomat. They would investigate his wife. And that would inevitably lead to unraveling the facts about Valerie Wilson, or Valerie Plame, and her involvement with the CIA.

As Romerstein put it in an article for Human Events, when answering the question about who really exposed Wilson's wife, "The culprit was Joe Wilson…with some help from his wife."

He wrote, "When Wilson wrote an op-ed in The New York Times in July [2003] and revealed that he had gone to Niger on a CIA assignment, he called attention to his wife. CIA people who are really undercover are very careful about not identifying themselves or their families with the agency. They wait until their children are old enough to keep their mouths shut before revealing, even to them, that they are CIA officers. Wilson listed his wife's maiden name in the biography he put on the web site of the Middle East Institute."

The nepotism was bad enough. But Romerstein is saying that Plame's role in arranging the mission for her husband is solid proof that she was not concerned about having her "cover" blown because she was not truly under cover. Part of the confusion stems from the different forms of "cover" available to CIA employees and which can be protected under law. Romerstein says she was under "cover" only in the sense that she had used a front company, an entity called "Brewster-Jennings & Associates." That was a "convenience" or "light cover," but not the kind of "deep cover" that has to be protected under the terms of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. What's more, she had not been overseas over the previous five years, as required for the law to apply. Instead, she had been driving in and out of the CIA headquarters in Virginia and had a desk job. That's not the mark of a real covert agent.

Romerstein, who had a hand in drafting the bill, explained, "When a CIA officer under deep cover is assigned to a hostile country, he knows that the enemy counter-intelligence service will do a background check. Any involvement of a relative with the CIA will endanger the officer's cover." Those facts mean that Plame was not under deep cover and that there must have been no plan to send her abroad under deep cover. She was certainly not deployed overseas at the time that her identification with the agency was disclosed. Furthermore, Romerstein says that "Mrs. Joe Wilson also helped shred her cover when she made a contribution to the Al Gore for President campaign and listed her cover company in the Federal Election Commission filing. If she were ever posted overseas under cover, that would provide the hostiles with a lead to unravel her CIA connection."

When Wilson went public with his column in the New York Times, he had to know that such an article would lead to scrutiny of his wife. Equally significant, it might lead to scrutiny of her role in arranging his trip, in violation of federal nepotism laws. Therefore, he had to try to get his wife off the hook. That's why he absolved her of any role in arranging his mission in his book. The media initially accepted what he had to say with no questions asked. Eventually, however, his cover-up fell apart when the Senate Intelligence Committee uncovered evidence that Plame had a role in her husband's mission.

Some news organizations noted this evidence at the time but because Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald had begun investigating the issue of who leaked information about her identity, the nepotism issue was simply shunted aside, even though that is the critical matter and gets to the heart of what the Wilson affair is all about. Columnist Robert Novak's naming of Plame as a CIA employee is a sideshow that only draws attention to a fact that isn't of any consequence.

In retrospect, it's clear the Plame and Wilson pulled off a monumental deception, with the help of the media. The facts suggest that Plame and her husband were determined to undermine the Administration's Iraq policy and were prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to accomplish that. Together with their media allies, they created such a firestorm over the naming of Plame that the White House panicked into seeking a special prosecutor.

When Bush official Karl Rove warned Matt Cooper of Time away from the story, on the ground that Plame had arranged the trip by her husband, he was on to the hard truth about this case. But the media were not really interested and the White House did not pursue this line of inquiry to its logical conclusion-a full-fledged investigation into the Plame-Wilson plot and who else in the CIA was behind it. Perhaps the White House was fearful of starting a war with the CIA.

Instead, as it now stands, White House officials could eventually be indicted not for disclosing the identity of a covert agent but for providing conflicting information to the special prosecutor about who knew what about Plame and when. On the other hand, because the information about her was recycled to and from the press, it may be hard for Fitzgerald to make any sense of it. The silence of jailed New York Times reporter Judith Miller complicates his problem. As for Plame, she's still at the CIA. So that problem remains.

Broken

How can you "like this source better"?. It is the same source.

Broken

Getting an unbiased view from Cliff Kincaid is about as likely as getting one from Michael Moore. Normally, I would describe an article like this as telling half the story; but that would be giving way too much credit.

A few comments on the jucier bits of BS:
First off, it was Rove, not Wilson, who told Time reporter Cooper that Wilson's wife authorized the trip. Cooper's account from his Grand Jury testimony: "It was, KR [Rove] said, Wilson's wife, who apparently works at the Agency on WMD issues who authorized the trip."

So Rove spreads the lie that Valerie Wilson sent Joe Wilson, which Wilson correctly denies. Wilson says his wife had nothing to do with the decision. Technically correct, but she did forward his name to her boss when the Niger question popped up in late 2002. At this point, however, no decision to send anyone to to Niger had been made.

Furthermore, Wilson had excellent qualifications. He had been a diplomat both in Niger and Iraq and had "excellent contacts"in Niger, according to the CIA report on his trip.

The argument that Wilson outed Valerie Wilson by publishing his article doesn't hold water. Wilson was well known to foreign intelligence; he had been a very visible diplomat for decades in both the Mid East and Africa. Wilson was not undercover at all; his wife was.

Valerie Wilson was publicly outed by Novak. Novak said, " Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. "

Kincaid can dance all he wants, but he can't get around that fact- which of course, he forgets to mention.
There can be no case for nepotism. Plame did not make the decision. Wilson was judged qualified for the mission on his own expertise.
The CIA, the Justice department, the special prosecutor, and the presiding judge are all quite satisifed Plame(Valerie Wilson) was under cover. There would be no investigation otherwise. No one is disputing any of this except for a few righty die-hards.

As the article admits, Brewster-Jennings & Associates cover was blown and anyone else in regular contact with Plame, domestic or foreign. What foreign national will risk contact with CIA, if their CIA contact can be uncovered at the whim of Washington politics? Who would take the risk of working with the CIA?
If neither her cover or cover company had been compromised, how does Plame making a donation "shred" her cover? She was already publicly listed as working for Brewster-Jennings & Associates. The connection was public knowledge for any who would care to look, regardless of who Plame donated to.

At this point in his article, Kincaid repeats these same arguments: Wilson outed his wife, Plame was not under cover, and it was all nepotism anyway. Kincaid makes an effort to explain why the investigators aren't paying attention to Kincaid's arguments.

Evidently Plame and Wilson have completely bamboozled the CIA, Justice, Fitzgerald, and the Grand Jury. Only the author of this brilliant article, Kincaid, knows the real truth.
Let's take a step back here and look at why the whole Niger Uranium connection was nonsense from the very beginning.

1: Iraq had 500 tons of uranium in country. This is enough to make about ten nukes. After 1998, this stockpile was no longer under IAEC inspection. If Saddam wanted to make weapons he would use this uranium. He would have no need to import.

2: Iraq had no means to enrich the uranium they had. This was the fundamental stumbling block to their program.

3: When the IAEC was let back into Iraq in November 2002, they found that the 500 tons of uranium in Iraq had not been touched since 1998.

4: Wilson and many others independently concluded it was extremely unlikely Iraq could bypass the security on Niger's mines, even in the unlikely event Iraq wanted more uranium than the 500 tons already in country.

Despite all this well-known information, the administration continued to push the threat of Iraqi nuclear weapons. This threat was entirely made up. Wilson said so in his article. Someone in the admin passed Novak the information on Plame to discredit Wilson.

Furthermore, the details of the "forged" uranium sales agreement (between Iraq and Niger) were already known to the CIA in early 2002. This information and the later forged documents all came from SISSMI, the Italian intelligence agency. This SISSMI info was the only Niger-Iraq information received by US, British, and French intelligence.

So, even if you take Kincaid's story hook-line-and-sinker, there was an abundance of evidence against any claim of an impending Iraqi nuclear threat. Wilson's intelligence merely confirmed what was already concluded at State and the CIA's Counterproliferation Division (CPD). This conclusion was passed by the CIA to Congress, the British, and the White House.

However, there were three groups who disagreed. John Bolton's group at State, WINPAC at CIA, and Cheney's Office of Special Plans (OSP). Bolton's chief of staff also worked at WINPAC. All of the claims overriding the evidence against an Iraqi nuclear program came from these offices.

Shek

Will this thread ever end?

Parihaka

Not until the next elections one would suspect, both sides seem to be characterised as "men on a mission"

__________________
In the realm of spirit, seek clarity; in the material world, seek utility.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Leader

Nah, it just the Dems. The purpose of the two major parties is to bring together grows of people in a coalition in order to have power in and control the government. At the national level the Dems hold almost no power. I question whether you can even say they're "on a mission." They need to get their own house in order and work toward building a coalition that can win.

__________________

Broken

Not if you keep posting to it.

Strangely, there is more Plame traffic today in the conservative blogosphere than in the MSM or the liberal blogosphere. No new news so far today, just a lot of re-hashing.

Confed999

Ummmm, because they said "they don't know" instead of just making crap up. You still don't get the joke do you?

dalem

He can't.

-dale

Confed999

Personally, I'm going with "won't".