Rove was the source of the Plame leak... so it appears

parados wrote:

Tico wrote:

Or you meant to say something else. I do not think your are dense, nor do I think you haven't been paying attention. I trust I don't need to set forth here again the very specific legal definition of "covert agent" for you? I know you have read it before, so are you seriously contending that "undercover" is synonymous with that legal definition in the IIPA? That would be a ridiculous thing to claim. I'm sure you meant to say something else.

In the off-chance that you actually meant it, care to explain how you contend "undercover" and "covert agent" are synonymous?

Failure to cite a specific law that covers an "undercover agent" as opposed to a "covert agent" makes them synonymous in this instance.

Hmm. I'm not sure I agree. Am I correctly following your bizarre logic: If I called her a "hungry hippo," but failed to cite a specific law that covers a "hungry hippo" -- as opposed to a "covert agent" -- then in your view, the two would be synonymous?

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You can not show me a way that revealing the name of an undercover agent rises to the standard of breaking the law unless they are also covert.

I'm telling ya ... ask Cyclops.

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All covert agents are undercover ...

... or were within 5 years, ...

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... but not all undercover agents are necessarily covert.

True.

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Only revealing the names of a covert agent is against the law. If it is determined to be against the law to reveal the name of a specific "undercover" agent then that agent must be covert. There is no other logical explanation.

That is your position, which Cyclops disagrees with.

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Spin away Tico. The sky is not green no matter how many times you question the color of blue it is.

Have you ever seen a purple sky right before a tornado? :wink:

The only bizarro logic is your by introducing hippos. It points to the failure of your disagreement when you can't point out specific logic errors. Hippo is not a subset of covert agent. If B(covert agent) is a subset of A(undercover agent) (All members of B must be members of A) and all members of C (outed covert agents as defined by law.) must be members of B then any member of A that is in C must also be a member of B.

Tico wrote:

parados wrote:

Spin away Tico. The sky is not green no matter how many times you question the color of blue it is.

Have you ever seen a purple sky right before a tornado? :wink:

Leave it to you to now argue that clouds are the same as sky. :wink:

parados wrote:

The only bizarro logic is your by introducing hippos. It points to the failure of your disagreement when you can't point out specific logic errors. Hippo is not a subset of covert agent. If B(covert agent) is a subset of A(undercover agent) (All members of B must be members of A) and all members of C (outed covert agents as defined by law.) must be members of B then any member of A that is in C must also be a member of B.

While that it true, it is not supportive of your contention that "failure to cite a specific law that covers an 'undercover agent' as opposed to a 'covert agent' makes them synonymous in this instance." In fact, it weakens your argument because since B is a subset of A, you cannot claim that any member of A must therefore be a member of B, which it what you are trying to claim.

parados wrote:

Tico wrote:

parados wrote:

Spin away Tico. The sky is not green no matter how many times you question the color of blue it is.

Have you ever seen a purple sky right before a tornado? :wink:

Leave it to you to now argue that clouds are the same as sky. :wink:

Not the clouds ... the sky. You aren't from the Midwest ... I'm guessing East Coast? :wink:

Ticomaya wrote:

parados wrote:

The only bizarro logic is your by introducing hippos. It points to the failure of your disagreement when you can't point out specific logic errors. Hippo is not a subset of covert agent. If B(covert agent) is a subset of A(undercover agent) (All members of B must be members of A) and all members of C (outed covert agents as defined by law.) must be members of B then any member of A that is in C must also be a member of B.

While that it true, it is not supportive of your contention that "failure to cite a specific law that covers an 'undercover agent' as opposed to a 'covert agent' makes them synonymous in this instance." In fact, it weakens your argument because since B is a subset of A, you cannot claim that any member of A must therefore be a member of B, which it what you are trying to claim.

Rather convenient to forget about C and claim I am stating a member of A must be a member of B. I am stating a member of A that is ALSO a member of C MUST be a member of B. In order for the CIA to have sent what they did to DoJ C MUST exist and Plame MUST be a member of C in order for CIA to do so.

Ticomaya wrote:

parados wrote:

Tico wrote:

parados wrote:

Spin away Tico. The sky is not green no matter how many times you question the color of blue it is.

Have you ever seen a purple sky right before a tornado? :wink:

Leave it to you to now argue that clouds are the same as sky. :wink:

Not the clouds ... the sky. You aren't from the Midwest ... I'm guessing East Coast? :wink:

I am curious when you have ever seen a tornado. Purple sky? The wall cloud trails a thunderhead normally. It is either blue sky behind it or cloud cover. A tornado doesn't change sky color. The clouds pick up color. A green tint is the old wives tale of tornado warning. Thunderstorms late in the day will often have pink clouds. But purple sky? Nope. Never seen it. Not much sky to see if you are in a tornado warning. Usually clouds, clouds and more clouds, if you can even see them because of the heavy rain. You must be looking at pictures of tornados with bad color to think they create a "purple" sky.

So I've been out of town and waaaaay out of the loop the last week. Can anyone summarize important plot developments, if any, between July 27th and now? I'd be much obliged.

Columnist Hints Book Was Source That Led to Use of C.I.A. Officer's Name
August 2, 2005


By ANNE E. KORNBLUT
WASHINGTON, Aug. 1 - One of the most puzzling aspects of the C.I.A. leak case has had to do with the name of the exposed officer. Why did the syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak identify her as Valerie Plame in exposing her link to the C.I.A. in July 2003 when she had been known for years both at the agency and in her personal life by her married name, Valerie Wilson?

Mr. Novak offered a possible explanation for the disconnect on Monday, suggesting in his column that he could have obtained Ms. Wilson's maiden name from the directory Who's Who in America, which used that name in identifying her as the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador.

Mr. Novak did not explicitly cite the directory as his source. Nor was this his first public reference to the Who's Who listing. In a column in October 2003, three months after he had first disclosed Ms. Wilson's name and her role, Mr. Novak cited the published listing as evidence that Ms. Wilson's identity was "no secret."

But in drawing renewed attention to the published listing, Mr. Novak seemed to suggest more directly than ever before that the scrutiny that has focused on which of his sources provided him the name might have been misplaced, and that he might well have figured it out by himself.

Any request that he withhold Ms. Wilson's name from his column of July 14, 2003, would have been "meaningless" once he had been told she was married to Mr. Wilson, Mr. Novak wrote on Monday, because she was openly listed in the directory. But Mr. Novak also wrote that he would never have used Ms. Wilson's name had anyone from the C.I.A. told him that doing so would endanger her or anyone else.

The special counsel in the leak case has been trying to determine whether government officials violated federal laws about the handling of classified information when someone leaked Ms. Wilson's identity and C.I.A. role to reporters. The fact that Mr. Novak identified her as Valerie Plame had seemed to some observers to narrow the field of possible suspects in the leak case, because she had not used that name since her marriage in 1998.

A State Department memorandum drafted in 2003 and taken on board Air Force One the week before Mr. Novak's column ran identifies Ms. Wilson by her married name rather than Ms. Plame. The prosecutor has taken an interest in the memorandum - which outlines Ms. Wilson's role in suggesting her husband for a fact-finding trip to Niger - and has shown it to numerous witnesses in the case in an apparent effort to determine whether it was a source for Mr. Novak or the officials who leaked the information to him.

If not for Who's Who, it is not clear how Mr. Novak would have decided to identify Ms. Wilson as Ms. Plame rather than the name she commonly used.

In the Who's Who directory for 2003, personal information about Mr. Wilson includes his origins in Bridgeport, Conn., and the names of his previous wife and his four children. His current wife is listed as Valerie Elise Plame, and the date of their marriage April 3, 1998.

There is no mention of her employer.

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.

There's a rather problematic article in Tuesday's Times on the subject of Robert Novak's new column about the Plame matter.

It's by Anne Kornblut.

The question the
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article seeks to answer is the mystery of why Novak referred to Joe Wilson's wife as Valerie Plame when she had already for several years been going to by Valerie Wilson. The question has never had any legal significance per se. But it does have evidentiary significance, as Kornblut notes, in as much as the use of the name may shed light on Novak's sources and, as Kornblut doesn't note, on their motives.

Along the way, Kornblut appears to buy into Novak's absurd argument that the need to keep Plame/Wilson's identity secret was in any way related to which name she went by.

Writes Kornblut ...

Any request that he withhold Ms. Wilson's name from his column of July 14, 2003, would have been "meaningless" once he had been told she was married to Mr. Wilson, Mr. Novak wrote on Monday, because she was openly listed in the directory. But Mr. Novak also wrote that he would never have used Ms. Wilson's name had anyone from the C.I.A. told him that doing so would endanger her or anyone else.
Again, this is nonsense.

The disclosure was identifying Wilson's wife as a CIA operative, not that he had a wife, which needless to say was not a state secret.

On these points my only criticism of the article is that Kornblut seems to go along with Novak's diversion, making the issue of the name appear to have more legal consequence than it has.

The real problem, though, is that Kornblut doesn't examine another series of potential motives and the abundant evidence of Novak's mendacity on this subject.

Novak's use of Plame's name has been used to try to narrow down who his sources may have been -- something that Novak has a strong interest in concealing. Many have also speculated that Plame/Wilson was identified by the name 'Plame' precisely to cause the most damage to her career and the clandestine networks she had been involved in, since this was name she'd used through most of her career.

In other words, there's a very clear potential motive for referring to her by her maiden name. It's not a meaningless distinction.

In his column yesterday, Novak suggests that anyone could have figured out Wilson's wife's name by looking him up in Who's Who. And Kornblut, perhaps not unreasonably, takes this as a suggestion that this may well have been what Novak did.

That may be true. Someone could have done that.

But why should we believe Novak?

There is very strong evidence that Novak has been lying about his exposure of Plame from the start.

As I've noted here on a number of occasions, Novak's claim that he used the word 'operative' either accidentally or through sloppiness is simply not credible -- on the basis of simple logic and a review of his previous columns. Novak only came up with his 'accidental operative' story after a legal inquiry got underway.

And the same seems to be the case with his dust-kicking claims about discovering Plame's name from Who's Who.

Timothy Phelps and Knut Royce got to Novak a week after his original column ran. And he said nothing about having to track down Plame's name himself or any second-guessing about the word 'operative'.

He was quite clear. When Phelps and Royce asked him about his exposure of Plame he told them: "I didn't dig it out, it was given to me. They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it."

Bear in mind that he made that statement in the context of an article that was all about how he came up with Plame's name and why he had revealed her identity as a covert agent.

The bottom line here is that Novak is simply not a reliable source. By all indications he has already lied publicly in an effort to protect both himself and his sources. There's simply no reason to take what he says at face value when he comes up with new and improbable stories which again have the clear effect of reducing the legal vulnerability of his sources and further damage to his own professional reputation.

-- Josh Marshall

"There is no mention of her employer"

Based on ABC News sources (and our own video camera) it appears that at least two witnesses testified before the grand jury last Friday, both close associates of Karl Rove.

ABC News has learned that one was Susan Ralston, Rove's long-time right hand. The other, per ABC News' Jake Tapper, was Israel "Izzy" Hernandez, Rove's former left hand (and now a top Commerce Department official). It isn't clear if either had been asked to testify before last week.

The appearances of Ralston and Hernandez suggests at least part of the focus [by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald]," writes The Note, "remains on Rove, although his attorney tells ABC News that he still believes Rove is not a target of the investigation.
(The Note)

Hello Timber.

The title of your first column reads is misleading at best: Columnist Hints Book Was Source That Led to Use of C.I.A. Officer's Name.

Yet the same article never refers to the book Wilson wrote the year after the inappropriate disclosure. Instead it refers to the fact that Valerie Plame was Wilson's wife in whatever Who's who list. The same Who's who list doesn't refer to her as a CIA operative, so conveniently forgotten. And the fact that she was Wilson's wife isn't in itself much of a secret. Her duties as a CIA operative are not disclosed in the Who's who list.

Debunked, Timber. You're getting slow ...

Haven't seen you in the thread for a while till the other day, Timber; thought it was because you were getting tired of all the ass-kicking the Opposition has been doing to your side lately on this issue.

And there's more to come! Hee hee.


We'll see if you're still chuckling when Fitzgerald releases his results. Somehow, I doubt it...

If your going to start with the assumption that Plame is a member of C, then it follows she must also be a member of B. Again, that is ASSUMING she is a member of C, and I've been pointing out that is the assumption you are making.

But while it's true that a member of C is necessarily a member of A, it does not follow that A=C. For example, suppose D is another wholly contained subset of A (perhaps this group are undercover operatives working desk jobs at Langley that have never been overseas), which contains a subset E (outed undercover operatives working desk jobs at Langley that have never been overseas). While it is also true that a member of E must be a member of D and must be a member of A, it does not follow that E=A. For if that logical analysis were accurate, then C=E, and that is not true.

Ticomaya wrote:

parados wrote:

Tico wrote:

parados wrote:

Spin away Tico. The sky is not green no matter how many times you question the color of blue it is.

Have you ever seen a purple sky right before a tornado? :wink:

Leave it to you to now argue that clouds are the same as sky. :wink:

Not the clouds ... the sky. You aren't from the Midwest ... I'm guessing East Coast? :wink:

I am curious when you have ever seen a tornado. Purple sky? The wall cloud trails a thunderhead normally. It is either blue sky behind it or cloud cover. A tornado doesn't change sky color. The clouds pick up color. A green tint is the old wives tale of tornado warning. Thunderstorms late in the day will often have pink clouds. But purple sky? Nope. Never seen it. Not much sky to see if you are in a tornado warning. Usually clouds, clouds and more clouds, if you can even see them because of the heavy rain. You must be looking at pictures of tornados with bad color to think they create a "purple" sky.

Whether Ms Plame was or not a covert operative is only but one of the numerous issues involved in the Bush administration strategy of weakness and medieval secrecy. Whether Novak is only but a servile mouthpiece for his political rulers is a non sequitur. That he describes himself as a journalist is an affront to all those working the profession.

Bush as his first namesake King George thinks he can do no wrong. That was true in God granted royalty but is certainly in any democracy an affront at the basic principle of such. Bush believes and his adorable followers believe in infallibility. Yet Bush and his derelict minions have been wrong time and time again. They have misled the country and buried the consequences in the absolute incredible ignorance of the American public for all that isn't American pie and stupid claims of being better than all the world. That Bush won with such a large majority in 2004 is an affront to all well informed and educated Americans (although with the current education programs there will be far less of them).

Wake up America: your current world standing is just one of a declining empire, out of its wits and in touch with reality (one has to wonder the vociferous appetite of America for well scripted "reality shows"). Consumerism rules us better than any dictator alive or dead, We export jobs and create trade deficits to give ourselves the standard of living we so crave like drug addicts give away their lives. But it is never our fault. Always that of others that apparently have taken away our free will.

WE so bask in that culture of irresponsibility that while we accept our ever increasing trade deficits we also accept as matter of fact the that e have this God's gift of being on a world's free lunch.

The Plame and Wilson affair exemplifies this. Some people in America are willing to accept for political gain the outing of classified information in order to subsidize their thirst for power. That affair has never been for policy gains (albeit some defend it such as Tyco's transparent lust for politics rather than policy and patriotism behind his lame attempts at legalese). It's been brutal political backroom strategies that gain little if contempt for their supporters by some people willing to question and make accountable the ones they elect.

It was dead wrong for any administration officials to out a CIA member. They know it, most caring people do. You just don't out Secret service people . It's classified information. You don't out people working within the nation's quest in the war on terrorism

Caught between a rock and a hard place, the Bush Repugnant administration chooses the gutter lower road of Nixon. Lie until you can't. Be totally irresponsible until you are exposed. Then hopefully, get a pardon from your successor. Nixon was scum. Led the country to an all time moral low. Bush sets with his gang of thugs (including a few convicted felons) a new standard for scum as only Texans can in their trust that all is ever so bigger in Texas: super scum. Sorry if I offended a few naïve Texans. The idea is not to offend you. It's to shame Bush and his attempt to demonize what so many Americans have fought and die for: our democracy and it's underlining principle of accountability.