this whole thing reminds me of "hogan's heros", colonel clink and sergeant schulz :
"i know nothing, herr commandant ! "
hbg
With all this evidence coming out on who outed the CIA agent, it makes one wonder how Bush-supporters can continue to debate the important issues. If it was the other way around; where the democrats outed a CIA agent, they would be crying bloody murder, and demanding firings and resignations. They would allow their own party these criminal actions, and even go so far as to rationalize the legality even though it threatens many lives.
The question of whether Ms. Wilson served abroad in the five-year period is the subject of dispute. An article in USA Today recently noted that Mr. Wilson did not refer to any foreign assignments by himself or his wife after June 1997 in his book, "The Politics of Truth," which was published last year. The syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak first disclosed Ms. Wilson's name and status in July 2003, six years later.
Christopher Wolf, a lawyer with Proskauer Rose in Washington who is advising the Wilsons, declined to comment on particular assignments that Ms. Wilson might have undertaken.
Speaking generally, he said: "I don't believe the statute requires a permanent assignment abroad. It can be trips abroad."
Okay, kuvasz, is another package on the way to CA? LOL
An operative's covert status is a formal designation made by the C.I.A., Mr. Smith said. Given that the agency referred the matter to the Justice Department for possible prosecution in the first place, there is good reason to think that it considered Ms. Wilson covert.
July 18, 2005, 8:01 a.m.
Did the CIA "Out" Valerie Plame?
What the mainstream media tells the court ... but won't tell you.
With each passing day, the manufactured "scandal" over the publication of Valerie Plame's relationship with the CIA establishes new depths of mainstream-media hypocrisy. A highly capable special prosecutor is probing the underlying facts, and it is appropriate to withhold legal judgments until he completes the investigation over which speculation runs so rampant. But it is not too early to assess the performance of the press. It's been appalling.
Is that hyperbole? You be the judge. Have you heard that the CIA is actually the source responsible for exposing Plame's covert status? Not Karl Rove, not Bob Novak, not the sinister administration cabal du jour of Fourth Estate fantasy, but the CIA itself? Had you heard that Plame's cover has actually been blown for a decade ?- i.e., since about seven years before Novak ever wrote a syllable about her? Had you heard not only that no crime was committed in the communication of information between Bush administration officials and Novak, but that no crime could have been committed because the governing law gives a person a complete defense if an agent's status has already been compromised by the government?
No, you say, you hadn't heard any of that. You heard that this was the crime of the century. A sort of Robert-Hanssen-meets-Watergate in which Rove is already cooked and we're all just waiting for the other shoe ?- or shoes ?- to drop on the den of corruption we know as the Bush administration. That, after all, is the inescapable impression from all the media coverage. So who is saying different?
The organized media, that's who. How come you haven't heard? Because they've decided not to tell you. Because they say one thing ?- one dark, transparently partisan thing ?- when they're talking to you in their news coverage, but they say something completely different when they think you're not listening.
You see, if you really want to know what the media think of the Plame case ?- if you want to discover what a comparative trifle they actually believe it to be ?- you need to close the paper and turn off the TV. You need, instead, to have a peek at what they write when they're talking to a court. It's a mind-bendingly different tale.
SPUN FROM THE START
My colleague Cliff May has already demonstrated the bankruptcy of the narrative the media relentlessly spouts for Bush-bashing public consumption: to wit, that Valerie Wilson, nee Plame, was identified as a covert CIA agent by the columnist Robert Novak, to whom she was compromised by an administration official. In fact, it appears Plame was first outed to the general public as a result of a consciously loaded and slyly hypothetical piece by the journalist David Corn. Corn's source appears to have been none other than Plame's own husband, former ambassador and current Democratic-party operative Joseph Wilson ?- that same pillar of national security rectitude whose notion of discretion, upon being dispatched by the CIA for a sensitive mission to Niger, was to write a highly public op-ed about his trip in the New York Times. This isn't news to the media; they have simply chosen not to report it.
The hypocrisy, though, only starts there. It turns out that the media believe Plame was outed long before either Novak or Corn took pen to paper. And not by an ambiguous confirmation from Rove or a nod-and-a-wink from Ambassador Hubby. No, the media think Plame was previously compromised by a disclosure from the intelligence community itself ?- although it may be questionable whether there was anything of her covert status left to salvage at that point, for reasons that will become clear momentarily.
This CIA disclosure, moreover, is said to have been made not to Americans at large but to Fidel Castro's anti-American regime in Cuba, whose palpable incentive would have been to "compromise[] every operation, every relationship, every network with which [Plame] had been associated in her entire career" ?- to borrow from the diatribe in which Wilson risibly compared his wife's straits to the national security catastrophes wrought by Aldrich Ames and Kim Philby.
THE MEDIA GOES TO COURT ... AND SINGS A DIFFERENT TUNE
Just four months ago, 36 news organizations confederated to file a friend-of-the-court brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington. At the time, Bush-bashing was (no doubt reluctantly) confined to an unusual backseat. The press had no choice ?- it was time to close ranks around two of its own, namely, the Times's Judith Miller and Time's Matthew Cooper, who were threatened with jail for defying grand jury subpoenas from the special prosecutor.
The media's brief, fairly short and extremely illuminating, is available here[/b][/URL]. The Times, which is currently spearheading the campaign against Rove and the Bush administration, encouraged its submission. It was joined by a "who's who" of the current Plame stokers, including ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, AP, Newsweek, Reuters America, the Washington Post, the Tribune Company (which publishes the Los Angeles Times and the Baltimore Sun, among other papers), and the White House Correspondents (the organization which represents the White House press corps in its dealings with the executive branch).
The thrust of the brief was that reporters should not be held in contempt or forced to reveal their sources in the Plame investigation. Why? Because, the media organizations confidently asserted, no crime had been committed. Now, that is stunning enough given the baleful shroud the press has consciously cast over this story. Even more remarkable, though, were the key details these self-styled guardians of the public's right to know stressed as being of the utmost importance for the court to grasp ?- details those same guardians have assiduously suppressed from the coverage actually presented to the public.
Though you would not know it from watching the news, you learn from reading the news agencies' brief that the 1982 law prohibiting disclosure of undercover agents' identities explicitly sets forth a complete defense to this crime. It is contained in Section 422 (of Title 50, U.S. Code), and it provides that an accused leaker is in the clear if, sometime before the leak, "the United States ha[s] publicly acknowledged or revealed" the covert agent's "intelligence relationship to the United States[.]"
As it happens, the media organizations informed the court that long before the Novak revelation (which, as noted above, did not disclose Plame's classified relationship with the CIA), Plame's cover was blown not once but twice. The media based this contention on reporting by the indefatigable Bill Gertz ?- an old-school, "let's find out what really happened" kind of journalist. Gertz's relevant article, published a year ago in the Washington Times, can be found here[/URL].
THE MEDIA TELLS THE COURT: PLAME'S COVER WAS BLOWN IN THE MID-1990s
As the media alleged to the judges (in Footnote 7, page 8, of their brief), Plame's identity as an undercover CIA officer was first disclosed to Russia in the mid-1990s by a spy in Moscow. Of course, the press and its attorneys were smart enough not to argue that such a disclosure would trigger the defense prescribed in Section 422 because it was evidently made by a foreign-intelligence operative, not by a U.S. agency as the statute literally requires.
But neither did they mention the incident idly. For if, as he has famously suggested, President Bush has peered into the soul of Vladimir Putin, what he has no doubt seen is the thriving spirit of the KGB, of which the Russian president was a hardcore agent. The Kremlin still spies on the United States. It remains in the business of compromising U.S. intelligence operations.
Thus, the media's purpose in highlighting this incident is blatant: If Plame was outed to the former Soviet Union a decade ago, there can have been little, if anything, left of actual intelligence value in her "every operation, every relationship, every network" by the time anyone spoke with Novak (or, of course, Corn).
THE CIA OUTS PLAME TO FIDEL CASTRO
Of greater moment to the criminal investigation is the second disclosure urged by the media organizations on the court. They don't place a precise date on this one, but inform the judges that it was "more recent" than the Russian outing but "prior to Novak's publication."
And it is priceless. The press informs the judges that the CIA itself "inadvertently" compromised Plame by not taking appropriate measures to safeguard classified documents that the Agency routed to the Swiss embassy in Havana. In the Washington Times article ?- you remember, the one the press hypes when it reports to the federal court but not when it reports to consumers of its news coverage ?- Gertz elaborates that "[t]he documents were supposed to be sealed from the Cuban government, but [unidentified U.S.] intelligence officials said the Cubans read the classified material and learned the secrets contained in them."
Thus, the same media now stampeding on Rove has told a federal court that, to the contrary, they believe the CIA itself blew Plame's cover before Rove or anyone else in the Bush administration ever spoke to Novak about her. Of course, they don't contend the CIA did it on purpose or with malice. But neither did Rove ?- who, unlike the CIA, appears neither to have known about nor disclosed Plame's classified status. Yet, although the Times and its cohort have a bull's eye on Rove's back, they are breathtakingly silent about an apparent CIA embarrassment ?- one that seems to be just the type of juicy story they routinely covet.
A COMPLETE DEFENSE?
The defense in Section 422 requires that the revelation by the United States have been done "publicly." At least one U.S. official who spoke to Gertz speculated that because the Havana snafu was not "publicized" ?- i.e., because the classified information about Plame was mistakenly communicated to Cuba rather than broadcast to the general public ?- it would not available as a defense to whomever spoke with Novak. But that seems clearly wrong.
First, the theory under which the media have gleefully pursued Rove, among other Bush officials, holds that if a disclosure offense was committed here it was complete at the moment the leak was made to Novak. Whether Novak then proceeded to report the leak to the general public is beside the point ?- the violation supposedly lies in identifying Plame to Novak. (Indeed, it has frequently been observed that Judy Miller of the Times is in contempt for protecting one or more sources even though she never wrote an article about Plame.)
Perhaps more significantly, the whole point of discouraging public disclosure of covert agents is to prevent America's enemies from degrading our national security. It is not, after all, the public we are worried about. Rather, it is the likes of Fidel Castro and his regime who pose a threat to Valerie Plame and her network of U.S. intelligence relationships. The government must still be said to have "publicized" the classified relationship ?- i.e., to have blown the cover of an intelligence agent ?- if it leaves out the middleman by communicating directly with an enemy government rather than indirectly through a media outlet.
LINGERING QUESTIONS
All this raises several readily apparent questions. We know that at the time of the Novak and Corn articles, Plame was not serving as an intelligence agent outside the United States. Instead, she had for years been working, for all to see, at CIA headquarters in Langley. Did her assignment to headquarters have anything to do with her effectiveness as a covert agent having already been nullified by disclosure to the Russians and the Cubans ?- and to whomever else the Russians and Cubans could be expected to tell if they thought it harmful to American interests or advantageous to their own?
If Plame's cover was blown, as Gertz reports, how much did Plame know about that? It's likely that she would have been fully apprised ?- after all, as we have been told repeatedly in recent weeks, the personal security of a covert agent and her family can be a major concern when secrecy is pierced. Assuming she knew, did her husband, Wilson, also know? At the time he was ludicrously comparing the Novak article to the Ames and Philby debacles, did he actually have reason to believe his wife had been compromised years earlier?
And could the possibility that Plame's cover has long been blown explain why the CIA was unconcerned about assigning a one-time covert agent to a job that had her walking in and out of CIA headquarters every day? Could it explain why the Wilsons were sufficiently indiscrete to pose in Vanity Fair, and, indeed, to permit Joseph Wilson to pen a highly public op-ed regarding a sensitive mission to which his wife ?- the covert agent ?- energetically advocated his assignment? Did they fail to take commonsense precautions because they knew there really was nothing left to protect?
We'd probably know the answers to these and other questions by now if the media had given a tenth of the effort spent manufacturing a scandal to reporting professionally on the underlying facts. And if they deigned to share with their readers and viewers all the news that's fit to print ... in a brief to a federal court.
Quote:SPUN FROM THE START
My colleague Cliff May
July 18, 2005, 11:23 a.m.
Valerie's No Victim
Plame put herself into a political place.
Let's cut through all the clutter: Almost two years ago, I wrote that Joe Wilson had himself to blame for the publicity surrounding his wife, Valerie Plame. I was wrong. Look to Valerie Plame herself.
Despite all the hype, it appears that Plame works a desk job at the CIA. That's an admirable and important line of work. But it doesn't make her a covert operative, and it didn't make her a covert operative when Bob Novak mentioned her in his July 14, 2003, column, or the five years preceding the column's publication, during which time she hadn't served overseas as a spy, either. And even if Plame had been a covert operative, as I read the statute, Karl Rove or anyone revealing her identity, would: 1) have had to secure the information from classified information; and 2) intended to use the information to expose her identity. There's no information on the public record to support this, either.
The New York Times now reports that a State Department memorandum identifying Plame was circulated on Air Force One and perhaps other places. Ex-Secretary of State Colin Powell was reportedly seen on the plane with the memo in his hand. (Of course, like so much the Times publishes, this had already been reported long ago by both the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.) Perhaps the document was classified. Who knows at this point? But if Plame wasn't a covert operative who met the five-year foreign-service requirement, identifying her based on the memo should be of no legal consequence. And there are other reasons to conclude that revealing Plame's identity would not be a crime. In a devastating piece about the media's unconscionable hypocrisy, Andy McCarthy explains that the same media that are speculating about Rove's guilt filed papers in federal court insisting that there can be no underlying crime as Plame's identity was already known thanks to revelations having nothing to do with Rove or anyone else at the White House.
At this point, I have to wonder: What, exactly, is being investigated? The Left acts as if it doesn't much care as long as someone in this administration is made to look like a criminal. The goal is to damage the president. Indeed, even before the investigation's end, Charles Schumer, Harry Reid, and Joe Wilson himself are demanding Rove's head. And to think it all started with Valerie Plame herself.
That's right. Plame started this phony scandal. And so far, she's gotten away with it. What do I mean? Plame has shown herself to be an extremely capable bureaucratic insider. In fact, we know she's accomplished ?- she accomplished getting her husband, Joe Wilson, an assignment he desperately wanted: a trip to Niger to investigate a "crazy" report that Saddam Hussein sought yellowcake uranium from Niger (her word, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, not mine). And she was dogged. She asked not once but twice (the second time in a memo) that her husband get the job. And there's more. The Senate Intelligence Committee investigation also found that a CIA "analyst's notes indicate that a meeting was 'apparently convened by [the former ambassador's] wife who had the idea to dispatch [him] to use his contacts to sort out the Iraq-Niger issues."
Now, Wilson didn't have an intelligence background. Indeed, the committee revealed that Wilson didn't have a "formal" security clearance, but the CIA gave him an "operational clearance." The fact is that there was little to recommend Wilson for the role, other than his wife's persistence.
Indeed, the committee reported further that some at the CIA "believed that the embassy in Niger had good contacts and would be able to get to the truth of the uranium issue, suggesting a visit from the former ambassador would be redundant...."
Why Wilson?
This is the real scandal. Plame lobbied repeatedly for her husband, and she knew full well that he was hostile to the war in Iraq and the administration's foreign policy. She had to know his politics ?- and there can no longer be any pretense about him being a nonpartisan diplomat who was merely doing his job. By experience and temperament, Wilson was the wrong man to send to Niger. Plame affirmatively stepped into what she knew might become a very public political controversy, given her husband's predilections (and her own) about that "crazy" report of yellowcake uranium.
In fact, Wilson was so concerned that his wife's aggressive and clandestine efforts in securing his assignment would become known that he lied about who sent him to Niger to cover her (and his) tracks. So, in his July 6, 2003, New York Times op-ed, he lied to the American people, writing: "It was my experience in Africa that led me to play a small role in the effort to verify information about Africa's suspected link to Iraq's nonconventional weapons programs. Those news stories about that unnamed former envoy who went to Niger? That's me. In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake ?- a form of lightly processed ore ?- by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990's. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office."
And in his book, Wilson wrote: "Valerie had nothing to do with the matter. She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip." Lie upon lie intended to conceal his wife's role and perpetuate the myth to the American people that he was a mere diplomat approached by the CIA because of his supposed expertise and professionalism. Wilson didn't want his and his wife's motivations to spoil the firestorm he was about to unleash against the president ?- with the help of the New York Times (which, to this day, has not run a correction and, therefore, stands by Wilson's demonstrable lies).
When Wilson returned from Niger, he never got around to filing a written report. After all, why produce a written report that would be circulated to real professionals and policymakers, who would subject it to serious scrutiny. However, Wilson was debriefed by the CIA and his debriefers did take notes. According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the debriefers' didn't share Wilson's information with, among others, the White House because they concluded Wilson didn't come up with much.
And remember, the crux of Wilson's op-ed was that there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein sought yellowcake uranium from Niger, that he had communicated that fact to the administration, that the administration ignored or rejected his findings, and that President Bush lied to the nation to justify the war when, during his January 2003 State of the Union address, he said that "the British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Committee Considerations
Also remember that a year later, an independent British commission, which reviewed the intelligence behind the Iraq-Niger uranium claim, concluded that the president's statement was "well founded," and the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that "a number of intelligence reports" contained similar information.
Significantly, the Senate Intelligence Committee learned that the debriefers' conclusions differed in several important ways from Wilson's, including respecting yellowcake uranium.
The committee wrote:
[list]First, the former ambassador described his findings to Committee staff as more directly related to Iraq and, specifically, as refuting both the possibility that Niger could have sold uranium to Iraq and that Iraq approached Niger to purchase uranium. The intelligence report described how the structure of Niger's uranium mines would make it difficult, if not impossible, for Niger to sell uranium to rogue nations, and noted that Nigerian officials denied knowledge of any deals to sell uranium to any rogue states, but did not refuse the possibility that Iraq had approached Niger to purchase uranium.
Second, the former ambassador said that he discussed with his CIA contacts which names and signatures should have appeared on any documentation of a legitimate uranium transaction. In fact, the intelligence report made no mention of the alleged Iraq-Niger uranium deal or signatures that should have appeared on any documentation of such a deal. The only mention of Iraq in the report pertained to the meeting between the Iraqi delegation and former [Niger] Prime Minister Mayaki.
Third, the former ambassador noted that his CIA contacts told him there were documents pertaining to the alleged Iraq-Niger uranium transaction and that the source of the information was the [blacked out] intelligence service." In fact, the CIA did not provide Wilson with "any information about the source or details of the original reporting as it would have required sharing classified information and noted that there were no 'documents' circulating ... at the time of the former ambassador's trip, only intelligence reports from [blacked out] intelligence regarding an alleged Iraq-Niger uranium deal. ...[N]one of the meeting participants recall telling the former ambassador the source of the report ...[/list]So, Wilson lied about what he found (or didn't find) in Niger, he lied about discussing with his CIA debriefers certain documentation and signatures he never saw, and he lied about the CIA telling him of certain classified documents and sources. His New York Times op-ed was fiction, as was information he later leaked to the Washington Post, information he gave to other media outlets, and significant aspects of his book.
To this day, despite all this evidence, the media embrace Wilson's story, evidence be damned. The media outlets that were used by Wilson, and published or repeated his lies, are very forgiving. They portray Wilson as he demands to be portrayed, not as he is. And they regurgitate the rhetoric about poor Valerie Plame ?- a patriot and victim endangered and ruined by politically motivated leaks and a powerful White House bent on discrediting her husband. Even Meet the Press's Tim Russert, who fancies himself a hard-nosed interrogator, could not have a done a better job of misinforming the public and smearing the White House ?- cutting and pasting statements and video clips, and throwing softballs to, of all people, Bill Clinton's (and now George Soros's) hatchetman, John Podesta. Plame's central and aggressive role in promoting her husband, who in turn hoped to damage the credibility of the president in the midst of a war ?- from her CIA perch ?- doesn't even merit a mention. (Also, see Cliff May's excellent reporting about the Plame/Wilson/David Corn connections.[/URL])
And in an Alice In Wonderland-like storyline, the same media that demand confidentiality for their sources as a First Amendment right, also demand the identity of Bob Novak's sources and the names of administration officials who've spoken to the media. They cheer the very criminal investigation they once claimed endangered their profession. Meanwhile, who's under investigation? Not Plame and Wilson, who appear to have hatched this scandal, but those truly victimized by it ?- administration officials who, it appears, sought to correct Wilson's lies. Their phone conversations with reporters and e-mails to colleagues are now scrutinized by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and his grand jury as if they're war criminals. No wonder Plame is the toast of the Washington establishment and appears in publicity shots in Vanity Fair with a big grin. Look what she's wrought.
