Fitzgerald Investigation of Leak of Identity of CIA Agent

Tico: I didn't cite Olbermann and you know when you are desperate. I don't have to give you psychoanalysis. Hitchens is a drunk and hardly one to use for a debate.

An Updated Plamegate Timeline
By Larry Johnson
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Tuesday 11 April 2006

The frantic spinning by the White House and its crazy right-wing allies, including Michael Ledeen and Christopher Hitchens (a neo-righty), to explain why George Bush was in the middle of the effort to discredit Ambassador Joe Wilson is failing on the facts. Ledeen and Hitchens insist that the reports that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium from Niger are true. Ledeen cites the UK's Butler report as his "proof" and Hitchens relies on mental gymnastics and circumstances rather than evidence for his belief in the "kool aid."

As a public service, I offer the following linked timeline where you can examine the documents for yourself. Once you review this material, there should be no doubt that President Bush is a bald-faced liar and used his office to attack Joe Wilson for trying to ensure the American people were told the truth about Iraq and its alleged efforts to buy uranium in West Africa.

Event One - 13 February 2002. During his CIA morning brief, Vice President Cheney asks the CIA to find out the truth about an item in the Defense Intelligence Agency's National Military Joint Intelligence Center Executive Highlight (Vol. 028-02) that analyzed a recent CIA intelligence report and concluded that "Iraq is probably searching abroad for natural uranium to assist in its nuclear weapons program." No judgment was offered about the credibility of the reporting. (Senate Intelligence Committee Report [SICR], page 38)

Event Two. Senior officials in the CIA's Directorate of Operations' Counter Proliferation Division discussed how to respond to Vice President Cheney's request and decided to ask Ambassador Wilson to travel to Niger. (Senate Intelligence Committee Report, page 39). This part of the report falsely claims, however, that Ambassador Wilson's wife recommended him for the trip. The Republican staff did not accurately represent the CIA's position on what happened. Fortunately, two different sets of journalists got the story right:

Newsday reporters Tim Phelps and Knut Royce reported on July 22, 2003, that:

A senior intelligence officer confirmed that Plame was a Directorate of Operations undercover officer who worked "alongside" the operations officers who asked her husband to travel to Niger. But he said she did not recommend her husband to undertake the Niger assignment. "They (the officers who did ask Wilson to check the uranium story) were aware of who she was married to, which is not surprising," he said. "There are people elsewhere in government who are trying to make her look like she was the one who was cooking this up, for some reason," he said. "I can't figure out what it could be." "We paid his (Wilson's) airfare. But to go to Niger is not exactly a benefit. Most people you'd have to pay big bucks to go there," the senior intelligence official said. Wilson said he was reimbursed only for expenses. (Newsday article "Columnist Blows CIA Agent's Cover," dated July 22, 2003).

One year later (July 13, 2004) David Ensor, the CNN correspondent, called the CIA for a statement of its position and reported that a senior CIA official confirmed Ambassador Wilson's account that Valerie did not propose him for the trip.

Event Three. In the first of March, 2002, Vice President Cheney asks his CIA briefer for an update on the Niger issue. Around this time, Ambassador Wilson returns from Niger and is debriefed by two CIA officers from the Directorate of Operations. The officers draft an intelligence report based on Wilson's findings. On 8 March 2002, this intelligence report is disseminated. The CIA rated the report as "good," because the information responded to at least some of the outstanding questions in the intelligence community (SICR pp. 43-46). The Senate Intelligence Committee goes to great length to try to impugn Ambassador Wilson, but these facts are clear: Joe Wilson, along with US Ambassador to Niger Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick and four-star Marine Corps general Carleton Fulford, each separately, reported that there was no substance to the intelligence report claiming Iraq was trying to buy uranium yellowcake. Even the Senate Intelligence Committee reluctantly reaches the same conclusion.

Event Four - 23 July 2002. The head of British foreign intelligence comes away from a meeting with President Bush and his advisors in Washington convinced that war in Iraq is inevitable.

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

Event Five - October 2002. The National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction is published. With respect to the question of uranium and West Africa, the intelligence community concluded:

We cannot confirm whether Iraq succeeded in acquiring uranium ore and/or yellowcake from these sources. Reports suggest Iraq is shifting from domestic mining and milling of uranium to foreign acquisition. Iraq possesses significant phosphate deposits, from which uranium had been chemically extracted before Operation Desert Storm. Intelligence information on whether nuclear-related phosphate mining and/or processing has been reestablished is inconclusive, however.

The events following the publication of the NIE are particularly telling, because the CIA repeatedly informed Congressional and Executive branch officials, including the White House, that they doubted the reports of Iraq trying to buy uranium from Niger.

The Senate Intelligence Committee report from 2004 recounts the following incidents:

On Oct. 2, 2002, the Deputy DCI [director of central intelligence] testified before the SSCI [Senate Select Committee on Intelligence]. Sen. Jon Kyl asked the Deputy DCI whether he had read the British White Paper and whether he disagreed with anything in the report. The Deputy DCI testified that "the one thing where I think they stretched a little bit beyond where we would stretch is on the points about Iraq seeking uranium from various African locations." (page 54) [Note: Ambassador Wilson provided the following summary in his letter to the Senate Intelligence committee.]

On Oct. 4, 2002, the NIO for Strategic and Nuclear Programs testified that "there is some information on attempts ... there's a question about those attempts because of the control of the material in those countries ... For us it's more the concern that they [Iraq] have uranium in-country now." (page 54)

On Oct. 5, 2002, the ADDI [associate deputy director for intelligence] said an Iraqi nuclear analyst - he could not remember who - raised concerns about the sourcing and some of the facts of the Niger reporting, specifically that the control of the mines in Niger would have made it very difficult to get yellowcake to Iraq. (page 55)

Based on the analyst's comments, the ADDI faxed a memo to the deputy national security advisor that said, "Remove the sentence because the amount is in dispute and it is debatable whether it can be acquired from this source. We told Congress that the Brits have exaggerated this issue. Finally, the Iraqis already have 550 metric tons of uranium oxide in their inventory." (page 56)

On Oct. 6, 2002, the DCI called the deputy national security advisor directly to outline the CIA's concerns. The DCI testified to the SSCI on July 16, 2003, that he told the deputy national security advisor that the "President should not be a fact witness on this issue," because his analysts had told him the "reporting was weak." (page 56)

On Oct. 6, 2002, the CIA sent a second fax to the White House that said, "More on why we recommend removing the sentence about procuring uranium oxide from Africa: Three points (1) The evidence is weak. One of the two mines cited by the source as the location of the uranium oxide is flooded. The other mine cited by the source is under the control of the French authorities. (2) The procurement is not particularly significant to Iraq's nuclear ambitions because the Iraqis already have a large stock of uranium oxide in their inventory. And (3) we have shared points one and two with Congress, telling them that the Africa story is overblown and telling them this is one of the two issues where we differed with the British." (page 56)

Event Six. Despite the CIA's view that the information was not credible, President Bush and his administration continued to try to use the information. In late December of 2002, the State Department inserted the claim into a fact sheet but then removed it. According to the Washington Post:

After that, the Pentagon asked for an authoritative judgment from the National Intelligence Council, the senior coordinating body for the 15 agencies that then constituted the U.S. intelligence community. Did Iraq and Niger discuss a uranium sale, or not? If they had, the Pentagon would need to reconsider its ties with Niger. The council's reply, drafted in a January 2003 memo by the national intelligence officer for Africa, was unequivocal: The Niger story was baseless and should be laid to rest.

And what did President Bush do? He ignored the intelligence community and told the American people in the State of the Union:

The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

This was a lie. There was no recent information that Saddam was seeking "significant" quantities of uranium. The British information was based on events from 1999. There was no evidence of recent activity on this front.

Despite the lack of supporting intelligence, President Bush intended to start the war in Iraq on 10 March 2003. This, according to the, New York Times is stated in a classifed British Government memo, which reports that:

During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, he [Bush] made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Mr. Blair's top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by The New York Times.... "The start date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March," Mr. Manning wrote, paraphrasing the president. "This was when the bombing would begin."

Event Seven - 6 May 2003. Nick Kristof writes in the New York Times, "I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged."

Although Kristof merged his discussion with Ambassador Wilson of the forged documents and the visit to Niger, this revelation set off alarm bells and started the White House preparation for damage control. The White House launched an to deal with Ambassador Wilson. A recent effort filing by Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald responding to an earlier request for information by Scooter Libby's lawyers states that (see p. 26):

Indeed, there exist documents, some of which have been provided to defendant, and there were conversations in which defendant participated, that reveal a strong desire by many, including multiple people in the White House, to repudiate Mr. Wilson before and after July 14, 2003.

Event Eight - 6 July 2003. Ambassador Wilson's op-ed appears in the New York Times. Wilson makes the following key points:

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.

I met with Ambassador Owens-Kirkpatrick at the embassy ... I was not surprised, then, when the ambassador told me that she knew about the allegations of uranium sales to Iraq - and that she felt she had already debunked them in her reports to Washington.... Before I left Niger, I briefed the ambassador on my findings, which were consistent with her own. I also shared my conclusions with members of her staff. In early March, I arrived in Washington and promptly provided a detailed briefing to the C.I.A.

Though I did not file a written report, there should be at least four documents in United States government archives confirming my mission. The documents should include the ambassador's report of my debriefing in Niamey, a separate report written by the embassy staff, a C.I.A. report summing up my trip, and a specific answer from the agency to the office of the vice president (this may have been delivered orally). While I have not seen any of these reports, I have spent enough time in government to know that this is standard operating procedure.

The question now is how that answer was or was not used by our political leadership. If my information was deemed inaccurate, I understand (though I would be very interested to know why). If, however, the information was ignored because it did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq, then a legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses.

Event Nine. George Bush and Dick Cheney consult on how to respond to Ambassador Wilson's charges and decide to leak the Executive Summary of the October 2002 NIE. Curiously, the Executive Summary says nothing about uranium sales by Niger to Iraq. And it was during the week after Joe Wilson's op-ed appeared that Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, at the behest of Dick Cheney and George Bush, fanned out to trash the Ambassador. In the process they also divulged the name of Joe's wife, Valerie Wilson.

For those who still believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, it is unlikely that the name of Valerie Wilson surfaced during the White House planning to retaliate against Joe Wilson. For those still in touch with reality who recognize the difference between hard facts and wishful fantasies, it is very likely that George Bush and Dick Cheney at least gave tacit approval to go after Valerie Wilson. In fact, the White House spin worked mightily to make her part of the story when, if they really wanted to know the truth, they only needed to ask George Tenet. They did not, and the rest is history.

Until last week, we could assume that George Bush avoided the plan to use leaks and false information to attack Joe Wilson. Now, in light of the revelations from Patrick Fitzgerald, George Bush is implicated directly.

The real point, however, is not the outing of a covert CIA officer. The tragedy is that our President lied to make the case to go to war in Iraq. He manipulated and ignored intelligence. And, when the lie was exposed, he blamed the CIA rather than take responsibility for his own actions. As I have said before, that is a definition of a coward.

Vietnamnurse wrote:

Tico: I didn't cite Olbermann and you know when you are desperate. I don't have to give you psychoanalysis. Hitchens is a drunk and hardly one to use for a debate.

a. I never said you cited Olbermann.

??????

b. I'm not desperate.

We didn't expect you to admit it

c. I don't need psychoanalysis.

Of course you don't think you do, recognition is an important first step

d. What do you have against drunks?

Well, that could explain a lot.

e. I didn't use him for a debate.

So at the time the information was first leaked, it was not declassified.

Lacking Biolabs, Trailers Carried Case for War
Administration Pushed Notion of Banned Iraqi Weapons Despite Evidence to Contrary

By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 12, 2006; A01

On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile "biological laboratories." He declared, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction."

The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true.

A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq -- not made public until now -- had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president's statement.

The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks later were stamped "secret" and shelved. Meanwhile, for nearly a year, administration and intelligence officials continued to publicly assert that the trailers were weapons factories.

The authors of the reports were nine U.S. and British civilian experts -- scientists and engineers with extensive experience in all the technical fields involved in making bioweapons -- who were dispatched to Baghdad by the Defense Intelligence Agency for an analysis of the trailers. Their actions and findings were described to a Washington Post reporter in interviews with six government officials and weapons experts who participated in the mission or had direct knowledge of it.

None would consent to being identified by name because of fear that their jobs would be jeopardized. Their accounts were verified by other current and former government officials knowledgeable about the mission. The contents of the final report, "Final Technical Engineering Exploitation Report on Iraqi Suspected Biological Weapons-Associated Trailers," remain classified. But interviews reveal that the technical team was unequivocal in its conclusion that the trailers were not intended to manufacture biological weapons. Those interviewed took care not to discuss the classified portions of their work.

"There was no connection to anything biological," said one expert who studied the trailers. Another recalled an epithet that came to be associated with the trailers: "the biggest sand toilets in the world."
Primary Piece of Evidence

The story of the technical team and its reports adds a new dimension to the debate over the U.S. government's handling of intelligence related to banned Iraqi weapons programs. The trailers -- along with aluminum tubes acquired by Iraq for what was claimed to be a nuclear weapons program -- were primary pieces of evidence offered by the Bush administration before the war to support its contention that Iraq was making weapons of mass destruction.

Intelligence officials and the White House have repeatedly denied allegations that intelligence was hyped or manipulated in the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. But officials familiar with the technical team's reports are questioning anew whether intelligence agencies played down or dismissed postwar evidence that contradicted the administration's public views about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Last year, a presidential commission on intelligence failures criticized U.S. spy agencies for discounting evidence that contradicted the official line about banned weapons in Iraq, both before and after the invasion.

Spokesmen for the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency declined to comment on the specific findings of the technical report because it remains classified. A spokesman for the DIA asserted that the team's findings were neither ignored nor suppressed, but were incorporated in the work of the Iraqi Survey Group, which led the official search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The survey group's final report in September 2004 -- 15 months after the technical report was written -- said the trailers were "impractical" for biological weapons production and were "almost certainly intended" for manufacturing hydrogen for weather balloons.

"Whether the information was offered to others in the political realm I cannot say," said the DIA official, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified.

Intelligence analysts involved in high-level discussions about the trailers noted that the technical team was among several groups that analyzed the suspected mobile labs throughout the spring and summer of 2003. Two teams of military experts who viewed the trailers soon after their discovery concluded that the facilities were weapons labs, a finding that strongly influenced views of intelligence officials in Washington, the analysts said. "It was hotly debated, and there were experts making arguments on both sides," said one former senior official who spoke on the condition that he not be identified.

The technical team's findings had no apparent impact on the intelligence agencies' public statements on the trailers. A day after the team's report was transmitted to Washington -- May 28, 2003 -- the CIA publicly released its first formal assessment of the trailers, reflecting the views of its Washington analysts. That white paper, which also bore the DIA seal, contended that U.S. officials were "confident" that the trailers were used for "mobile biological weapons production."

Throughout the summer and fall of 2003, the trailers became simply "mobile biological laboratories" in speeches and press statements by administration officials. In late June, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell declared that the "confidence level is increasing" that the trailers were intended for biowarfare. In September, Vice President Cheney pronounced the trailers to be "mobile biological facilities," and said they could have been used to produce anthrax or smallpox.

By autumn, leaders of the Iraqi Survey Group were publicly expressing doubts about the trailers in news reports. David Kay, the group's first leader, told Congress on Oct. 2 that he had found no banned weapons in Iraq and was unable to verify the claim that the disputed trailers were weapons labs. Still, as late as February 2004, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet continued to assert that the mobile-labs theory remained plausible. Although there was "no consensus" among intelligence officials, the trailers "could be made to work" as weapons labs, he said in a speech Feb. 5.

Tenet, now a faculty member at Georgetown's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, declined to comment for this story.

Kay, in an interview, said senior CIA officials had advised him upon accepting the survey group's leadership in June 2003 that some experts in the DIA were "backsliding" on whether the trailers were weapons labs. But Kay said he was not apprised of the technical team's findings until late 2003, near the end of his time as the group's leader.

"If I had known that we had such a team in Iraq," Kay said, "I would certainly have given their findings more weight."
A Defector's Tales

Even before the trailers were seized in spring 2003, the mobile labs had achieved mythic stature. As early as the mid-1990s, weapons inspectors from the United Nations chased phantom mobile labs that were said to be mounted on trucks or rail cars, churning out tons of anthrax by night and moving to new locations each day. No such labs were found, but many officials believed the stories, thanks in large part to elaborate tales told by Iraqi defectors.

The CIA's star informant, an Iraqi with the code name Curveball, was a self-proclaimed chemical engineer who defected to Germany in 1999 and requested asylum. For four years, the Baghdad native passed secrets about alleged Iraqi banned weapons to the CIA indirectly, through Germany's intelligence service. Curveball provided descriptions of mobile labs and said he had supervised work in one of them. He even described a catastrophic 1998 accident in one lab that left 12 Iraqis dead.

Curveball's detailed descriptions -- which were officially discredited in 2004 -- helped CIA artists create color diagrams of the labs, which Powell later used to argue the case for military intervention in Iraq before the U.N. Security Council.

"We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails," Powell said in the Feb. 5, 2003, speech. Thanks to those descriptions, he said, "We know what the fermenters look like. We know what the tanks, pumps, compressors and other parts look like."

The trailers discovered in the Iraqi desert resembled the drawings well enough, at least from a distance. One of them, a flatbed trailer covered by tarps, was found in April by Kurdish fighters near the northern city of Irbil. The second was captured by U.S. forces near Mosul. Both were painted military green and outfitted with a suspicious array of gear: large metal tanks, motors, compressors, pipes and valves.

Photos of the trailers were quickly circulated, and many weapons experts were convinced that the long-sought mobile labs had been found.

Yet reaction from Iraqi sources was troublingly inconsistent. Curveball, shown photos of the trailers, confirmed they were mobile labs and even pointed out key features. But other Iraqi informants in internal reports disputed Curveball's story and claimed the trailers had a benign purpose: producing hydrogen for weather balloons.

Back at the Pentagon, DIA officials attempted a quick resolution of the dispute. The task fell to the "Jefferson Project," a DIA-led initiative made up of government and civilian technical experts who specialize in analyzing and countering biological threats. Project leaders put together a team of volunteers, eight Americans and a Briton, each with at least a decade of experience in one of the essential technical skills needed for bioweapons production. All were nongovernment employees working for defense contractors or the Energy Department's national labs.

The technical team was assembled in Kuwait and then flown to Baghdad to begin their work early on May 25, 2003. By that date, the two trailers had been moved to a military base on the grounds of one of deposed president Saddam Hussein's Baghdad palaces. When members of the technical team arrived, they found the trailers parked in an open lot, covered with camouflage netting.

The technical team went to work under a blistering sun in 110-degree temperatures. Using tools from home, they peered into vats, turned valves, tapped gauges and measured pipes. They reconstructed a flow-path through feed tanks and reactor vessels, past cooling chambers and drain valves, and into discharge tanks and exhaust pipes. They took hundreds of photographs.

By the end of their first day, team members still had differing views about what the trailers were. But they agreed about what the trailers were not.

"Within the first four hours," said one team member, who like the others spoke on the condition he not be named, "it was clear to everyone that these were not biological labs."

News of the team's early impressions leaped across the Atlantic well ahead of the technical report. Over the next two days, a stream of anxious e-mails and phone calls from Washington pressed for details and clarifications.

The reason for the nervousness was soon obvious: In Washington, a CIA analyst had written a draft white paper on the trailers, an official assessment that would also reflect the views of the DIA. The white paper described the trailers as "the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program." It also explicitly rejected an explanation by Iraqi officials, described in a New York Times article a few days earlier, that the trailers might be mobile units for producing hydrogen.

But the technical team's preliminary report, written in a tent in Baghdad and approved by each team member, reached a conclusion opposite from that of the white paper.
Key Components Lacking

Team members and other sources intimately familiar with the mission declined to discuss technical details of the team's findings because the report remains classified. But they cited the Iraqi Survey Group's nonclassified, final report to Congress in September 2004 as reflecting the same conclusions.

That report said the trailers were "impractical for biological agent production," lacking 11 components that would be crucial for making bioweapons. Instead, the trailers were "almost certainly designed and built for the generation of hydrogen," the survey group reported.

The group's report and members of the technical team also dismissed the notion that the trailers could be easily modified to produce weapons.

"It would be easier to start all over with just a bucket," said Rod Barton, an Australian biological weapons expert and former member of the survey group.

The technical team's preliminary report was transmitted in the early hours of May 27, just before its members began boarding planes to return home. Within 24 hours, the CIA published its white paper, "Iraqi Mobile Biological Warfare Agent Production Plants," on its Web site.

After team members returned to Washington, they began work on a final report. At several points, members were questioned about revising their conclusions, according to sources knowledgeable about the conversations. The questioners generally wanted to know the same thing: Could the report's conclusions be softened, to leave open a possibility that the trailers might have been intended for weapons?

In the end, the final report -- 19 pages plus a 103-page appendix -- remained unequivocal in declaring the trailers unsuitable for weapons production.

"It was very assertive," said one weapons expert familiar with the report's contents.

Then, their mission completed, the team members returned to their jobs and watched as their work appeared to vanish.

"I went home and fully expected that our findings would be publicly stated," one member recalled. "It never happened. And I just had to live with it."

Researcher Alice Crites contributed to this report.

Debate, you call the delsuions you post debate?

I asked if you had seen it, not if you all could post it here..

Patrick Fitzgerald found that Plame had indeed done "covert work overseas" on counterproliferation matters in the past five years, and the CIA "was making specific efforts to conceal" her identity, according to newly released portions of a judge's opinion. (A CIA spokesman at the time is quoted as saying Plame was "unlikely" to take further trips overseas, though.) Fitzgerald concluded he could not charge Libby for violating a 1982 law banning the outing of a covert CIA agent; apparently he lacked proof Libby was aware of her covert status when he talked about her three times with New York Times reporter Judith Miller. Fitzgerald did consider charging Libby with violating the so-called Espionage Act, which prohibits the disclosure of "national defense information," the papers show; he ended up indicting Libby for lying about when and from whom he learned about Plame.

I don't know if the following has posted or not, but I just happened to see this article while looking at other things and to me, it just jumped out at me with all the talk about Plame being "covert" or not in these threads. If it has already been discussed and I have overlooked it, just ignore my post entirely.

Quote:

Patrick Fitzgerald found that Plame had indeed done "covert work overseas" on counterproliferation matters in the past five years, and the CIA "was making specific efforts to conceal" her identity, according to newly released portions of a judge's opinion. (A CIA spokesman at the time is quoted as saying Plame was "unlikely" to take further trips overseas, though.) Fitzgerald concluded he could not charge Libby for violating a 1982 law banning the outing of a covert CIA agent; apparently he lacked proof Libby was aware of her covert status when he talked about her three times with New York Times reporter Judith Miller. Fitzgerald did consider charging Libby with violating the so-called Espionage Act, which prohibits the disclosure of "national defense information," the papers show; he ended up indicting Libby for lying about when and from whom he learned about Plame.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11179719/site/newsweek/

Well, I said if it has already been discussed to just ignore my post.

In any event, not your best effort, tico, but rather than rehash old ground, never mind.

revel wrote:

Well, I said if it has already been discussed to just ignore my post.

In any event, not your best effort, tico, but rather than rehash old ground, never mind.

Well, you obviously don't have a clue what you're talking about, but rather than open up old wounds, never mind.

Clueless Joe Wilson
How did the CIA's special envoy miss Zahawie's trip to Niger?
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, April 17, 2006, at 3:14 PM ET

Nobody appears to dispute what I wrote in last week's Slate to the effect that in February 1999, Saddam Hussein dispatched his former envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency, and former delegate to non-proliferation conferences at the United Nations, to Niger. Wissam al-Zahawie was, at the time of his visit, the accredited ambassador of Iraq to the Vatican: a more senior post than it may sound, given that the Vatican was almost the only full European embassy that Iraq then possessed. And nobody has proposed an answer to my question: Given the fact that Niger is synonymous with uranium (and was Iraq's source of "yellowcake" in 1981), and given that Zahawie had been Iraq's main man in nuclear diplomacy, what innocent explanation can be found for his trip?

The person whose response I most wanted is Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who has claimed to discover that Saddam was guiltless on the charge of seeking uranium from Niger, and has further claimed to be the object, along with his CIA wife, of a campaign of government persecution. On Keith Olbermann's show on April 10, Wilson was asked about my article and about Zahawie. He replied that Zahawie:

[i] is a man that I know from my time as acting ambassador in Baghdad during the first Gulf War. ... He was ambassador to the Vatican, and he made a trip in 1999 to several West and Central African countries for the express purpose of inviting chiefs of state to violate the ban on travel to Iraq. He has said repeatedly to the press, he's now in retirement, and also to the International Atomic Energy Agency, to their satisfaction, that uranium was not on his agenda[/i].