Libby Guilty

Perhaps now we can put this episode behind us, but I doubt it. Some things just seem to go on forever. Governments, no matter what their philosophy or who leads them, always step in doo-doo. That's human beings for you, and the more centralized an organization is, the greater the opportunities.

At the beginning of the 21st century, we are still trying to figure out how to best balance government between Centralization and De-centralization. Either of those two extremes is a real disaster waiting to happen. The Constitution has served us well, it still serves us better than any alternative we know of. However, no one should ever think that perfection will ever be obtained, and human foibles and errors will continue until humans no longer run government organizations.

Asherman wrote:

Perhaps now we can put this episode behind us, but I doubt it. Some things just seem to go on forever. Governments, no matter what their philosophy or who leads them, always step in doo-doo. That's human beings for you, and the more centralized an organization is, the greater the opportunities.

At the beginning of the 21st century, we are still trying to figure out how to best balance government between Centralization and De-centralization. Either of those two extremes is a real disaster waiting to happen. The Constitution has served us well, it still serves us better than any alternative we know of. However, no one should ever think that perfection will ever be obtained, and human foibles and errors will continue until humans no longer run government organizations.

Asherman, I am curious what your opinion is on a question I have. Your opinions seem fairly balanced and fair on most things. This is something in regard to this case that hardly anyone is talking about.

How many times do you recall in history where a person employed by or contracted by the CIA, does work, and then not in an official capacity writes oped pieces to be published in the press about his work, attacking the administration? If I have this right, he had no official capacity in the chain of command in the CIA. He simply did the supposed work, reported it to superiors, and his job was done. Where in the manual does it say a person like that has permission to write openly about their work? He was not elected or appointed to anything, yet he took it upon himself to not only do the work, but also to interpret the work, without ever writing a written report even.

Must there be some kind of law or code pertaining to CIA work that would prohibit this kind of activity?

How many times do you recall in history where a person employed by or contracted by the CIA, does work, and then not in an official capacity writes oped pieces to be published in the press about his work, attacking the administration?

The CIA was formed at the beginning of the Cold War to conduct foreign intelligence and to centralize collected intelligence from the various intelligence agencies of the U.S. government. The basic division of labor was that the FBI handle domestic intelligence, the military intelligence services would concentrate on military matters, NSA collects and analyizes SATINT and ELENT signals, and the CIA was to handle all foreign intelligence. BTW each of these elements have separate Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence arms.

There have been several former employees of both the CIA and NSA who later published revealing material about those agencies. Some of those hanging Agency and Classified Intelligence operations out in public enjoyed a moment of fame/infamy. The Pentagon Papers and the Puzzle Palace are two relatively well-known examples. Some Intelligence Officers have gone public to denounce Company policies and procedures. A number of outstanding field agents were very vocal against closing down HUMINT networks, thereby increasing our reliance upon ELENT and SATINT products. The Carter and Clinton Administrations may have been the least supportive of aggressive US Intelligence operations, but the trend away from HUMINT is evident in every administration since LBJ.

Moles are a different story, and we've been plagued by them since WWII. US agents are "turned" by a foreign government, and reveal classified information detrimental to the country. Some of the moles become well known after their cover is blown. Most moles have been severely dealt with.


If I have this right, he had no official capacity in the chain of command in the CIA. He simply did the supposed work, reported it to superiors, and his job was done. Where in the manual does it say a person like that has permission to write openly about their work? He was not elected or appointed to anything, yet he took it upon himself to not only do the work, but also to interpret the work, without ever writing a written report even.
Perhaps you missed this Ash but Libby was conviceted of Perjury(telling lies))

Who is "he"? Intelligence officers are supposed to clear with their agency anything they later write that even remotely deals with intelligence. There isn't anything I can add without knowing what case you're referring to.

Perhaps some of those DEEP thinking leftists and Anarchists can help.

Perhaps some of those DEEP thinking leftists and Anarchists can help.

How many times do you recall in history where a person employed by or contracted by the CIA, does work, and then not in an official capacity writes oped pieces to be published in the press about his work, attacking the administration?

Who is "he"? Intelligence officers are supposed to clear with their agency anything they later write that even remotely deals with intelligence. There isn't anything I can add without knowing what case you're referring to.

Perhaps some of those DEEP thinking leftists and Anarchists can help.

Kubasz (sic, very sic) reminds us Wilson was not even being paid by the CIA to take his little trip to Niger. This aspect of what he did is not mentioned often, but I ask again, how come he was picked to go down there then?

Joe Wilson was Qualified
by Larry Johnson

Check out the latest from the Libby trial, courtesy of David Corn. Looks like Joe Wilson was well qualified to make the trip to Niger, at least that's Libby's line.

You remember all those conservative Bush-backers who derided former Ambassador Joseph Wilson and said he had been miserably unqualified to take a trip for the CIA to Niger to check out the allegation that Iraq had sought uranium there? Wilson's critics on the right pooh-poohed the trip and his abilities, claiming he had no expertise and no standing to be handed such a mission. Their aim was to undermine Wilson's stinging charge that the White House had twisted the prewar intelligence on Iraq. Well, let's turn to Scooter Libby on this.

Libby: Wilson was Qualified, and the Veep Thought So, Too

Today, the prosecution in the Libby trial played audiotapes of Libby's March 24, 2004 grand jury appearance. During that session, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald asked Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff if Libby believed that Wilson had been a reasonable choice for this mission to Niger. Libby said:

I thought he was fully qualified to do the mission...There was a suggestion in the [Bob] Novak column [of July 14, 2003] that his wife had been the one who suggested him to go....I didn't think he was unqualified to do the job....I thought he was qualified to do the mission.

And what about the veep? What did he think? Libby said:
I think the vice president thought he was qualified...For what he did, I would think the vice president thought he was qualified....At times he had suspicions [Wilson was selected because of his wife worked at CIA].
So if Libby and Cheney believed Wilson was qualified for the trip, will Wilson's detractors now concede this point? Or do they think that Libby was not telling the truth to a grand jury while under oath?

Posted by David Corn at February 7, 2007 10:35 AM

INTRODUCTION: The Bush White House, the GOP and their extended arms in the media have issued misleading and false talking points (example) to discredit Joseph Wilson, rather than take responsibility for illegally outing the covert identity of Wilson's CIA wife Valerie Plame Wilson - an act orchestrated and executed by senior Bush administration officials. This page provides a systematic rebuttal to the deceptive or fraudulent talking points on this topic, put out by conservative media, bloggers, GOP partisans and operatives of the Bush administration. I have relied here on my own work as well as on that of various reporters and bloggers. In a nutshell this issue is about one thing and one thing alone. The Bush administration, embarrassed by revelations that they misled and lied to Americans about the reasons to go to war with Iraq (especially on the uranium in Africa issue), exacted revenge on whistleblower Joseph Wilson by needlessly exposing his wife (and setting their dogs loose on her) and jeopardizing America's national security in the process.

Owing to the large amount of disinformation in circulation, I decided to break-down the debunking into the following sections.
I. VALERIE PLAME AND HER IDENTITY
II. JOSEPH WILSON'S TRIP TO NIGER, AND HIS SUBSEQUENT CLAIMS
III. KARL ROVE
IV. LEWIS LIBBY
V. BUSH ADMINISTRATION (outside of Rove and Libby)
VI. THE CRIME AND THE INVESTIGATION
VII. OTHER

Wilson served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for African Affairs at the National Security Council from June 1997 until July 1998. In that capacity he was responsible for the coordination of U.S. policy to the 48 countries of sub-Saharan Africa, He was one of the principal architecs of President Clinton's historic trip to Africa in March 1998.

Ambassador Wilson was the Political Advisor to the Commander-in-Chief of United States Armed Forces, Europe, 1995-1997. He served as the U.S. Ambassador to the Gabonese Republic and to the Democratic Republic of Sao Tome and Principe from 1992 to 1995. From 1998 to 1991, Ambassador Wilson served in Baghdad, Iraq as Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy. During ''Desert Shield'' he was the acting Ambassador and was responsible for the negotiations that resulted in the release of several hundred American hostages. He was the last official American to meet with Saddam Hussein before the launching of ''Desert Storm.''
Ambassador Wilson was a member of the U.S. Diplomatic Service from 1976 until 1998. His early assignments included Niamey, Niger, 1976-1978; Lome, Togo, 1978-79; the State Department Brueau of African Affairs, 1979-1981; and Pretoria, South Africa, 1981-1982.

In 1982, he was appointed Deputy Chief of Mission in Bujumbura, Burundi. In 1985-1986, he served in the offices of Senator Albert Gore and the House Majority Whip, Representative Thomas Foley, as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow. He was Deputy Chief of Mission in Brazzaville, Congo, 1986-88, prior to his assignment to Baghdad.

Here's how Wilson described his meeting with former Prime Minister Mayaki:

"He had mentioned to me that on the margins of a ministerial meeting of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1999, a Nigerien businessman had asked him to meet with an Iraqi official to discuss trade. My contact said the alarm bells had immediately gone off in his mind. Well aware of the United Nations sanctions on Iraq, he met with the Iraqi only briefly and avoided any substantive issues. As he told me this, he hesitated and looked up the sky as if plumbing the depths of his memory, then offered that perhaps the Iraqi might have wanted to talk about uranium. But since there had been no discussion of uranium--my contact was idly speculating when he mentioned it--there was no story. I spoke with this Nigerien friend again in January 2004, and he recollected our conversation in 2002. He told me that while he was watching coverage of press conferences in Baghdad prior to the second Gulf War, he recognized the Iraqi information minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, known to Americans as "Baghdad Bob," as the person whom he had met in Algiers."(28)

And here is Wilson's description of what he said about his trip and this meeting in his debriefing session.

Within an hour of my return to Washington in early March 2002, a CIA reports officer, at my request, arrived at my home. Over Chinese takeout, I gave him the same details of my trip and conclusions that I had provided to Owens-Kirkpatrick in Niamey before my departure. These included the account of the meeting between my Nigerien contact and the Iraqi official on the margins of the OAU meeting, as well as my observations about where our government might inquire further if it was not persuaded by my report or those of the ambassador and the general whose inquiries had preceded mine. (29)

SSCI Report
Now compare that to what appears in the SSCI Report, including the direct citations from the CIA report itself. The CIA report did not name Wilson or identify him as a former ambassador (which is one of the pieces of evidence that suggests it was in the documents sent to Libby on June 9). Rather, it described him as a "contact with excellent access who does not have an established reporting record."

The report described Wilson's conversation with former Minister for Energy and Mines Mai Manga, who explained:

He knew of no contracts signed between Niger and any rogue states for the sale of uranium. He said that an Iranian delegation was interested in purchasing 400 tons of yellowcake from Niger in 1998, but said that no contract was ever signed with Iran.(44)

In addition, the CIA report described Wilson's conversation with former Prime Minister Ibrahim Mayaki who explained that he knew of no contracts signed between Niger and any rogue states between 1996 and 1999, when he had been in a position to know. Mayaki went on to explain the famous meeting with an Iraqi delegation:

Mayaki said, however, that in June 1999, [redacted] businessman, approached him and insisted that Mayaki meet with an Iraqi delegation to discussion "expanding commercial relations" between Niger and Iraq. The intelligence report said that Mayaki interpreted "expanding commercial relations" to mean that the delegation wanted to discuss uranium yellowcake sales. The intelligence report also said that "although the meeting took place, Mayaki let the matter drop due to the UN sanctions on Iraq." (43)

The SSCI report provides more detail on the CIA report when discussing differences between Wilson's version of what he reported and the CIA report. The CIA report included details of the uranium industry in Niger and noted that it would be almost impossible to sell uranium to rogue states, but did not refute the possibility that Iraq had approached Niger to purchase uranium.(44)

And here's the part that stunned me, when I first realized what it said:

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 Prime Minister Mayaki. (44)

As I said when I first wrote about this, this suggests the CIA report completely obscured the reason behind Wilson's trip, which was to respond specifically to a piece of intelligence alleging an Iraqi-Nigerien uranium deal.

Joe Wilson's SSCI Interview

The SSCI staff asked Wilson for more details about his report. He provided important details that apparently weren't in the CIA report.

The former ambassador said that Mayaki did meet with the Iraqi delegation but never discussed what was meant by "expanding commercial relations." The former ambassador said that because Mayaki was wary of discussing any trade issues with a country under United Nations (UN) sanctions, he made a successful effort to steer the conversation away from a discussion of trade with the Iraqi delegation. (44)
In other words, Wilson specifies that Mayaki was only speculating when he said the expanding trade referred to Iraq. And that Mayaki ended the meeting before the Iraqis could make such a detail more clear.

Wilson's version of his report differed from the CIA report in a few more important ways.

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.

[snip]
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.

[snip]
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 [redacted] intelligence service. (44)

So already, we can see some sources for the major problems that would come later.

• Wilson understood his trip to be an investigation of a specific piece of intelligence alleging an Iraq-Niger uranium deal; the reports officer reported it as a general trip about uranium trades with rogue nations.
• Wilson claims to have provided the information the CIA needed to assess the uranium deal allegations; the reports officer recorded no such thing.
There's one piece of information that may or may not have appeared in the CIA report, which caused some problems later on.
• Wilson knew the meeting between Mayaki and Baghdad Bob took place in Algiers, not in Niger. From what we know of the CIA report, it's not clear whether that detail was included.
But we know the CIA report did include a detail that Ari Fleischer seems to have willfully obscured later.
• The CIA report makes it clear that Mayaki, not Wilson, met with Baghdad Bob. But Ari seems to have intentionally confused that issue when he started using tidbits from this report.
I'll look at what Tenet and Ari made of this report in just a bit. But first, I'd like to consider a few of the reasons behind these discrepancies.

I'm sorry, I assumed you were referring to someone from within the community speaking out of turn. I don't see that Ambassador Wilson did anything he shouldn't have. He went and looked into a report, but found nothing to support it. He presumably passed that information along, and went his merry way. There was no reason why he should not have made his feelings public, though I'm sure that some in the administration didn't like it. Oh well....

Somehow, Wilson's wife was identified as a CIA agent and that got published. It appears that her association with the CIA was widely known, at least privately. Apparently a number of Washington journalists knew she was connected to the CIA, but didn't go public with that knowledge. I don't think that anyone in this administration purposefully "outed" the woman for spite. Appearances though are important, and in the resulting tempest (largely resulting from the more radical Democrats) a Special Prosecutor got named who needed to show that he was earning his keep. I think when it became apparent that no successful prosecution for breaking a CIA cover was possible, they needed something to show for their efforts. Libby drew the short straw, and I think he's handled the injustice of the situation admirably. I doubt he will get a Presidential pardon before the next Presidential election, but trust he'll be pardoned then.

Lets get on with the problems facing the country, and let the dead bury the dead.

'Tis truly astonishing just how simplistic the conservative mind frame can be.

The simplistic nature of the conservative mind never ceases to amaze me. Moreover, their stunning hypocrisy on virtually all matters is hard to comprehend. For instance, they pointed to support the rule of law in their persecution of Clinton for lying about a sexual indiscretion. But they seek a pardon for a man who perjured himself in an investigation of a matter involving treason.