When And Why Joseph C Wilson IV Outed Valerie Plame

"So, did Powell choose Valerie to be on this team he created which set up shop at the CIA?"

I'd be very surprised if anybody like Powell would have been concerning himself with a GS-14 (actually, a GG-14), which is the mid-est of the mid-level drones.

But while you are here, I wonder if you have any exact date as to when Mr. Wilson came to be involved with VIPS.

As you know, that agit-prop documentary Wilson did, "UNCOVERED: The War on Iraq" was really a VIPS project. It was begun in June of 2003, and finished in just a few weeks.

Given that VIPS is an organization of *current* and former intelligence officers, you have to wonder how they came to get involved with Wilson -- if not through Valerie.

Moreover, one of its more prominent (and unbalanced) members is Larry C. Johnson, who claims to have been a classmate of Valerie's during her training days. And he claims to have been friends with her ever since.

Did the VIPS folks know about Valerie, and were they working with Wilson, even before Novak's column came out?

Raymond Close, listed on the Iraq Study Group’s Web site as a ‘freelance analyst,’ is actually a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which, in July 2003, called for Vice President Dick Cheney’s resignation for an alleged conspiracy to distort intelligence, which they said had been uncovered by none other than Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. The following summer, Close posited that ‘Bush and the neocons’ had fabricated the charge ‘that the evil Iranian mullahs inspired and instigated the radical Shia Islamist insurgency.’ To Close, the problem was not Iranian training and supply of money and sophisticated explosives to terrorists, but rather neoconservatism.”

July 15, 2003

Something fishy

Nicholas Kristof's column in the New York Times, as part of a charge that the Bush administration has corrupted intelligence gathering, has this interesting bit:

But Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of retired spooks, issued an open letter to President Bush yesterday reflecting the view of many in the intel community that the central culprit is Vice President Dick Cheney. The open letter called for Mr. Cheney's resignation.

Kristof cites mostly the alleged views of unnamed intelligence officials. So we just have his word for it. Among the only people cited by name are a newly formed outfit, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). Kristof treats them as a disinterested group of non-partisan, non-ideological experts. These are not crazed anti-Bush fanatics, like Paul Krugman or ANSWER. Yeah, right.

VIPS does not seem to have a website, but its email is vips@counterpunch.org, and their open letter appears to have been published at CounterPunch (run by Alexander Cockburn, the Nation columnist), an outfit whose staple is stuff comparing Bush to Hitler. VIPS also published an open letter in opposition to the war at Common Dreams back in February.

The spokesman for VIPS is Raymond McGovern, a retired CIA analyst. McGovern's email is also at CounterPunch. He is giving a briefing today with Rep. Dennis Kucinich. McGovern has compared the Iraq war to Vietnam, even saying that it could lead to nuclear war. He has charged that if WMDs are found in Iraq, they may well have been planted. He believes Tenet's job is safe because if Tenet were fired, he would reveal that the White House ignored intelligence warnings pre-9/11. McGovern has urged CIA analysts to illegally release classified documents to show what he believes to be true, specifically citing Daniel Ellsberg.

Another member of the VIPS steering committee is William Christison, who among other things believes that the Bush administration is attempting to colonize the Middle East, jointly with Israel. He believes that the war on terror is being used to turn the US into a military dictatorship. He is also a backer of the left-wing UrgentCall, along with people such as Noam Chomsky, Barbara Kingsolver, Julian Bond, and Jonathan Schell.

Kristof is trying to pass off a fairly left-wing group as a group of non-partisan "professionals". Remember Katie Couric's description of MoveOn.com, a very left anti-war group as simply an outfit “started by two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs frustrated by the political process”? This is the same kind of scam.

http://tinyurl.com/2b75la

"Kristof is trying to pass off a fairly left-wing group as a group of non-partisan "professionals". Remember Katie Couric's description of MoveOn.com, a very left anti-war group as simply an outfit “started by two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs frustrated by the political process”? This is the same kind of scam."

Yes he did. And he was not alone by a long shot.

When Plame's disclosure first hit, it was the VIPS who led the media charge about what an outrage this was. (Never mind that they are in the business of trying to cajole current and former intel people to leak damaging secrets to the media.)

Their "letters" to the President and Congress were the stuff of headlines both on TV and in the newspapers. All reported without any mention of who they were and what their real goal was.

And of course the absolute topper was when the Democrats picked Larry C. Johnson himself to "respond" to one of President Bush's Saturday radio addresses.

There was a clear and concerted effort to ignore what these people were and to pretend that they were a real professional organization that was concerned about protecting the integrity of our intelligence agencies.

When exactly the opposite is true.

Some other relevant FR threads:

Wilson Didn't Complain About "The 16 Words" Until He Was Working On Kerry Campaign
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1445574/posts

Wilson (2/02/2003): "Hussein will use WMDs to defend himself"
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1443079/posts

Former CIA Agent Phillip Agee On the Wilson Affair (The Traitor And Murderer Opines)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1442831/posts

CIA 'Expert' Larry Johnson: "Plame Undercover For Three Decades"
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1451694/posts

Flashback: "Intelligence Analyst" Larry C. Johnson: "The Declining Terrorist Threat (July 10, 2001)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1447248/posts

'Terrorist Expert' Larry Johnson's Frontline Interview About Bin Ladin (2000)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1451559/posts

Ex CIA Larry Johnson: Terrorism Isn't A Threat, But Big Tobacco Is!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1448666/posts

Larry Johnson, Daniel Ellsberg The Truth Telling Project --Pleading For Intel Leaks
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1451334/posts

Larry Johnson's Group (VIPS) Called On CIA Employees To Leak Secrets To Hurt Bush
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1450548/posts

Is Ex-CIA Agent Larry C. Johnson Threatening A Freeper?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1450846/posts?page=58

Thanks! Speaking of Wilkerson:

Affirming that he had called Bolton as an "abysmal choice" for the U.N. post, Wilkerson said Bolton went so far in his speeches that he was ordered to clear them with him or the office of Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.
The former Powell aide [Wilkerson] said Bolton was too aggressive in pushing sanctions against Chinese companies for spreading weapons technology and "overstepped the bounds" in the way he tried to block a third term for Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency.
----- Bolton Criticized by Former Intel Official By BARRY SCHWEID, AP Diplomatic Writer

But while you are here, I wonder if you have any exact date as to when Mr. Wilson came to be involved with VIPS.

It was before Novak's column.

From Larry Johnson's blog :

Biography of Ray McGovern [See VIPS]
Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. He was a C.I.A. analyst for 27 years, and is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
The coming months are likely to see senior Bush administration officials frog marched out of the White House to be booked, unless the president moves swiftly to fire Fitzgerald—a distinct possibility. With so many forces at play, it is easy to lose perspective and context while plowing through the tons of information on this case. What follows is a retrospective and prospective, laced with some new facts and analysis aimed at helping us to focus on the forest once we have given due attention to the trees.
In late May 2003, the Education for Peace in Iraq Center (EPIC) informed me [Ray McGovern] that a former U.S. ambassador named Joseph Wilson would be sharing keynote duties with me at a large EPIC conference on June 14.
I was delighted—for two reasons. This was a chance to meet the “American hero” (per George H. W. Bush) who faced down Saddam Hussein, freeing hundreds of American and other hostages taken when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. More important, since Wilson had served as an ambassador in Africa, I thought he might be able to throw light on a question bedeviling me since May 6, when New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote an intriguing story about a mission to Niger by “a former U.S. ambassador to Africa.” --- "Chickens Come Home to Roost on Cheney ," by Larry Johnson , Thu Oct 20th, 2005 at 12:34:45 PM EDT [Johnson's blog]

Did the VIPS folks know about Valerie, and were they working with Wilson, even before Novak's column came out?

On June 26, I conducted an interview with 27-year CIA veteran Ray McGovern. McGovern served every President from Kennedy to Bush Sr., and delivered a wide spectrum of insight and data regarding both the September 11 attack and the second Iraq war. When I questioned McGovern on the impact these developments were having on the American intelligence community, McGovern made a prescient prediction:
".... In the coming weeks, we're going to be seeing folks coming out and coming forth with what they know, and it is going to be very embarrassing for the Bush administration."
--------- June 26, 2003 From liberalslant (no surprise here) by William Rivers Pitt. Ewww.
((William Rivers Pitt is a teacher from Boston, MA. He is a New York Times best-selling author of two books - "War On Iraq" (with Scott Ritter)..William is a contributing writer for Liberal Slant. He is on the writing staff at www.truthout.com where this article was published))
9 posted on 10/01/2003 10:37 AM EDT by unsycophant

".... In the coming weeks, we're going to be seeing folks coming out and coming forth with what they know, and it is going to be very embarrassing for the Bush administration."

Yes, I remember that now. Good memory.

And you can bet McGovern was talking about Joe Wilson and/or Valerie Plame. (But more likely just Wilson, since Plame hadn't quite reached her retirement time yet.)

And who else has come out? Only Wilson.

And McGovern had probably just come from doing his interviews for the "Uncovered" film that Wilson also starred in.

Funny how neither Wilson, let alone McGovern have never been questioned about this part of the timeline.

VIPs was started in January 2003:

The group has about 45 members and has expanded since it first began in January 2003 to include not just CIA analysts but also former State Department employees and members of the FBI.
The former analysts sought each other out just before the start of the declared war on Iraq because, like their name implies, they needed a sanity check, McGovern said. They needed to compare notes on what they saw going on in the Bush administration and in the media.
"What we hoped, of course, was that the movement would become more than the sum of its parts," he said during a conversation with the Monitor before his presentation Friday.
The group has written letters to President Bush and General Secretary of the United Nations Kofi Annan and opinion pieces for online publications like Common Dreams and Salon.com. --- "Former CIA official looks to leak the truth ," CHELSEA CONABOY, Concord Monitor. Concord, N.H.: Oct 5, 2004. pg. B.01 Copyright Concord Monitor/Sunday Monitor Oct 5, 2004

Another note on VIPS:

The Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) group is headed by Ray McGovern. FreeRepublic's Shermy discovered that Counterpunch.org published one of their screeds and mentioned that VIPS could be contacted through counterpunch.org at : vips@counterpunch.org

Also, VIPS relates to the Australian I mentioned in the earlier timeline who came out after Howard. From an interview on DemocracyNow! by Amy Goodman :

RAY MCGOVERN: "We have indeed. There have been a few courageous people who have stood on principle at some personal cost. Ironically, we intelligence professionals, we, unfairly, we tend to dismiss foreign service officers as knee-jerk mouthpieces for the administration. Well, three such foreign service officers have stood on principle and have quit, some of them before the war ever started, and they have issued eloquent statements as to how their conscience would not permit them to have to tell these lies to folks, to try to rally support for an unjust US policy. There is Andrew Wilke in Australia, an incredible person whom Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity had to this country. We all chipped in and paid for his fare. He spoke in Congress at one of the congressional hearings. Andrew quit the Office of National Assessments in Australia, which is the CIA counterpart, eight days before the war, because he could no longer countenance his country going into a war on the basis of intelligence that he saw to be bogus. And he spoke out immediately, and over the last few weeks, although you won’t see it in the US press, he and Prime Minister Howard in Australia have been having a personal argument in the press as to how the intelligence was over-egged as the British say, exaggerated, sexed-up, as some of the other British and Australians say. So there is precedent for people speaking out. "-------- [Ray McGovern quoted in transcript] “The Crazies Are Back”: Bush Sr.’s CIA Briefer Discusses How Wolfowitz & Allies Falsely Led the U.S. To War," Wednesday, September 17th, 2003, http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/17/1543215 [Obviously a leftwing wacko source]

re the May 3, 2003 meeting of the "Senate Democratic Policy Committee" where Joe Wilson is known to have spoken on a panel about WMDs and the Iraq War:

There is something very suspicious and possibly incriminating about the FACT that the SDPC is trying to prevent people from knowing that Joe Wilson (and Valerie) were meeting with them more than 2 months before the supposed "outing" of Valerie....... I have long suspected that the facts that Joe and Valerie turned up here with senate Demagogues, that this led directly to Kristof's May 6, 2003 column, that the later Vanity Fair article referenced BOTH Joe and Valerie meeting with Kristof, and that all reference to the SDPC meeting was later deep-sixed from the SDPC website were highly significant when taken together.

Joe and Valerie were colluding unethically (and in Valerie's case probably ILLEGALLY) with the Demagogues right from the start.

How do we get at more info about the May 3, 2003 meeting of the SDPC? One very curious fact is that not only has it been deep-sixed from the SDPC website, but when you try to look for it in the history of the Internet Archives, the entire history of the site at the current URL stops at June 29, 2004. You can't find anything earlier than that on the "Internet Wayback" Machine.... yet we can be quite confident that the SDPC did not just create their website for the first time on June 29, 2004.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://democrats.senate.gov/dpc/

THAT is probably just the date when they "sanitized" it and created a new URL???

I could be wrong of course, it's POSSIBLE that (1) the website with that URL was only created for the first time on June 29, 2004, or (2) the URL was changed but for innocent reasons (maybe a re-organization of the server, etc.).

YET, consider that virtually everyone with a website, especially a group concerned with reaching and influencing the public as is the case for the SDPC, does not normally want to minimize access to their website (make it harder to find, etc.) -- there may be something very suspicious about (1) the fact that the May 3, 2003 meeting of the SDPC does not appear anywhere on their website, and (2) that it does not seem possible to find earlier incarnations of that website than June 29, 2004.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://democrats.senate.gov/dpc/

Can any freeper with better web research skills figure out (1) whether there are earlier versions of the SDPC website, probably at some different URL?? (2) is there a version closer to May 3, 2003 that can show Joe was listed on the panel for that meeting?

If indeed there is such a version, closer to May 3, 2003 and showing Joe Wilson as a panelist, it would indeed be a most "interesting" fact that the SDPC had deep-sixed that fact from history, and that no so-called "journalists" (if there are any anymore) have tracked down the basis for this cover-up of collusion between the Demagogues and Joe/Valerie.

"How do we get at more info about the May 3, 2003 meeting of the SDPC? One very curious fact is that not only has it been deep-sixed from the SDPC website, but when you try to look for it in the history of the Internet Archives, the entire history of the site at the current URL stops at June 29, 2004. You can't find anything earlier than that on the "Internet Wayback" Machine.... yet we can be quite confident that the SDPC did not just create their website for the first time on June 29, 2004."

Just going from memory here, when I first posted about the SDPC meeting, the site listed things both after AND before that date.

So if the earlier things are now gone, I suspect it is to make it seem more harmless that the May 2nd meeting is gone.

BTW, as I know you know, just year and half later, the SDPC had a couple of the VIPS squad before them, testifying about what a treasonous act the leaking of Plame's employment was:

DPC Hearings
http://democrats.senate.gov/dpc/dpc-hearing.cfm?A=5

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