Issues & Insights - Vanity Unfair

Politics: Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson have filed suit charging Cheney, Rove, Libby et al. with "intentional and malicious" exposure of her identity. How was her identity already known? Let us count the ways.

'This lawsuit concerns the intentional and malicious exposure by senior officials of the federal government of . . . (Plame), whose job it was to gather intelligence to make the nation safer and who risked her life for her country," lawyers for the husband-and-wife team say in the lawsuit.

We admit we don't know much about the dangers faced by an analyst sitting at a desk at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. But this assertion seems a bit over the top, coming after columnist Robert Novak, who "revealed" Plame's identity in a July 14, 2003, column, said no administration official gave up her actual name and that he found it in her husband's entry in "Who's Who In America."

Why was Plame behind a desk at Langley in the first place? Well, according to Washington Times reporter Bill Gertz, U.S. officials said Plame's identity was first disclosed to Russia by a Moscow spy in the mid-1990s. The Cubans learned her identity when they read supposedly sealed documents sent by the CIA to the U.S. Interests Section at the Swiss Embassy in Havana.

Her value as a "covert" asset vanished long ago. One of the reasons Plame had a desk job at Langley, having been brought back to the U.S. in 1994, was that the CIA suspected her identity had been compromised by turncoat spy Aldrich Ames.

In fact, when 36 news organizations filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of The New York Times' Judith Miller and Time magazine's Matthew Cooper, they made the argument, citing Gertz's reporting, that Plame's identity was already known worldwide.

I'm starting to think that not 1 reporter in 100 either knows the truth or is reporting the truth.

The Senate Bipartisan Committee reported that what Joe Wilson was reporting privately in closed door sessions to Congress actually bolstered the Bush administration's position that Iraq was trying to purchase uranium.

The bipartisan committee report that shows Wilson lied about what he found in Niger:
http://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=21844942

The panel found that Wilson's report, "rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, actually bolstered the case for most intelligence analysis."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39834-2004Jul9

To this day, British intelligence maintains that Saddam Hussein sought uranium in Africa, recently underlined by a report from The Financial Times of London. The British government states "European intelligence officers have now revealed... human and electronic intelligence sources from a number of countries picked up repeated discussion of an illicit trade in uranium from Niger." The New York Times paraphrased the above with a clear-cut story titled: "Intelligence Backs Claim Iraq Tried to Buy Uranium." The essay leaves no doubt as to the claim of Bush in January 2003 that Saddam Hussein was not only was trying to procure uranium, but had been for years.
http://www.nytimes.com/financialtimes/business/FT1087373295002.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Wilson misled the Washington Post in June 2003, when he told the paper that the Niger intelligence was based on documents that had clearly been forged because "the dates were wrong and the names were wrong." In fact, Wilson had never seen the reports.

When the Senate committee staff asked Wilson how he could have come to that conclusion, Wilson replied that he may have "misspoken" (See first paragraph) to reporters.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39834-2004Jul9
The MSM signed an amicus brief saying there was no crime in the Plame leak:

36 major news organizations and professional reporters' groups (including CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, Reuters, The Associated Press, The Tribune Company, The Washington Post, The New York Press Club and The White House Corespondents) insisted that "no crime" had been committed in the "Plame Leak" case because, among other things, Valerie Plame's identity had previously been disclosed to both the Russians and the Cubans!

Read their brief here:

http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1665581/posts?page=12#12

The desired damage has already been done by this lawsuit. Even on Fox, they are reporting the fact of the lawsuit, and the charges made without any comment that the suit appears to be frivolous.

To those of us who are political junkies, the truth is obvious, but for most of America, these charges against Cheney and Rove sound legitimate and serious.

Unless it gets thrown out of court before the elections, and in a way that makes it big news, the Dem's score votes with this stunt - no matter how illegitimate and underhanded it may be.

politically active Plame, who contributed to Gore, and the politically active Wilson, who served as a John Kerry adviser, could have enjoyed a nice quiet Virginia lifestyle, sipping mint green tea on their veranda. They freely chose not to.

IMO, this lawsuit will be the major unraveling of their chutzpah. This could be the event in court that forces both of them into the witness stand to reveal how it was BOTH OF THEM that "outed" Plame long before the Bush Administration was dragged into this sordid story. Hopefully, by the time this whole soap opera is off the MSM radar, these two will be in orange jumpsuits rueing the day they decided to start this whole chain of events.

When you look at Roberts' statements what immediately jumps out at me is how he laid out the FACTS and that his colleagues on the committee who were Democrats could not find it in themselves to acknowledge the truth. Joe Wilson was not credible, he had, through ignorance or worse, misled the CIA, the Committee and the press about the whole affair. He had not debunked anything but rather he had given analysts even more reason to suspect something was up.

The Democrats have shown themselves to be completely reprehensible around this whole situation. Rather than deal in facts they have chosen to not only ignore them but continue to support lies in order to weaken Bush who is a sitting President in a time of war. I don't have an issue with an opposition party that stands on some principles on what is good for the country and its people but the Democrats have long since stopped being a credible opposition party and instead have allowed their hatred for anything Bush to guide their actions, the consequences on this country be damned!!

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