Larry C. Johnson is CEO and co-founder of BERG Associates, LLC
Posted on 10/17/2005 7:25:22 PM PDT by blogblogginaway
Despite claims to the contrary, the Identity Protection Act spells trouble for White House officials. Republican talking points have achieved some success in muddying the waters by insisting that Robert Novak's outing of CIA clandestine officer, Valerie Plame, was not a violation of the law. The typical presentation of this red herring was bandied about most recently in an October 10, 2005 article by Washington Times reporter, Joseph Curl. Curl wrote:
But lawyers familiar with the probe say special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald appears to be changing the grand jury's initial focus in part because the law protecting covert CIA operatives appears not to apply to Valerie Plame, whose name first surfaced in a July 2003 column by conservative Robert Novak. "There is not one fact that I have seen that there could be a violation of the agent identity act," said Victoria Toensing, a lawyer who helped draft the 1982 act.
The Intelligence Identities Protection Act outlaws intentional disclosure of any information identifying a covert agent. The penalty for violating the law is imprisonment for up to 10 years.
But according to the law, Mrs. Plame was not a "covert agent" at the time that at least two senior Bush administration officials discussed her with reporters.
Ms. Toensing is wrong. Let us pray that Ms. Toensing is not practicing law these days because, if her comments in this article reflect her abilities as an attorney, clients could be in serious trouble. Valerie Plame was a "covert agent" as defined by the law. In her cover position as a consultant to Brewster-Jennings, Ms. Plame served overseas on clandestine missions. Just because she did not live overseas full time does not mean she did not work overseas using her status as a non-official cover officer.
Unfortunately, the organized plot by White House officials to expose Valerie Plame also permanently ended her ability to ever serve overseas in an official cover position. At a minimum, U.S. tax payers invested at least $250,000 (that is in 1985 dollars) in training Valerie as a case officer. Karl Rove, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and others not yet revealed destroyed by their reckless acts her career, a CIA front company, and a network of intelligence assets.
The law to "protect the identities of undercover officers, agents, and sources" is only one possible source of jeopardy for the White House gang. (The key parts of the law are reprinted below.) The important point is not that a law was broken, but that our country is in the hands of a President who is willing to tolerate people in his Administration who are admitted liars and who played a direct role in compromising our nation's security. President Bush is sending a clear message--it is more important to protect cronies than protect this country.
Oct 17, 2005 -- 10:01:34 PM EST
TITLE 50 > CHAPTER 15 > SUBCHAPTER IV > § 421 § 421. Protection of identities of certain United States undercover intelligence officers, agents, informants, and sources
Release date: 2005-03-17
(a) Disclosure of information by persons having or having had access to classified information that identifies covert agent Whoever, having or having had authorized access to classified information that identifies a covert agent, intentionally discloses any information identifying such covert agent to any individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship to the United States, shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both. (b) Disclosure of information by persons who learn identity of covert agents as result of having access to classified information Whoever, as a result of having authorized access to classified information, learns the identify of a covert agent and intentionally discloses any information identifying such covert agent to any individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship to the United States, shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both. (c) Disclosure of information by persons in course of pattern of activities intended to identify and expose covert agents Whoever, in the course of a pattern of activities intended to identify and expose covert agents and with reason to believe that such activities would impair or impede the foreign intelligence activities of the United States, discloses any information that identifies an individual as a covert agent to any individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such individual and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such individual's classified intelligence relationship to the United States, shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than three years, or both. (d) Imposition of consecutive sentences A term of imprisonment imposed under this section shall be consecutive to any other sentence of imprisonment.
TITLE 50 > CHAPTER 15 > SUBCHAPTER IV > § 426
§ 426. Definitions
Release date: 2005-03-17
For the purposes of this subchapter:
(4) The term "covert agent" means-- (A) a present or retired officer or employee of an intelligence agency or a present or retired member of the Armed Forces assigned to duty with an intelligence agency-- (i) whose identity as such an officer, employee, or member is classified information, and (ii) who is serving outside the United States or has within the last five years served outside the United States; or (B) a United States citizen whose intelligence relationship to the United States is classified information, and-- (i) who resides and acts outside the United States as an agent of, or informant or source of operational assistance to, an intelligence agency, or (ii) who is at the time of the disclosure acting as an agent of, or informant to, the foreign counterintelligence or foreign counterterrorism components of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; or (C) an individual, other than a United States citizen, whose past or present intelligence relationship to the United States is classified information and who is a present or former agent of, or a present or former informant or source of operational assistance to, an intelligence agency.
Larry C. Johnson is CEO and co-founder of BERG Associates, LLC
Valerie Plame Undercover Since She was 10 years old? (http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2003/10/1/95934.shtml),
NewsMax.com, October 1, 2003: "Former CIA agent Larry Johnson told PBS's The News Hour last night
(http://pbs-newshour.virage.com/cgi-bin/visearch?user=pbs-newshour&template=play220ram.html&query=%2A&squery=%2BClipID%3A3+%2BVideoAsset%3Apbsnh093003&inputField=%20&ccstart=1665983&ccend=2233784&videoID=pbsnh093003) that Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, had been
operating undercover for 'three decades.'
... The Washington Post, however, says that Ms. Plame is an attractive, slim blonde with film star looks who happens to
be just 40 years old.
... If both accounts are true, that means Plame was placed undercover by the CIA when she was just 10 years old.
... Either Mr. Wilson has been caught fibbing again, this time about his wife's age, or Mr. Johnson needs to update his chronology."
News story also covered at the Drudge Report (http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm).
NUTJOB EXTRAORDINAIRE...
October 7, 2005
How About Focusing on the Real Issues?
The Plame Case
By LARRY JOHNSON
Former CIA analyst
Want to know one reason why the CIA has been unable to recruit spies? Just reflect on how a potential recruit would react to the outing of Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA operations officer.
The investigation into which administration officials compromised Plame, wife of former US ambassador Joseph Wilson, is nearing completion. Lost in the recent spurt of press reporting, however, is the fact that the outing of Ms. Plame (and, as night follows the day, her carefully cultivated network of spies) has done great damage to US clandestine operations-not to mention those she recruited over her distinguished career.
Ms. Plame, a very gifted case officer, was a close colleague of mine at CIA. Her dedication and courage were made abundantly clear when she became one of the few to volunteer to asume the risks of operating under non-official cover-meaning that if you get caught, too bad, you're on your own; the US government never heard of you.
The supreme irony is that Plame's now-compromised network was reporting on the priority-one issue of US intelligence-weapons of mass destruction. Thus, it was made clear to all, including active and potential intelligence sources abroad, that even when high-priority intelligence targets are involved, Bush administration officials do not shrink from exposing such sources for petty political purpose. The harm to CIA and its efforts to recruit spies instinctively wary of the risks in providing intelligence information is immense.
Shortly after the invasion of Iraq, Ambassador Wilson publicly exposed an important lie-and the president as liar-in-chief-when Wilson debunked reporting that Iraq was seeking uranium in the African country of Niger. Still, as Wilson himself has suggested, the primary purpose of leaking his wife's employment at CIA was not so much to retaliate against him personally, but rather to issue a warning to others privy to administration lies on the war not to speak out. Administration officials felt they needed to provide an object lesson of what truth tellers can expect in the way of swift retaliation.
...and It Was All Based on a Forgery
Whether or not indictments come down, our domesticated mainstream media probably will continue to play down the damage to US intelligence. Even more important, they are likely to ignore completely the very curious event that started the whole business-the forging of documents that became the basis of reporting that Iraq was seeking uranium in Niger for its (non-existent) nuclear weapons program. Together with other circumstantial evidence, the neuralgic reaction of Vice President Dick Cheney to press reports that he was point man for promoting the bogus "intelligence" report suggests that he may also have been its intellectual author/authorizer.
Yes, I am suggesting that it may have been an inside job. Cheney and his chief of staff Lewis Libby may well have had a hand in commissioning the forgery, as a way of manufacturing an intelligence report, with "mushroom cloud" written all over it-in order to deceive Congress into approving an unnecessary war. The more you look into the whole affair, the curiouser and curiouser it becomes. Why, for example, would Senate Intelligence Committee chair Pat Roberts (R, Kansas) adamantly refuse to investigate the provenance of a forgery used to start a war?
And why did former Secretary of State Colin Powell, addressing the UN on February 5, 2003, decide to delete from his very long laundry list of spurious charges against Iraq its alleged attempt to acquire uranium from Niger? Even though he himself had avoided repeating the famous "16 words" used by President Bush just five weeks before (se below), Powell was forced to listen stoically as Mohammed El-Baradei, head of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, reported on world-wide TV that his own and outside experts had concluded that the Iraq-Niger documents were "not authentic." The White House left it to Powell to concede that El-Baradei was correct, and Powell eventually did so.
Perhaps special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald will be able to shed light on some of this.
I have read analyses like yours before, and they seem convincing. However, if you are right, then what is Patrick Fitzgerald investigating? Fitzgerald must have been informed as to Plame's status with the CIA. It is legal (or at least it is not unusual in D.C.) to discuss the identity of non-covert CIA employees.
I don't get it.
I hope you didn't think I meant anything against you. That was my anger at Larry Johnson, NOT YOU! I apologize if you thought it was.
Why do you think that?!
I have NO ANGER toward you AT ALL for any reason.
The President should have fired Plame the minute Wilson's NYT editorial was published. She became not only a liability for the CIA but a potential danger to national security. Do we really want someone like her standing by and watching her husband spread lies to discredit any administration in the run up to a war?
Just an FYI...
The law that makes it a crime to reveal an undercover agent has almost never been enforced. The law's author says it sets a high bar:
"The person revealing the information must absolutely know that the government is taking measures to protect this person's identity," said Victoria Toensing, former U.S. deputy assistant attorney general.
Why Did Joseph Wilson Lie?
By Cliff Kincaid | August 2, 2005
When Wilson went public with his column in the New York Times, he had to know that such an article would lead to scrutiny of his wife.
One of the fascinating questions about the Valerie Plame affair is why Joseph Wilson lied about his wife's role in sending him on that mission to investigate the Iraq-uranium link. In his own book, ironically titled, The Politics of Truth, Wilson admits that if she played such a role, that might be a violation of federal nepotism laws. Of course, the special prosecutor is not investigating that. But Herbert Romerstein, a former professional staff member of the House Intelligence Committee, says there is another reason. And that is that her involvement in sending her husband on a CIA mission to Africa meant that when Wilson went public about it, foreign intelligence services would investigate all of his family members for possible CIA connections. Those intelligence services would not simply assume that he went on the mission because he was a former diplomat. They would investigate his wife. And that would inevitably lead to unraveling the facts about Valerie Wilson, or Valerie Plame, and her involvement with the CIA.
As Romerstein put it in an article for Human Events, when answering the question about who really exposed Wilson's wife, "The culprit was Joe Wilson…with some help from his wife."
He wrote, "When Wilson wrote an op-ed in The New York Times in July [2003] and revealed that he had gone to Niger on a CIA assignment, he called attention to his wife. CIA people who are really undercover are very careful about not identifying themselves or their families with the agency. They wait until their children are old enough to keep their mouths shut before revealing, even to them, that they are CIA officers. Wilson listed his wife's maiden name in the biography he put on the web site of the Middle East Institute."
The nepotism was bad enough. But Romerstein is saying that Plame's role in arranging the mission for her husband is solid proof that she was not concerned about having her "cover" blown because she was not truly under cover. Part of the confusion stems from the different forms of "cover" available to CIA employees and which can be protected under law. Romerstein says she was under "cover" only in the sense that she had used a front company, an entity called "Brewster-Jennings & Associates." That was a "convenience" or "light cover," but not the kind of "deep cover" that has to be protected under the terms of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. What's more, she had not been overseas over the previous five years, as required for the law to apply. Instead, she had been driving in and out of the CIA headquarters in Virginia and had a desk job. That's not the mark of a real covert agent.
Romerstein, who had a hand in drafting the bill, explained, "When a CIA officer under deep cover is assigned to a hostile country, he knows that the enemy counter-intelligence service will do a background check. Any involvement of a relative with the CIA will endanger the officer's cover." Those facts mean that Plame was not under deep cover and that there must have been no plan to send her abroad under deep cover. She was certainly not deployed overseas at the time that her identification with the agency was disclosed. Furthermore, Romerstein says that "Mrs. Joe Wilson also helped shred her cover when she made a contribution to the Al Gore for President campaign and listed her cover company in the Federal Election Commission filing. If she were ever posted overseas under cover, that would provide the hostiles with a lead to unravel her CIA connection."
When Wilson went public with his column in the New York Times, he had to know that such an article would lead to scrutiny of his wife. Equally significant, it might lead to scrutiny of her role in arranging his trip, in violation of federal nepotism laws. Therefore, he had to try to get his wife off the hook. That's why he absolved her of any role in arranging his mission in his book. The media initially accepted what he had to say with no questions asked. Eventually, however, his cover-up fell apart when the Senate Intelligence Committee uncovered evidence that Plame had a role in her husband's mission.
Some news organizations noted this evidence at the time but because Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald had begun investigating the issue of who leaked information about her identity, the nepotism issue was simply shunted aside, even though that is the critical matter and gets to the heart of what the Wilson affair is all about. Columnist Robert Novak's naming of Plame as a CIA employee is a sideshow that only draws attention to a fact that isn't of any consequence.
In retrospect, it's clear the Plame and Wilson pulled off a monumental deception, with the help of the media. The facts suggest that Plame and her husband were determined to undermine the Administration's Iraq policy and were prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to accomplish that. Together with their media allies, they created such a firestorm over the naming of Plame that the White House panicked into seeking a special prosecutor.
When Bush official Karl Rove warned Matt Cooper of Time away from the story, on the ground that Plame had arranged the trip by her husband, he was on to the hard truth about this case. But the media were not really interested and the White House did not pursue this line of inquiry to its logical conclusion-a full-fledged investigation into the Plame-Wilson plot and who else in the CIA was behind it. Perhaps the White House was fearful of starting a war with the CIA.
Instead, as it now stands, White House officials could eventually be indicted not for disclosing the identity of a covert agent but for providing conflicting information to the special prosecutor about who knew what about Plame and when. On the other hand, because the information about her was recycled to and from the press, it may be hard for Fitzgerald to make any sense of it. The silence of jailed New York Times reporter Judith Miller complicates his problem. As for Plame, she's still at the CIA. So that problem remains.
http://tinyurl.com/bwul3
Karl Rove, Whistleblower
He told the truth about Joe Wilson.
Wednesday, July 13, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
Democrats and most of the Beltway press corps are baying for Karl Rove's head over his role in exposing a case of CIA nepotism involving Joe Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame. On the contrary, we'd say the White House political guru deserves a prize--perhaps the next iteration of the "Truth-Telling" award that The Nation magazine bestowed upon Mr. Wilson before the Senate Intelligence Committee exposed him as a fraud.
For Mr. Rove is turning out to be the real "whistleblower" in this whole sorry pseudo-scandal. He's the one who warned Time's Matthew Cooper and other reporters to be wary of Mr. Wilson's credibility. He's the one who told the press the truth that Mr. Wilson had been recommended for the CIA consulting gig by his wife, not by Vice President Dick Cheney as Mr. Wilson was asserting on the airwaves. In short, Mr. Rove provided important background so Americans could understand that Mr. Wilson wasn't a whistleblower but was a partisan trying to discredit the Iraq War in an election campaign. Thank you, Mr. Rove.
http://tinyurl.com/casno
Mark Steyn: How a serial liar suckered Dems and the media
Chicago Sun-Times ^ | 07/18/04 | Mark Steyn
Well, the week went pretty much as I predicted seven days ago:
BUSH LIED!! Not.
BLAIR LIED!!! Not.
But it turns out JOE WILSON LIED! PEOPLE DIED. Of embarrassment mostly. At least I'm assuming that's why the New York Times, MSNBC's Chris Matthews, PBS drone Bill Moyers and all the other media bigwigs Joseph C. Wilson IV suckered have fallen silent on the subject of the white knight of integrity they've previously given the hold-the-front-page treatment, too.
And what about John F. Kerry? Joe Wilson campaigned with Kerry in at least six states, and claims to have helped with the candidate's speeches. He was said to be a senior foreign policy adviser to the senator. As of Friday, Wilson's Web site, restorehonesty.com, was still wholly paid for by Kerry's presidential campaign.
Heigh-ho. It would be nice to hear his media boosters howling en masse, "Say it ain't so, Joe!" But Joe Wilson's already slipping down the old media memory hole. He served his purpose -- he damaged Bush, he tainted the liberation of Iraq -- and yes, by the time you read this the Kerry campaign may well have pulled the plug on his Web site, and Salon magazine's luxury cruise will probably have to find another headline speaker, and he won't be doing Tim Russert again any time soon. But what matters to the media and to Senator Kerry is that he helped the cause of (to quote his book title) The Politics Of Truth, and if it takes a serial liar to do that, so be it.
But before he gets lowered in his yellowcake overcoat into the Niger River, let's pause to consider: What do Joe Wilson's lies mean? And what does it say about the Democrats and the media that so many high-ranking figures took him at his word?
First, contrary to what Wilson wrote in the New York Times, Saddam Hussein was trying to acquire uranium from Niger. In support of that proposition are a Senate report in Washington, Lord Butler's report in London, MI6, French intelligence, other European agencies -- and, as we now know, the CIA report, based on Joe Wilson's original briefing to them. Against that proposition is Joe Wilson's revised version of events for the Times.
This isn't difficult. In 1999, a senior Iraqi "trade" delegation went to Niger. Uranium accounts for 75 percent of Niger's exports. The rest is goats, cowpeas and onions. So who sends senior trade missions to Niger? Maybe Saddam dispatched his Baathist big shots all the way to the dusty capital of Niamy because he had a sudden yen for goat and onion stew with a side order of black-eyed peas, and Major Wanke, the then-president, had offered him a great three-for-one deal.
But that's not what Joe Wilson found. Major Wanke's prime minister, among others, told Ambassador Wilson that he believed Iraq wanted yellowcake. And Ambassador Wilson told the CIA. And the CIA's report agreed with the British and the Europeans that "Iraq was attempting to procure uranium from Africa."
In his ludicrously vain memoir The Politics Of Truth, Wilson plays up his knowledge of the country. He makes much of his intimacy with Wanke and gives himself the credit for ridding Niger of the Wanke regime. The question then is why a man who knew so much about what was going on chose deliberately to misrepresent it to all his media/ Democrat buddies, not to mention to the American people. For a book called The Politics Of Truth, it's remarkably short of it. On page 2, Wilson says of his trip to Niger: "I had found nothing to substantiate the rumors." But he had.
That's what lying is, by the way: intentional deceit, not unreliable intelligence. And I'm not usually the sort to bandy the liar-liar-pants-on-fire charge beloved by so many in our politics today, but I'll make an exception in the case of Wilson, who's never been shy about the term. He called Bush a "liar" and he called Cheney a "lying sonofabitch," on stage at a John Kerry rally in Iowa.
Saddam wanted yellowcake for one reason: to strike at his neighbors in the region, and beyond that at Britain, America and his other enemies. In other words, he wanted the uranium in order to kill you.
The obvious explanation for Wilson's deceit about what he found in Africa is that his hatred of Bush outweighed everything else. Or as the novelist and Internet maestro Roger L. Simon put it, "He is a deeply evil human being willing to lie and obfuscate for temporary political gain about a homicidal dictator's search for weapons-grade uranium."
Technically, it's weaponizable uranium, not "weapons grade." But that's the point. Simon isn't the expert, and, as Ambassador Wilson trumpets loudly and often, he is. This isn't a case of another Michael Moore, court buffoon to the Senate Democrats, or Whoopi Goldberg, has-been potty-mouth to John Kerry. They're in show biz; what do they know?
But Wilson does know; he went there, he talked to officials, and he lied about America's national security in order to be the anti-Bush crowd's Playmate of the Month. Either he's profoundly wicked or he's as deranged as that woman on the Paris Metro last week who falsely claimed to have been the victim of an anti-Semitic attack. The Paris crazy was unmasked within a few days, but the Niger crazy was lionized for a full year.
Some of us are on record as dismissing Wilson in the first bloom of his unmerited celebrity. But John Kerry was taken in -- to the point where he signed him up as an adviser and underwrote his Web site. What does that reveal about Mister Nuance and his superb judgment? He claims to be able to rebuild America's relationships with France, and to have excellent buddy-to-buddy relations with French political leaders. Yet anyone who's spent 10 minutes in Europe this last year knows that virtually every government there believes Iraq was trying to get uranium from Africa. Is Kerry so uncurious about America's national security he can't pick up the phone to his Paris pals and get the scoop firsthand? For all his claims to be Monsieur Sophisticate, there's something hicky and parochial in his embrace of an obvious nutcake for passing partisan advantage.
Any Democrats and media types who are in the early stages of yellowcake fever and can still think clearly enough not to want dirty nukes going off in Seattle or Houston -- or even Vancouver or Rotterdam or Amman -- need to consider seriously the wild ride Yellowcake Joe took them on. An ambassador, in Sir Henry Wootton's famous dictum, is a good man sent abroad to lie for his country. This ambassador came home to lie to his. And the Dems and the media helped him do it.
July 15, 2004, 8:16 a.m.
APB for Joe Wilson
When you pound Bush, you’re hot. When you’re exposed as a liar, you’re not.
By Tim Graham
If the national media were teaching college journalism students their theory of political coverage this year, the theory's name would be Another Problem for Bush. It puts news in a very partisan box. If a fact, a quote, or an allegation casts the president in a negative light, then it is news, pure and simple. If incoming news developments contradict that theory — even if previous massively hyped anti-Bush firestorms start to fizzle — they shall be ignored. Reporters must never disassemble a previously assembled Problem for Bush.
On Friday evening and into the new week, President Bush was (as always) "clearly on the defensive" against the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's report on prewar intelligence assessments. But on Saturday morning, Washington Post reporter Susan Schmidt actually showed signs of having read the committee report (do TV news people read reports, or just reports on reports?). She found that Joseph C. Wilson IV, the former ambassador to Gabon who declared there was no Iraqi attempt to acquire uranium in Niger, "was specifically recommended for the mission by his wife, a CIA employee, contrary to what he has said publicly."
Journalists who cared about reporting the truth — and the truth-telling problems of the author of The Politics of Truth — would recognize the error of their previous reporting and interviewing and celebrating of Wilson, which broke out in sweaty ardor a year ago. But the record of press coverage in the last few days shows that truth is not the highest national media value. Bashing Bush is.
Let's review how fervently certain national media outlets have promoted Joe Wilson's conspiratorial storyline about Plamegate, and how they have failed to follow up in the last few days.
NBC was the most aggressive Wilson promoter on TV, beginning with a Meet the Press appearance on July 6, 2003 hyping Wilson's original breakout in a New York Times op-ed. On July 22, Katie Couric promoted a Today interview: "Still to come this morning on Today, a man who says he's become the target of a White House smear campaign for blowing the whistle on the president's State of the Union address." Wilson appeared on Meet the Press again on October 5.
NBC also gave the warmest reception for Wilson's book, with three days of bookings on Saturday Today, Meet the Press, and Monday's Today on May 1, 2, and 3. Couric promoted Wilson again on May 3: "Another book critical of the Bush administration hits stores today, this one by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson. He says he told the truth about the evidence against Iraq, and his wife paid the price."
So now that Wilson has been caught in a lie, how much Wilson coverage is there on NBC? None, as of this writing. That's too bad, since Wilson misled Tim Russert on October 5:
RUSSERT: Was there a suggestion that this was cronyism, that it was your wife who had arranged the mission?
WILSON: I have no idea what they were trying to suggest in this. I can only assume that it was nepotism. And I can tell you that when the decision was made, which was made after a briefing and after a gaming out at the agency with the intelligence community, there was nobody in that room when we went through this that I knew.
ABC promoted Wilson and his conspiracy theories on the September 29 Good Morning America and the September 30 Nightline. Ted Koppel honed right in on Mrs. Wilson's role in the affair. His fourth question was the important one: "Did your wife propose to her colleagues at the CIA that they call her husband, you?" Wilson replied: "No." That's not what the committee report says. Schmidt wrote: "The report states that a CIA official told the Senate committee that Plame 'offered up' Wilson's name for the Niger trip, then on Feb. 12, 2002, sent a memo to a deputy chief in the CIA's Directorate of Operations." But ABC has offered no coverage of Joe Wilson's crumbling story in the last few days.
CBS promoted Wilson's theories in an October 5 Face the Nation interview, in which Bob Schieffer began by underlining how much danger Plame must face thanks to the Robert Novak column reporting her CIA employment. He never found the opportunity to ask if Plame presented Wilson to her CIA colleagues, perhaps because he was too busy underlining the Wilson thesis that the White House was in a war against courageous CIA elements to prevent the facts from coming out. CBS has also ignored any story on Wilson in the last few days.
Perhaps the most vigorous print promoter of Wilson was Time magazine, who put Wilson's mug on the cover in their October 13, 2003, edition, confident enough to assert in its headline that someone in the administration was "Leaking with a vengeance....a classic tale of whispers, retribution, and rivalries." The Time article suggested: "The double-barreled leak had two targets. One was to tag Wilson as a tired, second-rate diplomat who couldn't get a job without his wife's help. The leakers also wanted to drop the hint that the CIA had purposefully chosen someone it believed would come back with a skeptical finding." Now that the Senate committee report said Wilson got the job with his wife's help, where was Time? They haven't mentioned Joe Wilson since the July 5 issue, when Clinton-loving columnist Joe Klein attacked Cheney and Rumsfeld for "blustery testosteronics" against war critics like Wilson.
http://tinyurl.com/c6a8t
Dear Larry Johnson,
Yes, Victoria is still practicing law. You can take your dumb*ss argument to her here...
diGenova & Toensing, LLP
Attorneys at Law
Criminal and Civil Litigation.
Practice in Federal Courts, Federal Departments and Agencies,
and Congress for National and International Clients.
901 15th Street NW Suite 430
Washington DC 20005
I DARE YOU!!!
This hoser worked for the State Department in counterterrorism? How much did the taxpayers lose in that poor investment?
Please repost this Washington Post article with the link and excerpt it down to 300 words or less. Thanks.
Plame's Input Is Cited on Niger Mission (Joe Wilson lied about EVERYTHING)
Washington Compost ^ | 7/10/04 | Susan Schmidt
Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, dispatched by the CIA in February 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq sought to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program with uranium from Africa, was specifically recommended for the mission by his wife, a CIA employee, contrary to what he has said publicly.
snip
Wilson's assertions -- both about what he found in Niger and what the Bush administration did with the information -- were undermined yesterday in a bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report.
snip
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39834-2004Jul9.html
Well, she, as well as her own husband, should also face charges for the same thing, since they saw no problem outing her for their own personal gain earlier on! This is pure, unadulterated 'crap'!
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