posted on October 4, 2003 08:03:55 AM new
This is an excellent timeline of news reports about Valerie Plame's job description, linked and annotated, beginning with Novak's original column.
posted on October 4, 2003 09:31:57 AM new
Escalation of effects of leak continues...
Leak of Agent's Name Causes Exposure of CIA Front Firm
The leak of a CIA operative's name has also exposed the identity of a CIA front company, potentially expanding the damage caused by the original disclosure, Bush administration officials said yesterday.
The inadvertent disclosure of the name of a business affiliated with the CIA underscores the potential damage to the agency and its operatives caused by the leak of Plame's identity. Intelligence officials have said that once Plame's job as an undercover operative was revealed, other agency secrets could be unraveled and her sources might be compromised or endangered.
A former diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity said yesterday that every foreign intelligence service would run Plame's name through its databases within hours of its publication to determine if she had visited their country and to reconstruct her activities.
"That's why the agency is so sensitive about just publishing her name," the former diplomat said.
posted on October 4, 2003 07:26:21 PM new
They undoubtedly worry that they may be next if their politics are questioned. How would you like to be under cover -in Yeman say- and have to worry that your dad or aunt Martha is a Democrat so you may be betrayed to punish them?
posted on October 7, 2003 06:16:39 AM new
Looks like the "slime and defend" guys will have to back down. George Bush has announced that unauthorized disclosure of an undercover C.I.A. officer's identity was a "very serious matter" and "a criminal action"
But only 500 of its 2,000 White House employees have responded to a Justice Department demand for documents as part of an investigation into the source of the leak.
Lawyers know: The point of the exercise for the White House Counsel's office is not to withhold documents and claim privilege. That usually requires the withholding party to list the documents on a "privilege log," which states the sender, receipient(s), type of document, subject matter, and privilege claimed.
Note well what Scott McClellan kept saying: He kept saying that the WHC would review the documents for "relevance" and "responsiveness." This is how lawyers play the game; by reading the document request as narrowly as possible, they'll try to withhold as many documents as possible by claiming they're not relevant to the request. You'd better believe that they'll think of excuses why every unsavory document that turns up is somehow not relevant to the request. I suspect that unless "Novak," "Wilson," or "Plame" appears on the document's face, it'll drop into the "non-responsive" category.
And here's the kicker: Those documents need not be listed on a privilege log. Furthermore, in normal litigation, the people on the other side are actively searching for documents, and they'll go to court multiple times to get what they think you're withholding as non-responsive. Do we really think the Justice Department will do that here?
Kenneth Fair
posted on October 10, 2003 02:01:33 PM new
As Kerry said,
"They can't find Osama bin Laden."
"They can't find Saddam Hussein."
"They can't even find the leaker in the White House."
"If the president says, `I don't know if we're going to find this person,' what kind of a statement is that for the president of the United States to make?" Mr. Lautenberg asked. "Would he say that about a bank-robbery investigation? He should be as indignant as everybody else is over this breach."
WASHINGTON, Oct. 15 Several senior criminal prosecutors at the Justice Department and top F.B.I. officials have privately criticized Attorney General John Ashcroft for failing to recuse himself or appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the leak of a C.I.A. operative's identity.
Mr. Ashcroft and Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, have also been under fire for their initial handling of the case. The Justice Department allowed the White House to wait overnight on Sept. 28 before sending an electronic message ordering White House employees not to destroy records related to the leak.
Ashley Snee, a spokesman for Mr. Gonzales, said he believed the delay was acceptable because no one in the White House had any idea there was an investigation. But The New York Times and The Washington Post had reported the day before that the C.I.A. had forwarded the matter to the Justice Department for possible investigation.
posted on October 16, 2003 07:50:38 AM new
Was She Covert? Apparently Not.
And, of course, others disagree.
"The Valerie Plame kerfuffle seems to be fuffling out. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times offers "a few pertinent facts" about her career":
"First, the C.I.A. suspected that Aldrich Ames had given Mrs. Wilson's name (along with those of other spies) to the Russians before his espionage arrest in 1994. So her undercover security was undermined at that time, and she was brought back to Washington for safety reasons."
"Second, as Mrs. Wilson rose in the agency, she was already in transition away from undercover work to management, and to liaison roles with other intelligence agencies. So this year, even before she was outed, she was moving away from "noc"--which means non-official cover, like pretending to be a business executive."
"After passing as an energy analyst for Brewster-Jennings & Associates, a C.I.A. front company, she was switching to a new cover as a State Department official, affording her diplomatic protection without having "C.I.A." stamped on her forehead."
"Third, Mrs. Wilson's intelligence connections became known a bit in Washington as she rose in the C.I.A. and moved to State Department cover, but her job remained a closely held secret. Even her classmates in the C.I.A.'s career training program mostly knew her only as Valerie P. That way, if one spook defected, the damage would be limited.
"Now, let's go back to the beginning of this kerfuffle. The Nation's David Corn claimed on July 16 that the identification of Plame as a CIA "operative" in Bob Novak's column two days earlier was a "potential violation" of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, under which, in Corn's words, "it is a crime for anyone who has access to classified information to disclose intentionally information identifying a covert agent."
"Under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, an employee of an intelligence service is a "covert agent" only if he has worked overseas within the past five years. Thus if Kristof is right, there is no violation here. Where did Corn get the idea that Plame was a covert agent? From her husband, Joseph Wilson, it would appear":
"Without acknowledging whether she is a deep-cover CIA employee, Wilson says, "Naming her this way would have compromised every operation, every relationship, every network with which she had been associated in her entire career. This is the stuff of Kim Philby and Aldrich Ames."
"This Joe Wilson is a clever one, isn't he? He didn't actually say his wife was a covert agent, so he can't quite be accused of lying. But if Kristof's account of Plame's career is accurate, Wilson misled Corn (as well as others who followed his lead, including Kristof's colleague Paul Krugman) by making a hypothetical statement based on a premise he knew to be false, which gave journalists hostile to the Bush administration all they needed to make an accusation of criminal wrongdoing."
You're still trying to blame the victim? Typical sleaze spin, Linda.
More on what did he know and when did he know it....per Novak...He "didn't mean it".
Taking Novak up on his challenge over his one regret Josh Marshall
When Robert Novak identified Valerie Plame as a CIA employee in his syndicated column July 14, did he think she was a covert agent, an analyst or just some Langley paper-pusher?
Its not an idle question, because what Novak knew is almost certainly what his sources knew. And what his sources those two senior administration officials knew is central to the current FBI investigation.
On NBCs Meet The Press Oct. 5, Novak said he didnt know what Plame did at the CIA and had no reason to believe she was covert.
The one thing I regret I wrote, he told Tim Russert: I used the word operative, and I think [David] Broder will agree that I use the word too much. I use it about hack politicians. I use it about people on the Hill. And if somebody did a Nexis search of my columns, theyd find an overuse of operative. I did not mean it.
Could that really be true? Was the whole thing just a misunderstanding?
There are at least three reasons to believe Novak knew a lot more about Plames status than hes now letting on.
Reason 1: In the intelligence world, operative pretty much always means a clandestine agent. In his column he referred to Plame as an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction.
Could a veteran columnist such as Novak have been so sloppy with this word? Not if you go by his past practice.
I took Novak up on his Nexis challenge, and he does make frequent use of the word operative. But the question is how he uses it in this context. I searched for all the times Novak has used the term agency operative or CIA operative, and I came up with six examples. In every case, Novak clearly used the phrase to refer to clandestine agents.
On Dec. 3, 2001, Novak used the CIA operative phrase to describe Mike Spann, the clandestine CIA operative who was killed at the prison uprising at Mazar-i-Sharif during the Afghanistan war. A month earlier, on Nov. 1, he used agency operative to refer to agents who had handled the late Afghan resistance leader Abdul Haq.
Little more than a month before that, on Sept. 23, he used CIA operative to refer to the clandestine operatives in Latin America that former CIA Director Stansfield Turner cracked down on in the late 1970s.
In a July 5, 1999, book review in The Weekly Standard, Novak referred to the hero of Bill Buckleys Blackford Oakes spy novels as a CIA operative. Needless to say, Blackford Oakes, a spy novel hero, is undercover. The other two references, from 1997, also clearly refer to an undercover operative.
In other words, Novak knows the phrase agency operative is a term of art with a very specific meaning. And he uses it advisedly. Now he says he used it in a completely different way when referring to Plame. That strains credulity, to put it mildly.
Reason 2: A week after Novaks column appeared, Timothy M. Phelps and Knut Royce of Newsday wrote an article about the disclosure and Novaks role in it. The whole point of the article was that Novak and his sources had blown the cover of an undercover operative.
If Novak doubted Plame was undercover or hadnt known it at the time, youd think he would have mentioned it. But he didnt. When he asked, he told Phelps and Royce: I didnt dig it out, it was given to me. They thought it was significant. They gave me the name and I used it.
Only after the feeding frenzy started and the stakes got higher did Novak change his tune.
Reason 3: The third clue is murky, but suggestive.
In his original column Novak wrote: Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilsons wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report.
That sourcing seems odd. Novak flatly asserted that Plame was CIA and then sourced the claim that she got Wilson the gig in Niger to two senior administration officials. Id want to source both points. But this circuitous sourcing would make a lot of sense if Novak wanted to avoid a sentence that read: Two administration officials told me that Wilsons wife was an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. And you can certainly see why he would have wanted to avoid it.
All the available evidence points to the conclusion that Novak and his sources knew full well that Plame was a clandestine agent.
The irony is that Novak really doesnt owe anybody any explanations. I wouldnt have done what Novak did, but its the responsibility of government officials to keep this information secret, not reporters. He doesnt have to explain himself. And he doesnt have to squeal on his sources.
But if Novak wants the respect of a journalist just reporting a story, then he should stop spinning on behalf of those sources. And that sure seems like what hes doing.
You're still trying to blame the victim? No....I think they will get to the bottom of this. Just presenting all the sides, helen, while you want to pin this on ONLY the Bush administration. Besides....this was Nicholas Kristol's [New York Times] 'take' on this issue.....not mine.
I think he does a GREAT job of giving a 'balanced' opinion on this issue.
"All in all, I think the Democrats are engaging in hyperbole when they describe the White House as having put Mrs. Wilson's life in danger and destroyed her career; her days skulking along the back alleys of cities like Beirut and Algiers were already mostly over."
"Moreover, the Democrats cheapen the debate with calls, at the very beginning of the process, for a special counsel to investigate the White House. Hillary Rodham Clinton knows better than anyone how destructive and distracting a special counsel investigation can be, interfering with the basic task of governing, and it's sad to see her display the same pusillanimous partisanship that Republicans showed just a few years ago."
"If Democrats have politicized the scandal and exaggerated it, Republicans have inexcusably tried to whitewash it. The leak risked the security of all operatives who had used Brewster-Jennings as cover, as well as of all assets ever seen with Mrs. Wilson. Unwitting sources will now realize that they were supplying the C.I.A. with information, and even real agents may fear exposure and vanish."
"C.I.A. veterans are seething, and rightly so, at the betrayal by their own government. Larry Johnson, who entered the agency at the same time as Mrs. Wilson, is a Republican who voted for President Bush Eand he's so enraged that he compares the administration leaker to the spies Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen."
"Here's a woman who put her life on the line," Mr. Johnson said. "But unlike a Navy seal or a marine, she didn't have a gun to fight back. All she had to protect her was her cover."
"We in journalism are also wrong, I think, to extend professional courtesy to Robert Novak, by looking beyond him to the leaker. True, he says he didn't think anyone would be endangered. Working abroad in ugly corners of the world, American journalists often learn the identities of American C.I.A. officers, but we never publish their names. I find Mr. Novak's decision to do so just as inexcusable as the decision of administration officials to leak it."
"This scandal leaves everybody stinking".
[ edited by Linda_K on Oct 16, 2003 09:20 AM ]
Federal law-enforcement officials said that
they have developed hard evidence of
possible criminal misconduct by two
employees of Vice President Dick Cheney's
office related to the unlawful exposure of a
CIA officer's identity last year.
The investigation, which is continuing, could
lead to indictments, a Justice Department
official said.
According to these sources, John Hannah
and Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter"
Libby, were the two Cheney employees.
"We believe that Hannah was the major
player in this," one federal law-enforcement
officer said.
Calls to the vice president's office were not
returned, nor did Hannah and Libby return
calls.
The strategy of the FBI is to make clear to
Hannah "that he faces a real possibility of
doing jail time" as a way to pressure him to
name superiors, one federal law
-enforcement official said.
~~~~~
And Salon reports a rumor
GOP inner circles are buzzing with the rumor that President Bush is planning to drop Dick Cheney from his reelection ticket and replace him with 9/11 action hero Rudy Giuliani. Arianna Huffington
posted on February 6, 2004 08:44:55 AM new
Arianna Huff-and-puffington would be the last to know. More likely Dick's heart will give out soon. ("Give out" being just a euphemism, of course... )
posted on February 6, 2004 09:28:31 AM new
I wonder how George Sr feels about his sons administrations problems with the CIA?
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If it's really "common" sense, why do so few people actually have it?
helen
