Sad.

Can of Corn.What a sniveling little weasel.

Rubbish.

Scooter ping!!

I think she was the lady that gave the working guys at the CIA coffee, back rubs and blow jobs.

If David Corn told me it was raining, I`d be tempted to sell my umbrella!

This doesn't make sense. How was Plame both under non-official cover, pretending not to work for the CIA, and working for the counterproliferation division at CIA headquarters in Langley?

And if she was truly under non-official cover, why in the world would she let her husband write an op-ed piece in the New York Times about her work?

bttt

And I'm really the original James Bond.

didn't this covert agent drive everyday from her driveway through the front gate of CIA headquarters?

But there's at least 5 gates at Langley. So, who would know? Her neighbors didnt' know until Novak's article. So I'm wondering.........

Well, if David Corn says it's so, it must be so. Who could refute such a reputable source as The Nation?/sarc

Horse manure. She was brought in and given a desk to stop her from causing problems.

Obviously that gambit didn't work.

all these reporters say they knew and others did too

http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2005/11/reporters_who_k.html

> But there's at least 5 gates at Langley. So, who would know? Her neighbors didnt' know until Novak's article. So I'm wondering.........

Come on, that's just silly. The existence of 5 gates isn't a countermeasure for someone who is intent on identifying CIA employees. The vast majority of people working at the CIA probably take the same gate every morning.

I don't bye it either! This is one of those Big Lies that the MSM repeats like a Creed (and the Bushies have been completely incompetent at dismantling).

Novak said the administration official told him in July that Wilson's trip was 'inspired by his wife,' and that the CIA confirmed her 'involvement in the mission for her husband.' ... 'They asked me not to use her name, but never indicated it would endanger her or anybody else,' he said, adding that a source at the CIA told him Plame was 'an analyst -- not a covert operator and not in charge of undercover operators.'"

I think the authors will have to go back and check their sources. This part of the story seems to have moved on a few steps with the evidence put forward in the Libby trial:

Another issue was whether Valerie Wilson had sent her husband to Niger to check out an intelligence report that Iraq had sought uranium there. Hubris contains new information undermining the charge that she arranged this trip. In an interview with the authors, Douglas Rohn, a State Department officer who wrote a crucial memo related to the trip, acknowledges he may have inadvertently created a misimpression that her involvement was more significant than it had been.

Byron York covered the trial and wrote this piece: Is Everything We Know About Joe Wilson’s Trip to Niger Wrong?

The accepted version of events is that Vice President Dick Cheney got things started when he asked for information about possible Iraqi attempts to purchase uranium in Africa. After that request, CIA employee Valerie Plame Wilson suggested sending her husband to look into the question, and after that, the CIA flew Joseph Wilson to Niger to investigate. But the new documents suggest that Mrs. Wilson suggested her husband for the trip before the vice president made his request. In other words, Joseph Wilson’s visit to Niger, which everyone believes was undertaken at the behest of the vice president, was actually in the works before Dick Cheney asked his now-famous question. And if that is true, our current understanding of the chronology of events is wrong.

The problem for Isikoff and Corn is that either Plame was a high ranking operational officer and then her suggestion to send Wilson would be the same as "arranging" it. If, however, she was just a "paper-pusher" then her suggestion would be treated as just that, a suggestion. Of course, given the fact that Wilson had been sent to Niger before, and that the CIA was in a hurry to make sure that they didn't loose points to the DIA, the likelihood that her suggestion would be acted on was very high.

What Valerie Plame Really Did at the CIA

I was under the impression that she was just another worthless bureaucratic parasite. What am I missing here?

"A covert agent is defined as an agent who had worked abroad in a covert status in the preceding five years."(from 'World News Net' article)

"In 1997 she returned to CIA headquarters and joined the Counterproliferation Division."(from 'The Nation' Article)

1998=1 1999=2...2003=6

Please check my math? Do the rules of arithmetic apply only to one side of the aisle and not both?

So basically what Corn is saying is that Val was a paper pusher. We know she wasn't covert.

Thanks to the jury giving interviews after the verdict it is clear many suffered from BDS. Libby will either win on appeal or be pardoned. Either way he will never spend a day in jail. The lefties know this and that is why they are still so bitter about this whole thing. I love it!

facts, apply only to one side and not theirs.

Corn conveniently leaves out the fact that if Plame returned to Langley in 1997, she could not have been "covert", as defined by statute, in 2003.

"She was brought in and given a desk to stop her from causing problems."

See? That's because clintooon defeated the re-authorization of Rule 678BA.

Rule 678BA: ANY CIA officer, or employee, that has been deemed to be a "Broken Arrow", is to be ELIMINATED forthwith.

Oh, for the good old days.

:O)

P

~~What~~ Valerie Plame Really Did at the CIA

How was Plame both under non-official cover, pretending not to work for the CIA, and working for the counterproliferation division at CIA headquarters in Langley?

And if she was truly under non-official cover, why in the world would she let her husband write an op-ed piece in the New York Times about her work?

Stop with the questions. You are interrupting the flow of the story. Valerie and Joe are uber-patriots and Heroes of the Left and you are just getting in the goddam way.

repeat the MSM mantra before bedtime

Valerie and Joe sacrificed themselves
to save us from Bush, The AntiChrist.
Scooter was an Imp of Satan.

Joe Wilson should be carved into Mt. Rushmore, at his own expense, of course. With money from Jacqueline Wilson, and the book rights, not to mention fees from African clients, he can easily afford it.

George Bush should also be rewarded with a spot on Mt. Rushmore; not his head, though. Since he obviously wasn't using it when he allowed Fitzgerald into this without the need to, his portrait in stone should accurately reflect where his head actually is and apparently will remain for all time.

I don't see anything in this column to support a claim that she was covert as defined by the law. Besides, there is this:

__________________________________________________________

CNN WOLF BLITZER REPORTS Aired July 14, 2005 - 17:00 ET

WILSON: My wife was not a clandestine officer the day that Bob Novak blew her identity.

I dunno.. Plame in the Iraqi Task Force prior to the war.. poor intelligence before the war... this seems a bit like a CIA CYA project..

Note to Corn and the democRATs/liberals/socialists out in cyberland:

You didn't get your Fitzmas, neener, neener neener, you bunch of richard heads.

5.56mm

Thanks for the ping and the thoughts. I think Corn has some new information but he pushes his thesis a bit harder than the evidence he presents warrants. I know you've probably read this already, but for reference on the present thread here are my comments on the parts of his book covering what he summarizes in this article:

---

Plamegate: 25 Lingering Questions

(The first four questions and answers below were previously posted as Was Plame Covert? A Review of Isikoff and Corn's Hubris.)

I recently finished reviewing Michael Isikoff and David Corn’s Hubris (New York: Crown Publishers, 2006) to see what it adds to the current state of knowledge in the Plamegate investigation. Here I will present my findings in the form of a list of questions and answers focusing on loose ends and other points of interest in the case. I will list the questions first so that individual readers may more easily scroll down to topics of interest.

Questions

1. What did Valerie Wilson aka Valerie Plame do at CIA?

2. Did Aldrich Ames leak Plame’s identity to the Russians?

3. What was the relationship between Plame, WINPAC, and the CPD?

4. Was Plame covert?

5. Did Plame influence CIA’s decision to send her husband to Niger?

6. Was Wilson’s Niger trip prompted by the Niger forgeries?

7. What was the motive behind the Niger forgeries?

8. What role did Italian intelligence play in the Niger forgery scandal?

9. What role did French intelligence play in the Niger forgery scandal?

10. What role did British intelligence play in the Niger forgery scandal?

11. How did the Niger forgeries spread through US intelligence files?

12. Is there any substantiation of Seymour Hersh’s report that a renegade CIA faction passed the Niger forgeries onto the Bush administration?

13. Who put the reference to Niger in the State Department’s December 2002 fact sheet?

14. Was Bush’s 2003 State of the Union reference to Africa a reference to the Niger forgeries?

15. What role did the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence play in triggering the Niger forgery investigation?

16. Who gave a copy of the Niger forgeries to the IAEA?

17. How much did Joseph Wilson know about the forgeries when he spoke on CNN in March 2003?

18. Did the Bush administration target Plame in retaliation against Joseph Wilson?

19. Was Plame’s CIA status an open secret in Washington before Novak’s column?

20. Who was the friend of Joseph Wilson who approached Robert Novak on the street the afternoon Novak talked to Richard Armitage?

21. What role did David Corn play in triggering the DOJ probe of Novak’s column?

22. Did Michael Isikoff’s relationship with Philip Agee’s associate Mark Hosenball influence Newsweek’s coverage of the investigation?

23. Who at CIA requested the probe of Novak’s column?

24. Who at the Department of Justice assigned Patrick Fitzgerald to the probe?

25. Who was leaking information from the grand jury to the media?

Answers

1. What did Valerie Wilson aka Valerie Plame do at CIA?

According to Isikoff and Corn (12-13, 283-286), after Plame graduated from the CIA’s training program, she began working with the CIA Directorate of Operations’ European Division in the Cyrus/Greece/Turkey area in the late 1980s, serving as a junior case officer supporting officers in the field. In 1989 she reportedly started working at the CIA station in Athens as a talent spotter and recruiter for the Agency. In this capacity they say she initially posed as a State Department officer, using an Official Cover (OC, referring to a cover which involves another US government agency and thus provides diplomatic immunity). Then in the early 1990s she reportedly adopted a Nonofficial Cover (NOC, aka “deep cover”, referring to a cover involving a non-government CIA front such as a fake business entity), posing as a member of an energy firm operating out of Belgium.

Walter Pincus, Dana Priest, and other researchers have previously noted that Plame’s front company was called Brewster-Jennings & Associates, a disclosure that has generated remarkably little follow-up from a media usually eager to expose CIA scandals. Some researchers have asserted that Robert Novak’s 2003 column compromised CIA assets linked to Brewster-Jennings. But others have called attention to a report by former FBI agent Sibel Edmonds indicating that a year earlier the FBI was already aware that Brewster-Jennings had been compromised during a conversation between Marc Grossman and Turkish lobbyists under Bureau surveillance in a corruption investigation. Bloggers have also observed that the last known paperwork associated with Brewster-Jennings dates from Plame’s 1999 tax filing, and have wondered whether Brewster-Jennings was already defunct by 2003, when Isikoff and Corn say Plame had moved on to JTFI. Isikoff and Corn’s book sheds no new light on these matters.

Isikoff and Corn state that Plame was transferred from Europe to CIA headquarters in 1997 and was assigned by request to what they call “the Counterproliferation Division (CPD) of the Directorate of Operations”. She met Joseph Wilson at the Turkish embassy in Washington in early 1997, married him a year later, and had two children.

Isikoff and Corn state that following a maternity leave, Valerie Wilson returned to CPD in spring 2001 and was assigned to “CPD’s Iraq unit”, which they say became the “Joint Task Force on Iraq” (JTFI) in the wake of 9/11. They assert that at the time of Novak’s July 2003 column, Valerie Wilson was running the JTFI’s “operations group” and had begun filing paperwork to move from JTFI to a personnel management position and change her status from NOC to OC. Unfortunately the authors cite no on-the-record or official sources to substantiate this important information, attributing it to “confidential interviews with CIA sources” (424n; cf. 439n).

I have so far been unable to find any sources independent of Isikoff and Corn which discuss the JTFI. But the term “Joint Task Force” and the corresponding “JTF” component of the abbreviation suggest the phrase may be referring to CIA support of a military Joint Task Force (JTF), which is a force coordinating multiple military units in order to achieve a specific operational task. (For discussion of how such Joint Task Forces are structured, see the excerpt from the slideshow presentation “The Joint Task Force” reproduced online at http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/ioac/jtf1.htm ; and the organizational charts accompanying Michael P. Noonan and Mark R. Lewis, “Conquering the Elements: Thoughts On Joint Task Force (Re)Organization”, Parameters, Autumn 2003, 31-45, online at http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/03autumn/noonan.pdf.) I will toss out the guess (which I emphasize is only a guess) that what Isikoff and Corn are describing may have involved the CIA’s support of military Joint Task Forces such as the Joint Task Force Southwest Asia (JTF-SWA), which coordinated aerial operations and marine interdiction in Iraq and the Persian Gulf area after the Gulf War; and Task Force 20, an elite unit which among other tasks hunted for WMDs during the early phases of the Iraq War. If my guess is correct, I would also suspect that CIA support of such a Joint Task Force would be determined by functional, task-oriented considerations rather than governed by the neat on-paper divisions between the CPD and other CIA units. Again, this is only a guess on my part, based on the minimal information about JTFI currently available.

2. Did Aldrich Ames leak Plame’s identity to the Russians?

Although this question seems highly relevant to the key issue of whether Plame was covert at the time of Novak’s column, Isikoff and Corn choose to gloss over it by relegating their discussion to a footnote (as they frequently do with other important information inconvenient to their spin). According to Isikoff and Corn, 284n:

Her reassignment might have been due to Aldrich Ames. . .Within the CIA, some officers came to believe that Plame had been among the officers whose return had been prompted by the Ames case, but it was never clear if Ames had told the Russians about her.

3. What was the relationship between Plame, WINPAC, and the CPD?

This question also bears on the issue of Plame’s covert status. In the CIA’s organizational structure, there is a functional division between the Directorate of Intelligence (DI), which analyzes collected data, and the Directorate of Operations (DO), which runs covert operations. As CIA expert Loch Johnson notes in America’s Secret Power, such on-paper divisions are somewhat artificial and can be misleading, because in practice a CIA agent or unit functions in coordination with other agents, units, and agencies. There has been some confusion over whether Plame’s assignment at the time of Novak’s column properly fell under the DI or DO.

Novak’s original column described Plame as “an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction” and stated that CIA “counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him”. More recently Novak has stated that Richard Armitage “told me unequivocally that Mrs. Wilson worked in the CIA’s Counter-Proliferation Division.” Isikoff and Corn also describe Plame as working in CPD since 1997 (284-285):

In 1997, Plame returned to CIA headquarters.
Back at Langley, Plame had to choose a new career path within the agency. She figured that with the end of the Cold War, the two growth industries in the intelligence field were counterterrorism and counterproliferation. She picked weapons and requested an assignment in the DO’s new Counterproliferation Division, a unit Congress had pushed the CIA to create to address concerns about the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

This would seem to place Plame in the DO. However, other sources have described Plame as working for the Weapons, Intelligence, Nonproliferation & Arms Control Center (WINPAC), which a September 2001 CIA organizational chart (DI Design Center/MPG 381234A1 9-01) lists under the DI (while showing no distinct “Counterproliferation Division” listed under the DO). Judith Miller’s notes on her July 2003 conversations with Scooter Libby describe Mrs. Wilson as working at WINPAC. Similarly, an October 2003 Los Angeles Times article by Doyle McManus and Bob Drogin stated that “Wilson's wife works with Foley in the CIA's Nonproliferation Center”; and a January 2004 Vanity Fair profile based on interviews with the Wilsons described WINPAC director Alan Foley as “Valerie Plame’s boss”. On p.424 of The Politics of Truth Joseph Wilson mentioned Foley, calling him “the recently retired director of the Nonproliferation Center at the CIA”. Wilson made no correction of the Vanity Fair characterization of Foley as his wife’s boss.

Isikoff and Corn assert on p. 392 that Libby characterized Plame’s title to Miller “wrongly”. However another explanation may lie in the relationship between WINPAC and CPD.

The September 2001 CIA organizational chart mentioned above labels WINPAC as “DCI Weapons, Intelligence, Nonproliferation & Arms Control Center” and lists it in the same column as the “DCI Crime and Narcotics Center”. Now “DCI” refers to the Directorate of Central Intelligence, a designation which at that time referred to the CIA Director’s dual capacity as not only the Director of the CIA proper but also as the Director of Central Intelligence, responsible for coordinating all US intelligence agencies. (Since 2005 the DCI position has been superseded by the new Director of National Intelligence title, which is separate from the position of CIA Director.) Within the DCI structure of that period there were several specialized “centers” which coordinated the CIA’s work with that of other agencies such as the FBI in order to address issues that spanned international geographic areas and transcended the jurisdiction of any single US agency. A discussion of the structure of the intelligence community in William Arkin’s Code Names covers WINPAC under the rubric of the DCI and its centers rather than the CIA proper:

The Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), who is also the director of the CIA, is a cabinet member who at least in theory oversees the IC [Intelligence Community]. . .The DCI also oversees a number of specialized centers, such as the Counterterrorist Center (CTC) and the Center for Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control (WINPAC).
--William M. Arkin, Code Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs, and Operations in the 9/11 World, Hanover, New Hampshire: Steerforth Press, 2005, 39

Similarly, an article by Washington Post reporter Vern Loeb depicts WINPAC as being formed from three existing units, one of which was the DCI’s Nonproliferation Center (NPC):

The Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control Center will bring three existing CIA analytic staffs together under Alan Foley, a veteran Soviet military analyst. As head of the Arms Control Intelligence Staff, he has spent the last three years supporting arms control treaty negotiators.
In his new role, Foley will assume responsibility as well for the existing Nonproliferation Center, which dealt with a broad range of proliferation issues, and the Office of Transnational Issues' Weapons Intelligence Staff, which is composed largely of scientists and engineers.
--Vern Loeb, “CIA Is Stepping Up Attempts To Monitor Spread of Weapons”, Washington Post, March 12, 2001

CIA references indicate that all three of WINPAC’s predecessors were organized under DI, but a close reading reveals that NPC was actually a DCI center administratively housed within DI. NPC was established in September 1991 as the focal point for all US intelligence community activities related to nonproliferation. In December 1991 it took over the Arms Control Intelligence Staff’s former role as the focal point for supporting all US government nonproliferation activity related to Iraq. Later it concentrated on nonproliferation activity related to Iran and North Korea. DCI George Tenet expanded the NPC by shifting several analytical units into NPC and establishing a Senior Scientist position in 1997, at the time Isikoff and Corn say Plame joined the “new” Counterproliferation Division.

At the time Plame became involved in nonproliferation issues in 1997, NPC was headed by Gordon Oehler. Oehler was replaced later that year by John Lauder, who performed the functions that would later be performed by WINPAC’s Alan Foley. The relationship of NPC to other areas of the CIA and the Intelligence Community during this period was summarized in a 1998 report of the House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence:

When the DCI's Nonproliferation Center (NPC) was established in 1991, one of its core missions was to coordinate the disparate IC nonproliferation activities, improve communication between programs and eliminate duplication of effort. As coordinator of IC assessments on proliferation topics, but not an analytic group per se, the NPC was to serve as a one-stop nonproliferation information shop for policy makers.
After its formation, the NPC took on a number of additional responsibilities. It developed strategic plans to help guide the U.S. Government's response to the proliferation problem and provided support to CIA's Operations Directorate (DO), as well as other collectors and law enforcement agencies. The NPC also worked on collection deck development and produced a ‘gaps’ study that identified deficiencies in proliferation-related collection activities. The NPC was also chartered to review the IC's performance on proliferation activities and to make relevant budget recommendations. In addition, the NPC Director was designated the issue manager for nonproliferation activities. With these and other responsibilities, the NPC has made numerous contributions to the IC's nonproliferation effort. . .
In 1992, the Committee conducted a detailed study of NFIP proliferation programs, with a specific focus on the new NPC. This year, the Committee plans to conduct a follow-up study on this topic. The Committee assessment will involve a thorough, top-down review of the NPC organization, mission and activities. The Committee will: review the NPC's efficacy as coordinator of nonproliferation programs; review NPC funding levels and staffing assignments; consider where the NPC should be located within the IC; examine NPC's relationship with the CIA's Directorates of Intelligence (DI) and Operations (DO); and examine the NPC's role in the collection and issue manager processes. Likewise, the Committee will review other proliferation-related programs throughout the IC, including within the DI and DO, with an eye toward recommending a logical construct to the Intelligence Community's efforts on the proliferation issue.
--United States House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, House Report 105-135: Part 1: Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1998, online at http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/cpquery/?&dbname=cp105&sid=cp105dq0gC&refer=&r_n=hr135p1.105&item=&sel=TOC_90656& and www.loyola.edu/dept/politics/intel/hrpt105-135.pdf

The final sentences of this excerpt indicate that at this time the NPC had a relationship with both the DI and DO within the DCI rather than being strictly a DI or DO unit per se. A 1999 CIA document clarifies the relationship between NPC, the DCI, and the CIA:

Although NPC resides administratively in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), it is a Community Center and its Director will receive overall direction from the DCI and DDCI. The Center will have the widest possible representation in its management staff, and activities from throughout the US Intelligence Community. NPC will seek continued augmentation by DOD personnel to enhance coordination of nonproliferation and counterproliferation intelligence efforts between the Intelligence Community and DOD.
--Director of Central Intelligence, “Director of Central Intelligence Directive 7/2, Oversight of the US Intelligence Community’s Efforts to Combat the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction and Their Means of Delivery”, May 7, 1999, online at http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/dcid7-2.htm

All this suggests that WINPAC’s function within the DCI involved coordinating the DI’s nonproliferation activity with what Isikoff and Corn call “the DO’s new Counterproliferation Division”, and the division between WINPAC and CPD was not necessarily as firm as Isikoff and Corn imply. It also suggests that whether or not Plame was covert at the time of Novak’s column cannot be deduced simply by identifying her as a CPD employee, but more information about her position in the chain of command and her actual duties would be required to resolve this issue. This underscores the significance of the document declassification which Libby’s defense team has requested and Patrick Fitzgerald has resisted.

4. Was Plame covert?

As the above comments on Question 3 indicate, the data uncovered by researchers to date does not seem to provide sufficient information to state definitively whether or not Plame was covert. During the course of Libby’s trial, Judge Reggie Walton admitted that even he did not know if Plame was covert.

However, the question would seem easy enough to resolve if relevant CIA organizational charts and/or internal documents were made available to the public. What was the relationship between WINPAC, CPD, and other areas of the DCI and CIA? Who was Plame’s supervisor, and who did they answer to within the CIA hierarchy? What were Plame’s actual duties? Having this type of information would be a big step towards more definitive answers. Unfortunately, Judge Walton has barred testimony on Plame’s status from Libby’s trial, so the best opportunity to resolve this issue has been wasted. Further progress on this aspect of the investigation will evidently require use of the Freedom of Information Act.

5. Did Plame influence CIA’s decision to send her husband to Niger?

Robert Novak’s July 14, 2003 article “Mission to Niger” recorded two conflicting accounts of the role Plame played in arranging her husband’s trip to Niger. One account was told by Bush administration sources (now known to be and Richard Armitage and Karl Rove) and one by a CIA source (now known to be CIA spokesman Bill Harlow):

Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him.

Wilson’s account in The Politics of Truth was closer to what the CIA told Novak:

Apart from being the conduit of a message from a colleague in her office asking if I would be willing to have a conversation about Niger’s uranium industry, Valerie had had nothing to do with the matter. She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip. The suggestion that Valerie might have improperly influenced the decision to send me to Niger was easy to disprove.

A 2004 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) report on prewar intelligence disputed Wilson’s account. It mentioned that the CIA had previously sent Wilson to Niger in 1999 “after his wife mentioned to her supervisors that her husband was planning a business trip to Niger in the near future and might be willing to use his contacts in the region”. The report stated that in relation to Wilson’s 2002 trip to Niger, a CPD reports officer told Senate investigators that Wilson’s wife “offered up his name”. Consistent with this officer’s statement was a memo Valerie Plame sent the CPD’s Deputy Chief on February 12, 2002, the day before CPD sent a cable to a CIA overseas station requesting concurrence with the idea of sending Wilson to Niger. In the memo Plame says her husband

has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.

Wilson countered the SSCI’s allegations in a July 21, 2004 article which quoted Newsday, CNN, and the Los Angeles Times citing anonymous CIA sources:

In the last two weeks, since the Senate Intelligence Committee released its report on intelligence failures, the smear attacks have intensified. . .The primary new charge from the Republicans is that I lied when I said Valerie had nothing to do with my being assigned to go to Niger. That's important to the administration because there's a criminal investigation underway, and if she did play a role, divulging her CIA status may be defendable. In fact, though the Senate committee cites a CIA source saying Valerie had a role in the assignment, it ignores what the agency told Newsday reporters as early as July 2003, long before I ever acknowledged Valerie's CIA employment. “A senior intelligence officer,” the reporters wrote, “confirmed that Plame was a Directorate of Operations undercover officer who worked ‘alongside’ the operations officers who asked her husband to travel to Niger.
”But he said she did not recommend her husband to undertake the Niger assignment. ‘They [the officers who did ask Wilson to check the uranium story] were aware of who she was married to, which is not surprising,’ he said. ‘There are people elsewhere in government who are trying to make her look like she was the one who was cooking this up, for some reason,’ he said. ‘I can't figure out what it could be.’” Last week, a CIA source repeated this to CNN and the Los Angeles Times.

Wilson elaborated in an online letter addressed to SSCI Chairman Pat Roberts and Vice-Chairman John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV:

The conclusion is apparently based on one anodyne quote from a memo Valerie Plame, my wife sent to her superiors that says “my husband has good relations with the PM (prime minister) and the former Minister of Mines, (not to mention lots of French contacts) both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.” There is no suggestion or recommendation in that statement that I be sent on the trip. Indeed it is little more than a recitation of my contacts and bona fides. The conclusion is reinforced by comments in the body of the report that a CPD reports officer stated the “the former ambassador's wife offered up his name” (page 39) and a State Department Intelligence and Research officer that the “meeting was apparently convened by [the former ambassador's wife] who had the idea to dispatch him to use his contacts to sort out the Iraq-Niger uranium issue.”
In fact, Valerie was not in the meeting at which the subject of my trip was raised. Neither was the CPD Reports officer. After having escorted me into the room, she departed the meeting to avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest. It was at that meeting where the question of my traveling to Niger was broached with me for the first time and came only after a thorough discussion of what the participants did and did not know about the subject. My bona fides justifying the invitation to the meeting were the trip I had previously taken to Niger to look at other uranium related questions as well as 20 years living and working in Africa, and personal contacts throughout the Niger government. Neither the CPD reports officer nor the State analyst were in the chain of command to know who, or how, the decision was made. The interpretations attributed to them are not the full story. In fact, it is my understanding that the Reports Officer has a different conclusion about Valerie's role than the one offered in the “additional comments”. I urge the committee to reinterview the officer and publicly publish his statement.

Isikoff and Corn add a few pieces of information to this controversy. They record that Plame told friends she had written the description of her husband’s qualifications quoted in the SSCI report only after being approached by a CPD officer requesting her husband’s assistance. They also identify the State Department officer the SSCI report quoted saying that Plame “apparently convened” the CIA’s meeting with Wilson, naming this officer as Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) Africa analyst Douglas Rohn. According to Isikoff and Corn, Rohn later explained that he had used the word “apparently” because he hadn’t actually seen Plame at the meeting and wasn’t certain that she had organized it, and he “acknowledged that his memo may have created a misimpression about Valerie Wilson’s involvement”. Isikoff and Corn’s footnotes mention that they interviewed Rohn, but their comment that he acknowledged his memo may have created a misimpression is their own summary rather than a direct quotation in context, so it is unclear what significance to give this acknowledgement. It sounds like Rohn was essentially acknowledging that he was not an eyewitness to Plame organizing the meeting, which does not necessarily imply that he was mistaken in believing she had. It would be helpful to know what or who led Rohn to believe Plame had convened the meeting.

Isikoff and Corn do not identify the CPD officer who told Senate investigators that Wilson’s wife “offered up his name”. This officer’s firsthand account is a missing piece of information that could help shed light on the question of whether Plame influenced the CIA’s decision to send her husband to Niger.

bump to read later

This article is from 2006, September 18. Just 3 weeks earlier, on 2006 August 27, Corn published this:

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/capitalgames?pid=116511

"One mystery solved.

It was Richard Armitage, when he was deputy secretary of state in July 2003, who first disclosed to conservative columnist Robert Novak that the wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson was a CIA employee. "

...

"Bush critics have long depicted the Plame leak as a sign of White House thuggery. I happened to be the first journalist to report that the leak in the Novak column might be evidence of a White House crime--a violation of the little-known Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which makes it a crime for a government official to disclose information about an undercover CIA officer (if that government official knew the covert officer was undercover and had obtained information about the officer through official channels).Two days after the leak appeared, I wrote:

Did senior Bush officials blow the cover of a US intelligence officer working covertly in a field of vital importance to national security--and break the law--in order to strike at a Bush administration critic and intimidate others? "

...

"Fitzgerald, as Hubris notes, investigated Armitage twice--once for the Novak leak; then again for not initially telling investigators about his conversation with Woodward. Each time, Fitzgerald decided not to prosecute Armitage. Abiding by the rules governing grand jury investigations, Fitzgerald said nothing publicly about Armitage's role in the leak.

The outing of Armitage does change the contours of the leak case. The initial leaker was not plotting vengeance. He and Powell had not been gung-ho supporters of the war. Yet Bush backers cannot claim the leak was merely an innocent slip. Rove confirmed the classified information to Novak and then leaked it himself as part of an effort to undermine a White House critic."

...

Just Corn being himself. He can just shrug off the facts and continue with his theories as THE facts.

Coyly pretending that Plame was covert, while at the same article he blows this argument :

"In 1997 she returned to CIA headquarters and joined the Counterproliferation Division. (About this time, she moved in with Joseph Wilson; they later married.)"

And how about effectiveness of her group (CPD / JTFI)?

""We knew nothing about what was going on in Iraq," a CIA official recalled. "We were way behind the eight ball. We had to look under every rock." Wilson, too, occasionally flew overseas to monitor operations. She also went to Jordan to work with Jordanian intelligence officials who had intercepted a shipment of aluminum tubes heading to Iraq that CIA analysts were claiming--wrongly--were for a nuclear weapons program. (The analysts rolled over the government's top nuclear experts, who had concluded the tubes were not destined for a nuclear program.)"

Interestingly, the same aluminum tubes were present at Libya's WMD program, which folded AFTER Saddam's regime fell.

Corn is just ghostwriting a script for Joe and Valerie.

What a sniveling little ~~weasel~~ John Edwards.

Bull sh!t.