Posted on 07/11/2005 11:18:25 PM PDT by Howlin
I WROTE a column on Oct. 10, 2003, about the strange case of Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame.
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...I offered my speculation of what an administration official might have said to a journalist to explain just how Wilson — a Clinton administration official — got the assignment in the first place: "Administration official: 'We didn't send him there. Cheney's office asked CIA to get more information. CIA picked Wilson . . . Look, I hear his wife's in the CIA. He's got nothing to do. She wanted to throw him a bone.' "
Hate to say I told you so, but . . .
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There's no mistaking the purpose of this conversation between Cooper and Rove. It wasn't intended to discredit, defame or injure Wilson's wife. It was intended to throw cold water on the import, seriousness and supposedly high level of Wilson's findings.
While some may differ on the fairness of discrediting Joseph Wilson, it sure isn't any kind of crime.
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So if the offense wasn't against Plame, what of the offense against Wilson? There was no offense. As many of Joe Wilson's own hottest defenders would no doubt argue in relation to President Bush, exposing a liar is not only not a crime, it's a public service.
And Wilson lied. Repeatedly.
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What isn't controversial is this: Karl Rove didn't "out" Valerie Plame as a CIA agent to intimidate Joe Wilson. He was dismissing Joe Wilson as a low-level has-been hack to whom nobody should pay attention. He was right then, and if he said it today, he'd still be right.
And if Valerie wants to live a quiet spy life, she should stop having her picture taken by society photographers and stop getting stories written about her on the front page of the Times.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
And the question remains: What, exactly, does the Hollywood left want with a CIA secret agent and her low-level diplomat husband? Oh yeah..... Stop Bush!
Posted by Howlin to weegee
On News/Activism 07/12/2005 1:49:36 AM EDT · 28 of 33
From the Wall Street Journal:
Mr. Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, last week denied that Mr. Rove had contacted Mr. Cooper last Wednesday (which Matt Cooper certainly said standing on the steps of the courthouse), and said that when Mr. Rove spoke to Mr. Cooper two years ago, "Karl didn't disclose Valerie Plame's identification to anyone. That's not a technical statement. That's as practical and direct as I can make it." He also told The Wall Street Journal that Mr. Rove had never asked any reporter to treat him as a confidential source in the matter, "so if Matt Cooper is going to jail to protect a source, it's not Karl he's protecting."
Now let's discuss this statement from this article:
"Cooper, according to an internal Time e-mail obtained by Newsweek magazine, spoke with Rove before Novak's column was published. In the conversation, Rove gave Cooper a "big warning" that Wilson's claims might not be entirely accurate and that it wasn't the director of the CIA or the vice president who sent Wilson on his trip. Rove apparently told Cooper that it was "Wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on WMD (weapons of mass destruction) issues who authorized the trip," according to a story in Newsweek's July 18 issue.
Where is the proof that Rove said that part of that sentence? For all we know, Cooper added that to the email himself......because everybody in D.C. knew where she worked. FGS, he is married to Mandy Grundwald and she sure as hell knew.
Damn! You've done gone and "outed" her! :-)
Here is Deborah Orin's article.
Yeah, I just read over sadimgnik's recent posting history and he/she/it is definitely a troll.
"King Midas" is best ignored.
Regards,
LH
They're popping up all over the place. The mods have been playing "Whack a Troll" all day long.
The funniest part is, these goofs really thought they had something. With this dud of a story, they were actually smelling blood in the water.
Simpletons.
That he would, that he would! And since this site is NOT for "moderates" ( what's a "moderate Conservative anyway ? ), Mr Aussie I am a journalist ( yeah, sure, and if my grandmother had wheels....LOL ) should just shut up about things he doesn't know anything at all about. But noooooooooo, he shoots his bloody mouth off instead.
After seven months, I wouldn't be able to remember my user name OR my password.......but, of course, to them it's a high art form.
You haven't been paying attention or reading a damn thing have you?
Damned straight Mandy G. knew!
Everyone knew. This is all political.
It was common knowledge - so common, no one down the ladder had to worry about mentioning it - not even her husband.
Actually, I was beaten to the punch. I read here that the CIA believes that Aldrich Ames "outed" her and that's why they brought her in (removed her from covert work) back around 1995. That's ten years ago.
Regards,
LH
Oh sorry, that's Folk Implosion.
Not only working together, but using the CIA as a launching pad for campaign-season political attacks. During a time of war, no less.
Imagine the outrage if all the roles in this little soap opera were reversed.
Personally, I think Mrs. and Mr. Plame should be held accountable for their actions in a big way. If what they did wasn't abuse of power, I don't know what is.
Secrets of the Scandal
By Nicholas D. Kristof
October 11, 2003
Like any good spy story, the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson is far more complex than it seems on the surface.
I know Mrs. Wilson, but I knew nothing about her C.I.A. career and hadn't realized she's "a hell of a shot with an AK-47," as a classmate at the C.I.A. training "farm," Jim Marcinkowski, recalls. I'll be more careful around her, for she also turns out to be skilled in throwing hand grenades and to have lived abroad and run covert operations in some of the world's messier spots. (Mrs. Wilson was not a source for this column or any other that I've written about the intelligence community.)
Those operations remain secret, but there are several crucial facts that can be made public without putting anyone at risk — and together, they leave everybody looking bad. The C.I.A. is now conducting a damage assessment, which will determine what networks and operations it will have to close down. But my sense is that Democrats exaggerate the damage to Mrs. Wilson's career and to her personal security, while Republicans vastly play down the enormity of the security breach and the danger to the assets she worked with.
And now a few pertinent facts:
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.
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 — and 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.
I believe Joe Wilson fancies himself akin to James Angleton.
It's more than high art. They're saving the world, don'tcha know.
Total for this search: $4,000
|
Contributor |
Occupation |
Date |
Amount |
Recipient |
|
GRUNWALD, MANDY |
GRUNWALD COMMUNICATIONS/CONSULTANT |
6/30/2003 |
$2,000 |
Lieberman, Joe |
|
GRUNWALD, MANDY |
GRUNWALD COMMUNICATIONS/POLITICAL C |
10/24/2004 |
$2,000 |
DNC Services Corp |
I'm particularly fond of the ones who arrive to "set us straight."
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