Posted on 07/15/2005 1:53:20 PM PDT by golfboy
WASHINGTON The husband of the C-I-A agent whose cover was blown is clearing up some confusion over a comment he made to C-N-N.
Joseph Wilson said yesterday that his wife, Valerie Plame, "was not a clandestine officer the day Bob Novak blew her identity."
Today, he says he was only pointing out that once her identity was blown, his wife lost her ability to be a covert agent. He says he wasn't suggesting that she had stopped working undercover for the C-I-A beforehand.
Wilson is continuing his attack on White House adviser Karl Rove, for discussing his wife with columnist Novak and Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper. The discussion came just days after Wilson had written in The New York Times that some of the administration's intelligence on Iraq's nuclear weapons was twisted to exaggerate the threat.
I don't know about anyone else .. but I'm LMBO
He's almost as good as Dean
ROFLOL! You owe me a keyboard!
"She made no bones about the fact that she was an agency employee and her husband was a diplomat," Fred Rustmann, a covert agent from 1966 to 1990, told The Washington Times.
"Her neighbors knew this, her friends knew this, his friends knew this. A lot of blame could be put on to central cover staff and the agency because they weren't minding the store here. ... The agency never changed her cover status."
Mr. Rustmann, who spent 20 of his 24 years in the agency under "nonofficial cover" -- also known as a NOC, the same status as the wife of Mr. Wilson -- also said that she worked under extremely light cover.
In addition, Mrs. Plame hadn't been out as an NOC since 1997, when she returned from her last assignment, married Mr. Wilson and had twins, USA Today reported yesterday.
The distinction matters because a law that forbids disclosing the name of undercover CIA operatives applies to agents that had been on overseas assignment "within the last five years."
"She was home for such a long time, she went to work every day at Langley, she was in an analytical type job, she was married to a high-profile diplomat with two kids," Mr. Rustmann said. "Most people who knew Valerie and her husband, I think, would have thought that she was an overt CIA employee."
Brings to mind the deer in the headlights...never sees it coming. Before he's slammed.
All Clown Wilson & one Ms. Plame need now do is themselves offer up recusal / confidentiality releases for Judith Miller at the NTY so she can testify and explain why she was willing to go to jail to protect their fraudulent stories.
You flatter me...put in on my tab... ;^D
Yes my FRiend!
(grovel, grovel)
Dean is the BEST thing that ever happened to the Republican party. Even the clip they played yesterday from his appearance at the NAALCP yesterday made him sound like a bozo!
Wilson, is just a sweating pathological liar............more in the style of algor. :)
That would appear to be the case.
"clandestine" "covert" Wilson seems to be playing with words as did he who "did not have "sex" with that woman".
For the life of me, I cannot figure out why the MSM and the Dims thought they could get by with this "scandal"!
from http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0507/14/wbr.01.html
BLITZER: But the other argument that's been made against you is that you've sought to capitalize on this extravaganza, having that photo shoot with your wife, who was a clandestine officer of the CIA, and that you've tried to enrich yourself writing this book and all of that.
What do you make of those accusations, which are serious accusations, as you know, that have been leveled against you?
WILSON: My wife was not a clandestine officer the day that Bob Novak blew her identity.
BLITZER: But she hadn't been a clandestine officer for some time before that?
WILSON: That's not anything that I can talk about. And, indeed, I'll go back to what I said earlier, the CIA believed that a possible crime had been committed, and that's why they referred it to the Justice Department.
She was not a clandestine officer at the time that that article in "Vanity Fair" appeared. And I have every right to have the American public know who I am and not to have myself defined by those who would write the sorts of things that are coming out, being spewed out of the mouths of the RNC...
I appreciate your desire for precision, but I do not understand your point. The last paragraph seems to be a total non sequitur. Wilson must have known perfectly well what Blitzer was trying to confirm, namely, since she had not been a cladestine agent in a foreign country for over 5 years at the time she was identified as CIA, nobody broke the law. He is clearly wriggling, by introducing irrelevant material. Strangely, his answer is to the questions that Blitzer has yet to ask!! --
"I have every right to have the American public know who I am and not to have myself defined by those who would write the sorts of things that are coming out, being spewed out of the mouths of the RNC..."
Blitzer then obliges by asking the question:
"BLITZER: Who did you vote for in 2000?"
I would swear the phrase "defined by" was in answer to Couric's question about whether he is a Democrat. Can anybody verify.
The whole interchange with Blitzer is bizarre. Wilson's clarification does not clarify anything, except that if someone is known to work for the CIA and their picture shows up in Vanity Fair they are not likely to sent anytime soon on a covert operation. I kind of doubt that anybody was sending the wife of an Ambassador on a cladestine operation period. Once she married Wilson her cover was blown!
I frequently flatter people for financial gain. ;)
Oops! ...put it on my tab... ;^D
Dean, if he sees your posting will react with a great big YEAAAHHHH!!!!
Where is the coverup when a person releases all reporters to testify about what he said about them?
Blitzer is of course one of the libbies, but I felt he could be fair when he wanted. I was literally laughing out loud at this story, it's such a DNC hackjob.
Uh.....he's a democrat. Is that a rhetorical question?
_______________________________________
Yeah ultimately it was rhetorical. I sit here and shake my head about someone who has clearly been in over his head during all of this.
placemark
And my point in making the distinction is that for purposes of the statute, 'covert' has a specific legal definition, while 'clandestine' could just mean her job was kept under wraps. For example, the five-year foreign posting requirement would have nothing to do with whether one was 'clandestine.'
I don't see how that can be a reasonable interpretation of his remarks. If the relevant part of the CNN transcript is what is shown here, then Wilson uses the phrasing "was not a clandestine officer" followed by a description of the day or time when she was not a clandestine officer twice within the space of a few seconds. To believe Wilson's revisionist interpretation of what he was saying, you would have to accept that he used essentially identical wording within an interval of a few breaths to mean two completely different things.
First, Wilson states:
My wife was not a clandestine officer the day that Bob Novak blew her identity.
Then he states:
She was not a clandestine officer at the time that that article in Vanity Fair appeared.
So, if one were to twist the first sentence to mean that as of the instant when Bob Novak blew her secret identity she was no longer a clandestine officer, but she might have been before and up to that very instant, you would have egg on your face if you tried to claim that that's what he also meant in the closely-following statement about her status at the time when the article appeared in Vanity Fair. That's a mighty big one to swallow, isn't it?
If, in Wilson's mind, the mere act of revealing her CIA connection caused her to no longer be a clandestine agent, then wouldn't that have occurred when her identity was first known to have been revealed, purportedly by Aldrich Ames to various Communist government agents? Or, does she continue to be a clandestine officer while her cover has been blown to enemies of the United States, but only ceases to be a clandestine officer when her identity is revealed to United States citizens? The absurdity of that is self-evident, isn't it? You can't be deflowered twice, can you?
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