Posted on 07/19/2005 12:18:07 PM PDT by outlaw1_2003
With each passing day, the manufactured "scandal" over the publication of Valerie Plame's relationship with the CIA establishes new depths of mainstream-media hypocrisy. A highly capable special prosecutor is probing the underlying facts, and it is appropriate to withhold legal judgments until he completes the investigation over which speculation runs so rampant. But it is not too early to assess the performance of the press. It's been appalling.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
But veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh says that retired CIA clandestine officers may have forged the documents as part of a "sting operation" against the Bush administration.
Writing in a recent issue of the New Yorker magazine, Hersh reports the intent may have been to embarrass "Iraqi hawks at the top of the Bush administration." These officers calculated that the "hawks" couldn't resist using the forgeries to make their case and would then look foolish when the hoax was revealed. But, Hersh writes, the tactic backfired and the forgeries gained "widespread acceptance within the administration." If true, Hersh has uncovered a scandal that could easily eclipse the Wilson affair. But so far, the media have ignored Hersh's allegations. Is that because the White House was the intended victim of the hoax?
Also, an article I found while doing research on the multitude of CIA resignations a few days ago, which at the time I dismissed as moonbat rantings...BUT:
Why did DCI George Tenet suddenly resign on June 3rd, only to be followed a day later by James Pavitt, the CIA's Deputy Director of Operations (DDO)?SourceThe real reasons, contrary to the saturation spin being put out by major news outlets, have nothing to do with Tenet's role as taking the fall for alleged 9/11 and Iraqi intelligence “failures” before the upcoming presidential election.
Both resignations, perhaps soon to be followed by resignations from Colin Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage, are about the imminent and extremely messy demise of George W. Bush and his Neocon administration in a coup d'etat being executed by the Central Intelligence Agency. The coup, in the planning for at least two years, has apparently become an urgent priority as a number of deepening crises threaten a global meltdown.
Shortly after the “surprise” Tenet-Pavitt resignations, current and former senior members of the U.S. intelligence community and the Justice Department told journalist Wayne Madsen, a former Naval intelligence officer, that they were directly connected to the criminal investigation of a 2003 White House leak that openly exposed Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA officer.
Seymour Hersh dropped a major bombshell that went virtually unnoticed, 54 paragraphs deep into an October 27, 2003 story for the New Yorker titled “The Stovepipe.”
“Who produced the fake Niger papers? There is nothing approaching a consensus on this question within the intelligence community. There has been published speculation about the intelligence services of several different countries. One theory, favored by some journalists in Rome, is that [the Italian intelligence service] Sismi produced the false documents and passed them to Panorama for publication.“Another explanation was provided by a former senior C.I.A. officer. He had begun talking to me about the Niger papers in March, when I first wrote about the forgery, and said, 'Somebody deliberately let something false get in there.'
He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.”
Okay...there is much misinformation in the article which has now been disproven, as Rove/Bush/Cheney were not legally complicit in the leak Plame's name, but what about the basic premise that this whole thing was a coup set up by the CIA? That would explain the shakeup at the CIA. You will notice that Powell's name is in there too, and he did resign in that time frame, just as they said. They are now trying to hang that State Dept. memo around Bush's neck. The information in the memo had to have come from the CIA as it explained how Wilson was chosen for the trip. As another Freeper said days ago and I paraphrase..."asking for info on Wilson who claimed he went to Niger due to a request from the VP's office seems like a natural reaction to me". Call me a ravingnutter, but there just happens to be more "there" in this story than the one the media is spinning wildly, it just fits so neatly. It's not like we are playing six degrees here...all roads lead back to the CIA.
Why not tack on another live sentence on Ames and let the
whole mess go?
Who is the dog that is not barking here?
Story was published one day after Wilson's NYT article IIRC, and had pre-cisely the same agenda.
Claimed CIA connexions.
The monkey-shines shenanigans may shed light on the motivation for the Wilson=Plame escapade.
Has Doug Thompson of Capitol Hill Blue testified before the grand jury?
See: http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/media/features/9226/index.html
As an aside, the departure lounge at Jose Marti had one mens room. There were two toilets, and one didn't have a seat. One could by cigars and rum there prior to walking out to the plane. In the arrival lounge, one could buy laundry detergent or a gallon of paint, depending on the day.
Good question, I know Doug pretty well and I will try to find out.
<< Good question, I know Doug pretty well and I will try to find out. >>
Thank you. I'm pinguing Doug also to this in case he still visits FR.
His situacion is the opposite of Matt Cooper, Judith Miller, etc. Rather than protecting a confidential source, Thompson was the victim of a scammer. Doug would probably like to discover who the scammer was, who the guy worked for, and what pre-cisely he was up to.
It would serve Doug well to go public with what he knows...
and, if he hasn't already, to testify before the grand jury.
Interesting, but why would Bush give the medal of freedom to someone he suspected might be guilty of a leak?
O'Donnell is FOS. If this investigation is all about who said what to reporters, any court is going to back up the investigator's subpoenas of reporters. There is no such thing as judges having an "inclination" to shield reporters.
You also know what Cooper said to the grand jury about Rove. It's small beans. And Rove gave a blanket waiver to all reporters he talked to, something a guilty man does not do. I think Fitzgerald is really after his other source, who is the same person Judith Miller is covering for. He won't talk about the other person, but he spilled to Tim Russert that he had another source and told the grand jury about it.
I see the media is finally starting to look into just who it was that forged those documents. About darned time. And you may well be onto something, ravingnutter.
He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.”
>>
I recall well that article.
I believe there might be a direct connexion 'tween this and the "Terrance J. Wilkinson" CapitolHillBlue.com hoax, and also with l'affaire Wilson=Plame.
How else does one explain Mr Wilkinson??
Was this connected with the Mr. Wilkinson fiasco? That would be most interesting. You have a good memory, Khan.
If Joe diGenova is right, and I suspect he is, the federal investigation into the disclosure of the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame should never have happened.
“My views are stronger than ever,” the former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia said Monday when asked about the white-hot controversy that has sent a New York Times reporter to jail, changed the rules of investigative journalism and now threatens to envelop the White House in a major crisis. “This investigation never should have started because it’s apparent that no crime was ever committed.” “The only way an investigation can begin is if the agency swears — swears — that it took every conceivable step to protect this person’s identity.”
For example, the CIA had to answer 11 specific questions about what steps it took to protect the identity of a covert agent. But diGenova questions whether some of the information the CIA provided the Justice Department on those 11 questions “was materially false.”
In addition, he pointed out that the CIA paid for Wilson’s trip, didn’t ask him to sign a confidentiality agreement, didn’t object to his writing the op-ed article in the Times and allowed him to conduct TV interviews and to appear in a photo with his wife in Vanity Fair, he noted.
“The CIA isn’t stupid,” he said. “They wanted this story out. I’m raising the question: Did the CIA mislead Fitzgerald?”
Hold on to your hat. The plot is about to thicken.
Behind the scenes, the single most important reason for the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson farce is that CIA Director Porter Goss has finally started to clean house at Langley. Goss's long-overdue shake-up is clearly backed by the White House, the top levels of the Pentagon and State Department, and the new National Director of Intelligence, John Negroponte.
Judging by Director Goss's remarks at his Senate confirmation hearings, those whose jobs are most in danger include the CIA "experts" in WMD proliferation – Valerie Plame's outfit – who completely failed to anticipate the Indian and Pakistani nukes, and just couldn't figure out what was going on with Iraqi WMDs. Valerie Plame's bosses are facing the axe for decades of failures.
And it's about time, because Iran is within sight of its first nukes. You don't suppose that has anything to do with the Plame/Wilson publicity stunt, do you?
The farcical Plame/Wilson assault on Karl Rove is a shot across the bow of the White House. The spook bureaucracy is fighting for its perks, hand-in-hand with the Democrats and the media. This is exactly the same iron triangle that destroyed Richard Nixon. [My comment: Hence all the sudden media hype about Watergate]
Valerie Plame's CIA bosses took care not to ask Mr. Wilson to sign a confidentiality agreement, routine in such cases, almost as if they wanted him to make a public fuss. They were not surprised, one might think, when Mr. Wilson promptly took his story to New York Times Op-Ed Editor Gail Collins, one of the great Bush-haters of all time.
The farcical "outing" of Valerie Plame therefore raises a genuinely frightening monster from the swamp: A subversive alliance between the intelligence bureaucracy, the Democratic Party and the media. The common thread among all the characters in this low-brow comedy is hatred of President Bush and American power. Joe Wilson's eyebrows go ballistic when he talks about the White House. Just watch him sometime.
It was a publicity stunt from the get-go. Wilson's "confidential trip" to Niger gave him the superficial credentials to publish his "expose" in the Times. He'd gone there, talked to the top officials face to face, and by gum, they told him it was all a lie! Not even Gail Collins could possibly believe this banana sauce, but Wilson's charges provided a useful stick with which to beat the White House.
Judging by Director Goss's remarks at his Senate confirmation hearings, those whose jobs are most in danger include the CIA "experts" in WMD proliferation – Valerie Plame's outfit – who completely failed to anticipate the Indian and Pakistani nukes, and just couldn't figure out what was going on with Iraqi WMDs. Valerie Plame's bosses are facing the axe for decades of failures.
The rogue agents within the CIA are intent on undermining this administration. It's so much easier to work for a president who won't actually USE the intelligence gathered at the CIA and thus, if/when they are wrong, there are no repercussions.
According to Goss' supporters, the agency has been out of control, recently leaking negative stories to the press to undermine the White House.
"The CIA has got to be kept out of partisan politics," said Stansfield Turner, who was CIA director under President Carter. "And it appears that they were leaking information to influence the election. Porter Goss has now got a difficult problem."
I don't know that there is a connexion, but I strongly suspect one.
Btw, the Hersh story is disputed. There was a different report that the fake Niger documentation was forged by French intelligence.
The Hersh report ties in much better with both the Wilson=Plame and Wilkinson tales. It would be dificult to understand Wilson=Plame and Wilkinson as followups to a French op. If the French started this, why didnt they follow thru?? How does one explain the 20-year Wilkinson history??
Perhaps both stories are factual. The French could have been put up to the forgery, or had the idea suggested to them, by the rogue ex-CIA cabal.
All mysterious still...
The French forging documents was the first story I'd heard, although I still rather like your theory about Wilkinson.
Chirac was in bed with Saddam and would do anything to protect his investment.
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