WASHINGTON - Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., revealed Friday that two years ago he discussed the blown cover of CIA operative Valerie Plame with then CIA director George Tenet and that Tenet "was furious." Tenet promptly called the Justice Department to demand an investigation into who in the Bush administration leaked Plame's identity to columnist Robert Novak, Schumer said at a hearing held by House and Senate Democrats.
Novak revealed Plame's identity in July 2003 in a column in which he said she played a key role in having her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, sent to Niger to investigate reports that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had tried to buy materials for a nuclear weapon there.
The Democratic panel heard from five former CIA operatives who said the disclosure of Plame's classified identity was a breach of the law that forbids government officials from revealing the identity of an undercover intelligence officer and a violation of trust that has harmed America's intelligence-gathering capabilities.
More stuff ...
Wikipedia-Valerie Plame
"Plame is the third wife of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. Plame met Wilson, her second husband, at a Washington D.C party in early 1997. She was able to reveal her CIA role to him while they were dating because he held a high-level security clearance. At the time, Wilson was separated from his second wife Jacqueline, a former French diplomat. Wilson and Plame are the parents of five-year-old twins."
The 2nd Mrs. Wilson:
Corp. Watch- USA:African Governments Spend Millions on Lobbying- 5/20/01
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Gabon, another oil producer, has gone through more than a half a dozen lobbying firms in recent years. Most of them, like Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, McPherson & Hand, and Powell Tate, have been politically very well connected to both major parties. Costs have been well over a million dollars a year, or an average of about 250,000 dollars per agency.
Most recently, however, Gabon appears to have cut off some of its agents, settling instead for relationships with UK-based Shandwick Public Affairs, which last year bought out Powell Tate and Cassidy & Associates.
Gabon has also maintained a three-year-old relationship with Jacqueline Wilson, the ex-spouse of a senior US diplomat. According to her filings, Wilson receives tens of thousands of dollars for special projects and reports to President Omar Bongo's daughter, Pascaline Mferri Bongo.
In her latest filing, Wilson reported that she was paid 60,000 dollars between August and November 2000 to ''support action of president of Gabon to fight AIDS pandemic (and) develop a strategy.'' As to work performed, she reported sending ''letters to the office of National AIDS policy at the White House.''
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Wikipedia-Joseph Wilson
Joseph C. Wilson IV (born November 6, 1949) was a United States career foreign service officer and later a diplomat between 1976 and 1998.
He served as ambassador to Gabon and São Tomé and Príncipe under President George H. W. Bush and helped direct Africa policy for the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton. He was hailed as "truly inspiring" and "courageous" by George H. W. Bush after sheltering more than one hundred Americans at the US embassy in Baghdad, and mocking Saddam Hussein's threats to execute anyone who refused to hand over foreigners. As a result, in 1990, he also became the last American diplomat to meet with Saddam Hussein (Wilson, 2003).
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The Spy Next Door (by Richard Leiby & Dana Priest 10-8-03)
Excerpt:
The Wilsons -- he's 53; she's 40 -- are at the center of a growing political controversy as the Justice Department investigates her unmasking, which occurred in a July 14 column by conservative pundit Robert Novak, who cited "two senior administration officials" as his sources. The outing has sparked a furor in the intelligence community, with some saying they feel betrayed by their government.
"We feel like the peasants with torches and pitchforks," said Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst who was in Plame's officer training class in 1985-86. "The robber barons aren't going to be allowed to get away with this."
In February 2002, the CIA dispatched Joseph Wilson, a retired ambassador who has held senior positions in several African countries and Iraq, to Niger to investigate claims that Saddam Hussein's government had shopped there for uranium ore that could be processed into weapons-grade material. He reported back that Niger officials said they knew of no such effort. His report has since been confirmed by U.S. intelligence officials.
(SNIP)
Plame was recruited by the agency shortly after graduation from Pennsylvania State University, sources said. She later earned two master's degrees, one from the London School of Economics and one from the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium.
Plame underwent training at "The Farm," as the facility near Williamsburg, Va., is known to its graduates. As part of her courses, the new spy was taken hostage and taught how to reduce messages to microdots. She became expert at firing an AK-47. She learned to blow up cars and drive under fire -- all to see if she could handle the rigors of being an undercover case officer in the CIA's Directorate of Operations, or DO. Fellow graduates recall that off-hours included a trip to the movies to watch the Dan Aykroyd parody "Spies Like Us."
Plame also learned how to recruit foreign nationals to serve as spies, and how to hunt others and evade those who would hunt her -- some who might look as harmless as she herself does now as a mom with a model's poise and shoulder-length blond hair.
Her activities during her years overseas remain classified, but she became the creme de la creme of spies: a "noc," an officer with "nonofficial cover." Nocs have cover jobs that have nothing to do with the U.S. government. They work in business, in social clubs, as scientists or secretaries (they are prohibited from posing as journalists), and if detected or arrested by a foreign government, they do not have diplomatic protection and rights. They are on their own. Even their fellow operatives don't know who they are, and only the strongest and smartest are picked for these assignments.
Five years ago Plame married Joseph Wilson -- it was her second marriage, his third. They crossed paths at a reception in Washington. "It was love at first sight," Joseph Wilson reports. When they met, in 1997, Wilson held a security clearance as political adviser to the general in charge of the U.S. Armed Forces European Command.
For the past several years, she has served as an operations officer working as a weapons proliferation analyst. She told neighbors, friends and even some of her CIA colleagues that she was an "energy consultant." She lived behind a facade even after she returned from abroad. It included a Boston front company named Brewster-Jennings & Associates, which she listed as her employer on a 1999 form in Federal Election Commission records for her $1,000 contribution to Al Gore's presidential primary campaign.
Administration officials confirmed that Brewster-Jennings was a front. The disclosure of its existence, which came about because it was listed in the FEC records, magnifies the potential damage related to the leak of Valerie Wilson's identity: It may give anyone who dealt with the firm clues to her CIA work. In addition, anyone who ever had contact with the company, and any foreign person who ever met with Valerie Plame, innocently or not, might now be suspected of working with the agency.
Friends and neighbors knew Valerie Wilson as a consultant who traveled frequently overseas. They describe her as charming, bright and discreet. "She did not talk politics," said Victoria Tillotson, 58, who has often socialized with the Wilsons.
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Wilson held a security clearance as political adviser to the general in charge of the U.S. Armed Forces European Command
Anyone remember who was the General -US Armed Forces European Command in '97? Was it Weasley?? And I wonder how much Dana Priest knows.... boy, have she and Leiby ever laid it on thick in this piece . whew!
The French former Mrs. Wilson seems to have secured quite a nice lobbying assignment with the country of Wilson's former ambassadorship...
Has anyone asked Valerie Plame Wilson if and what she shared with Wilson in the way of sensitive information? ===================================================
Also, Nigeria is very rich in oil reserves ..lotsa $$$ to toss around .. and corrupt:
Corp.Watch-AFRICA: African Oil Leaders Promise To Open the Books On Oil Deals, Answering Demands For Transparency- 6-27-04
In April, the two countries sold the first of nine oil fields put on auction to ChevronTexaco and ExxonMobil, receiving a signature bonus of US$123 million.
Saturday night's accord answers demands for openness in oil deals between multinationals and West African governments, with public accounting to discourage illegal payments and misuse of money for national resources.
West Africa has become one of the world's fastest growing regions, as the United States, Asia and Europe look for alternatives to Middle East oil.
Nigeria, the world's No. 7 oil exporter, regularly is listed as one of the world's most corrupt nations. London-based Global Witness has estimated that a nearby country, Equatorial Guinea, has put almost 100 percent of its oil profits into overseas accounts.
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Some good research by Shermy last year:
Joseph Wilson, Niger, Uranium and Bush’s Famous Sixteen Words: Evolution of a Confused Story April 16, 2004
Excerpt:
In 1982 until 1985 Wilson was deputy chief of the US mission in Burundi in 1982. There he met his second wife, Jacqueline. Jacqueline was a “Cultural Counselor” attached to the French Embassy.
-In 1985 Wilson returned to the USA to work in Tom Foley’s and Al Gore’s offices. He married Jacqueline in 1986.
-Wilson later was stationed in Iraq. He recounts that on the eve of Saddam’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait he and Jacqueline dined with “Saddam’s principal arms buyer in Paris...” (Not something I would be talking about...)
-After leaving government service around 1998 Wilson started consulting. One pursuit included “looking to set up” a gold-mine company “out of London”, to mine for gold in Niger at some unidentified time. Wilson’s interviews exhibit he has expert-like knowledge of mining operations in Niger. This gold mine project might help explain his expertise. (((((MY NOTE: and maybe his $$$.)))
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Good commentary from RealClear Politics-What Would Michael Kelly Say?
In 1993 Kelly wrote a lengthy essay for the New York Times Magazine titled "Master of the Game." The piece focuses somewhat unflatteringly on David Gergen's pioneering role in developing what we've come to know as the art of political spin: the sound-bytes, the photo ops, the leaks, message discipline, war rooms, etc. But Kelly's true lament was over a Washington press corps that had grown insular, lazy and enamored with spin - and he included himself among this group.
Marvel at how relevant Kelly's words - now twelve years since they were printed on the page - are today:
Read at Link - Excerpt
The press pack has become both obese and incestuous. There are 1,700 accredited White House reporters, and most of them keep in promiscuous electronic touch - through Nexis and the Federal News Service and the Associated Press and Reuters and CNN and PBs and C-Span - with one another's work and with the vast bloviation of words and pictures that Washington produces every day. Overwhelmed by size and undermined by excessive intimacy, the pack has lost its howling way.
It has become as faddish as a teenager, vacillating in its attitudes toward the powers that be, going from bubbling enthusiasm to hysterical anger, from cheering all that the president says to denouncing all that the president does. It is so thoroughly conformist that it celebrates group-think as (conventional) wisdom.
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Comments .. clues?
Tell Me who will believe putz slime bag dipstick schmuck schumer.The man lies through his teeth every time he opens his mouth.
