[Cautor]

Putting some of the pieces together.

[abner]

Nice.

[Mo1]

Ping

[beckett]

Lots of good background. Thanks.

Wilson/Plame would get fried in court, should the case ever get that far, which it won't.

[blake6900]

Judith Miller may hold the key.

The funniest part of this whole saga is the notion that Miller is sitting in jail because the release allowing her to name her "source" was, in her and the NY Times' words, "coerced". The only conceivable reason as to why she will not name her source is because to do so would be not only an embarrassment to her and her employer but quite possibly would be an admisssion of engaging in an illegal activity.

She and the Times knows who the source is and my guess is she's the source. Novak worked a deal with the prosecutor, possibly named her as the source and Miller, not wanting to invoke the Fifth Amendment during Grand Jury testimony, is hiding behind the supposed right of a journalist to protect a source. It's simply makes too little sense for her to be sitting in jail to protect Libby or Rove when those cats are basically already out of the bag.

[cricket]

[The real question the main stream media continues to ignore is who in the CIA and/or Department of State went to bat to support Plame’s efforts to get her Bush-hating-Kerry-supporting husband an assignment in Niger which he would soon use to try and torpedo the Bush campaign. The signs increasingly indicate it was neither Rover nor Libby. A fact worth recalling is that Wilson was on the payroll of the Kerry campaign until he was thoroughly discredited by revelations proving he had lied about how he garnered the Niger trip. The Kerry camp pulled out all the stops to try and trash George W. Bush. Could they have had a hand in this phony outing setup? Judith Miller may hold the key.]

So WHEN do those 'who know'. . .beg the question into the light of public scrutiny. . .are they waiting for this 'original' version to be cast into our history books. . .or another jaundiced film experience by Michael Moore?

Once this myth saturates public consciousness. . .the truth will not matter. . .

[GOPJ]

hmmmmm...

Wilson was on the payroll of the Kerry campaign until he was thoroughly discredited by revelations proving he had lied about how he garnered the Niger trip. The Kerry camp pulled out all the stops to try and trash George W. Bush. Could they have had a hand in this phony outing setup? Judith Miller may hold the key.

[blake6900]

One other point not picked up by the MSM is the fact that while we know Tenet and Cheney were not responsible for sending Joe Wilson to Niger, it's never really been explained who actually made the decision to send him there and why it was necessary in the first place, particularly someone of such relatively high visability. The president said what he said in his state of the union address and then the CIA sends someone over to Niger to prove it? Methinks some anti-Bush folks were out to get 'em.

[blake6900]

Just so there’s no mistaking the fact that Valerie Wilson was and is a left-leaning Democrat, it should be noted that she more recently contributed $372 on October 11, 2004 to “America Coming Together” organization, a George Soros-backed liberal Democrat activist group.

BTW ACT announced today it's closing the doors on most of its' big city offices and have sent out pinks slips to most of its' workers to look for other work. Looks like Soros has pulled the plug.

[beyond the sea]

Rob Griffin, regional president of a real estate firm that once oversaw the leased property remarked that “It’s almost like out of a spy novel—the tenant that wasn’t there.”?

LOL. Just like out of a spy novel.

;-)

[digger48]

Where do the Clintonistas who were working for Kerry fit into the timeline?

[SolidSupplySide]

Wilson was and is a left-leaning Democrat, it should be noted that she more recently contributed $372 on October 11, 2004 to “America Coming Together” organization, a George Soros-backed liberal Democrat activist group. Interestingly, in the records documenting this contribution, she listed no employer and instead stated she was “retired,” a statement in clear contradiction of the facts. In short, she told a fib on her campaign disclosure.

She was on an "enforced" leave of absence from the CIA on October 11, 2004.

[SolidSupplySide]

A fact worth recalling is that Wilson was on the payroll of the Kerry campaign until he was thoroughly discredited by revelations proving he had lied about how he garnered the Niger trip.

That had to happen about the same time that Valerie was placed on an "enforced" leave of absence from the CIA. Someone ought to match those dates up and see how closely they coincide. Coincidence, as I said in the previous sentence, or related?

[McGavin999]

Nice summary. If the Brewster Jennings cover is an example of what the CIA was producing, it's no wonder we're in such trouble. There is something decidedly unprofessional about it. Is this an example of CIA work, or is it an example of Ms. Plame's work?

The whole incident is beginning to look like something out of a 3 Stooges movie.

[Sir Francis Dashwood]

One of the best I have seen so far on the issue...

Bump/bookmark... bada-bing...

[ken5050]

Kudos...

[Sam Hill]

Great research, Cautor! Kudos!

I think the Vanity Fair piece and others indicate Plame was educated at the London School of Economics on the CIA's dime. I can't think of much else to add.

"They paid $735,000 for the home which records show had previously sold for a mere $44,000."

Man alive, does that ever jump out. It reminds me of so many Clintonite deals, like George Stephanolpolis's. Very fishy.

[Sam Hill]

"A fact worth recalling is that Wilson was on the payroll of the Kerry campaign until he was thoroughly discredited by revelations proving he had lied about how he garnered the Niger trip."

Technically, I believe he was an "unpaid advisor," just like Sandy Burglar. But he was certainly expecting some kind of payment for his services, should Kerry be elected, in the form of a plum job.

[nightowl]

You are absolutely correct and I have posted my thoughts serveral times on Free Republic. Fitzgerald needs to wrap this sucker up and indict Miller for criminal contempt and obstruction of justice and throw the book at the crooked Wilson's. That would be true justice in this case.

[Rockingham]

This is a good piece of work. I offer two comments.

First, US intelligence officers commonly use covers that cannot survive close scrutiny. The risks are monitored and covers are abandoned and created as need arises. Good covers and the associated personal "legends" that can stand intense scrutiny are expensive, difficult, and time-consuming to create.

Plame's cover seems to have been of the first type, useful and necessary, but inherently insecure and temporary. Most likely, Plame's undercover career was mostly over before Novak's column ran, with her cover perhaps still useful in limited instances, such as servicing prior contacts.

The loss of Plame's cover due to Novak's column, if that can even be said to have taken place, does not seem to have made for any appreciable danger to Plame and other CIA officers and agents. There would have been perhaps some minor scurrying by the CIA to wind up a blown cover, a matter about as consequential or unexpected as the Chicago police having to replace a worn out patrol car.

Second, the controversy that Wilson and Plame have worked so hard to generate and promote reeks of CIA and State Department incompetence and obstructionism as to Bush's foreign policy, as well as that Wilson and his wife are Democrats seeking to get a few licks in for their team. But are those explanations fully adequate for Wilson and Plame's conduct? There is a disturbing and little explored Saudi dimension to the entire controversy.

To put it bluntly, is the Wilson/Plame controversy in some part a Saudi operation designed to weaken Bush and subvert US Iraq policy? Wilson's current gig is in an organization funded by Saudi cash and sympathetic to Saudi foreign policy. Plame's work for the CIA also seems to have been in regard to the oil industry and Aramco, which necessarily means involvement with vital Saudi interests. And, on present knowledge, the possibility cannot be ruled out that Plame's CIA work could have been in immediate alliance with Saudi intelligence.

If this was the middle or late stages of the Cold War and there were similar associations and actions benefiting a Warsaw Pact country, the persons involved would have fallen under close investigation by US counterintelligence. Of course, this is not the Cold War, but a new war on terror, with the Saudis no more reliable a US ally than De Gaulle was or Vichy France would have been in WW II. Indeed, the Saudi regime and the extended royal family so fractured that Saudi Arabia and the Saudis are best regarded as both allies and enemies, essential for their oil but otherwise unworthy of any trust.

We are only in the early stages of the war on terror, with US strategy and policy hotly contested and in flux, just as in the early years of the Cold War. The US government and its foreign policy and intelligence communities are riddled not so much by neocons as with vast numbers of Arabists and Saudi sympathizers and hirelings. Saudi cash has bought them a great many friends in the US. We know that Joe Wilson and his institute receive substantial funding from the Saudis. Is there more of a Saudi connection than that? And is the sum of all such connections essential to explaining what Wilson and Plame have been up to?

[AZ_Cowboy]

Superb. I would love to see some footnotes or endnotes, though.

I have suspected for some time that the Plame Game is some sort of a ruse. I suspect that a lot of us here in the FR community have our theories. Quite a number of pundits on the right do as well, apparently.

There are just too many oddities in the whole thing for the reality of what happened to be what has been presented to the public via MSM coverage.

First and foremost, we have the highly improbable situation where Judith Miller is sitting in jail to protect Karl Rove. Matt Cooper almost took the fall, too. I find it very hard to believe that either of the companies these folks respectively work for would retain employees that were willing to go this far to stick up for the Bush Administration, expecially when it might involve bagging Karl Rove.

I am also bothered by the fact that there is very little to show for this alleged Niger trip by Joe Wilson. To add further suspicion, we have the fact that both Wilsons apparently had a certain animosity toward Bush and the Iraq war. Lastly, we now have the report that memos suggesting that this was a nepotistic venture getting Wilson over there in the first place.

The other previous "leaks" of Plame were new to me. I missed the original work sone on FrontpageMagazine by Ben Johnson.

Frankly, I remain committed to my original theory that Wilson is the origin of his wife's own leak, staging it with the knowledge that it would keep him out of the hot seat for an obviously bungled mission, keep his wife employed, all the while damaging the Administration and the Iraq War.