Posted on 10/09/2005 8:55:28 PM PDT by Fedora
And I think it does have legs. It may not have legs over the next two or three months, but when you see American casualties moving from one to five or to ten per day, and you see Tony Blair's government fall because in the U.K. it is a big story, there will be some ramifications, I think, here in the United States, so I hope that you will do everything you can to keep the pressure on.
This highlights the significance of Wilson identifying himself as a source for the Guardian. Are ex-diplomats legally allowed to assist covert operations aiming to topple American allies? I must've missed the part of the Constitution that authorized Joseph Wilson to make his own foreign policy.
Yes, I think you're absolutely right in that what we know about the facts of the matter is that it WAS in fact a CIA assignment. I gather he went to Langley where he met with a group that included both CIA people (including his wife) and State people, where he was vetted for the assignment which was then approved.
I think what Lyin' Joe may be thinking at the time of this speech is that because (i) he is a former State person, (ii) there were State people in the room, and (iii) he was never asked to sign a confidentiality agreement and apparently was never informed his assignment was secret, therefore if he were later to be prosecuted for disclosing classified CIA information one of his possible defenses was that he didn't "knowingly" do so because he didn't subjectively believe it was a CIA assignment, but rather for a different agency.
Another possibility is that, being part of this anti-Bush cabal composed of former CIA people and then-current CIA people in Alan Foley's department, he simply wanted to distance himself from the CIA, but did it in the most clumsy way possible.
Clarke is another lunatic in the Clinton administration. They all got big heads & thought they were smarter than anyone else during the Clinton administration. That's why we are in the mess we are today. No one knew a damn thing about running the country & protecting us from TERRORISTS!
They were all too busy being "smart", "wonderful", "leaders", etc.
Who knows what he was doing after he left the government...as we found out he was only a phone call away from reasserting himself in the region.
I have always found it very interesting that Chomsky quotes Knut Royce (yes, that's the one who along with Timothy Phelps confirmed Plame's status in Newsday) as the one American journalist who told the truth about the first Gulf War. Royce wrote an article citing a US diplomat as his source wherein he said that Saddam had wanted a diplomatic solution but the White House ignored the proposal. In Wilson's book he refers to a call a received from Phelps about Novak's article...Wilson says he had met Phelps 12 years earlier in Iraq. I think it's quite possible that Wilson has been leaking information out of school for a long, long time.
sedition, anyone?
I tend to think it was a French-led intelligence operation assisted by Saddam's intelligence agents (who had penetrated the Iraqi resistance by infiltrating Jordanian intelligence units working with MI6 and the CIA in the 1990s) and sympathizers from a few other intelligence agencies, including a Carter/Clintonista faction of the CIA.
Director Goss for one. There are more conservatives then you would expect.
Wesley Clark's another one--and interestingly, during the Kosovo War when Wilson was stationed in Germany as political advisor to the United States European Command, he was assisting Clark's predecessor, George Joulwan, from 1995 to about July 1997; Clark took over from Joulwan July 10, right about the time Wilson left.
That's what it looks like to me.
Our long national nightmare is over!!!!Anyone could read this, compare it to the Kristof and Pincus pieces and figure out who he was and who he was married to and see his obvious anti-Semitic,anti-Administration slant.
And who do you think was funding EPIC? Heh..Fedora Bless you..
Recall that Wilson seemed to have been caught out in a lie on the forged Niger uranium contract (saying he knew the names and dates therein were wrong at a point in time months before he otherwise should have been aware of the existence of that document). Supposedly there has been an FBI investigation into the forged Niger uranium contract. I wonder if this investigation has looked into Wilson's inconsistent statements on this matter. Were I in charge of this investigation I would consider French interests as among the likely suspects for the forger of this document, and consider whether Wilson first learned of this document through French sources.
I should add that while I find it quite interesting that Fitzgerald has recently contacted Wilson, I am pessimistic that Fitzgerald will follow the facts all the way to where ever they may lead because (i) once he clears the senior White House people (if in fact he does) then the conflict of interest that was the rationale for appointing a Special Counsel disappears, and the investigation of any possible crimes by Wilson, CIA people or journalists is likely to simply get folded back into the Justice Department and (ii) if Fitzgerald and his FBI team start focusing on Wilson, they may find themselves butting up against the FBI investigation into the forged Niger uranium contract (if in fact it is still ongoing).
Now that's another interesting question. . .
On the anti-Semitic issue, the DNC has already been embarrassed by Wilson's cospeaker McGovern:
Dean Condemns 'Anti-Semitic Literature' (passed out at Conyers Downing St. forum yesterday)
A handful of people at Democratic National Headquarters distributed material critical of Israel during a public forum questioning the Bush administration's Iraq policy, drawing an angry response and charges of anti-Semitism from party chairman Howard Dean on Friday.
"We disavow the anti-Semitic literature, and the Democratic National Committee stands in absolute disagreement with and condemns the allegations," Dean said in a statement posted on the DNC Web site.
SNIP
One witness, former intelligence analyst Ray McGovern, told Conyers and other House Democrats that the war was part of an effort to allow the United States and Israel to "dominate that part of the world," a statement Dean also condemned.
It seems to me that if Dean condemns McGovern, he needs to condemn Wilson in the same breath, for they are not only saying the same thing, they are saying it from the same podium, as the EPIC conference illustrates.
The French angle becomes more plausible if Wilson's financial interests are factored in: his wife prior to Valerie was a French diplomat (serving a function frequently used as a cover by French intelligence) and, along with the French-American politician Pierre Salinger, a registered lobbyist for the President of Gabon, Omar Bongo, who was the chief African ally of the French oil company TotalFinaElf, a major beneficiary of the Oil-for-Food bribes which prior to the Iraq War had a contract with Saddam's regime worth an estimated 12.5 to 27.0 billion barrels of oil reserves.
Fedora--all of that crowd is--McGovern, Johnson--almost all if not all of those former diplomats always endorsing Kerry was this crowd and most in one way or the other are on the Saudi payroll(thru "think" tanks or with Saudi businesses). This is why they have so vehemently opposed Bush..
Good points, especially the French oil interests - the oil contract that Saddam offered to Total created an extremely powerful financial interest in France (as well as Russia, as I recall) against regime change. We should also consider that it need not necessarily be the case that French intelligence per se is behind the uranium contract forgery and other efforts to undermine the US; in other words even though Chirac, French oil interests and others may have been actively working against us (and using Wilson as a tool), I would not assume that that is necessarily the case for the professionals constituting the leadership of French intelligence.
I know Wilson's Rock Creek associates are Saudi-linked. I haven't looked into EPIC's funding yet. Do you have any specifics on that?
Wilson was also hanging around with MoveOn.org, so given that and the left-wing groups represented at EPIC, it's a good guess Soros is another funding source.
Yes, I am referring to the elements of French intelligence that would be aligned with Chirac on that, and there are likely intelligence veterans who feel about Chirac's policies as some here felt about Clinton's--I have a French friend who speaks of Chirac in the same tone as "the disgusting socialist Mitterand", as he puts it. Unfortunately Chirac is currently in a position where he can hire and fire at the executive level and issue overall policy directives, which is why I referred to it a French intelligence operation, without implying that everyone in French intelligence is happy with it. And yes, Russia also had a large stake in Iraqi oil, as did China, and some Western oil companies and other oil companies had smaller stakes as well; I emphasize France in this context because TotalFinaElf had the largest contract with Saddam and Wilson's background is in French Africa, but there are certainly other angles to it that are relevant to the big picture. I think Wilson was working for some much bigger interests.
If you go to the website and click it says the speakers' bureau is sponsored by and lists a number of groups like Amnesty-Ineternational and churches, etc..but you'd have to get a copy of their IRS filing to get the full details. My hunch is Saudi and pro-Saddam folks, but it started in 1998 obviously to fight sanctions so their may be some money there from elsewhere as well (French maybe). It smells.
The first mention I find of his speech here is by a blogger on July 16, 2003 in response to an article by Kevin Drum in The Washington Monthly (foremerly edited by Matt Cooper. oddly enough.)http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2003_07/001661.php#018818
February 1997
At the time, (Joe) Wilson was based in Stuttgart, serving as the political adviser to George Joulwan, the U.S. general in charge of the European command; Plame was based in Brussels. Meeting in Paris, London, and Brussels, they got very serious very quickly. On the third or fourth date, he says, they were in the middle of a "heavy make-out" session when she said she had something to tell him. She was very conflicted and very nervous, thinking of everything that had gone into getting her to that point, such as money and training.
She was, she explained, undercover in the C.I.A.
In 1997, Plame moved back to the Washington area, partly because (as was recently reported in The New York Times) the C.I.A. suspected that her name may have been on a list given to the Russians by the double agent Aldrich Ames in 1994.
snip
Wilson was caught off guard when around July 9 he received a phone call from Robert Novak, who, according to Wilson, said he'd been told by a C.I.A. source that Wilson's wife worked for the agency. "Can you confirm or deny?" Wilson recalls Novak as saying. "I need another source."
Wilson says he replied, "I'm not going to answer any questions about my wife."
At this point, Wilson says, he and his wife thought the leak could be contained if no one picked it up.
This strikes me as very significant. If Fitzgerald is looking at the disclosure act to bring indictments against Government officials who talked about Wilson's trip at all and we have Wilson dicussing it at a lecture, I would assume his attempts to indict on that statute fall apart.
He is left with perjury, obstruction, and conspiracy. As far as I know, it is not criminal to talk about a highly visible attmept to undermine one's efforts.
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