Posted on 10/18/2005 12:13:44 PM PDT by CT
Rush says there is a rumor on the street that the CIA leak case is about to produce some indictments. He also said it was just a rumor, and did not assign probabilities.
I am suggesting we use this thread to get a single post that establishes key facts around this entire matter. For instance:
1. It is widely believed that Joe Wilson's testimony to the select Senate Committee upon his return from Niger is in conflict with his NYT editorial some months later. If so, it would mean Wilson was lying to either the Senate or American public through his editorial.
Please provide news links that establish Wilson's duplicity.
2. Media has variously reported Valerie Plame as a covert CIA agent. However facts established when the case first broke had Plame as a regular staff CIA employee working at Langley for the 5 years prior to allegedly being 'outed.' If so, it would mean the law prohibiting naming covert agents does not apply.
Within the last few weeks the usual media outlets have now started reporting Plame as a covert, Division of Operations employee, with no mention of Plame's most current role, and widely known identity as CIA staff.
Please provide news and other links that establish Plame's less-than-covert identity; also how media has 'airbrushed' key facts in this invetsigation that would put the entire case in doubt.
3. There are a number of circumstances, facts, and related information that makes this a very strange case. One common element, however, is how poorly the liberal media has covered it. In particular, how reporters have used inuendo and a new phenomenon - projection - to write stories with little or no basis in fact. Karl Rove is therefore only the latest example.
Please provide any and all links that establish examples of how poorly the media has performed, as well as key examples of media bias.
If there is anything else worth including, please do. It will be most useful if we can get any and all relevant data linked here.
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If it was genuinely an open secret, a lot of people would be coming forward and Fitzgerald's case would have proceeded in a different fashion
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I direct you to a paragraph written by the prosecutor who got Sheik Abdel Rahman (the spiritual leader of the first WTC bombing ) in Jail ( Andrew Mccarthy )
Here it is :
http://nationalreview.com/mccarthy/mccarthy200507180801.asp
"As the media alleged to the judges (in Footnote 7, page 8, of their brief), Plame's identity as an undercover CIA officer was first disclosed to Russia in the mid-1990s by a spy in Moscow. Of course, the press and its attorneys were smart enough not to argue that such a disclosure would trigger the defense prescribed in Section 422 because it was evidently made by a foreign-intelligence operative, not by a U.S. agency as the statute literally requires.
But neither did they mention the incident idly. For if, as he has famously suggested, President Bush has peered into the soul of Vladimir Putin, what he has no doubt seen is the thriving spirit of the KGB, of which the Russian president was a hardcore agent. The Kremlin still spies on the United States. It remains in the business of compromising U.S. intelligence operations.
Thus, the media's purpose in highlighting this incident is blatant: If Plame was outed to the former Soviet Union a decade ago, there can have been little, if anything, left of actual intelligence value in her "every operation, every relationship, every network" by the time anyone spoke with Novak (or, of course, Corn).
THE CIA OUTS PLAME TO FIDEL CASTRO
Of greater moment to the criminal investigation is the second disclosure urged by the media organizations on the court. They don't place a precise date on this one, but inform the judges that it was "more recent" than the Russian outing but "prior to Novak's publication."
And it is priceless. The press informs the judges that the CIA itself "inadvertently" compromised Plame by not taking appropriate measures to safeguard classified documents that the Agency routed to the Swiss embassy in Havana. In the Washington Times article — you remember, the one the press hypes when it reports to the federal court but not when it reports to consumers of its news coverage — Gertz elaborates that "[t]he documents were supposed to be sealed from the Cuban government, but [unidentified U.S.] intelligence officials said the Cubans read the classified material and learned the secrets contained in them."
Thus, the same media now stampeding on Rove has told a federal court that, to the contrary, they believe the CIA itself blew Plame's cover before Rove or anyone else in the Bush administration ever spoke to Novak about her. Of course, they don't contend the CIA did it on purpose or with malice. But neither did Rove — who, unlike the CIA, appears neither to have known about nor disclosed Plame's classified status. Yet, although the Times and its cohort have a bull's eye on Rove's back, they are breathtakingly silent about an apparent CIA embarrassment — one that seems to be just the type of juicy story they routinely covet."
If Plame's cover was blown, as Gertz reports, how much did Plame know about that? It's likely that she would have been fully apprised — after all, as we have been told repeatedly in recent weeks, the personal security of a covert agent and her family can be a major concern when secrecy is pierced. Assuming she knew, did her husband, Wilson, also know? At the time he was ludicrously comparing the Novak article to the Ames and Philby debacles, did he actually have reason to believe his wife had been compromised years earlier?
And could the possibility that Plame's cover has long been blown explain why the CIA was unconcerned about assigning a one-time covert agent to a job that had her walking in and out of CIA headquarters every day? Could it explain why the Wilsons were sufficiently indiscrete to pose in Vanity Fair, and, indeed, to permit Joseph Wilson to pen a highly public op-ed regarding a sensitive mission to which his wife — the covert agent — energetically advocated his assignment? Did they fail to take commonsense precautions because they knew there really was nothing left to protect?
We'd probably know the answers to these and other questions by now if the media had given a tenth of the effort spent manufacturing a scandal to reporting professionally on the underlying facts. And if they deigned to share with their readers and viewers all the news that's fit to print ... in a brief to a federal court.
Regarding the fact that Valerie Plame's work at the CIA was not an unknown thing, I direct you to the following report from the Washington Times :
http://washingtontimes.com/national/20050715-121257-9887r.htm
"A former CIA covert agent who supervised Mrs. Plame early in her career yesterday took issue with her identification as an "undercover agent," saying that she worked for more than five years at the agency's headquarters in Langley and that most of her neighbors and friends knew that she was a CIA employee.
"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."
Asked whether his wife had been compromised before the press leak, Mr. Wilson said, "I have no idea," though he said that her work has had to change since the leaks.
"My wife's status is that she is back at work, obviously in a different capacity, and she no longer has the cover that she once held," he said.
Today on Hugh Hewitt's show - Jed Babbin substituting - he took a call in which Judith Miller was identified as authoring a book in 2002 called GERMS. In the foreward or somewhere in the early part, she thanks the CIA and guys like Richard Clark for helping her write the book. There are some relevant names here. People that should be paid attention to, including Clark and others.
This would tend to reinforce my theory that Miller is 'very close' to the intelligence community. And very close to what I call the Kerry wing of the CIA.
As a heads up, Babbin is buying the book on Amazon tonight, and will start the show off tomorrow to discuss. I suggest it will well worth listening. Trust me.
by Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg, William Broad "IT was noon on Sunday, September 9, 1984..." (more)
SIPs: germ program, germ effort, germ weapons, germ arsenal, botulinum vaccine (more) CAPs: Soviet Union, White House, Fort Detrick, Gulf War, Saddam Hussein (more)
Amazon.com
Three reporters from The New York Times survey the recent history of biological weapons and sound an alarm about the coming threat of the "poor man's hydrogen bomb." Germs begins ominously enough, recounting the chilling attack by the followers of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh in 1984 on the Dalles, Oregon--no one died, but nearly 1,000 were infected with a strain of salmonella that the cult had legally obtained, then cultured and distributed.
While the U.S. maintained an active "bugs and gas" program in the '50s and early '60s, bio-weapons were effectively pulled off this country's agenda in 1972 when countries around the world, led by the United States, forswore development of such weapons at the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. The issue reemerged in the early '90s thanks to Saddam Hussein and revelations of the clandestine and massive buildup of bio-weapons in remote corners of the Soviet Union. The book's description of the Soviet program is horrific. At its peak the program employed thousands of scientists, developing bioengineered pathogens as well as producing hundreds of tons of plague, anthrax, and smallpox annually. The authors conclude that while a biological attack against the United States is not necessarily inevitable, the danger of bio-weapons is too real to be ignored. Well-researched and documented, this book will not disappoint readers looking for a reliable and sober resource on the topic. --Harry C. Edwards
# How the CIA secretly built and tested a model of a Soviet-designed germ bomb, alarming some officials who felt the work pushed to the limits of what is permitted by the global treaty banning germ arms.
# How the Pentagon embarked on a secret effort to make a superbug.
# Details about the Soviet Union's massive hidden program to produce biological weapons, including new charges that germs were tested on humans.
# How Moscow's scientists made an untraceable germ that instructs the body to destroy itself.
# The Pentagon's chaotic efforts to improvise defenses against Iraq's biological weapons during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
# How a religious cult in Oregon in the 1980s sickened hundreds of Americans in a bio-terrorism attack that the government played down to avoid panic and copycat strikes.
# Plans by the U.S. military in the 1960s to attack Cuba with germ weapons.
Germs also shows how a small group of scientists and senior officials persuaded President Bill Clinton to launch a controversial multibillion-dollar program to detect a germ attack on U.S. soil and to aid its victims -- a program that, so far, is struggling to provide real protection.
Based on hundreds of interviews with scientists and senior officials, including President Clinton, as well as on recently declassified documents and on-site reporting from the former Soviet Union's sinister bio-weapons labs , Germs shows us bio-warriors past and present at work at their trade. There is the American scientist who devoted his professional life to perfecting biological weapons, and the Nobel laureate who helped pioneer the new biology of genetically modified germs and is now trying to stop its misuse. We meet former Soviet scientists who made enough plague, smallpox, and anthrax to kill everyone on Earth and whose expertise is now in great demand by terrorists, rogue states, and legitimate research labs alike.
A frightening and unforgettable narrative of cutting-edge science and spycraft, Germs shows us why advances in biology and the spread of germ weapons expertise to such countries as Iran, Iraq, and North Korea could make germs the weapon of the twenty-first century.
About the Author
Judith Miller, a correspondent for The New York Times since 1977, has reported from throughout the world and concentrated on the Middle East and the former Soviet republics. Her most recent book is God Has Ninety-nine Names.
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Kerry wing of the CIA.
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I didn't know that the CIA had a Democratic and GOP wing !
Could it be that the Kerry wing of the CIA fed Bush false information ?
This is getting curiouser and curiouser !
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