Posted on 10/21/2005 9:44:44 AM PDT by blogblogginaway
The media version of the CIA leak case is that the White House illegally revealed a CIA employees identity because her husband, Joseph Wilson, was an administration critic.
But former prosecutor Joseph E. diGenova says the real story is that the CIA launched a covert operation against the President when it sent Wilson on the mission to Africa to investigate the Iraq-uranium link. DiGenova, a former Independent Counsel who prosecuted several high-profile cases and has extensive experience on Capitol Hill, including as counsel to several Senate committees, is optimistic that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald will figure it all out.
DiGenova tells this columnist, It seems to me somewhat strange, in terms of CIA tradecraft, that if you were really attempting to protect the identity of a covert officer, why would you send her husband overseas on a mission, without a confidentiality agreement, and then allow him when he came back to the United States to write an op-ed piece in the New York Times about it.
That mission, he explained, leads naturally to the questions: Who is this guy? And how did he get this assignment? Thats not the way you protect the identity of a covert officer, he said. If it is, then [CIA director] Porter Goss is doing the right thing in cleaning house at the agency.
If the CIA is the real villain in the case, then almost everything we have been told about the scandal by the media is wrong. Whats more, it means that the CIA, perhaps the most powerful intelligence agency in the U.S. Government, was deliberately trying to undermine the Bush Administrations Iraq War policy. The liberals who are anxious for indictments of Bush Administration officials in this case should start paying attention to this aspect of the scandal. They may be opposed to the Iraq War, but since when is the CIA allowed to run covert operations against an elected president of the U.S.?
DiGenova first made his astounding comments about the Wilson affair being a covert operation against the President on the Imus in the Morning Show, carried nationally on radio and MSNBC-TV. I wondered whether these serious charges would be refuted or probed by the media. Imus, a shock jock who has spent several days grieving and joking about the death of his cat, didnt grasp their significance. But the mainstream press didnt seem interested, either.
DiGenova told me he believes there has been a war between the White House and the CIA over intelligence and that the agency, in the Wilson affair, was using the sort of tactics it uses in covert actions overseas. One has to consider the implications of this statement. It means that the CIA was using Wilson for the purpose of undermining the Bush Administrations Iraq policy.
If this is the case, then one has to conclude that the CIAs covert operation against the President was successful to a point. It generated an investigation of the White House after officials began trying to set the record straight to the press about the Wilson mission. At this point, its still not clear what if anything Fitzgerald has on these officials. If theyre indicted for making inconsistent statements about their discussions with one another or the press, that would seem to be a pathetically weak case. And it would not get to the heart of the issuethe CIAs war against Bush.
One of those apparently threatened with indictment, as Times reporter Judith Millers account of her grand jury testimony revealed, is an agency critic named Lewis Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Miller said that Libby was frustrated and angry about selective leaking by the CIA and other agencies to distance themselves from what he recalled as their unequivocal prewar intelligence assessments. Miller said Libby believed the selective leaks from the CIA were an attempt to shift blame to the White House and were part of a perverted war over the war in Iraq.
Wilson was clearly part of that war. He came back from Niger in Africa and wrote the New York Times column insisting there was no Iraqi deal to purchase uranium for a nuclear weapons program. In fact, however, Wlson had misrepresented his own findings, and the Senate Intelligence Committee found there was additional evidence of Iraqi attempts to buy uranium.
DiGenova raises serious questions about the CIA role not only in the Wilson mission but in the referral to the Justice Department that culminated in the appointment of a special prosecutor. At this point in the media feeding frenzy over the story, the issue of how the investigation started has almost been completely lost. The answer is that it came from the CIA. Acting independently and with great secrecy, the CIA contacted the Justice Department with concern about articles in the press that included the disclosure of the identity of an employee operating under cover. The CIA informed the Justice Department that the disclosure was a possible violation of criminal law. This started the chain of events that is the subject of speculative news articles almost every day.
The CIAs version of its contacts with the Justice Department was contained in a 4-paragraph letter to Rep. John Conyers, ranking Democratic Member of the House Judiciary Committee. Conyers and other liberal Democrats had been clamoring for the probe.
DiGenova doubts that the CIA had a case to begin with. He says he would like to see what sworn information was provided to the Justice Department about the status of Wilsons CIA wife, Valerie Plame, and what active measures the CIA was taking to protect her identity. The implication is that her status was not classified or protected and that the agency simply used the stories about her identity to create the scandal that seems to occupy so much attention these days.
But if the purpose was not only to undermine the Iraq War policy but to stop the administration from reforming the agency, it hasnt completely worked. Indeed, the Washington Post ran a long story by Dafna Linzer on October 19 about the turmoil in the agency as personnel either quit or are forced out by CIA Director Goss. Like so many stories about the CIA leak case, this story reflected the views of CIA bureaucrats who despise what Goss is doing and resist supervision or reform of their operations.
Members of the press do not want to be seen as too close to the Bush Administration, but acting as scribblers for the CIA bureaucracy, which failed America on 9/11, is perfectly acceptable.
DiGenovas comments might be dismissed as just the view of an administration defender. But his comments reflect the facts about the case that emerged when the Senate Intelligence Committee conducted an independent investigation. Wilson, who became an adviser to the Kerry for President campaign, had claimed his CIA wife had no role in recommending him for the trip, but the committee determined that was not true. Why would Wilson misrepresent the truth about her if the purpose were not to conceal the curious nature of the CIA role and its hidden agenda in his controversial mission? And who in the CIA besides his wife was behind it?
In this regard, Millers account of her testimony to the grand jury disclosed that Fitzgerald had asked whether Libby had complained about nepotism behind the Wilson trip, a reference to the role played by Plame. This is the line of inquiry that could lead, if Fitzgerald pursues it, to unraveling the CIA covert operation behind the Wilson affair. There may be rogue elements at the agency who are conducting their own foreign policy, in contravention of the official foreign policy of the U.S. Government elected by the American people. Like it or not, Bush is the President and he is supposed to run the CIA, not the other way around.
Fitzgerald has the opportunity to break this case wide open. Or else he can take the politically correct approach, which is popular with the press, and go after administration officials.
One irony of the case is that Miller is under strong attack by the left as an administration lackey when she didnt even write an article at the time noting Libbys criticisms of the CIA and the Wilson trip. Did her other sources, perhaps in the CIA, persuade her to drop the story? We may never know because she claims that she got Fitzgerald to agree not to question her about them. But what she did eventually report, after spending 85 days in jail, amounts to an exoneration of the Bush Administration. Libby, Karl Rove and others obviously believed they could not take on the CIA directly but had to get their story out indirectly through the press. They got burned by Miller and other journalists.
Gosss CIA house-cleaning, of course, has come too late to save the administration from being victimized in the Wilson/Plame affair. Some officials could get indicted because of faulty or inconsistent memories. It is also obvious that liberal journalists are so excited over possible indictments of Bush officials that they are willing to overlook the agencys manipulation of public policy and the press. But if the CIA has been out-of-control, subverting the democratic process and undermining the president, the American people have a right to know. If Fitzgerald doesnt blow the whistle on this, the Congress should hold public hearings and do so.
Scroll down to red arrow and circle.
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/docs/wilson.whoswho.pdf
Anyone remember the Miranda memo thingie back in 2003-04?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/search?s=Miranda+memos&ok=Search&q=deep&m=all&o=score&SX=4359468ee0ab9a45855c031ee96fcccba6ee0059
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 did not 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 memo around Bush's neck.
Yes, I have my tin foil hat securely on, LOL! From some more reliable sources:
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 its 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 persons 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 Wilsons trip, didnt ask him to sign a confidentiality agreement, didnt 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 isnt stupid, he said. They wanted this story out. Im raising the question: Did the CIA mislead Fitzgerald?
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.
The agency guys were so pissed at Cheney, the former officer said. They said, O.K, were going to put the bite on these guys. My source said that he was first told of the fabrication late last year, at one of the many holiday gatherings in the Washington area of past and present C.I.A. officials. Everyone was bragging about itHeres what we did. It was cool, cool, cool. These retirees, he said, had superb contacts among current officers in the agency and were informed in detail of the sismi intelligence.
They thought that, with this crowd, it was the only way to goto nail these guys who were not practicing good tradecraft and vetting intelligence, my source said. They thought itd be bought at lower levelsa big bluff. The thinking, he said, was that the documents would be endorsed by Iraq hawks at the top of the Bush Administration, who would be unable to resist flaunting them at a press conference or an interagency government meeting. They would then look foolish when intelligence officials pointed out that they were obvious fakes. But the tactic backfired, he said, when the papers won widespread acceptance within the Administration. It got out of control.
Like all large institutions, C.I.A. headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, is full of water-cooler gossip, and a retired clandestine officer told me this summer that the story about a former operations officer faking the documents is making the rounds. Whats telling, he added, is that the story, whether its true or not, is believedan extraordinary commentary on the level of mistrust, bitterness, and demoralization within the C.I.A. under the Bush Administration. (William Harlow, the C.I.A. spokesman, said that the agency had no more evidence that former members of the C.I.A. had forged the documents than we have that they were forged by Mr. Hersh.)
The F.B.I. has been investigating the forgery at the request of the Senate Intelligence Committee. A senior F.B.I. official told me that the possibility that the documents were falsified by someone inside the American intelligence community had not been ruled out. This story could go several directions, he said. We havent gotten anything solid, and weve looked. He said that the F.B.I. agents assigned to the case are putting a great deal of effort into the investigation. But somebodys hiding something, and theyre hiding it pretty well.
i thought those were FBI plots.
If nothing else, the CIA was careless and stupid in sending Wilson to Niger. He was not in the agency, he was not a WMD expert, he was not a trained investigator, he had not been to Niger for several years, and he was a publicity-seeking blabbermouth. That such an unqualified person was sent on a politically sensitive mission, that his "investigation" was - by his own admission - haphazard and unprofessional, that he was not required to prepare a formal report of his findings, that he was not required to sign a security pledge, that his story found its way into the press before Cheney even knew about it, that his mission would almost certainly further compromise the identity of his CIA wife, and that the CIA initiated a "leak" investigation against the White House - all of this is "prima facie" evidence of either gross incompetence or worse, i.e. a plot against the President of the United States by one of its own intelligence agencies. Yet the MSM have looked the other way.
bttt
wow BTTT
More leaks in Wilson's boat...
Miller NOW admits she met/talked with Libby on June 23rd. Sandy first burgled on June 28th. Wilson wroted his op-ed on July 6th.
How did Miller even know enough to inquire about Joe? He hadn't dropped his column yet?
The little lying b**** had another source before Libby......but she has conveniently forgotten "who". It had to come out of the Dem Camp that Valerie was going to "burn". Hence, Valerie Flame. Miller had to know of BOTH Valerie and nice Mr. Wilson.
During the next few weeks a documentary will be released in the US in which, alongside American diplomats that have served in Niger, a number of ex-CIA agents appear. The common objective that unites them is an attempt to demonstrate the role and responsibility of Bush in the dirty affair. No small coincidence this: those involved, as we have already indicated, are the movers and shakers behind a strategy put in place to favour the rise of JF Kerry. Amongst those involved is Vincent Cannistraro, ex-CIA and subsequently a security advisor to the Vatican. Its rather odd that Cannistraro, who in public conferences tried to convince the Americans of the dangers of the Iraqi nuclear threat, is now placing the blame for the false documents on the Italians.
who is "the CIA"? Do they mean Tenet?
Ping!
I didn't know that Wilson was Plame's second husband but she was born Plame. So, who was her first husband? That might be interesting???
I think those forged documents were connected to France somehow.
And, if you remember it wasn't an elite unit (like a SEAL team, ForceRecon, or Green Berets) that captured Saddam. It was a tactical team from the 4th ID. (DISCLAIMER: I'm not saying that soldiers in the 4th ID aren't "elite", but just that is wasn't a SEAL team or some other recognized "elite" unit, per se).
Certainly, they had some intelligence information, but it wasn't as if it it was the aforementioned SEAL team that had to battle their way into a palace to snatch Saddam, actions which are often times the result of CIA-fed information.
One might be forgiven for thinking that the intelligence that was used in the initial strike was flawed, whereas the hard-working soldiers of the 4th ID didn't rely on CIA intelligence but on-the-ground intelligence that, in the end, had them nabbing Saddam.
Perhaps that's no coincidence?
"Nigerian embassy." Is this the embassy of the Republic of Niger, or the embassy of Nigeria? I'd guess the former but haven't followed the details on the forged documents.
bttt
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