Posted on 10/25/2005 11:39:50 AM PDT by Wuli
Sorry to get back to you somewhat late. I guess you could be right. It was more or less conjecture on my part.
I've kind of gotten a bit sidetracked regarding the threads about Clinton telling Blair to drop Bush or else he'd be going down too. I've searched FR through google but haven't really been able to get too far. I will keep trying a bit more but may not be able to get too much farther. If I do find them i'll post the URLs for them here for the sake of completion.
and wondering again, why he was given his intelligence role in 2002,
and looking at many holes in the CIA's work, before and after Wilson's trip,
and finding that, to my mind, mere incompetence alone cannot account for those holes,
I believe, in my amatuer mind, there is sufficient grounds to believe that:
(1) At the worst, there was a CIA conspiracy against the President, possibly because the CIA knew it had been vetting insufficient evidence on Iraqi WMD matters since 1998, if not before, and they were trying to prohibit any action that would expose their failures in that regard - like a US invasion leading to a true WMD-discovery process in Iraq. Remember, the vaunted CIA's suprise at the extent of Iraqi nuclear research, found after the Gulf War?
Or
(2)There were divisions within the CIA, with regard to Iraq-Africa-Uranium deals and while one faction remained mostly dominant, the other faction was upset that their view did not become policy. That faction was not only opposed to the consensus Iraq-Africa-Uranium view in the CIA, they were an angry group, opposing other elements of the CIA consensus views on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction in general. They felt righteous indignation that their view was not policy. They sought to change that, by sabotaging the intelligence stream in some way to call into question the consensus views.
Here is my reasoning, among parts of the PlameGame timeline.
Mid 1990s to 2001 - US intelligence agencies believe (or at least tell two Presidents they believe) Iraq made a number of attempts to buy uranium in Africa, from a number of African nations (not just Niger), some as late as 1999 and 2000. It is unclear, in that intelligence, how sucessful were all the attempts, but the CIA thinks some might have been.
9/11 to November 1, 2001 - After 9/11, with planning for military action in Afghanistan underway, the assessment of all WMD intelligence rises as a national priority. With those concerns, and with what the CIA continued to say on that subject, with respect to Iraq, the administration questions the legitimacy and prudence of continuing the diplomatic rope-a-dope charade with Iraq. The administration's view is that the questioning of Iraq's current WMD efforts and any residual WMD abilities can no longer remain unanswered. Post 9/11, we needed unambiguous answers. Less emphasized and more obscure, but equally relevant and urgent questions also existed concerning cooperation between Sadaam Hussein and Al Queda type terrorist groups. We already know, at that time, among many other things, that the maker of the 1993 World Trade Center bombs has been living in Baghdad and Al Zarqawi has already arrived in Iraq from Afghanistan, and already working with an Al Queda unit in the Kurdish area and traveling between there and cities in Iraq's Sunni triangle, like Tikrit and Falluja.
November 17, 2001 - The Taliban government in Kabul, Afghanistan falls to coalition forces.
Feburary 12, 2002 - Vice President Cheney receives an intelligence briefing. It includes, among other things, mention of possible Iraqi attempts to purchase "yellowcake" uranium in Niger. This item is, according to CIA internal documents, based on (1)a report from "a foreign government service" recieved on October 15, 2001, and a second report, said to have come from "a foreign government service", and (3)said by the CIA to come from "a very credible source," and (4) said to corroborate earlier accounts.
First, it is important to note at this point and empasize, that Niger did not stand, then, later or now, as the first, or the only venue of suspected Iraqi-Africa uranium deals.
I think we can start our conspiratorial guessing right here.
Britain and the US had other intelligence regarding Iraq, Africa and uranium. If the CIA had not yet done its due diligence on the Niger information, if the information was thought suspect by the CIA Counterproliferation Division (Valerie Plame's unit), why was it inserted into the briefing for Mr. Cheney, at this point. Why wasn't it investigated further, beforehand? Or, were the suspicions about it already confirmed and known in the CIA by those who passed it into Mr. Cheney's briefing. Note that it would be the Counterproliferation Division who would vet such intelligence and one of their employees, we now know, was already referring to this intelligence as that "crazy report".
Mr. Cheney questions the Niger item and Mr. Cheney asks his briefer to take his questing of the item back to the CIA.
If there was a "conspiracy", this is another point in its time line. "Anonymous sources" hereafter feed their friends in the media that it is the CIA, in February 2002, not Mr. Cheney that questions the Niger intelligence. Yet it is they who have inserted the "intelligence" to Cheney and he that has questioned it. (Does someone at the CIA already know, at this point, that the source for the "foreign government service" is the same forged documents that don't officially enter the US intelligence stream for another eight months?, yet they are not using that information to purge the item from official assessments and briefings?) Can what follows be mere incompetence?
Feburary 12-18, 2002 - Officials at the agency's Counterproliferation Division discuss how they might investigate the Niger claims. Valerie Plame suggests the agency send her husband. Nothing documents any search for any other candidate for the trip. The U.S. embassy in Niger sends a cable describing a "new" account of the alleged deal; saying it "provides sufficient detail to warrant another hard look at Niger's uranium sales." Officials of several U.S. intelligence agencies meet with Ambassador Wilson to discuss his trip.
First: how timely (??) is the cable from the embassy in Niger and how opposite in presentation it is on the subject, from what our ambassador says to Joe Wilson on his trip, before the end of February. You would almost think that someone is trying to reinforce the requirement for the trip Wilson (former ambassador) is already assigned to.
Also, at this point, we have the head of the Counterproliferation Division (1)sanctioning the insertion of the initial unvetted Niger item into the briefing for Cheney, (2)while his unit acts as though (in the record) they are uncertain how to investigate the item (their job is tracking WMD procurement activity around the world), (3) he does not question the sole-selection of Plame's husband for the Niger trip, (4)he does not require a confidentiality agreement from Wilson.
The Counterproliferation Divsion has (1)inserted questionable intelligence into official briefings, (2) vetted it as accurate (3) assigned an outside individual to proceed with investigating it (4) with nothing that will later prohibit that individual from discussing it or what he believes it means. The dissenters have their external public voice and the many truths debunking his later misreprentations can remain hidden by the inability of anyone to "out" the source from which his trip was derived in the first place - his wife.
March - October 1, 2002 - The CIA continues to vet an assessment of the Iraq-Niger-uranium matter that finds the deals plausible; contrary to Wilson's opinion of the product of his trip. We also know, from the CIA notes and memoranda discussing this matter during this period that the consensus view masked divisions in the CIA on this and other WMD matters. But officially nothing, including no new intelligence, has changed the consensus view.
Late September 2002 - It is at this point that I believe the dissenters within the CIA are moved to act dangerously and in a conspiratorial manner, against their official roles and repsonsibilities.
The showdown over Iraq is looming at the UN. Without a change, the formal CIA report the US will present to the UN and the IAEA, with its Iraq-Africa-uranium intelligence will not contain any "smoking gun" to "debunk" any of that intelligence.
October 1, 2002 - The CIA publishes a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi WMD and again there is no change on the consensus view of Iraq-Niger-Uranium.
October 2, 2002 - If there was a conspiracy it is at this point that the Deputy CIA Director , MacLaughlin, is knowingly or unknowingly assisting that conspiracy. On this date, in testimony in congress, he calls the Niger claims "not credible", in contradiction of the major assessment published the day before and without presenting any new intelligence to contradict that assessment. Is he aware, at this point, of the documents that will show up seven days later at our embassy in Rome? From the reported CIA documents and memorandum, nothing that might directly make the Niger deals "suspect", is in the intelligence stream until those documents arrive on October 9th, and so, nothing else seems to explain MacLauglins public view, one week earlier.
You cannot dismiss what happens next as simply incompetence on the part of the CIA.
October 9, 2002 to March 3, 2003 -
(1)The CIA has the "forged documents".
(2)The CIA continues to vet the consensus view on Iraq-Niger-Uranium, in public speeches and official CIA presentations, including the report it gives to the UN in February 2003.
(4)In less than a month, the IAEA tells the UN it believes the October 9th documents are forgeries, based clearly to them on the names and dates given on those documents (certain officials were not in those positions on the dates given).
(5)Who in the CIA would know how to fake the documents? Who in the CIA tracks (or at least attempts to track) international deals in uranium. Who in the CIA knows who the buyers, the sellers and the go-betweens are for such deals? Who in the CIA knows who are the relevant national officials in the various countries from which uranium is sold and when they held those offices? Who in the CIA knows the domestic and international managers and companies which actually perform the uranium mining and international transport operations? In other words, who in the CIA knows the entire universe of what it takes to affect and document the international uranium trade?
The answer is Valerie Plames CIA unit, the Counterproliferation Division. In fact, looking at the questions I just listed above, they are all supposedly part of her job.
Yet for 90 days, that division does not know the "forged" nature of documents that the IAEA identifies in less than one month? And, for that same 90 days no element of that "forged" nature enters into any official CIA assessment on the matter. One could guess that on top of the FBI and the CIA not talking to each other, before 9/11, that afterwards the CIA was not even talking to itself.
My own view is that incompetence cannot explain the official CIA actions, and particularly those of Valerie Plame's Division, during those 90 days.
Intelligence, in national security terms, is not a science. Outside of photos and a paper trail, collected by eyewitness human beings in the field, a lot of intelligence is assumptions from a preponderance of circumstantial evidence and the patterns of that evidence. More than one opinion can often reasonably be discerned from that evidence.
The CIA had a majority consensus view, consistent with a historical ongoing view.
There were dissenters, but they had no more than the same preponderance of circumstancial evidence, the patterns in that evidence and there different point of view about what it meant.
The Wilson trip and the forged documents were produced, possibly in concert with individuals outside the CIA and possibly outside the US to insert something tangible to back up their dissent.
One of the things that angered them the most afterwards, and for which Joe Wilson served as their megaphone, was that the forgeries were not given primary consideration above all other and evidence outside of Niger, in the policy views of the US and Britain. They were angered because their sole bogus item was not allowed to debunk the entire corpus of the Iraq-Africa-Uranium intelligence, as Britains independent Butler report noted.
How can Porter Goss unmask all of this and with whose help, and at what continuing danger to our intelligence gathering operations and with what continuing danger from the dissenters/conspirators?
Lastly, (repeating myself, I know) the actions and activities of too many individuals in the CIA cannot be explained by simple incompetence.
bttt - print @ work table
bump
You are right (did Wilson get his info on the documents from the news), that is clear, although the time from the first descriptive news article is only days after the March 3 announcement by the UN; and the IAEA had to do their work looking at the documents before that. But, Wilson COULD HAVE learned about the "forged" nature of the documents from the news.
Yet, as my new addition points out, the factors that make those documents forgeries could have easily and readily been detected by Valerie Plame's division at the CIA, yet from October 9, 2002 to March 3, 2003 the record is silent; there is no screeming memo from her division, up to Tenet, saying "these documents are forgeries"; at least none that her division or Tenet were willing to divulge to the congressional investigators on the joint intelligence committee.
I do not think that that failure was due to incompetence, and therefore I am of the assumption that, at least within days of October 9-10, 2002 (if not long before), Valerie Plame knew the "forged" nature of the documents as did others at the CIA. I also assume that her and Joe Wilson talked about those documents, at least from the time after they came into the CIA's possession and before March 3, 2003. Therefore, I think he is not lying when he talks to Kristof, the Washington Post or The New Republic concerning what he knows about what makes the documents "forged", I believe he is speaking from knowledge, not news reports.
I agree with you on all points - but I just wanted to point out that there is no EVIDENCE in the time-line that Wilson "knew" before he could have known. Of course his claims are either evidence of lies or of a much more sinister cover-up. The Senate Select Intelligence Committee decided on the former, but given the political situation at the time I am not surprised.
However, it would be intersting to find out a) when Kristof spoke to Wilson, and b) if Wilson told him some more specifics about the documents.
Quite honestly, to me Wilson appears to be a very sloppy liar, and I would think it less likely hat he picked up the relevant facts from studying/reading news reports rather than from gossip. And who would have been better positioned to give him some gossip than Ms Wilson?
I don't think it was just "some gossip" on Valerie's part. Given the nature of what her division in the CIA does, and if the "errors" on the "forged" documents are as obvious as they have been reported, then it should have only taken days for her division to know they were forged. She would have had knowledge, not gossip.
And yet, four months after we get the documents, they are on their way to the UN in the CIA's final WMD intel report, and there is no record of her division protesting. Someone wanted them found in that report as the forgeries they knew they were.
Keep in mind that Bush kept saying "Africa" not "Niger", (1)because US and the Brits had Iraq-Uranium intel regarding venues other than Niger, and (2)there was already some concern (MacLaughlin's October 1 statement to Congress and Tenet's October 6, warning on some language for a speech. Yet, in spite of those two incidents, despite the fact that Plame's division had to know what made them forgeries by mid to late October, the CIA keeps vetting the Niger language in speeches and reports, all the way up to the CIA report sent to the UN. Someone(s) in the CIA knew their questionable character and wanted them in that report because of their questionable character. On the uranium issue, it was the only impeachable piece of evidence but those who knew that and wanted it left in thought they only need that one bad apple; which is still their mantra today - everything that is wrong is cited back to Niger, and the Butler report and everythign else is ignored.
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