Posted on 10/30/2005 9:25:14 PM PST by smoothsailing
This is the Senate Intelligence Committee's summation of the CPD meeting at which the decision was made to send Wilson to Niger. It's unambiguous and indicates that whether Plame promoted her husband for the trip or merely offered to talk to him when asked she did not originate the idea of sending someone and did not make the decision to send him.
The whole question of Plame's participation is a disgusting red herring.
I haven't read Fitzgerald yet...but he's been quoted as saying [paraphrase] that he's been very cautious and careful and making his charges, about which laws were broken. There are a lot of technical considerations.
Plame was an employee of the Counter Proliferation Division, a part of the Directorate of Operations, not the Directorate of Intelligence. She apparently had enough power to (possibly) send her husband on important missions. So she wasn't a janitor or clerk. Whether she is or was covert and what that means legally is still not absolutely clear.
Not when it comes to that particular statute, however. It didn't apply to Plame.
That's a red herring, nobody suggests she made the decision.
From the Washington Post: "Valerie had nothing to do with the matter," Wilson wrote in a memoir published this year. "She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip."
Wilson stood by his assertion in an interview yesterday, saying Plame was not the person who made the decision to send him. Of her memo, he said: "I don't see it as a recommendation to send me."
Thanks for repeating Wilson's red herrings to us, you did an excellent job.
What Plame's memo failed to mention is that Wilson was formerly married to a French diplomatic staffer, who some folks believe was actually an intellligence agent. Also, that Wilson was a business consultant on African affairs, and so might have had a conflict of interest.
Did the CIA ask him about any of these things?
One other thing the media and Dems never mention: Doesn't the fact that Cheney asked the CIA to check out the Niger story suggest that he was interested in getting the facts straight? If he was indifferent to the facts, or wanted the facts ignored, he would never have made the request in the first place.
If the CIA was seriously trying to protect Plame's identity, they should never have selected Wilson for the Niger assignment, much less allowed him to speak to the press about it in a highly politicized manner. Once he did that, the "outing" of Plame was a virtual certainty. The MSM made that very point - among many others - in their "amici curiae" brief in the Miller/Cooper case, where they argued there was no underlying crime that would justify jailing the reporters for refusal to divulge sources.
On another related matter, what happened to ravingnutter? Haven't seen any posts by him lately. One of his last posts indicated he had gotten a private freepmail that warned him off this story. Any news on raving?
My point is that if Plame recommended her husband, knowing that he had been formerly married to a French diplomat, knowing he was a business consultant on Africa, and probably knowing that he was a Democrat partisan, then maybe it doesn't surprise that she is radioactive at the CIA.
No news on ravingnutter, but I think this story was the downfall of cyncooper, who had followed it closely, got too emotionally involved in it, and was - I'm told - suspended for repeated abrasive comments to those who didn't share her opinion.
bookmark
Wilson will never have to worry about anything because the MSM will continue to ignore his lies, inconsistencies, political motivation, and partisan associations. The Plamegate story needs a hero and a victim, and the MSM have cast Wilson in that role, and nothing will change that. Nothing, unless and until it's too late to make any difference. Two liberals wrote a very fair portrait of Kenneth Starr ("The Truth at Any Cost"), and damning of the Clinton White House, but by then it was too late, the public didn't want to hear about it anymore, and nobody read it.
None can be forced to testify against each other which sounds better than the 5th.
So, not all of them had to know "at the beginning" but they all knew when they hired Joe in May 2003. Two months later, (with the 5 year requirement passed), he would write his article, telling the world that HE WAS THE ENVOY sent to Niger.
The fact that they say that her classification was being changed in the Spring of 2003 and the ambiguity of her real classification suggests that some one may be playing with classification files.
Hey! I used to live in Palo Alto .. and I can tell you it is NOT a conservative town.
Except they're husband and wife. They do not have to say anything about anything which would incriminate themselves or each other.
Thank You Much!! What's CPD??
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