Posted on 10/30/2005 9:25:14 PM PST by smoothsailing
Joe Wilson in a Bind
By Clinton W. Taylor
Published 10/31/2005 12:07:45 AM
Last week I had the privilege of being lied to personally by Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, who spoke here at Stanford last Monday.
The fact that Joe Wilson is economical with the truth probably won't surprise many Spectator readers.
Nonetheless I assure you the horse I am beating, although it may be lying in the op-ed pages of the Los Angeles Times, is far from dead.
But this week there's new evidence of his lies to flog him with. When the indictment of Scooter Libby was unsealed on Friday, it finally placed one of Wilson's oft-repeated fabrications beyond the most hopeful partisan's credibility.
First the lie: In the Q&A after his talk last Monday, Wilson answered a question of mine with essentially the same statement about the origin of his mission to Niger that he relates in his L.A. Times op-ed:
Valerie was an innocent in this whole affair. Although there were suggestions that she was behind the decision to send me to Niger, the CIA told Newsday just a week after the Novak article appeared that "she did not recommend her husband to undertake the Niger assignment." The CIA repeated the same statement to every reporter thereafter.
The Newsday article he refers to notes:
A senior intelligence official confirmed that Plame was a Directorate of Operations undercover officer who worked "alongside" the operations officers who asked her husband to travel to Niger.
But he said she did not recommend her husband to undertake the Niger assignment. "They [the officers who did ask Wilson to check the uranium story] were aware of who she was married to, which is not surprising," he said. "There are people elsewhere in government who are trying to make her look like she was the one who was cooking this up, for some reason," he said. "I can't figure out what it could be."
This has been Wilson's story ever since the issue came up: he maintains his wife had nothing to do the CIA's decision to send him. It's important to his narrative that "outing" his wife was a bolt from the blue designed to intimidate and punish him.
The more plausible explanation is that the information came out because it cast Wilson's mission and his credibility in a new light. Evidence supports this interpretation. While the CIA may back Wilson's account to reporters, it has now twice contradicted him when the chips were down and the threat of perjury loomed.
The first contradiction, of course, occurred back in July 2004, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence devoted a few pages of its report on WMD intelligence failures to point out that Valerie Plame came up with the idea of sending her husband to Niger. Both a memorandum Plame wrote and the testimony of a CIA officer show that Wilson's trip was her idea. (The report can be downloaded here, and the relevant sections are on page 39, 40, and 72.)
That should have put an end to Joe Wilson's credibility, but it wasn't good enough for the diehard Wilson fans, like most of the audience at Stanford last week, or the editorial staff of the L.A. Times. But now the indictment of Scooter Libby has proved yet again that Wilson is full of it.
In order to claim that Libby had perjured himself and obstructed justice, the grand jury goes to great lengths to show how and when he had actually learned about the origin of Wilson's trip. To do so, they refer on page 4 of the indictment to a conversation between Libby and a "senior officer of the CIA" on June 11, 2003:
[Libby] was advised by the CIA officer that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and was believed to be responsible for sending Wilson on the trip.
And again on page 12 of the indictment:
[Libby] was informed by a senior CIA officer that Wilson's wife was employed by the CIA and that the idea of sending him to Niger originated with her.
This puts Wilson's fan club in a bind: either Wilson is lying, or the indictment is. Which is it? If it's the latter, then perhaps Scooter Libby didn't know what the indictment said he knew, and the indictment ought to be thrown out or at least amended.
Alas, most of the world sees it's the former. Wilson's lie, of course, wouldn't excuse any crime Libby might have committed, but it ought to be enough to prevent Wilson from ever being taken seriously again.
Clinton W. Taylor (clinton_w_taylor@hotmail.com) is a lawyer and a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Stanford.
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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