Posted on 11/03/2005 12:20:04 PM PST by swarthyguy
The hot-blooded search for criminality in the matter of Cheney/Libby/Rove has not truly satisfied those in search of first degree venality. Very soon after the indictment of Mr. Libby, the tricoteuses glumly conceded that no conspiracy has been uncovered. It is not alleged that Mr. Cheney whispered to Mr. Libby that he should conceal the truth from the grand jury or the special prosecutor. The great blast of publicity came from the technical exposure of Mr. Libby to (in his case, at his age) a life term in jail, plus a million-odd-dollar fine. If John Jones is hauled in and word is given out that if found guilty he will be hanged and his severance pay confiscated, the public's attention will be drawn to his crime even if it was to double park.
One commentator on television wrested his way free from the allure of prospective impeachments long enough to focus not on any contradiction in what Libby said to the grand jury and to the FBI and to the special prosecutor. Rather, to the root cause of the disturbance. This had to do with revealing that Valerie Plame Wilson was secretly in the employ of the Central Intelligence Agency, using a cover employer to disguise her affiliation.
The revelation of a covert affiliation can have terminal consequences, as the interrupted career of Colonel Penkovsky (1919-1963) bloodily illustrates. Most duplicities along this line are relatively innocent, but the protections given are not only psychologically important, they are marginally life-saving.
An autobiographical illustration. When in 1951 I was inducted into the CIA as a deep cover agent, the procedures for disguising my affiliation and my work were unsmilingly comprehensive. It was three months before I was formally permitted to inform my wife what the real reason was for going to Mexico City to live. If, a year later, I had been apprehended, dosed with sodium pentothal, and forced to give out the names of everyone I knew in the CIA, I could have come up with exactly one name, that of my immediate boss (E. Howard Hunt, as it happened). In the passage of time one can indulge in idle talk on spook life. In 1980 I found myself seated next to the former president of Mexico at a ski-area restaurant. What, he asked amiably, had I done when I lived in Mexico? "I tried to undermine your regime, Mr. President." He thought this amusing, and that is all that it was, under the aspect of the heavens.
We have noticed that Valerie Plame Wilson has lived in Washington since 1997. Where she was before that is not disclosed by research facilities at my disposal. But even if she was safe in Washington when the identity of her employer was given out, it does not mean that her outing was without consequence. We do not know what dealings she might have been engaging in which are now interrupted or even made impossible. We do not know whether the countries in which she worked before 1997 could accost her, if she were to visit any of them, confronting her with signed papers that gave untruthful reasons for her previous stay — that she was there only as tourist, or working for a fictitious U.S. company. In my case, it was 15 years after reentry into the secular world before my secret career in Mexico was blown, harming no one except perhaps some who might have been put off by my deception.
The great question here is Robert Novak. It was he who published, in his column, that Mrs. Joseph Wilson was a secret agent of the CIA. I am too close a friend to pursue the matter with Novak, and his loyalty is a postulate. What was going on? If there are mysteries in town, that surely is one of them, the role of Novak.
The importance of the law against revealing the true professional identity of an agent is advertised by the draconian punishment, under the federal code, for violating it. In the swirl of the Libby affair, one loses sight of the real offense, and it becomes almost inapprehensible what it is that Cheney/Libby/Rove got themselves into. But the sacredness of the law against betraying a clandestine soldier of the republic cannot be slighted.
tricoteuses = knitters
Too bad no one told Bill the law wasn't violated. Maybe he's getting too long in the tooth for these thought pieces.
Do you know French, or do you just have one heck of a vocabulary :)
Le Google, c'est votre ami!
that's all fine Mr Buckley.
now when someone is actually charged with outing her, if it can be shown that her status was covert, that the law was violated and someone is indicted for it, then we can talk.
in the meantime, Novak is still silent.
Or that is as close to a definition I could quickly find.
Buckley was an agent when an agent really was an agent for a reputable agency. That agency is no longer reputable and has not been since Clinton was President. Why Buckley doesn't acknowledge this is beyond me. Maybe he is losing his touch.
I suspect the real reason Bill wrote this piece was so he could trot out his reminisces about the time he was an agent. This was nothing more than an excuse to relive old times.
“tricoteuses”= ..the legendary mob of “tricoteuses” who allegedly witnessed and celebrated scenes of revolutionary violence during the Terror of the French Revolution."
Madame DeFarge, knitting needles clicking vengefully.
My best guess is that it will be a "friend" of Wilson's, perhaps even Wilson's attorney who is also Wilson's next door "neighbor" AND "best friend". (Remember the FBI in the neighborhood at the last minute).
I'm still trying to figure out why Cooper called Rove on the 11th when it hit the wire but Wilson didn't find out until the 12th when his neighbor (Attorney) waved him over to read the article. Especially since Joe had talked to Novak about the pending article. NO ONE CALLED JOE ON THE 11TH???
More specifically, a reference to the old hags in "A Tale of Two Cities" who knitted by the guillotine while waiting for the next execution.
William F. Buckley, "It was three months before I was formally permitted to inform my wife what the real reason was for going to Mexico City to live."
Yeah, well it was three dates before Valerie told Joe that she was CIA.
What a bizarre article. All it really says is that Buckley knows nothing about the CIA -- despite having been an agent a hundred years ago for less than a year.
Valerie Plame was NEVER a CIA agent. She was a CIA officer. The CIA hires agents, like Buckley claims to have been hired.
At one point we're told Plame had the job of hiring agents. But those days are long past.
She was not covert under the rigors of the IIPA. Case closed.
"A common misconception is that CIA has agents, when they actually have case officers who work on getting information and finding others who can get them information. There are two types of officers in the DO:
* Field operations officers: The "spies" who recruit agents in other countries.
* Staff operations officers: Their support team in Langley, VA."
http://www.soyouwanna.com/site/syws/cia/cia5.html
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