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Insight from A.J.Strata:

http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/2510

But what people will forget to note is Valerie Plame’s name was probably all over the Hill by this time.

Here is what would happen in the wake of the Ames fiasco - Congressional oversight. Congress would want to know the damage and what was being done about it. The list of agents compromised would be circulated, and the fact they were being moved off covert ops noted as they were re-assigned to Langley.

This list would be known as ‘the survivors’, those not killed by Ames’ treason. Wilson marrying someone on this infamous list would not go unnoticed in Washington DC either. And so when Val and Joe show up at events she will be known as one of the few who escaped Aldrich Ames.

This is how DC works folks. It is a gossipy, name dropping, information exposing town. I grew up in the midst of it and you level in the social pecking order is demonstrated by having these innocuous facts availble to show off with. The Wilsons were probably known as the ones who Saddam and Ames’ missed.

I ain’t buying the idea Joe Wilson was so unknown in DC people needed memos to know who he was and who he was married to. Once at Langley many people know who ‘works for the agency’.

I have known which neighbors work for which intelligence agency since I was a kid. It doesn’t take a seasoned eye long to detect the cover stories. I think we as a nation deserve to know what really happened, with Fitzgerald and with the CIA and State.

I think at a minimum this nation owes those answers to Scooter Libby facing 25 years in jail for Armitage’s leak and Fitzgerald’s lies. And we need to address Armitage’s attempts to cover his actions, as Toensing so aptly points out:

Mr. Armitage also knew he had met with Bob Woodward on June 13, 2003, telling him about Mr. Wilson’s wife’s CIA employment and her role in her husband’s trip to Niger. But when the FBI interviewed Mr. Armitage on Oct. 2, he admitted to the Novak conversation only, notably forgetting meeting with one of our country’s premier investigative reporters.

I am not buying Armitage did not recall the Woodward discussion because Woodward was quite clear he had to push Armitage to come clean. And why are we still learning of MORE leaks prior to the ones we know about now?

During the investigation Mr. Fitzgerald learned that a former New York Times reporter, Cliff May, twice told the FBI that, prior to Mr. Novak’s column, he had heard in an offhand way from a nongovernment employee that Mr. Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA, a clear indication that her employment was known on the street. Ditto columnist Hugh Sidey, who wrote that Ms. Plame’s name was “knocking around in the sub rosa world . . . for a long time.”

Someone else outside the government knew this information and was sharing it with journalists? Why is this not detailed on Fitzgerald’s investigation? Who was this person and how did they learn? This is clearly another leak point or two or three (considering the Knight-Ridder article chock full of classified information being leaked on June 12th, a month before Wilson outs himself).

We need to understand why this all went so wrong.