Paging Ray McGovern!!!
Notice Ray McGovern's name on the placecard in the extreme right corner; he's been cropped out.
Posted on 02/07/2007 5:30:00 AM PST by slowhand520
Is Everything We Know About Joe Wilson’s Trip to Niger Wrong? New evidence from the Libby trial — evidence Senate investigators never saw — could change the storyline.
By Byron York
For the last two weeks, a number of Republicans in Washington — in the administration, on Capitol Hill, and in the intelligence community — have been watching closely as the perjury and obstruction of justice trial of Lewis Libby unfolds in federal court. In particular, those Republicans have been poring over dozens of documents released as evidence in the case. Much of what they’ve seen is old stuff, things they’ve known about for years. But two documents are new, to most eyes at least, and they may significantly change our understanding of how the entire Joseph Wilson-Valerie Plame Wilson-Niger affair began.
The accepted version of events is that Vice President Dick Cheney got things started when he asked for information about possible Iraqi attempts to purchase uranium in Africa. After that request, CIA employee Valerie Plame Wilson suggested sending her husband to look into the question, and after that, the CIA flew Joseph Wilson to Niger to investigate. But the new documents suggest that Mrs. Wilson suggested her husband for the trip before the vice president made his request. In other words, Joseph Wilson’s visit to Niger, which everyone believes was undertaken at the behest of the vice president, was actually in the works before Dick Cheney asked his now-famous question. And if that is true, our current understanding of the chronology of events is wrong.
The story is contained in two exhibits, known in court as DX 66.2 and DX 66.3, entered into evidence by Libby’s defense team. The first is a CIA document headlined, “Briefer’s Tasking for Richard Cheney on 02/13/2002.” It begins:
Briefer: David D. Terry Briefing Date: 02/13/2002 Principal: Richard Cheney
Tasking: The VP was shown an assessment (he thought from [the Defense Intelligence Agency]) that Iraq is purchasing uranium from Africa. He would like our assessment of that transaction and its implications for Iraq’s nuclear program. A memo for tomorrow’s brief would be great.
The document doesn’t seem particularly newsworthy until it is viewed alongside a memo first revealed by the Senate Intelligence Committee in its report on the African uranium matter, released in July 2004. That report cited an e-mail written by Valerie Plame Wilson to her boss, the deputy chief of the CIA’s Counterproliferation Division, in which she suggested her husband for the fact-finding mission to Niger. A CIA official told the committee that Mrs. Wilson “offered up [Joseph Wilson’s] name” for the job, and the Senate report quoted the e-mail written by Mrs. Wilson saying, “my husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity.”
According to the Senate report, Valerie Plame Wilson sent her e-mail on February 12, 2002 — the day before the vice president was briefed on the African uranium matter. The discrepancy between the two dates seems glaring, but was not included in the Senate report. That is because, according to a source familiar with the committee’s investigation, the CIA did not include the document in the materials it turned over to the committee. Senate investigators apparently never knew the exact date of the vice president’s request, so they never knew it came after Plame’s e-mail.
What does the new information mean? On February 12, 2002, the Defense Intelligence Agency released — inside the government, not publicly — a report covering the Africa uranium issue; its title said that Niger had “signed an agreement to sell 500 tons of uranium a year to Baghdad.” CIA officials told Senate investigators the report spurred requests for information from both the State Department and the Department of Defense. Knowledgeable sources speculate — and they stress, they are speculating — that those inquiries from State and Defense were made on the 12th, the day the Defense Intelligence Agency report was sent around, and that Valerie Plame Wilson, in suggesting her husband be sent to investigate, was reacting to those requests, and not to the vice president’s question, which came the next day. In this new version of events, Dick Cheney was the last guy to request more information, not the first; the notion that his request started the whole affair seems wrong.
The other new document entered into evidence in the trial is another CIA memo, this one headlined “Memorandum for the Vice President” and dated February 14, 2002. That memo appears to begin — it’s not possible to say for sure because it is blacked out — with a discussion of the uranium issue, followed by this statement:
We have tasked our clandestine source[s] with ties to the Nigerien Government and consortium officials to seek additional information on the contract. We also are working with the Embassy and the defense attaché’s office in Niamey [Niger] to verify their reports.
It is not clear from the poorly-defined copies released as evidence whether the memo refers to a “clandestine source” or “clandestine sources.” But from everything that we know about the case, Joseph Wilson was the person who was given the assignment to check out the Niger uranium story. Embassy officials were also told about it, as the memo indicates, but Wilson was the CIA’s man with ties to the Nigerien government.
If the timing spelled out in the new document is accurate — if Wilson had already been picked for the task by February 14 — the new evidence sheds a different light on the version of events given by Wilson himself in his book The Politics of Truth. In that, Wilson wrote about a meeting with CIA officials — a meeting that took place on February 19, 2002 — at which “I was asked if I would be willing to travel to Niger to check out the report in question.” Perhaps Wilson was indeed asked to go to Niger at that meeting, but the newly-released CIA document suggests the agency settled on Wilson several days earlier.
The source familiar with the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation says the committee was never given the second document, either.
Perhaps it will turn out that there is some mistake in the memos, or in the interpretation of them, and that the generally-accepted version of the story remains accurate. But if the story told in the newly-public memos is correct, our entire understanding of how the CIA leak affair began will have to change.
They certainly didn't defend themselves at all. The spineless Republican Congress didn't investigate William Jefferson non-Clintoon, Sandy Burglar (not even the required and agreed upon lie detector test!), Hitlery's campaign financing in CA, on and on and on!
Before hiring Tony Snow, Dave Gregory and his ilk were running the show.
When we win back the Congress and elect a Republican President, this has to start. Confronting the MSM and the RATs with all kinds of demands for their sources, their immediate apologies on page one when we expose their lies, their affiliation, etc. must be done.
It's the only way to expose the enemy within and the outright traitors to the American people.
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Here is the New Republic's slant on a few things we're talking about:
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:hrf09dqFCEsJ:www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml%3Fi%3D20030630%26s%3Dackermanjudis063003+Cheney+didn%27t+pressure+intelligence&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=8&gl=us
It's full of crap, but gives enough nuggets about how the intelligence agencies work to be worth muddling through. I'm guessing they get a lot of that inside information from the likes of Wilson and Ray McGovern, who I believe is a traitor.
And it was Tenet who issued a mea culpa without revealing that Wilson's report had actually lent substance to the reports about Iraq trying to acquire yellowcake from Niger.
There can be only two reasons for this: 1.) ignorance of the activities of his own organization, or 2.) a malignant intent to undermine the President's position from the very outset.
I think we have been looking too hard at this Wilson stuff and we should look at what ELSE was going on all around this story that was hogging the headlines.
Let's start with Rockefeller.
And that statement proves it? Why don't you present some facts instead of flaming idiotic statements. No because you act like a liberal and emote, no facts required.
Thanks for proving my very point.
I think you are on to something.
Paging Ray McGovern!!!
Notice Ray McGovern's name on the placecard in the extreme right corner; he's been cropped out.
Great summation.
There were also the accusations that the VP was forcing CIA to shape intelligence to his liking before it was presented to the President. That never made sense to me -- until now.
It makes me think of the CIA like the old Mission: Impossible series... The agents would surround the (usually) 3rd World governments with an artificial reality, duping them into behaving against their own interests and then springing a trap.
Because Cheney operates by his own consistent intentions and procedures, he wasn't taken in. But that didn't stop Wilson and the Press (and Fitzgerald) from springing the trap.
Hence all of this current chaos and confusion....
Since you have no facts you obviously don't know what you are talking about. Tell me how this will make the media notice. If it won't it is not significant. And don't get into stupid nuances about that Cheney did or did not ask the CIA to look into this matter. It is obvious he did, if only verbally or implied. In other words you were correct on what was written in the article, but most likely incorrect about what happened. Some facts and not the typical hissy spewing I have seen so far.
Can I make a suggestion? If you don't feel this is newsworthy, perhaps another thread might interest you more?
Bingo! When was this plot hatched, and by whom?
Wilson went on a similar trip during the Clinton presidency, if I recall....
Are there plots being hatched in Federal Departments currently to bring down future presidencies???
Get a dictionary, I said it was not significant, not that it was not newsworthy! It will not change the media's story line, it is not significant.
Actually Tenet did include Wilson's earlier trip in his statement.
I'm inclined to assign incompetency to Tenet rather than malevolent motive. The Wilson gang, on the other hand...
The same former official also said that in June 1999 a businessman approached him and insisted that the former official meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations" between Iraq and Niger. The former official interpreted the overture as an attempt to discuss uranium sales.
CAPITAL REPORT, Tuesday, July 8, 2003
GLORIA BORGER, co-host:
But first, NBC's chief foreign affairs correspondent, Andrea Mitchell, joins us with the latest.
Andrea, how much of a problem is this for this administration right now?
ANDREA MITCHELL (NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent): Well, it's becoming a political problem; at least the Democrats are putting out statements. And, in fact, Democrats on the Hill in the Intelligence Committee, Senator Rockefeller demanding investigations, the inspector general of the CIA is already investigating. And while the Republican leadership on the Hill is pushing back and trying to prevent full-scale investigations, they themselves are going along with inquiries into it.
ALAN MURRAY, co-host:
Andrea, are you getting any explanation for how this could have happened? I mean, we now know that Ambassador Joe Wilson had come back a year earlier telling the State Department that it looked like bad intelligence. It seems to have been a widespread notion this was bad intelligence, and yet somehow it got put in the State of the Union address. How did it happen?
MITCHELL: Well, that is a great question, because this is the bad information that just wouldn't go away. It would not die. People tried to put a stake through it. And the only conclusion that Joe Wilson comes to and that other critics of the administration is that this was bad information, but it reflected so negatively on Saddam Hussein, it was the scariest thing they had against him, so those who wanted war used it to make their case. It was repeated by the Brits on September 24th of 2002, months and months after Wilson had come back and debunked it. It was repeated in September on "Meet the Press" by Dick Cheney to Tim Russert.
Again, it popped up in the national intelligence estimate, which is the consensus document that goes to the Hill and the White House, and this was October 1st. It was briefed to the Senate Intelligence Committee or Foreign Relations Committee, rather, on October 4th. And even though there was a caveat from the State Department that this information was highly dubious, this was buried in a footnote. And again it cropped up in December in a white paper put out by the State Department, even though people in the State Department knew it wasn't true.
BORGER: Andrea, this being Washington, somebody's going to have to take the fall for this. The president giving faulty information in a State of the Union address is not something that makes the president very happy. So who is going to end up taking the fall?
MITCHELL: Well, people at the CIA say that it's not going to be George Tenet; and, in fact, that high-level people at the CIA did not really know that it was false, never even looked at Joe Wilson's verbal report or notes from that report, didn't even know that it was he who had made this report, because he was sent over by some of the covert operatives in the CIA at a very low level, not, in fact, tasked by the vice president.
So one of Wilson's assumptions, which is that Dick Cheney asked the CIA about this allegation from a foreign intelligence service and that he was sent as a result of that, may not, in fact, be true. It could very well be that the vice president is correct, that he never asked for Joe Wilson to be sent, that it was a much lower level. And Condi Rice may, in fact, have been accurate when she said very recently to Russert on "Meet the Press" that this was buried deep in the bowels of the CIA.
But the bottom line is, though, that it did get into the national intelligence estimate, which is a very important document, and this came from the CIA to all the policy-makers and someone should have warned them--I talked to someone at the CIA today and they said this was a throw-away line and it should have been thrown away and it should never have gotten into the State of the Union, and we do need to find out how that happened.
The MSM has been quoting officials of the CIA from the beginning. That is why they stick to the story. They don't want to believe otherwise and will not bother to dig the information. There will have to be something to discredit the very people leaking the info, or proof identifying the actual leaker of this bogus story.
The significance is that Wilson claimed that the Whitehouse had manipulated the intelligence report as an excuse to war.
Cheney said that he never saw Wilson's intelligence report, which is probably true because the CIA says that there was no written report. This doesn't exactly ring true with anyone because the CIA always has written reports. It may be that Wilson didn't write a report, but someone else, possibly Plame, did and they are playihng games with investigators.
My guess on this whole case was that, perhaps the administration knew that Wilson was lying about everything, but the documents involved were too sensitive to release and needed to discredit Wilson, rather than discredit the lies, because they had no proof to show the people
The big question is, why did Wilson lie about the whole thing? Was Wilson working for anti-US interests inside our own government, or just anti-Bush interests? We know that he had worked as a national security advisor for Al Gore in the 2000 election.
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