Was she merely analyst--as Bob Novak and others have claimed? Was she only a desk-jockey--as Jonah Goldberg of The National Review insisted? No. She was operations chief of the Joint Task Force on Iraq (JTFI), a unit of the Counterproliferation Division of the clandestine Directorate of Operations.
For the two years prior to her outing, Valerie Wilson worked to gather intelligence that would support the Bush White House's assertion that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was loaded with WMDs. This means that Armitage--as well as Karl Rove and Scooter Libby--leaked classified information about a undercover CIA officer whose job it had been to look for evidence of Saddam's WMD programs. Any irony here? During this part of her career, Valerie Wilson traveled overseas to monitor operations she and her staff at JTFI were mounting.
Some critics (Paul) have argued that a woman recommending her husband for a job for which he is uniquely qualified should cause a professional to lose credibility. This article by David Corn reveals that Plame-Wilson was most qualified to know who could best handle the task of searching for Iraqi connections in Niger.
Could it be that Valerie Wilson was illegally outed because she more than any other person could confirm that the White House's claims of WMDs in Iraq were false?
6 comments:
When Wilson made the astoundingly unusual step of loudly and publically transforming his CIA operation into a partisan political polemic, that raised questions, including who he is and how he got that assignment. His and his wife's conduct after the first mention of her status in the press proves conclusively that their goals included besting Bush and promoting themselves, but not in protecting her employment status. No evidence yet indicates that Bush partisans revealed the Wilson-Plame connection, much less sought to do so, or sought to do so in order to undermine anything other than Wilson's credability as a man selected via nepotism rather than his unique qualifications.
Is it even conceivable that once his polemic appeared in the NYT that reporters would not eventually discover that his assignment involved the influence of his wife?
This article does make me wonder if Plame at the time was undercover, but that doesn't mean that Armatidge or any other source knew of that status, a neccessary requirement of such a revelation constituting either a crime or an attempt to harm her career.
Six: It amuses me endlessly that the Nadirs already knew instantly with 100% certainty that Plame's identity resulted from an insideous Bush conspiracy, and that no facts emerging since that delcaration have swayed their initial, instantaneous, pre-fact conclusion in the slightest. Bush is a lying conspirator no matter what, and in all cases! You would think by their reaction that Fitzgerald had uncovered an email exchange wherein Rove asked for Plame's status, then directed Scooter to insert this into a discussion with a reporter in order to teach her a lesson.
"The truth is out there," and Nadir already knows it!
Nadir: Here's how Joe Wilson described how he came to take the unpaid assignment that formed the basis of his refutation of Bush's claims about Niger, taken from his NTY essay:
========
It was my experience in Africa that led me to play a small role in the effort to verify information about Africa's suspected link to Iraq's nonconventional weapons programs. Those news stories about that unnamed former envoy who went to Niger? That's me.
In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake — a form of lightly processed ore — by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990's. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office.
=========
Wilson presented himself as connected directly to Cheney's "questions", with him personally providing the answers, and getting selected due to his well-known qualifications. He placed into public discussion how and why he got selected for this job. The the role that his wife played does not negate his qualifications, and it is conceiveable without her assistance somebody else might have thought of him. But no evidence demonstrates that to be the case. Nor does any evidence exist that Cheney or other top-level "decision-makers" prior to his article knew his name or specifically about his mission and oral report, which constituted one of several inputs into the final assessment.
Wilson's NYT article promted an inquiry by the Bushies and reporters: who is this guy, and how did he get the assignment? If Plame indeed lacked secret status, her role in selecting the investigator for an assignment that led to his criticism (which included boasting about his selection) still constituted a valid rhetorical counter-point. And even if she held covert status at this point, all who knew of her employment did not know of such a covert status, a requirement both for a crime and for an attempt to ruin her career. If they knew of her status, they would know that they were committing a crime; so why didn't they merely send an anonymous tip, like the Duke "Second Stripper" and her phoney phone call from the pay phone? By making a face-to-face revelation, they opened themselves to prosecution... if they knew she had covert status.
No reporter has yet asserted that any Bush partisan or anonymous source pushed Plame's identity. Whereas the Bushies behaved like people unaware that they were committing a crime, Wilson and Plame did not behave as though protecting Plame's identity was a serious concern for them.
Novak's original article stated:
"CIA officials did not regard Wilson's intelligence as definitive, being based primarily on what the Niger officials told him and probably would have claimed under any circumstances."
Novak's original article revealed that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA, but described his selection as having come from other CIA officials, who merely asked Plame to inform Wilson of their interest. So Novak did not present the Plame connection in any way that undermined Wilson's credibility. However, facts later revealed showed that Plame initiated the Wilson selection, which contradicts and undermines what Wilson implied in his article.
I recognize that if Nadir's wife hears that somebody's looking to hire an R&B group, and if she recommends them, that this in no way nullifies Nadir's bone fides as an R&B man. However, if Nadir declares that he got the gig because he's such a great R&B man, this isn't 100% accurate.
Post a Comment