[Mb-civic] V Plame

[Mha Atma Khalsa]

Since the V Plame case is back in the news, these 2
articles (1st one very short) courtesy of Ed Pearl are
well worth digesting...


Christian Science Monitor - Oct 7, 2005
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/100805G.shtml

Indictment Choices for the CIA Leak

By Daniel Schorr

This is, so help me, my last comment on the tangled
web of the
CIA leak until we get some hard news from Special
Prosecutor
Patrick Fitzgerald, whose two years of investigation
have now
lasted longer than the Watergate inquiry.

Some word may come soon - now that Judith Miller, the
last of
the journalists involved, has been heard from. So
let's recall how
it all started.

In his 2003 State of the Union address, President
Bush, on the
defensive because of his inability to find weapons of
mass
destruction to justify the coming war, said he had
heard from the
British that Saddam Hussein had sought "significant
quantities of
uranium in Africa."

In the face of widespread doubts, the CIA was asked to
send
someone to Niger to confirm the assertion. The agency
chose former
Ambassador Joseph Wilson, an old Africa hand. He spent
eight days
in Niger and found ... nothing. He then had the
temerity to write
in the New York Times that the administration was
practicing
deliberate deception.

That must have enraged administration officials, who
launched
what looks like a retaliatory strike, letting several
journalists know
that Mr. Wilson had been chosen for the assignment by
his wife who worked
for the CIA.

It is not clear whether they disclosed her name,
Valerie Plame,
and her undercover status in the CIA. A secret State
Department
memo had warned about such disclosure.

Columnist Robert Novak, the first to reveal Ms.
Plame's name
and status, said he had two government sources.

So what courses are open to Prosecutor Fitzgerald?
Indictment
under the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act
- if it can
be established that unmasking Ms. Plame was a
deliberate act.
Short of that, there could be an indictment for
conspiracy, which is
defined as acting toward a criminal end, such as
leaking security
information.

How high could indictments go? Despite earlier denials
of
involvement, it is now clear that presidential
assistant Karl Rove
and vice- presidential chief of staff Lewis Libby had
some role in
inviting reporters to dig further.

Could this go higher? The prosecutor interviewed
President Bush
and Vice President Cheney at some length. It is not
publicly known
if they are implicated.

It may be remembered that the Watergate grand jury
wanted to
indict President Nixon for obstruction of justice.
When advised
that a sitting president could not be prosecuted, the
grand jury
named him as an un-indicted coconspirator.

[Daniel Schorr is the senior news analyst at National
Public Radio.]

***

http://counterpunch.com/johnson10072005.html

October 7, 2005

How About Focusing on the Real Issues?
The Plame Case
By LARRY JOHNSON
Former CIA analyst


Want to know one reason why the CIA has been unable to
recruit spies? Just
reflect on how a potential recruit would react to the
outing of Valerie
Plame as an undercover CIA operations officer.

The investigation into which administration officials
compromised Plame,
wife of former US ambassador Joseph Wilson, is nearing
completion. Lost in
the recent spurt of press reporting, however, is the
fact that the outing
of Ms. Plame (and, as night follows the day, her
carefully cultivated
network of spies) has done great damage to US
clandestine operations-not
to mention those she recruited over her distinguished
career.

Ms. Plame, a very gifted case officer, was a close
colleague of mine at
CIA. Her dedication and courage were made abundantly
clear when she became
one of the few to volunteer to asume the risks of
operating under
non-official cover-meaning that if you get caught, too
bad, you're on your
own; the US government never heard of you.

The supreme irony is that Plame's now-compromised
network was reporting on
the priority-one issue of US intelligence-weapons of
mass destruction.
Thus, it was made clear to all, including active and
potential
intelligence sources abroad, that even when
high-priority intelligence
targets are involved, Bush administration officials do
not shrink from
exposing such sources for petty political purpose. The
harm to CIA and its
efforts to recruit spies instinctively wary of the
risks in providing
intelligence information is immense.

Shortly after the invasion of Iraq, Ambassador Wilson
publicly exposed an
important lie-and the president as liar-in-chief-when
Wilson debunked
reporting that Iraq was seeking uranium in the African
country of Niger.
Still, as Wilson himself has suggested, the primary
purpose of leaking his
wife's employment at CIA was not so much to retaliate
against him
personally, but rather to issue a warning to others
privy to
administration lies on the war not to speak out.
Administration officials
felt they needed to provide an object lesson of what
truth tellers can
expect in the way of swift retaliation.


...and It Was All Based on a Forgery

Whether or not indictments come down, our domesticated
mainstream media
probably will continue to play down the damage to US
intelligence. Even
more important, they are likely to ignore completely
the very curious
event that started the whole business-the forging of
documents that became
the basis of reporting that Iraq was seeking uranium
in Niger for its
(non-existent) nuclear weapons program. Together with
other circumstantial
evidence, the neuralgic reaction of Vice President
Dick Cheney to press
reports that he was point man for promoting the bogus
"intelligence"
report suggests that he may also have been its
intellectual
author/authorizer.

Yes, I am suggesting that it may have been an inside
job. Cheney and his
chief of staff Lewis Libby may well have had a hand in
commissioning the
forgery, as a way of manufacturing an intelligence
report, with "mushroom
cloud" written all over it-in order to deceive
Congress into approving an
unnecessary war. The more you look into the whole
affair, the curiouser
and curiouser it becomes. Why, for example, would
Senate Intelligence
Committee chair Pat Roberts (R, Kansas) adamantly
refuse to investigate
the provenance of a forgery used to start a war?

And why did former Secretary of State Colin Powell,
addressing the UN on
February 5, 2003, decide to delete from his very long
laundry list of
spurious charges against Iraq its alleged attempt to
acquire uranium from
Niger? Even though he himself had avoided repeating
the famous "16 words"
used by President Bush just five weeks before (se
below), Powell was
forced to listen stoically as Mohammed El-Baradei,
head of the UN's
International Atomic Energy Agency, reported on
world-wide TV that his own
and outside experts had concluded that the Iraq-Niger
documents were "not
authentic." The White House left it to Powell to
concede that El-Baradei
was correct, and Powell eventually did so.

Perhaps special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald will be
able to shed light
on some of this.

These are some of the key neglected issues underneath
the superficial
who-said-what-to-whom-when treatment that has
characterized most press
reporting. Small wonder that many of those trying to
follow this important
story are missing the forest for the trees. It is
important that a fuller
story be available to citizens of this country, to
enable us to judge the
enormity and significance of what happened.
Accordingly, my Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
colleagues and I thought it
would be useful to boil down into digestible,
chronological form the key
facts at the beginning of the story:

February 13, 2002: According to the Senate
Intelligence Committee's
"Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar
Intelligence
Assessments on Iraq" of July 2004 (pp 38-39), Vice
President Cheney asked
his CIA morning briefer for CIA's analysis of a
report, which he had seen
in a Defense Intelligence Agency publication, alleging
that Iraq was
trying to acquire uranium from Niger. In response, the
Director of Central
Intelligence's Center for Weapons Intelligence,
Nonproliferation, and Arms
Control (WINPAC) issued an intelligence assessment
with limited
distribution. It said, "Information on the alleged
uranium contract
between Iraq and Niger comes exclusively from a
foreign government service
report that lacks crucial details, and we are working
to clarify the
information and to determine whether it can be
corroborated." The
assessment also noted, "Some of the information in the
report contradicts
reporting from the U.S. Embassy in Niamey (Niger). US
diplomats say the
French Government-led consortium that operates Niger
's two uranium mines
maintains complete control over uranium mining and
yellowcake production."
The CIA sent a separate version of the assessment to
the Vice President's
office, which differed only in that it named the
foreign government
service.

February 19: Officials of the CIA's Directorate of
Operations (DO) have
told the Senate committee that DO managers-not Valerie
Plame-decided to
send former ambassador Wilson to Niger to make
immediate inquiries.
Wilson, who was acting ambassador in Baghdad when the
1991 Gulf War began,
had earlier served in Niger, and had wide contacts
there. On February 19,
after meeting with DO managers and other intelligence
community officials
at CIA headquarters, Wilson was commissioned to go to
Niger and
investigate.

February 26: Ambassador Wilson arrived in Niger. He
determined during the
course of his visit that there was no substance to the
allegation that
Iraq was trying to procure uranium in Niger. The US
Ambassador to Niger
told the Senate Committee that Ambassador Wilson's
conclusion was the same
as that reached earlier by the U.S. embassy in Niamey.

Early March: Vice President Cheney asked his CIA
briefer for an update on
the Niger issue. According to the Senate report on the
prewar performance
of intelligence, Cheney had not forgotten his original
request. And so CIA
officers immediately debriefed Ambassador Wilson on
the results of his
trip, wrote up his report, and disseminated the report
on 8 March (p. 42
of the Senate report).

Fall of 2002: CIA officials repeatedly warned the
administration and
Congress not to accept as fact the claim that Iraq was
trying to acquire
uranium. According to the Senate report (p. 54), the
Deputy Director of
the Central Intelligence Agency told Senator Kyl, for
example, that the
CIA did not agree with the British view that Iraq was
trying to acquire
uranium. On October 6, 2002, CIA Director Tenet called
Deputy National
Security Advisor Hadley to warn him not to introduce
the bogus information
into the speech being readied for the president to use
the next day (just
three days before Congress voted to authorize war).
Hadley removed the
passage from the speech (p. 56).

January 28, 2003: In his State of the Union Address,
President Bush
included the (in)famous "16 words," saying, "The
British government has
learned (sic) that Saddam Hussein recently sought
significant quantities
of uranium from Africa."

May: Vice President Cheney's office was irate over a
May 6 article by New
York Times columnist Nick Kristof regarding the
mission of a "former US
ambassador" to Niger, and in particular to Kristof's
assertion that the
Vice President had instigated the trip. According to
former senior CIA
officials, Cheney's aides were "very uptight about the
vice president
being tagged that way."

June: The White House, with the participation of Karl
Rove and Lewis Libby
(and, according to one recent report, of the president
and vice president
themselves), conceived and then executed a plan to
discredit Ambassador
Wilson. A variety of reports from journalists and
others show that as
early as the end of May, White House officials were
trying to dig up dirt
on Ambassador Wilson. And the State Department drafted
a top-secret
memorandum on the Iraq-Niger affair, identifying
Vallerie Plame by her
maiden name.

July 13: Robert Novak, citing two Administration
sources, identified
Valerie Plame by name as a CIA operative. Plame was
still under cover when
Novak published her name, thus compromising not only
Plame, but also the
many agents she had recruited. She conducted several
overseas missions as
part of her cover job.

Betrayal. There is no other word for it. Except some
might call it
treason.

Larry Johnson worked as a CIA intelligence analyst and
State Department
counter-terrorism official. He is a member of the
Steering Group of
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).






	
		
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