May 02, 2006
Wind
I don't much care for the over-saturated Plame case and have refused to cover it for the most part, but the latest round of over-the-top assertions are really too much.
Over at Donkelephant, Justin Gardener is in over his head regarding a Raw Story claim that Valerie Plame was working on Iran when she was exposed. Setting aside for now the fact that whoever leaked to MSNBC correspondent David Shuster is also a leaker worth firing and perhaps prosecuting, we catch Gardener hyperventilating:
To all of those who said she wasn't really a covert agent, that she wasn't really doing anything of importance…well, you're wrong. She was working on Iran. In fact, she was tracking the ins and outs of their attempts to acquire WMDs. And the Bush administration's actions most likely harmed that intelligence gathering.[snip]
Should Rove go to jail for leaking her name to Novak? Who friggin knows at this point. But should he be ashamed because his brand of dirty politics could have cost us something in the Iran intelligence shell game? You're damn right he should.
Back up a second, Justin.
Plame was a WMD analyst, based out of CIA headquarters since 1997 because her cover was likely exposed in the Adlrich Ames affair. Others sources say her cover was blown as far back as the mid-1990s in separate events by a spy in Russia and diplomatic incompetence in Cuba.
Her exact position was classified, but to argue that anyone who drove through the main gates of the CIA in Langley every day for work is somehow covert is asinine. Joe Wilson himself said she wasn't covert (his exact word was "clandestine") in a July 14, 2005 interview with Wolf Blitzer of CNN. As her husband, he just might know a bit more about that than does Justin and his compatriots.
As for Rove, it remains to be seen if he will even be charged. Shouldn't we wait to have a trial and then see if he is convicted before he is sent to jail, or is that whole "due process thing" superfluous?
As for what revealing Plame's name did or didn't do to her section in the CIA, I think Gardener and his friends at Raw Story are making assumptions they cannot possibly support without a much higher security clearance than they presently have at CIA HQ (which I think is "none," but feel free to correct me). Plame is hardly the only WMD analyst in the CIA, and is quite likely to be one of many working on Iran. I find it highly unlikely that an intelligence agency infamous for so many layers of bureaucracy would have just one analyst working on a country that most have targeted as one of our main proliferation threats since before President Clinton was in office.
Did the disclosure of Plame's identity have an impact on investigating Iran's WMDs? I'm sure it could have, but to what degree we may not know for some time (if ever), as that information is almost certainly classified. It would stand to reason that anytime you lose a person with experience it decreases the overall knowledge base to a certain degree. But Plame was not the only CIA analyst working on Iranian WMD programs, and I've seen no one able to cite evidence she was even one of the more important analysts in this area.
Her exposure was certainly unfortunate, but I don't think anyone can make the statement that it was highly detrimental to the overall work, and it certainly wasn't terminal to the Agency at large.
How could anyone have outed Plame when she wasn't and had not been under cover for years. Working at the CIA and driving in and out daily is not the procedure for an undercover agent. This is all just a political game that suckered a lot of people and now Fitzgearld is involved in a game of gotya for biased political purposes. Time to close him down and admit that the whole mess was a made up mess, kind of like the Limbaugh slander by a government hack. Ain't nothing there for anyone with an IQ above room tempature.
Posted by: Scrapiron at May 3, 2006 12:14 AMAccording to current and former intelligence officials, Plame Wilson, who worked on the clandestine side of the CIA in the Directorate of Operations as a non-official cover (NOC) officer….
Oh good…we’ve come full-circle again, landing precisely at what keeps appearing to be the central point of intersection of at least 2 controversies with only one organization/agency involved, the CIA.
For some strange reason Occam’s Razor keeps popping into my mind, Tenet.
However, Larisa Alexandrovna’s story revealed, at least, 2 new ’unnamed’ CIA sources whose clearance’s and positions are, or were, high enough to know the operational scope of Plame’s portfolio while she was at the Agency. If Fitzgerald doesn’t have a subpoena with Larisa in front of a grand jury very shortly and these 2 new ‘unnamed sources’ under investigation and indictment, he’s either stupid or another partisan hack - both of which I doubt.
Given the overall acceleration of events surrounding Iran and the crisis brewing in the Middle-East, we’re certainly looking at the justification for a general cleaning-out of everyone hired or put on the fast-track during, at least, the Clinton admin or maybe a case for the creation of a new agency. At minimum, I’d expect to see the militaries scope and involvement in the intelligence arena, if only temporarily, greatly expanded.
