Novak lets loose on Plame and the Democrat’s real plot
Anyone who has watched the farsical Plame Game and specifically the Democrat’s activities through it know that they have a plan all along: Get Rove and you’ll get Bush. Robert Novak writes:
“Republican Rep. Peter Hoekstra could hardly believe what he heard on television Friday as he watched a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing. Rep. Henry Waxman, the Democratic committee chairman, said his statement had been approved by the CIA director, Michael Hayden. That included the assertion that Valerie Plame Wilson was a covert CIA operative when her identity was revealed.
As House intelligence committee chairman when Republicans controlled Congress, Hoekstra had tried repeatedly to learn Plame’s status from the CIA but got only double talk from Langley. Waxman, 67, the 17-term congressman from Beverly Hills, may be a bully and a partisan. But he is no fool who would misrepresent the director of central intelligence. Waxman was correctly quoting Hayden. But Hayden, in a conference with Hoekstra yesterday, still did not answer whether Plame was covert under the terms of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.”
The former CIA employee’s status is critical to the attempted political rehabilitation of former ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife. The Democratic target always has been Karl Rove, President Bush’s principal adviser. The purpose of last week’s hearing was to blame Rove for “outing” Plame, in preparation for revoking his security clearance.
Claims of a White House plot became so discredited that Wilson was cut out of Sen. John Kerry’s presidential campaign by the summer of 2004. Last week’s hearing attempted to revive a dormant issue. The glamorous Mrs. Wilson was depicted as the victim of White House machinations that aborted her career in intelligence.”
As I told you before, watching Garbo with a colleague familiar with her “status” he nearly hit the wall when she said she was covert and had been out of the country in the fives years previous to Novak’s column. I think the response was “Bullshit” or something to that effect.
The real joke about last week’s Garbo Speaks is that it seemed that Waxman was so obvious in his biased it begged reason.
“Waxman and Democratic colleagues did not ask these pertinent questions: Had not Plame been outed years ago by a Soviet agent? Was she not on an administrative, not operational, track at Langley? How could she be covert if, in public view, she drove to work each day at Langley? What about comments to me by then CIA spokesman Bill Harlow that Plame never would be given another foreign assignment? What about testimony to the FBI that her CIA employment was common knowledge in Washington?”
Of course Waxman – as other democrats – weren’t there for for the facts, but to prepare the ground for the future:
“Waxman relied on his support from Hayden. When Hayden’s role was pointed out to one of the president’s most important aides, there was no response. The White House from the start has treated the Plame leak as a criminal case not to be commented on. The Democrats still consider it a political blunderbuss, aimed at Karl Rove and his boss.”
Mac: I sent the link to this story to Clarice this morning with a question..
Was there a time prior to this article when Novak mentioned that Harlow said she would never be sent overseas again? I have checked back and could not find such a quote from him. If Harlow was giving out this much background on her then I seriously doubt she was “covert.”
There is such a wealth of info that it is very possible I just missed it.
Tom McGuire (of course) is on this
here
http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/03/jerry_springering_governance.html
“I think that about 30% of Americans really are stupid (consider the bell curve distribution of intelligence), but even they have learned from Springer that the only thing worth paying attention to would be a program featuring Karl Rove’s mother-in-law throwing a chair at him for some sexual indiscretion with her toy poodle. Ooops! Don’t want to give the dumbbells on the Hill any ideas. (It’s just a metaphor to illustrate that the public – even the dumbest of them – hasn’t the sustained interest in these make believe “scandals” when there’s juicier stuff every day to keep them entertained at a level of complexity they can grasp.)”
cathyf at JOM has an interesting theory:
Arguing about the definition of “covert” with respect to the IIPA, CIA operational practice, or the accounting category of which account Plame was embezzling out of is silly. Fitzgerald is still claiming that Plame’s employment by the CIA was “classified.” We know the information that appeared in Novak’s column came from Richard Armitage, who got it by reading it in the INR report. We know that the person who put it in the INR report got it from the INR staffer who was at the meeting on Feb 19, 2002 where Valerie Plame identified herself as a “CIA managerial type” and identified Joe Wilson as her husband, as a former ambassador, and as the person that the CIA wanted sent to Niger to check out yellowcake intel. We know that Valerie Plame, an agent of the US Government, did not affirmatively protect her employment status at that meeting. Therefore, we know, because of the definition of classified as established in Executive Order 13292, that the information that appeared in Novak’s column was not classified. Because the information that appeared in Novak’s column, when traced back through the chain of custody to its source, was unclassified on Feb 19, 2002.
The executive order puts the burden upon the government to designate what information is classified and holds harmless any employee who treats information as unclassified if the government never communicated that the information was other than unclassified. When classified information is divulged (in error or otherwise) without its classification designation, the executive order establishes procedures for getting it back under cover, contingent upon whether it is possible. (Information not yet disseminated widely and/or noticed can often be collected up, and recipients notified of its status.) There was a 15-month gap between Valerie Plame disclosing her status to the INR meeting-goer and the INR meeting-goer passing it on in the report that Armitage read and passed on to Woodward, Novak and maybe others. There is no sign that Valerie Plame, the CIA, or any US government employee made any attempt at all to undo the release of “classified” information to the INR staffer at the Feb 19, 2002 meeting. So, according to the laws and regulations of the US government, we must conclude that her employment status was not classified after Feb 19, 2002. Clearly Plame’s employment status was classified earlier, and the exact point at which it became unclassified is unclear. But we can conclude with certainty that it was before Feb 20, 2002.
Which Libby’s lawyers were not allowed to even argue in Judge Reggie “La-la-la I Can’t Hear You” Walton’s court.
But I just realized something, “as if for the first time” in Waxman’s statement.
Her employment status with the CIA was classified information prohibited from disclosure under Executive Order 12958.
Clinton’s Executive Order 12958 was superceded, in March, 2003, by Bush’s Executive Order 13292. I looked at that and thought that either it was a simple error, or that this was Waxman and/or Hayden expressing contempt for the president and his authority by pretending that the superceded order was still in effect.
I’m now wondering if this is not a “what the meaning of ‘is’ is” lie about Plame’s status. If, as I claim we can conclude, Valerie Plame’s CIA employment was not classified (ignore covert — she can’t be covert if her employment isn’t classified) at any time after Feb 19, 2002, then Plame’s CIA employment was never classified under EO 13292. If the point at which her employment status became declassified was after Clinton issued EO 12958 on April 17, 1995 (which seems quite plausible), then it is technically absolutely true that “Her employment status with the CIA was classified information prohibited from disclosure under Executive Order 12958.”
Posted by: cathyf | March 22, 2007 at 09:11 AM
As I understand it, Novak called the CIA and verified her employment by telephone. What they are *really* angry about isn’t “outing” her as a CIA employee, it is “outing” her as wife of Wilson that is their real issue.
Look at it from a different perspective. If Valerie had not been related to Wilson and said “hey, I know someone who would be perfect for the job” and got Wilson selected, we would have never heard a peep about it and Wilson would have been some discredited has-been by now.
There is more to this Wilson/Plame thing than meets that eye that has still not been uncovered but I would look closer at Wilson’s connections with people associated with various clients of Fenton Communications.
In other words, this might be more about uncovering penetration of CIA by people with ties to various left wing groups such as Institute for Policy Studies and Center for International Policy and the like. Might try a little Google resarch and see what you can come up with, I don’t want to say too much because I wouldn’t want to influence the results of someone’s own research and they might find something I missed. Here are some associations to start with and using places like Follow the Network you can find more:
“Martha Honey” and “John Kerry” and “Center for Policy Studies”
“Dana Priest” and “William Goodfellow” and “Center for International Policy”
“William Goodfellow” and “Joe Wilson”
“Center for Internation Policy” and “Institute for Policy Studies” and “Fenton Communications”
This whole thing comes around once a year or so.
And to remove another layer of abstraction … once you manage to get quite a list of Fenton clients like VIPs, WWW, Code Pink, MoveOn, etc. then start looking at people like the Tides Foundation and associations with things like Heinz and Sorros money. Then tie Kerry to Heinz, Tides to their donations to various Fenton clients, and eventually you come to the conclusion that Joe Wilson’s primary occupation is being indirectly on the Kerry/Heinz – Sorros payroll and you wonder why he says and does the things he does? And you wonder why Dana Priest wrote the things she wrote as the main Intelligence Community reporter for the Washington Post? Why Larry Johnson happens to be a friend of Wilson’s and an associate of Dana Priest? THAT is what they are trying to distract the attention away from and PlameGate was political “punishment” for exposing it.
Just as a mental exercise, asume Plame was telling the truth when she said she did not know if she was covert!
What kind of an operation could a CIA agent be part of where their identity as a CIA agent was part of the operation?
Only type of operation I can think of is one in which she was passing what she believed to be phony state secrets to the enemy. The passing of the plans for a nuclear triggering device to Iran “Operation Merlin” would be right up Soro’s and Co’s. alley.
[...] Last week we had the pleasure of seeing Valerie Plame testify in front of a congressional hearing to discuss the situation and aftermath of being exposed in lue of her husband’s critical piece about enriched uranium. [...]
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