Truth is Stranger than Fiction

It’s simply amazing that it has come to this. Valerie Plame or Valerie “Wilson” as she now wants to be called, I’m sure to remind us of her wifely loyalty to her loser, political hack of a husband, used her position to get him a job seeking ways to discredit Bush administration policy. The CIA bought it and her husband did his hatchet job.

However when it was revealed that his wife, a known CIA analyst and fellow Bush-hater, long-since “outed” by Aldrich Ames, got him the job, Democrats scrambled to turn the national spotlight off this embarrassing revelation. Never ones to miss a political opportunity, they screamed: “National security breach! National security breach! The precious identity of an undercover agent has been blown!”

Now to think of the Democrats, who collectively have blown more covers, compromised more covert operations and destroyed more CIA careers than the KGB, as being the least bit concerned, much less “outraged” at the so-called “outing” of an “operative” is galling beyond the pale. But it didn’t even happen!

Nonetheless, the national press corps, never slow on the uptake when it comes to protecting their fellow Democrats, immediately allowed that to become the issue. Republicans, in their bottomless stupidity, allowed them to get away with it, flailing in self-defense instead of hammering away at the facts.

Fact: Whatever her former status, Valerie Plame is currently an analyst, not covered by the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

Fact: Her identity as a CIA employee was already known and not a secret.

Fact: Valerie Plame “outed” herself to Joe Wilson while she was still undercover, a direct violation of both CIA security protocols and universally accepted security practices.

Fact: Joe Wilson went to Niger not once, but twice, as a result of Plame’s lobbying CIA superiors for him.

Fact: Joe Wilson came back with information supporting allegations that Iraq sought uranium from Niger.

Fact: Joe Wilson is lying through his teeth. But hey, he’s got a book out; he’s making the talk show circuit every day. Why give up on a good thing?

They must be laughing all the way to the bank! What began as a panicked attempt to deflect prying eyes from Joe Wilson’s lies has become a national movement to destroy one of George W. Bush’s key strategists.

Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame have a lot more explaining to do than anyone else. This entire controversy should be exposed immediately for the political fraud it is and Joe Wilson, pathological liar that he is, along with his “hidden in plain sight” wife, should be frog-marched to the nearest penitentiary.

And while we’re at it, it might be useful to cool the Democrats’ ardor with just a brief walk down memory lane:

2004 - Sandy Berger. Caught stealing and destroying original top-secret classified documents taken from the National Archives related to Clinton administration handling of al Qaeda. This occurred right at the time the 9-11 Commission was investigating Clinton administration anti-terrorism efforts. Coincidence? I doubt it.

1996 - John Deutch, Clinton’s CIA Director. Discovered to have knowingly put top-secret documents, some at the highest level of classification (codeword) on unsecured home computers and laptop computers open to the internet and kept the documents after resigning as DCI. Why? Reno's Justice Department refused to investigate. Why?

1992-2000 - The Clinton administration. A virtual walking sieve of secrets. Their deliberate circumvention of background checks for White House appointees allowed, among other things, John Huang, a Chinese intelligence agent, access to highly classified information on an almost daily basis. Clinton's careless handling of secrets allowed China to steal and develop their own nuclear warhead miniaturization technology.

1985 - Esteemed Senator Patrick Leahy leaked classified information in an interview, resulting in the death of at least one agent.

1980 - Esteemed Congressman Ron Dellums (D-CA) said: “We should totally dismantle every intelligence agency in this country piece by piece, brick by brick, nail by nail." Awarded chairmanship of the House Armed Services Committee by Democrats in 1993. Voted against the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

1977 - Stansfield Turner. Jimmy Carter’s CIA Director. Personally responsible for the wholesale destruction of CIA’s human intelligence collection capability. Caused mass resignations of seasoned case officers. We have still not recovered.

This is just the short list. Need I say more?

More on the Plame Affair

A few more points need to be made regarding the issue of Valerie Plame's "outing". First, the law protecting covert case officers and agents from public exposure, known as the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, requires that a person must have been undercover overseas within the past five years. That was not the case for Ms. Plame. She has been working as an analyst in Washington, DC for at least the past six years.

Also, the Act says the person making the disclosure must have gotten the information from a classified source and known that the person being discussed was covert. It is doubtful that either one of these is true in the Plame case, whether or not it was Rove who revealed her name.

Plame was “outed” long ago by the CIA’s most notorious traitor, Aldrich Ames. It is why she left Europe in the first place. So anyone who would be interested, i.e. our enemies, already knew her identity. That of course would be irrelevant if Rove or whoever it was had knowingly exposed her and she was indeed an undercover case officer, for just because the damage had already been done, doesn't mean the law wasn't violated. But she was not an undercover officer.

Now, the Democrats raise the issue that even if this is true, outing a former agent could still cause damage, in certain circumstances grave damage. I agree. But if this were true in the Plame case, then someone should have been prosecuted long ago, because, never mind Aldrich Ames’ treason, it has been an “open secret” in Washington, DC, if it was even a secret at all, that Plame worked for the CIA. If the Dems are so concerned about National Security then they should be trying to find out who, besides Ames, outed her. I don’t see them doing this.

Why?

Well for one thing, it was probably Plame who outed herself in the first place. By their own admission in the Vanity Fair article, Wilson first learned of Plame’s employer on their third date. If she was so concerned about her undercover status, and at that time she still was undercover, it was a grave breech of security for her to reveal this information to Wilson at all, let alone after her third date. CIA Case officers are told not to tell their own families what they are doing. And never mind the oaths, how did she know Wilson wasn’t a spy? The other side uses romance to seduce operatives all the time. Sex was what originally got Aldrich Ames. And if you suggest Wilson couldn’t be working for the other side, then you just don’t know how it works.

It looks more and more like Wilson is working for the other side. For the “other side” today includes the national Democrat party, who are using every trick in the book in their attempt to trash the foreign policy of a sitting president. Their efforts are an enduring delight to our enemies. I call that treason!

Rove's Innocent - Who's Guilty?

This whole Niger yellowcake/Valerie Plame flap has smelled like a setup from day one. Not surprisingly the Democrats have zeroed in on Karl Rove as the Darth Vader of Starship Bush. Who else? For who has kicked their rears repeatedly and roundly in election after election? "If you can't beat someone in a fair fight, get the law after them" has always been an effective Democrat game plan. Even if you can't prove anything, the allegations themselves put a cloud over the person's head and force him or her to squander time and money in self-defense that would otherwise be spent continuing to whip Democrats. This time, with the Leftist media carrying their water as usual, they've managed to turn a non-issue into Watergate II.

If you remember, back in 2003, President Bush claimed in his State of the Union address that "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." This was one of the claims regarding weapons of mass destruction (WMD) which bolstered Bush's case for invading Iraq and are now known as the infamous "sixteen words."

The impetus for this claim was a visit in 1999 by Iraqi diplomats to the nation of Niger, whose main export product is milled uranium oxide or "yellowcake". They discussed "expanding commercial relations" with Niger's prime minister, Ibrahim Mayaki, who interpreted this to mean they were interested in yellowcake, since it was Niger's main export and the only one that Iraq could conceivably want. British intelligence learned of this meeting and with other corroborating information concluded that the Iraqis had indeed sought to purchase yellowcake from Niger during their 1999 trip.

Since this claim subsequently stirred so much controversy, in 2004 the British government commissioned a panel led by former cabinet member and current president of Oxford, Lord Butler to investigate whether or not British intelligence had gotten it right. Their six month investigation concluded that British intelligence had information "from several different sources" which supported their assessment and they have not backed down since.

In 2002, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson traveled to Niger ostensibly to learn whether or not allegations of uranium sales to Iraq were true. Now, Mr. Wilson and his wife are both Democrats and Wilson is a vitriolic opponent of G.W. Bush and his policies. His whole story doesn’t pass the sniff test.

Wilson claimed his trip was requested by the Vice President. The VP said no. I’ll go with Cheney on this one. Why would the administration send an opponent of its policies to do anything, much less a sensitive trip like that? That sounded fishy to me from day one.

In his own words, Joe Wilson spent “eight days sipping sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people.” He claims he didn’t turn up anything. However, what he reported to the CIA was quite different. Rather than debunking the story the CIA thought his information confirmed their suspicions. Wilson had met with Prime Minister Mayaki who told him about the Iraqis desire to expand "commercial relations" which Mayaki took to mean trade in uranium.

Since the Iraqis didn't get the stuff, Wilson dismissed that as a non-story. But it's the whole story! In fact, in his report to the CIA, Wilson also said Niger's former minister of mines told him that the Iraqis had tried to purchase 400 tons of uranium in 1998! How is that not evidence??

Concurrently, the CIA received reports that the Iraqis had also sought to purchase uranium from Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. So at that point it was reasonable to assume that the Iraqis were indeed seeking to obtain uranium, and that is what Bush said in his speech. Remember, Bush said Iraq "sought" uranium. He did not say they got it.

But around the same time, documents were forwarded to the US from the Italian Government purportedly outlining an agreement between Iraq and Niger to purchase 500 tons of yellowcake. The documents were obvious forgeries. The CIA at first ignored these documents. They had gotten enough information already with which to draw conclusions.

However, the Leftist press has made much of the fake documents and hypes stories that they were knowingly used to make an inflated case for invading Iraq--or at the very least that they debunked the whole WMD issue. They falsely claim the fake documents were the sole evidence the Bush administration used, when in fact ample, credible evidence already existed. Some even suggested that a low level Bush functionary might have forged the documents to please his boss. Who says the Left doesn't believe in black helicopters?

This whole analysis stinks. Why would anyone attempt to use blatant forgeries to make a case for war? A more likely explanation is that they were created to discredit the Niger yellowcake story. It is a common dirty trick in the intelligence business used to throw people off the track when they are dangerously close to the truth. You create documents of doubtful authenticity that support your opponent's position. When they are exposed as fakes, the effect is to cast doubt on his credibility and make his entire case appear contrived. The Russians are particularly good at this kind of game, but there are others who didn't want Iraq to be invaded either: France, Germany, even Iraq itself. Any one of them could be suspect. Who knows, maybe even Joe Wilson dreamed up the scam. Why not? He lied about everything else.

Even though it was too late to stop the war, the forgeries seem to have had their intended purpose. George W. Bush's whole case for war has been called into question. Furthermore, having come from the Italian government, the documents did double duty by discrediting Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, one of President Bush's staunchest supporters in the War on Terror. And because they continue to promote the lie that the British government used the fake documents to reach their conclusions, the Leftist media has also managed to smear our key ally.

The Senate Intelligence committee investigated the whole issue and found that the CIA's initial assessment was justifiable and did not rely at all on the forged documents. They also revealed that Joe Wilson had lied through his teeth in all his public revelations about the Iraq/Niger connection.

So in wondering aloud who might have sent a partisan opponent like Joe Wilson to Niger, some administration official had the temerity to suggest it was his wife--an assertion borne out by the facts. But instead of sheepishly admitting this little bit of partisan nepotism, Joe played up the wounded, self-righteous outrage act and accused the administration of maliciously "leaking" her name. In the process he also cleverly deflected questions about who really sent him and why. How convenient.

The Senate Intelligence committee investigators found that Wilson had indeed been recommended by his wife. According to their report a CIA official said Plame offered her husband’s name to the CIA's Director of Operations for an exploratory trip to Niger. She explained that Mr. Wilson knew both the Prime Minister of Niger and the former Minister of Mines and thus could perhaps gain useful information. Plame told her husband “there’s this crazy report” about Iraq getting uranium from Niger. The committee also revealed that Plame had set up another trip her husband took to Niger in 1999.

When asked in a July 9, 2004 interview about Plame's memo suggesting him for the trip, Wilson lamely answered: "I don't see it as a recommendation to send me." I guess that's one of those things that depends on what the definition of "is" is.

So now we have the specter of New York Times journalist Judith Miller in jail, refusing to reveal her sources regarding who "leaked" Valerie's name. If the source was Karl Rove, why isn't she talking? Rove signed an agreement authorizing any member of the media to testify about conversations they may have had.

The entire media establishment has been trying to get Rove since day one. Since when have they stood on principle to protect any republican, except perhaps John Dean, from anything? This confused me at first, but the more I thought about it, I realized that they likely had a completely different reason for not revealing their source: it wasn't Karl Rove! In fact, maybe it was Plame's pathological liar of a husband, Joe Wilson, who started this whole thing in the first place. If not, then it is doubtless someone else the New York Times would be embarrassed to reveal. Hopefully we'll find out.

I think we should start another investigation. Why, how and when did Joseph Wilson get involved? What about his wife? Is she even an operative? Her job description sounds much more like that of an analyst, a job for which cover is not required. No one will answer.

Both the New York Times and Time magazine have said in depositions they do not believe Rove broke the law. Why hasn't this been page one news? Everything negative they can dig up is. A lot of questions about this story have not even been asked, much less answered. Don't count on the national news media to help us out there, however. I don't think they want us to see the answers. Hopefully I have provided some of them here.