Right! Let's suppose(for arguments sake) that Plame was accidentally outed. 1. Why wouldn't the person who did it, jus say, "I did it. It was an accident, sorry." 2. Is it ok to have a person with security clearence of the top level who is so incompetent that they accidentally out top secret identities of intel agents working on WMD's? What a horrible accident it would be if they accidentally told all of our military secrets to the N. Koreans. Or if they accidentally revealed all of our intel gathering capability to the Chinese. If no felony was committed this is what we are left with. Someone so careless with such top level security credentials that they could keep on accidentally leaking state secret after state secret. And you contend that Bush is good for our national defense?
i think that what happened is novak wrote a story about joe wilson. he called a whitehouse source and said, "how did you come to hire joe wilson for this job?" and got the reply, "his wife, a cia officer, suggested him to us." nothing more, nothing less. it was then turned into a cause celebre, weeks after the article, by josh marshall, the times, and the wapo, time mag et al. who saw it as a "scandal' they could try and hang around bush's neck during an election year. after the admin called their bluff, and appointed a special proesecutor, who has garnered the cooperation of everyone in the case, from novak, to cheney, to scooter libby, to W himself, everyone, that is, execpt the reporters for the times and tiem magazine, who have a wrapped themselves in the false cloak or journalistic integrity, they've all shut up and decided there was no crime after all. all, except of course, the blind men on this bbs who can't bringf themselves to admit this was never anything more than a partisan witchhunt by the MSM during an election year.
<b>Originally posted by FranchiseBlade 1. Why wouldn't the person who did it, jus say, "I did it. It was an accident, sorry."</b> CJ (West Wing) didn't confess, did she? You don't offer yourself up when there is a witch hunt on. <b>2. Is it ok to have a person with security clearence of the top level who is so incompetent that they accidentally out top secret identities of intel agents working on WMD's? What a horrible accident it would be if they accidentally told all of our military secrets to the N. Koreans. Or if they accidentally revealed all of our intel gathering capability to the Chinese. If no felony was committed this is what we are left with. Someone so careless with such top level security credentials that they could keep on accidentally leaking state secret after state secret.</b> Are you prone to exageration?
do you think the whitehouse knows the undercover status of every employee in the CIA? what if plame identified herself as nothing more than a CIA WMD analyst?"
how is this ignorance of the law? ignorance of her status, undercover or not, is the very essence of the applicable statute and is the heart of the case!
the reply, "his wife, a cia officer ... (Novak actually knew more. He knew that Plame was a covert cia operative.) If the person who made the above reply did not know they were breaking the law, their ignorance is no defense.
First of all the whitehouse official would have been lying since Tenet has said that Plame was never the one who suggested Wilson was the one to be sent. That is problem one with the theory. That also means you have someone in the whitehouse who is so careless with top level secrets that they blab them over a reporter who calls. Imagine how many secrets this person would let out should he ever enter into a conversation with diplomats from other nations trained to elicit such topics. That theory might be ok if the only people who saw anything suspicious were the media. However, every single agency, including the FBI, CIA, etc. has seen reason to further the investigation the next step toward criminal prosecution. I don't think the CIA wanted to hang a scandal around Bush's neck during an election year. Your theory also supposes that the media was eager to hang a scandal around Bush's neck. The coverage of this felony received far less attention than the Swifties stuff which was shown to be false and full of holes time after time.
I wouldn't call investigations by the FBI, CIA, etc. of a felony involving the blowing of a CIA agent's covert status. That CIA agent was involved in WMD issues. This all happens at a time in which we have troops in the field presumably for WMD's. I dont' think investigating that constitutes a witch hunt. I'm not prone to exaggeration much in this case. If a white house source with security clearence casually blows the cover of an intel agent investing WMD issues to Robert Novak, why it would be an exaggeration to believe there is a chance he would disclose other things to trained to engage in conversations on the topic, and have experience dealing with administrative staffs.
The CIA has said she was undercover. They have acknowledged that she was a covert operative. I believe it was in this very thread that I linked to a mention of that too. It was on one of the first pages. Your theory only works if you ignore some of the important facts.
Isn't the fact that you are calling it a felony before it is proven to be a felonious charge an exageration? Any "political" crime turns into a Witch Hunt. I need only point to your constant references to "a felon in the White House" to prove the point. I think there may be a lack of clarifying language. We have Self Defense and Manslaughter and Murder I and Murder II to distinguish the differing motives for the same result. There may be a need for more complete language here, i.e. Exposure. Outing, Felonious Outing...
I'm not exaggerating, nor is it a witchhunt. It is 99% certain a felony was committed. It is slightly less certain the felon was from the whitehouse. I've asked for other plausible explanations and received none. If you have one I'd be willing to listen.
Listen up: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1348716/posts -- EX=PROSECUTOR: PLAME LEAK NOT ILLEGAL NEWSMAX Posted on 02/22/2005 The former prosecutor who helped draft the law that Democrats say was violated when someone in the Bush administration leaked a CIA worker's name to columnist Robert Novak now says that no laws were broken in the case. Writing with First Amendment lawyer Bruce Sanford in the Washington Post recently, former Assistant Deputy Attorney General Victoria Toensing explained that she helped draft the law in question, the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Says Toensing, "The Novak column and the surrounding facts do not support evidence of criminal conduct." For Plame's outing to have been illegal, the one-time deputy AG says, "her status as undercover must be classified." Also, Plame "must have been assigned to duty outside the United States currently or in the past five years." Since in neither case does Plame qualify, Toensing says: "There is a serious legal question as to whether she qualifies as 'covert.'" The law also requires that the celebrated non-spy's outing take place by someone who knew the government had taken "affirmative measures to conceal [the agent's] relationship" to the U.S., a prospect Toensing says is unlikely. Other signs that no laws were broken include the fact that after Plame was outted, the CIA's general counsel took no steps to prosecute Novak, as has been done to other reporters under similar circumstances. Neither did then-CIA Director George Tenet or his deputy pick up the phone to tell Novak that the publication of her name would threaten national security and her safety, as is also routinely done when the CIA is serious about prohibiting publication. In fact, the myth that laws were violated in the Plame case began to unravel in October 2003, in a column by New York Times scribe Nicholas Kristof, who explained that Valerie Plame had abandoned her covert role a full nine years before. "The C.I.A. suspected that Aldrich Ames had given [Plame's] name [along with those of other spies] to the Russians before his espionage arrest in 1994. So her undercover security was undermined at that time, and she was brought back to Washington for safety reasons." Kristof also noted that Plame had begun making the transition to CIA "management" even before she was outted, explaining that "she was moving away from 'noc' – which means non-official cover ... to a new cover as a State Department official, affording her diplomatic protection without having 'C.I.A.' stamped on her forehead." Noted the Timesman: "All in all, I think the Democrats are engaging in hyperbole when they describe the White House as having put [Plame's] life in danger and destroyed her career; her days skulking along the back alleys of cities like Beirut and Algiers were already mostly over." So why – with a special prosecutor now threatening to toss Time magazine's Matthew Cooper and New York Times reporter Judith Miller in jail if they don't give up their sources in the Plame case – aren't their lawyers invoking the "no laws were broken" defense? Explains the National Review's Rich Lowry: The Miller-Cooper defense hasn't made this argument because it would be too embarrassing to admit that the Bush administration's "crime of the century" wasn't really a crime at all, especially after a year and a half of media chest-beating to the contrary. "It was just a Washington flap played for all it was worth by the same news organizations now about to watch their employees go to prison over it," says Lowry. "That's the truth that the media will go to any length to avoid."
No, it is Occam's Razor that points to the extremely strong probability that a felony was created. I would say that P(felony)=.90-.95.
This is the first piece of legit evidence that even supports your claim that no felony was committed. That's a good thing. So given that everything in this article is 100% accurate it would be a case of the creator of this law's word that Plame wasn't under cover, or had her name classified, or we can believe the inteligence officials who have stated that she was under cover at the time. So we can trust the person who helped write a law back in '82, or we can trust the intel officials who said that Plame was undercover. Looking at the article we know that part of it is a red herring. The CIA did start their own investigation and decided it was serious enough to procede on to the next step up the legal ladder towards prosecution for the felony. If the CIA didn't feel that she was undercover, surely the CIA's own investigation would have turned that up. Yet the CIA felt it was serious enough to procede. Since Plame worked for the CIA. I would believe the CIA's assertion before the person who helped draft the law. I somehow believe that the CIA knows more about their employees than does a person who helped write a law in '82. It is fine to disagree, but in no way does it close the door on the possibility of a felony being committed.
here's some more background of the law's intent: -- In arguing that Fitzgerald should establish that a crime was committed before the trial judge, attorneys Victoria Toensing and Bruce W. Sanford, in their legal brief, cited, among other things, Novak’s claims that the official who leaked him the information about Plame did not intend to expose her status as a covert CIA operative: “The statute was specifically `crafted with care’ to be used in limited circumstances, because Congress wanted to `exclude the possibility that casual discussion, political debate, the journalistic pursuit of a story on intelligence, or the disclosure of illegality or impropriety in government will be chilled by the enactment of the bill. Congress intended only disclosures that `clearly represent a conscious and pernicious effect to identify and expose agents with the extent to impair or impede the foreign intelligence activities of the United States.’” http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=9473
