That's the kind of attacks that Bush takes everyday in the forum. I've with whoever said that we should rename D and D the "Bush Bashing forum," because that is all it has become as of late. I needed to get your attention and no, I don't read or look at Hustler. Have you guys let up for one day on Bush, ever? Just wondering.
get used to it! I had to endure 8 years of Clinton bashing... bamma you can argue semantics all you want. The fact is a leak was made from inside the white house, which is a federal offense. And I find it unconscionable that you could just dismiss this as "no big deal" and "silly". You! of all people a marine! in other news...Novak pussed out Said “nobody called me” and “no crime was committed”. Then started backtracking and saying that he doesn't know if the leak came from the white house.
The difference between this leak and the others from "every single admin" is that this one leaked the identity of an undercover CIA operative. I don't care wheter it was Rove or somebody else, whoever leaked it needs to go to jail.
Here's the article cited by Bama in bold... my comments in italics... _____________ Monday Sept. 29, 2003; 10:22 a.m. EDT Joe Wilson Vowed Vengeance Against Karl Rove The man at the center of the storm over whether the White House leaked the name of his CIA-analyst-wife to the press swore vengeance against the Bush administration just one month ago, telling a Seattle audience that he'd wanted to "to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs." (The man at the center continues to be Rove or whoever else at the Whitehouse leaked the name.) With the Washington Post doing his dirty work on Sunday, former ambassador to Iraq, Joseph Wilson seems to be gathering a few allies in his mission, with Democrats like Sen. Charles Schumer proclaiming yesterday, "Whoever [leaked Wilson's wife's name] should go to jail." (Notice the objective phrase "dirty work" as if an investigation into whether the nation's security was compromised is something to be repulsed by.) Wilson is the man tapped by the CIA, reportedly at his wife's recommendation, to travel to Niger to investigate reports that Saddam Hussein had sought to purchase yellow cake uranium, one of the country's chief exports. Because Wilson came up empty in terms of finding any evidence of a uranium transaction, the press has taken it as an article of faith that Bush's reference in last year's State of the Union message to British intelligence on the Iraq-Niger uranium deal was a deliberate attempt to mislead. The CIA's request late Friday that the Justice Department investigate whether the White House leaked Mrs. Wilson's name to columnist Robert Novak has set off media smoke alarms. But what hasn't gotten much attention is Novak's original report, which made it clear that the White House wasn't the only one who spilled the beans about Wilson's wife. Here's what Novak wrote on July 14: "Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him." So it wasn't just the White House who blew Mrs. Wilson's cover. In fact, the cavalier manner which the CIA seems to have confirmed her role in the imbroglio suggests there was nothing particularly secret about her identity in the first place. (I've wondered about the CIA sentence myself and we need more info on that. It is however, clear that the WH put the name on Novak's lips and he called the CIA to confirm the story. The fact that the CIA confirmed while going to pains to point out that "counter-proliferation officials" asked for Wilson does nothing to explain why the WH would leak her name and undercuts the purpose of the leak from the WH perspective. In regards to her position, this from today's Washington Post: 'She is a case officer in the CIA's clandestine service and works as an analyst on weapons of mass destruction. Novak published her maiden name, Plame, which she had used overseas and has not been using publicly. Intelligence sources said top officials at the agency were very concerned about the disclosure because it could allow foreign intelligence services to track down some of her former contacts and lead to the exposure of agents.') Despite complaints from Democrats like Schumer that the leak compromised both national security and Mrs. Wilson's safety, the agency told the Post for its Sunday report, "No further harm would come from repeating Plame’s name." ("No further harm" is not the same as "No harm was ever caused.") In fact, it's an open question as to whether Mrs. Wilson's identity was supposed to be a secret in the first place, with the Post noting far down in its report that the "CIA has declined to confirm whether she was undercover." (See note above regards today's Post story.) If Mrs. Wilson wasn't undercover, then this is a non-story ginned up by her husband, a unabashed Bush-hater who wrote in the notoriously left-wing Nation magazine earlier this year that under Bush, "America has entered one of it periods of historical madness." White House critics want to paint a picture of Mrs. Wilson as a super secret spy working abroad whose life was endangered because of a White House vendetta, while in reality she was apparently safe and sound working stateside as a CIA weapons analyst at the time of the Novak report. (Perhaps it was the White House screwing with his wife that turned him into a partisan... afterall, he served under Bush 41 and didn't turn into a raving liberal until after he got back from Africa. Also, note the phrase "at the time." Doesn't really address the questions of whether harm was done or what her past assignments might have been does it? Here's some admitted speculation that dovetails nicely with what we know from the Post via Josh Marshall: "We've heard a lot about how blowing Plame's cover was probably illegal and certainly dishonorable. But let's walk through what the implications are. Plame's beat, if we can use that word, was weapons of mass destruction. And, of course, WMD is the big issue. It's why Iraq, why Joe Wilson, why Niger, why CIA referrals. That's what's at the bottom of all this stuff. Keeping WMD out of the wrong hands is, or was, Plame's job. If that's her job you can figure that over the years she's been involved in various operations aimed at tracking proliferation, worked with various human sources, all sorts of stuff like that. Now Plame's name has been splashed across papers all over the world. And the folks that leaked her name made sure that they used her maiden name, Plame -- the one she did most of her work under -- rather than Wilson, the name which I'm told she now goes by. So now her name's out. And now every bad-actor and bad-acting government knows that anything that Plame was involved with, any operation, any company she was supposed to be working for, any people she worked closely with, are probably also CIA or at least work with CIA. WMD bad-guys now know to steer clear of them. Let's say there's some operation Plame hasn't been involved with for a decade -- but it's still on-going. People will remember she used to be in on that operation and thus it's tagged as an Agency operation and it's useless. Everyone will know to steer clear. Now, I have no knowledge of any operations Plame was involved in or covers she used. These are hypotheticals. But it gives you a sense of the sort of work she was involved in and the potential collateral damage of exposing her cover. And consider what her work was: protecting Americans from weapons of mass destruction. Chew on that irony. ")
At the cost of sounding like a shrill for Bush (which I am not. We disagree on too much policy-wise), but I fail to see the seriousness of this. The whole point I tried to make was I really don't think she was undercover (a field officer) at all, but simply an analyst. And analysts rarely leave Langley except to go abroad and hold discussions with their opposite numbers overseas. So what if her identity was revealed if she wasn't undercover? Her life was definitely not in danger. You could find out everyone who works at Langley by camping out the gate, taking tag numbers and using contacts at the DMV to find out the rest.
I don't think it's that simple, Sam. If "some lower level flunkie takes the fall", they are looking at 10 years in a Federal prison. That's assuming they don't get a Presidential pardon, which would be unlikely in a case like this. This bears repeating, courtesy of rimrocker... "We need more human intelligence. That means we need more protection for the methods we use to gather intelligence and more protection for our sources, particularly our human sources, people that are risking their lives for their country. Even though I'm a tranquil guy now at this stage of my life, I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious, of traitors." George H.W. Bush April 16th, 1999 Dedication Speech George Bush Center for Intelligence
At the cost of sounding like a shrill for Bush (which I am not. We disagree on too much policy-wise), but I fail to see the seriousness of this. <I>'She is a case officer in the CIA's clandestine service and works as an analyst on weapons of mass destruction. Novak published her maiden name, Plame, which she had used overseas and has not been using publicly. Intelligence sources said top officials at the agency were very concerned about the disclosure because it could allow foreign intelligence services to track down some of her former contacts and lead to the exposure of agents.'</I> Given that she worked in the field of WMD, her contacts likely were in that field. Do you think its serious if some of the contacts we have assisting us in WMD issues are exposed? There's a reason these people are kept undercover. If it wasn't important, they wouldn't be undercover.
But see, that's the rub. She isn't undercover. They are. So where is the problem? It is like someone saying, well Joe Schmo works at the Agriculture Dept.
It bears repeating that this is serious because it is against the law, and for good reason. I don't want some politician spouting off about CIA operatives, whether tehy are undercover or not.
No I don't think it's enough said... Nobody in the Bush administration called me to leak this. In July I was interviewing a senior administration official on Ambassador Wilson's report when he told me the trip was inspired by his wife, a CIA employee working on weapons of mass destruction. Another senior official told me the same thing. Nobody called but he was talking to a senior administration official who told him about Plame. Another official told him the same thing, though that one didn't call either. It's enough to make me yearn for the definition of "is." As a professional journalist with 46 years experience in Washington I do not reveal confidential sources. So he's not saying there's nothing to it, he's just saying he's not going to rat on who told him. When I called the CIA in July to confirm Mrs. Wilson's involvement in the mission for her husband -- he is a former Clinton administration official -- they asked me not to use her name, but never indicated it would endanger her or anybody else. According to a confidential source at the CIA, Mrs. Wilson was an analyst, not a spy, not a covert operator, and not in charge of undercover operatives'... He's also a former Bush 41 appointee. If they asked you not to use her name, doesn't that indicate they were at least somewhat concerned about her identity being made public? Also, the confidential source may have known what she was currently doing, but did that source have info regarding what she used to do? Again, refer to today's Post story.
Hmmmm. It seems that if the source is a traitor, Novak doesn't have any qualms about releasing the names. Lots of irony coming our way over the next weeks... _____________ Robert Novak July 12, 2001 The Hanssen Mystery WASHINGTON -- Three and half-years ago, I reported that a veteran FBI agent resigned and retired after refusing a demand by Attorney General Janet Reno to give the Justice Department the names of top secret sources in China. My primary source was FBI agent Robert Hanssen. Disclosing confidential sources is unthinkable for a reporter seeking to probe behind the scenes in official Washington, but the circumstances here are obviously extraordinary. The same traitor who delivered American spies into the Kremlin's hands was expressing concern about the fate of intelligence assets in China. When my source was revealed as a spy, my first fear was that I had been the victim of disinformation by a truly evil man. I wrote my column of Nov. 24, 1997 only after other officials confirmed Hanssen's account. Nevertheless, I now wanted to make doubly sure and rechecked my report's validity. I did so, and several sources -- including one FBI agent who would not speak to me in 1997 -- totally confirmed what I had written. I am absolutely convinced that Hanssen told me the truth. Then, why break a reporter's responsibility to keep his sources secret? I wrestled with this question for months and finally decided that my experience with Hanssen contributes to the portrait of this most contradictory of all spies. Furthermore, to be honest to my readers, I must reveal it. In mid-November 1997, critics were accusing the Justice Department of covering up 1996 campaign scandals. I was informed by Hanssen that Ray Wickman, head of the FBI's intelligence unit monitoring Chinese operations, was ordered in Reno's name to turn over secret sources in his Chinese account. Wickman refused to surrender this information, resigned from the FBI and retired from the government in September 1997. Wickman declined to discuss this with me then and more recently, when I again approached him. I never met Hanssen but talked to him three times over the telephone, the first at length and twice more briefly to check out information I received from other officials. He seemed to be well organized and deeply concerned about the possible compromise of secret assets in a Communist-ruled country. Hanssen told me Wickman's sources were of the highest caliber and among the FBI's most sensitive. All unattributed quotes in my column came from Hanssen. "It was an insult," I quoted Hanssen in describing the demand made of Wickman. He added: "The purpose of the FBI is to safeguard sources. The whole idea is to keep sources secret from the Justice Department. If Justice is going to have full access to our files, we have no purpose." I now have rechecked these quotes with another FBI source familiar with the Wickman situation. He agreed completely with these sentiments and attested to their accuracy. My encounter with Hanssen came during what the government alleges was his sabbatical from spying for over eight years from the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 until 1999, when KGB alumnus Vladimir Putin became Russia's prime minister en route to the presidency. Unanswerable questions are pondered. During the lengthy interim when he was not betraying his country, could Hanssen have felt some genuine concern about the security of U.S. assets in China if they fell into the hands of the attorney general? Could he have experienced a sudden change of heart after disclosing the identity of U.S. assets in Russia? Or, was he merely using me to undermine Reno -- and his boss, FBI Director Louis Freeh, as well? When I informed Hanssen that Freeh had told a member of Congress that he had heard nothing about Wickman's resignation, he replied disdainfully: "Of course, he heard about it." The accuracy of that assertion also has been newly verified to me by an additional source. Robert Hanssen is an enigma and will remain so at least until he reveals himself. The speculation that he is purely the embodiment of evil tends to be undermined by the validity of his report about Ray Wickman. He really may have been living a double-life, one as a patriotic, religious American and the other as spy of the century. That sounds fanciful, but any other explanation fails.
Hahaha. The truth is coming out, liberals. Seems you guys have *made up* this controversy and this woman was hardly *undercover*. This still doesn't beat slick willie's troubles. You guys need to at least make up something about Bush, not some lackie in the administration. Willie's troubles came straight from the top, himself. September 29, 2003, 10:22 a.m. Spy Games Was it really a secret that Joe Wilson's wife worked for the CIA? by Clifford D. May, NRO Contributor It's the top story in the Washington Post this morning as well as in many other media outlets. Who leaked the fact that the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV worked for the CIA? What also might be worth asking: "Who didn't know?" I believe I was the first to publicly question the credibility of Mr. Wilson, a retired diplomat sent to Niger to look into reports that Saddam Hussein had attempted to purchase yellowcake uranium for his nuclear-weapons program. On July 6, Mr. Wilson wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in which he said: "I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." On July 11, I wrote a piece for NRO arguing that Mr. Wilson had no basis for that conclusion — and that his political leanings and associations (not disclosed by the Times and others journalists interviewing him) cast serious doubt on his objectivity. On July 14, Robert Novak wrote a column in the Post and other newspapers naming Mr. Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA operative. That wasn't news to me. I had been told that — but not by anyone working in the White House. Rather, I learned it from someone who formerly worked in the government and he mentioned it in an offhand manner, leading me to infer it was something that insiders were well aware of. I chose not to include it (I wrote a second NRO piece on this issue on July 18) because it didn't seem particularly relevant to the question of whether or not Mr. Wilson should be regarded as a disinterested professional who had done a thorough investigation into Saddam's alleged attempts to purchase uranium in Africa. What did appear relevant could easily be found in what the CIA would call "open sources." For example, Mr. Wilson had long been a bitter critic of the current administration, writing in such left-wing publications as The Nation that under President Bush, "America has entered one of it periods of historical madness" and had "imperial ambitions." What's more, he was affiliated with the pro-Saudi Middle East Institute and he had recently been the keynote speaker for the Education for Peace in Iraq Center, a far-Left group that opposed not only the U.S. military intervention in Iraq but also the sanctions and the no-fly zones that protected Iraqi Kurds and Shias from being slaughtered by Saddam. Mr. Wilson is now saying (on C-SPAN this morning, for example) that he opposed military action in Iraq because he didn't believe Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and he foresaw the possibility of a difficult occupation. In fact, prior to the U.S. invasion, Mr. Wilson told ABC's Dave Marash that if American troops were sent into Iraq, Saddam might "use a biological weapon in a battle that we might have. For example, if we're taking Baghdad or we're trying to take, in ground-to-ground, hand-to-hand combat." Equally, important and also overlooked: Mr. Wilson had no apparent background or skill as an investigator. As Mr. Wilson himself acknowledged, his so-called investigation was nothing more than "eight days drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people" at the U.S. embassy in Niger. Based on those conversations, he concluded that "it was highly doubtful that any [sale of uranium from Niger to Iraq] had ever taken place." That's hardly the same as disproving what British intelligence believed — and continues to believe: that Saddam Hussein was actively attempting to purchase uranium from somewhere in Africa. (Whether Saddam succeeded or not isn't the point; were Saddam attempting to make such purchases it would suggest that his nuclear-weapons-development program was active and ongoing.) For some reason, this background and these questions have been consistently omitted in the Establishment media's reporting on Mr. Wilson and his charges. There also remains this intriguing question: Was it primarily due to the fact that Mr. Wilson's wife worked for the CIA that he received the Niger assignment? Mr. Wilson has said that his mission came about following a request from Vice President Cheney. But it appears that if Mr. Cheney made the request at all, he made it of the CIA and did not know Mr. Wilson and certainly did not specify that he wanted Mr. Wilson put on the case. It has to be seen as puzzling that the agency would deal with an inquiry from the White House on a sensitive national-security matter by sending a retired, Bush-bashing diplomat with no investigative experience. Or didn't the CIA bother to look into Mr. Wilson's background? If that's what passes for tradecraft in Langley, we're in more trouble than any of us have realized.
The truth is coming out, liberals. Seems you guys have *made up* this controversy You do realize the CIA are the ones that requested the investigation, right? Are they now a bunch of liberals?
All right, triumphant BigTexx, if it's no big deal and was public knowledge, why did the CIA ASK FOR THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT TO INVESTIGATE IT? And why did they bother leaking it in the first place? You mean if no harm was done on this petty attempt at revenge, it was excusable? God, this predictable sh-t from the NRO crowd is really insulting this time around. Wilson had no basis for his conclusion (other than traveling to Niger and investigating it himself, I'm sure Clifford May was in Niger too, but any way by conclusion YOU MEAN THE ONE THE FREAKING WHITE HOUSE RETREATED ON AND SAID HE WAS RIGHT ABOUT AND THAT YOU WERE WRONG ABOUT AND SAID THEY SHOULDN"T HAVE SAID? " The president's statement was based on the predicate of the yellow cake [uranium] from Niger,"Given the fact that the report on the yellow cake did not turn out to be accurate, that is reflective of the president's broader statement "White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, July 9 2003 Oh, well good job Clifford May. What a f-cking joke. His July 11 piece is pure garbage where he accuses him of being a shill for the FREAKING SAUDIS, just like the Bush family is (how many tiimes has Prince Bandar slept over in Houston again?). How does that put him at odds with anything? Crap like this solidifies that the National Review is one step below toilet paper. Thanks for pasting it, bigtexx, very illustrative.
Chat transcript with the reporter from the Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17134-2003Sep29.html
So May's point is that the Whitehouse effort to discredit Wilson didn't go far enough? You guys also better rethink the Plame name wasn't jeopardizing anything. It could lead to some substantial crow, especially considering the first line from the other side after the story broke was "We don't know enough and need to wait for the facts to come out." The one thing I find astonishing about this piece is it seems to suggest that the CIA did not send someone sufficiently loyal to Niger (even though Wilson was appointed to an Ambassadorship by Bush 41). Isn't it rich that the implication is that if someone more loyal was sent the intelligence could have been framed in a way that more in tune with what the Administration wanted? Isn't this whole idea being rebuked by the other big intelligence story going on in DC? Is this all the lame spin the other side has... smear, bluster, hanging your hat on the notion that Plame was not an operative when there is already ample evidence to suggest that was indeed the case? It goes to show how serious this is and that it's not going away. Every defense put forth so far only raises more questions. Keep working on those talking points though... something might stick. The other interesting thing about this piece is that there is no remorse whatsoever. Pure spin. And here I thought Republicans actually cared about national security.
