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Banned
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Something for the folks here who dismiss treason as a tool to be used for political revenge, to consider:
No democrat in congress has had the power to issue a subpoena to compell the testimony of any witness, since Jan., 2003. we will discover if that restriction is going to be reversed, less than nine weeks from now.
Now that this thread's author and his OP clearly endorse what appears in the Washington Post as "gospel", the following october, 2003 reporting, takes on a new demension. It also destroys the "no crime was committed" mantra of the "fringe" that sees no undermining of the CIA as treason. Little credence has been attributed to the fact that the CIA started the Plame investigation rolling when it complained that classified information about a CIA employee had been leaked to the press.
Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...nguage=printer
washingtonpost.com
The Spy Next Door
Valerie Wilson, Ideal Mom, Was Also the Ideal Cover
By Richard Leiby and Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, October 8, 2003; Page A01
One evening this summer, former diplomat Joseph Wilson sat amid the African-themed decor of his spacious Washington home, sipping a glass of beer and talking about a trip he took to Niger for the CIA. His wife, Valerie, was in the kitchen, preparing chicken for a cookout and arranging red, white and blue napkins.
Suddenly a giggling boy streaked nude into the living room and jumped into his father's lap. Bath time was nigh. Valerie Wilson rounded up the towheaded 3-year-old and his twin sister, efficiently taming the household whirlwind.
When Valerie E. Wilson -- maiden name Plame -- introduced herself to a reporter in her home on July 3, there was no hint she was anything other than a busy mother with an unflagging smile and classy wardrobe. She talked a bit about the joys and challenges of twins, then faded into the background.
One might have thought her to be a financial manager, maybe a real estate agent -- but never a spy. Few knew her secret: At 22, Plame had joined the Central Intelligence Agency and traveled the world on undercover missions.
A few months after that July evening, her name -- and her occupation -- would be published and broadcast internationally. In the public imagination, she would become "Jane Bond," as her husband later put it. A clandestine operative isn't supposed to be famous, but her identity was leaked to journalists by administration officials for what Joseph Wilson alleged was retaliation for his criticism of the White House's Iraq policies.
The Wilsons -- he's 53; she's 40 -- are at the center of a growing political controversy as the Justice Department investigates her unmasking, which occurred in a July 14 column by conservative pundit Robert Novak, who cited "two senior administration officials" as his sources. The outing has sparked a furor in the intelligence community, with some saying they feel betrayed by their government.
"We feel like the peasants with torches and pitchforks," said Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst who was in Plame's officer training class in 1985-86. "The robber barons aren't going to be allowed to get away with this."
In February 2002, the CIA dispatched Joseph Wilson, a retired ambassador who has held senior positions in several African countries and Iraq, to Niger to investigate claims that Saddam Hussein's government had shopped there for uranium ore that could be processed into weapons-grade material. He reported back that Niger officials said they knew of no such effort. His report has since been confirmed by U.S. intelligence officials.
On July 6, Wilson went public, saying the administration had exaggerated the case for war by including the so-called 16 words about uranium and Africa in the president's State of the Union message last January. A day later, the White House acknowledged it had been a mistake to include those words.
Novak's column suggested that Wilson got the assignment to Niger because of his wife, who was working on weapons proliferation issues for the CIA when she was outed. The agency and Wilson said Valerie Wilson was not involved in his selection. Wilson also said he was not paid for the assignment, though expenses for the eight-day trip were reimbursed.
<h3>Before the Novak column was published, at least six reporters were contacted by administration officials and allegedly told that Valerie Plame Wilson worked at the CIA. Whoever did so may have been trying to undermine the importance of Wilson's trip by implying it had been set up by his wife -- and therefore was not a serious effort by the agency to discover whether, in fact, Iraq had attempted to buy uranium in Niger.</h3>
The publication of her name left CIA officers aghast. "All the people who had innocent lunches with her overseas or went shopping or played tennis with her, I'm sure they are having heart attacks right now," said one classmate of Plame's who participated in covert operations. "I would be in hiding now if I were them."
Little is publicly known about the career of Valerie Plame (rhymes with "name"), and she did not respond to a request for an interview made through her husband. The CIA also declined to discuss her. But people close to her provided the basics of her biography: She was born in Anchorage, where her father, Air Force Lt. Col. Samuel Plame, was stationed, and attended school in a suburb of Philadelphia. Her mother, Diane, taught elementary school. She has a stepbrother, Robert, who is 16 years older.
Plame was recruited by the agency shortly after graduation from Pennsylvania State University, sources said. She later earned two master's degrees, one from the London School of Economics and one from the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium.
Plame underwent training at "The Farm," as the facility near Williamsburg, Va., is known to its graduates. As part of her courses, the new spy was taken hostage and taught how to reduce messages to microdots. She became expert at firing an AK-47. She learned to blow up cars and drive under fire -- all to see if she could handle the rigors of being an undercover case officer in the CIA's Directorate of Operations, or DO. Fellow graduates recall that off-hours included a trip to the movies to watch the Dan Aykroyd parody "Spies Like Us."
Plame also learned how to recruit foreign nationals to serve as spies, and how to hunt others and evade those who would hunt her -- some who might look as harmless as she herself does now as a mom with a model's poise and shoulder-length blond hair.
Her activities during her years overseas remain classified, but she became the creme de la creme of spies: a "noc," an officer with "nonofficial cover." Nocs have cover jobs that have nothing to do with the U.S. government. They work in business, in social clubs, as scientists or secretaries (they are prohibited from posing as journalists), and if detected or arrested by a foreign government, they do not have diplomatic protection and rights. They are on their own. Even their fellow operatives don't know who they are, and only the strongest and smartest are picked for these assignments.
Five years ago Plame married Joseph Wilson -- it was her second marriage, his third. They crossed paths at a reception in Washington. "It was love at first sight," Joseph Wilson reports. When they met, in 1997, Wilson held a security clearance as political adviser to the general in charge of the U.S. Armed Forces European Command.
For the past several years, she has served as an operations officer working as a weapons proliferation analyst. She told neighbors, friends and even some of her CIA colleagues that she was an "energy consultant." She lived behind a facade even after she returned from abroad. It included a Boston front company named Brewster-Jennings & Associates, which she listed as her employer on a 1999 form in Federal Election Commission records for her $1,000 contribution to Al Gore's presidential primary campaign.
Administration officials confirmed that Brewster-Jennings was a front. The disclosure of its existence, which came about because it was listed in the FEC records, magnifies the potential damage related to the leak of Valerie Wilson's identity: It may give anyone who dealt with the firm clues to her CIA work. In addition, anyone who ever had contact with the company, and any foreign person who ever met with Valerie Plame, innocently or not, might now be suspected of working with the agency.
Friends and neighbors knew Valerie Wilson as a consultant who traveled frequently overseas. They describe her as charming, bright and discreet. "She did not talk politics," said Victoria Tillotson, 58, who has often socialized with the Wilsons.
"I thought she was a risk assessment person for some international investment company," said Ralph Wittenberg, a psychiatrist who chairs the nonprofit Family Mental Health Foundation, where Valerie Wilson is a board member. In recent years, he said, Valerie Wilson has been an "unstinting" volunteer, running peer support groups for women who suffered from postpartum depression, as she had.
"I would never have guessed in a million years" that she was a spy, Wittenberg said.
Another acquaintance active in raising awareness of postpartum depression, Jane Honikman, briefly contemplated the image of Valerie Wilson slinging an AK-47 assault rifle. "I can't imagine her holding anything other than a spoon, or a baby," she said.
A few months after delivering the twins in January 2000, Valerie Wilson "had a serious bout of postpartum depression and she'd had a terrible time getting help," Wittenberg said. "She didn't want any other woman to have to go through that."
He and others at the foundation knew her as someone willing to help anytime. She gave speeches to medical groups about the need for better screening of new mothers and mobilized resources for crisis interventions. Wittenberg said the foundation's hotline has helped save depressed mothers from killing themselves and their children.
"She's affected hundreds and hundreds of people's lives. . . . She's helped them," said Wittenberg, who added that Valerie Wilson had authorized him to talk about her.
Valerie Wilson's parents knew she worked for the CIA and fretted about her trips abroad, but said they never asked for details.
"We didn't want to know, and she never offered," Diane Plame, 74, said in an interview. She added that, since high school, her daughter had wanted "to do something of value to others, and she felt she was achieving that in what she's done in her work. She wanted to be of value to the country and to be patriotic.
"We've been very proud of her -- no question," she added. Diane Plame and her husband, who is 83 and a World War II veteran, are "very angry" about the disclosure and fearful for their daughter's safety.
"They spoiled it. They more than spoiled it -- they brought a lot of harm," Diane Plame said, referring to the leakers and to Novak. "For people to come out and say this would cause no harm, what kind of IQs do they have?"
Novak wrote in an Oct. 1 column that "the CIA never warned me that the disclosure of Wilson's wife working at the agency would endanger her or anybody else." He added, "It was well known around Washington that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA."
Over the July Fourth weekend, the Plames were with the Wilsons, assisting with the twins and other chores. After feeding the children and completing most of the preparations for a barbecue, Valerie Wilson announced from the kitchen: "Bath time!"
She gave instructions to her mother -- "Everything's here" -- and announced to her father, "I have to leave right now."
The twins whined for her to stay. She gently told her son, "Mommy has to go to a meeting."
It turned out Valerie Wilson was to lead a postpartum support group that evening. A group of other mothers was waiting at her church. The spy exited into the twilight.
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Quote:
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstra...A90994DB404482
DEBATING A LEAK: THE DIRECTOR; C.I.A. Chief Is Caught in Middle by Leak Inquiry
October 5, 2003, Sunday
By ELISABETH BUMILLER (NYT); National Desk
Late Edition - Final, Section 1, Page 1, Column 2, 1432 words
At a few minutes before eight on Thursday morning, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, was parked in his usual chair just outside the Oval Office waiting to brief his chief patron, the president of the United States.
The morning newspapers were full of developments in what amounted to a war between the Central Intelligence Agency and the White House, and a Justice Department investigation that was barely 48 hours old into whether administration officials had illegally disclosed the name of an undercover C.I.A. officer.
Angry agency officials suspected that someone in the White House had exposed the officer, Valerie Plame, as a way to punish her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, for his criticism of the administration's use of intelligence to justify the war in Iraq.
But after President Bush told his chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., that he was ready to see Mr. Tenet -- ''O.K., George, let's go,'' Mr. Card called out to the intelligence chief -- Mr. Tenet, a rare holdover from the Clinton administration and a politically savvy survivor, did not even bring up the issue that was roiling his agency, Mr. Card said in an interview.
Instead, Mr. Tenet briefed the president on the latest intelligence reports, as he always does, and left it to the White House to make the first move about Mr. Wilson and Ms. Plame.
''I think I was the one who initiated it,'' Mr. Card recalled. The subsequent conversation between the president and Mr. Tenet about the investigation, he added, did not consume ''any significant amount of time or discussion or angst. It was basically, 'We're cooperating, you're cooperating, I'm glad to see the process is moving forward the way it should.' '' In conclusion, Mr. Card said, ''it certainly didn't reflect a strain in any relationship.''
And yet, six years into running the nation's primary spy organization, Mr. Tenet finds himself at one of the most difficult points in his tenure, caught between his loyalty to the president and defending an agency enraged at the White House. Although the leak investigation that is consuming Washington's political class has not, by all accounts, affected the chummy personal ties between the president and the director, it has still taken its toll on Mr. Tenet.
Even before this latest blowup, Mr. Tenet told friends that he was worn out from the relentlessness of his job since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and that he felt he had served long enough. (Only Allen W. Dulles and Richard Helms held the job longer.) Mr. Tenet, who has directed an extensive overhaul and expansion of the C.I.A. since the attacks, had talked about stepping down by late summer or early fall, people close to him said.
''It's a lot harder job than it was in the Dulles era, and he's been doing it for a long while,'' an agency official said. ''But I think he's for the moment happily engaged.''
Friends of Mr. Tenet's said that the leak investigation might now keep him in place longer than he wanted, if only to prove that he was not a casualty of the latest furor -- or of the political fallout from the failure so far to find chemical or biological weapons in Iraq.
''He wants to leave on his own terms, but he doesn't want to leave when it looks like he's being chased out of town,'' a former C.I.A. official said. David Kay, the government's chief weapons inspector, who was chosen and supervised by Mr. Tenet, told Congress on Thursday that his team had failed to find illicit weapons after a three-month search in Iraq, a major setback for the White House.
The latest fight has turned out to be a particularly angry one in an intelligence tug of war that began before the invasion of Iraq. Some C.I.A. officers have long said that they believe the White House and the Pentagon exaggerated intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify the war, while White House and Pentagon officials have long said that the C.I.A. had been too cautious in its findings.
In the summer, the conflict broke into the open when Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said that Mr. Tenet had been primarily responsible for not stripping from the president's State of the Union address an insupportable claim that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from Niger. Mr. Tenet and his allies were enraged, and Stephen J. Hadley, Ms. Rice's deputy, eventually took the blame.
<h3>But within the C.I.A., the exposure of Ms. Plame is now considered an even greater instance of treachery. Ms. Plame, a specialist in nonconventional weapons who worked overseas, had ''nonofficial cover,'' and was what in C.I.A. parlance is called a Noc, the most difficult kind of false identity for the agency to create.</h3> While most undercover agency officers disguise their real profession by pretending to be American embassy diplomats or other United States government employees, Ms. Plame passed herself off as a private energy expert. Intelligence experts said that Nocs have especially dangerous jobs.
''Nocs are the holiest of holies,'' said Kenneth M. Pollack, a former agency officer who is now director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. ''This is real James Bond stuff. You're going overseas posing as a businessman, and if the other government finds out about you, they're probably going to shoot you. The United States has basically no way to protect you.''
Mr. Tenet's latest battle with the White House began on July 6, when Mr. Wilson, in an article on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times, wrote of a mission the C.I.A. sent him on in 2002 to investigate whether Iraq had tried to buy uranium for its nuclear weapons program from Niger. Mr. Wilson concluded that Iraq had not, and that the administration had twisted evidence to make the case for war in Iraq.
Eight days later, the syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak wrote that it was Mr. Wilson's wife who had suggested sending him on the mission, implying that Mr. Wilson's trip was of limited importance. Mr. Novak identified Ms. Plame, and attributed the information to ''two senior administration officials.'' Mr. Wilson subsequently accused Karl Rove, the president's chief political aide, of involvement in leaking the information to Mr. Novak to intimidate Mr. Wilson into silence and to keep others from coming forward. But he has since backed off and said that Mr. Rove at least condoned the leak.
But Mr. Tenet was aware of the Novak column, and was not pleased, the C.I.A. official said. As required by law, the agency notified the Justice Department in late July that there had been a release of classified information; it is a felony for any official with access to such information to disclose the identity of a covert American officer. It is unclear when Mr. Tenet became aware of the referral, but when he did, he supported it, the C.I.A. official said, even though it was clearly going to cause problems for the White House. ''I don't think he lost any sleep over it,'' the official said.
The important thing, the official said, was that ''the agency was standing up for itself.''
Friends of Mr. Tenet's say that he knows how important it is that he be seen as defending the agency from political attacks, and that one reason he has stayed so long is to demonstrate that the directorship of central intelligence is not a partisan job. The other reason for his longevity, friends and detractors alike say, is that this son of a Greek restaurant owner from Queens has been brilliant at cultivating the Yale-educated son of the only president, George H. W. Bush, to have been director of central intelligence.
Last week, Mr. Card said, the director took time out from the grimness of the intelligence reports to talk about a subject dear to the president. ''Baseball,'' Mr. Card said.
As the former C.I.A. official summed up Mr. Tenet: ''He's not liked by everybody in the administration, but the president loves him.''
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Last edited by host; 09-02-2006 at 09:34 PM..
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