Saturday, January 14, 2006

plame, sibel, again

i'm reading the plame/wilson article in VF for the first time! shame on me - altho nobody ever refers to this article apparently it has been overshadowed by 'the photo'. the article was jan 04 - nearly a year after the invasion, half a year after Wilson's nyt op-ed, and just 3 months after novak's first column.

i'm really surprised that nobody ever points to this article - it's actually quite a rich vein. given the tea-leaf reading of every luskin verb, adjective, or silence in the interim, this article actually is quite significant, with a bunch of things that i didn't know. as i read through the article, i just grabbed some paragraphs or whatever that we interesting, and added some comment - read on if you are interested (it's unnecessarily long).

keep in mind when you are reading that i'm an avid sibelologist - and i have a theory, which is too brilliant to be true, that Wilson and Plame intentionally outed Plame in order to out Brewster Jennings, with the assistance of Scowcroft. according to my crazy hypothesis, they did this purely for personal financial reward and were paid off by a cabal in order to stop BJ uncovering an illegal arms/drugs distribution network.

much more likely is that BJ was outed without the knowledge of the Wilsons - but the purpose is the same - BJ was getting too close.

on with the article and my random comments:
"He had met Plame in February 1997 at a reception at the Washington home of the Turkish ambassador. He says that when his eyes fell on her from across the room he thought he knew her. He realized as he drew near that he did not-and that it was love at first sight. From that moment on, he says, "she did not let anyone into the conversation, and I did not let anyone into the conversation."
i don't really have any comment apart from the fact that all i previously knew was that it was an ATC event. sibel specifically pointed to this meeting.

"At the time, Wilson was based in Stuttgart, serving as the political adviser to George Joulwan, the U.S. general in charge of the European command; Plame was based in Brussels. Meeting in Paris, London, and Brussels, they got very serious very quickly. On the third or fourth date, he says, they were in the middle of a "heavy make-out" session when she said she had something to tell him. She was very conflicted and very nervous, thinking of everything that had gone into getting her to that point, such as money and training.

She was, she explained, undercover in the C.I.A. "It did nothing to dampen my ardor," he says. "My only question was: Is your name really Valerie?""
this is an incredible piece of news. Deep undercover? NOC? 3rd date? i can't believe the righties don't have that carved in stone! (maybe they do, i don't live there, but i've never heard it)

Tenet confirmed the trip was made on the C.I.A.'s "own initiative."
this is another new piece of news. AFAIK, the CW is that the ovp actually instigated wilson's trip to niger

"Cheney and his chief of staff, Lewis Libby, visited the C.I.A. several times at Langley and told the staff to make more of an effort to find evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and to uncover Iraqi attempts to acquire nuclear capabilities. One of the people who objected most fervently to what he saw as "intimidation," according to one former C.I.A. case officer, was Alan Foley, then the head of the Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center. He was Valerie Plame's boss. (Foley could not be reached for comment.)"
i'd never made the connection that plame's boss was openly critical of the ovp for being intimidating about iraqi wmd. is this significant? was he in charge of all nocs? is he the person who should have had full knowledge of the iraq wmd nonsense?


On the weekend of March 8, a U.S. official admitted, "We fell for it," about the Niger documents. A signature on one letter, dated October 10, 2000, was that of a foreign minister who hadn't been in office for nearly 11 years. Wilson appeared on CNN and told news anchor Renay San Miguel that he believed that if the U.S. government looked into its files it would find it had known a lot more about the Niger uranium story than it was now letting on. Wilson has since heard from someone close to the House Judiciary Committee that it is believed that Cheney's office started to do a "work-up" on him at that moment. (An official in Cheney's office says, "That is false.")

In early May, Wilson and Plame attended a conference sponsored by the Senate Democratic Policy Committee, at which Wilson spoke about Iraq; one of the other panelists was the New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof. Over breakfast the next morning with Kristof and his wife, Wilson told about his trip to Niger and said Kristof could write about it, but not name him. At this point what he wanted, Wilson says, was for the government to correct the record. "I felt that on issues as important to our whole society as sending our sons and daughters to kill and die for our national security we as a society and our government have a responsibility to our people to ensure that the debate is carried out in a way that reflects the solemnity of the decision being taken," he says.
it appears as though wilson was on cnn before the invasion, saying that he knows the administration, and then in early May, after 'mission accomplished' wilson got all uppity and 'wanted the record corrected' because he felt really bad about war.

Kristof's column appeared on May 6. On June 8, when Condoleezza Rice was asked about the Niger documents on Meet the Press, she said, "Maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency, but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery."

Wilson immediately called a couple of people in the government, whose identities he will not divulge-"They are close to certain people in the administration," he says-and warned them that if Rice would not correct the record he would. One of them, he says, told him to write the story. So at the beginning of July he sat down to write "What I Didn't Find in Africa."

While he was working, he says, he received a call from Richard Leiby, a reporter at The Washington Post, about his role in the 1991 Gulf War. Wilson told him about the Times article he was writing, and the Post, in an attempt to keep up, ran a story about Wilson on July 6. That same day Wilson appeared on Meet the Press; so did Senators John Warner (Republican, Virginia) and Carl Levin (Democrat, Michigan), who had just returned from Iraq. Both Warner and Levin commented that Wilson's article was of interest, as did Washington Post columnist David Broder. Only Robert Novak, in a separate segment, said that it was a nonstory.
Wilson is really worried about wars and lies, and he makes an appearance on cnn in march, talks to kristof in May, condi responds in june, and wilson writes an article in july. he's a patient war-time diplomat if nothing else.

But Wilson was caught off guard when around July 9 he received a phone call from Robert Novak, who, according to Wilson, said he'd been told by a C.I.A. source that Wilson's wife worked for the agency. "Can you confirm or deny?" Wilson recalls Novak as saying. "I need another source."

Wilson says he replied, "I'm not going to answer any questions about my wife."

At this point, Wilson says, he and his wife thought the leak could be contained if no one picked it up.

When the Novak story ran, identifying not the C.I.A. as the source of the leak but "two senior administration officials," Wilson says, he called Novak and said, "When you asked for the confirmation you said a 'C.I.A. source.'" "I misspoke," Wilson says Novak replied. (Novak declined to comment.)
i'm surprised that people haven't picked up on this. if we take novak at his word, he totally misrepresented his sources (aka, lied) , that's a serious journalistic transgression (i know that we have larger issues of concern). nobody refers to krove and libby (presumably) 'CIA' by mistake. (btw a lot of people in this article declined to comment. )

In the days after the Novak column ran, a producer from ABC-Wilson will not say who-phoned him at home and said, "They're saying things about you at the White House so off-the-wall we can't even put them up." NBC's Andrea Mitchell called him that weekend, he says, and told him that sources at the White House were telling her, "The real story here is not the 16 words-the real story is Wilson and his wife." Next, Wilson got a call from a journalist whom he won't name-but who is widely thought to be Chris Matthews-who, according to Wilson, gushed, "I just got off the phone with Karl Rove. He says your wife is fair game. I gotta go." Click.
these things they can't print - what are they? that his wife is cia? 'off the wall'? media folk who won't print the maladministrations talking points? i can understand that they might be reluctant to publish the fact that he is married to a spy, but 'off-the-wall'? was there something else in those phone calls that we don't know about?

Timothy M. Phelps and Knut Royce's July 22 Newsday story quotes Novak as saying he had not had to dig out Plame's name; rather, it had been given to him. "They (the leakers) thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it."
this statement has always been curious. the thing is this: can you imagine a group of the most malignant fuckers to ever inhabit the planet to ever settle for a soft-ass attack platform where the main arrow, after 3 months of strategerizing, was that his wife sent him as a boondoggle to an area where he was a demonstrable expert?

you might argue 'well - that's the best dirt they could find on him - it's all they had to work with.' i'd reply "so fucking what?" they turned john kerry into a purple bandaid, and john mccain into a niggerluvva, and iraq into WMDland and murtha in cindy sheehan and cindy sheehan into film-maker Ramsey Moore - surely they wouldn't be constrained by having to using 'truth' when it came to wilson.

Phelps and Royce also cited a "senior intelligence official" who said that Plame did not recommend her husband for the Niger job, adding, "There are people elsewhere in the government who are trying to make her look like she was the one who was cooking this up, for some reason. I can't figure out what it could be. We paid his (Wilson's) airfare. But to go to Niger is not exactly a benefit. Most people you'd have to pay big bucks to go there." Wilson said he was reimbursed only for expenses.
me neither - the official story doesn't make any fucking sense, even though i've probably heard it 10,000 times since the story first broke.

In the last week of September, Novak modified his story. In an appearance on CNN's Crossfire, he said, "Nobody in the Bush administration called me to leak this," and also that, "according to a confidential source at the C.I.A., Mrs. Wilson was an analyst, not a spy, not a covert operative, and not in charge of undercover operatives."
that sure seems to be a big mouthful of lies.

It did not, in his mind -or in the opinion of his wife-excuse what had happened. Plame herself thought instantly that the leak was illegal. Even members of her family did not know what she did.
compare that with the fact that she told wilson on the 3rd date that she was a spy....

To some conservative pundits, it seemed incredible that Wilson could have caused such mayhem on his own without the help of some left-wing umbrella group. Clifford May received the following in an e-mail from someone who asked him to check out Wilson's background. The e-mailer wrote:

Think how hard it is to pull off (a trifecta of a Sunday New York Times op-ed, a Sunday Washington Post story by staff writers Richard Leiby and Walter Pincus, and an appearance on one of the Sunday talk shows) even if you're a senior member of the Senate or a top politico.

He added, "This is sheer brilliance, and it's not Wilson's brilliance that we're seeing."
to my eternal disappointment, i kinda agree with my distinguished zombie colleagues on the right. wilson did cause a lot of mayhem - and while i don't know how difficult it is to pull of a 'trifecta', it's also true that it took an invasion and a 'victory' before wilson scored his perfect troika.

In August he had been approached by Carroll & Graf Publishers to write a memoir. As his and Plame's story hit the headlines, he still had not signed a deal. Yet he honored his oral agreement, and, according to Carroll & Graf executive editor Philip Turner, made no effort to ask for more money or conduct an auction among publishing houses. In fact, initially he did not want the publisher to take the book to the Frankfurt Book Fair to sell the foreign rights, because "I (didn't) want to create an impression, a false impression, that (I was) trying to cash in on this," he says. But then someone informed him that Novak had written about him finding a literary agent, implying Wilson was doing just that. He told his editor, "Go to Frankfurt! Flog that sucker. I'm entitled to make a living in this country."
does anyone believe any part of the 'foreign rights' story? i don't begrudge him the right to sell books - but why lie about it?

Former federal prosecutor James Orenstein says, "They are pulling punches.... They haven't subpoenaed reporters. When (White House counsel Alberto) Gonzales asked the prosecutor at the Justice Department for a chance to vet the information (the White House was turning over), they said yes. There may be good reason. But they can't say that they're not pulling punches."
wow - two interesting stories there. the first is that fitz wasn't being a maverick when he called reporters, it was embarassing that they hadn't already done it. secondly, the reporter is openly calling out abu gonzales - is the journo alluding to the delay between abu gonzales receiving the request and his email to all staff, or something else?

in summary, i think that this is a remarkably under-referenced article - even i have never read it before. the brouhaha over 'the photo' apparently undermined the message of the entire piece (which had some inexcusably odd journalistic moments)

that photo, and the entire article, has led many to ask 'why did they do it?' - i don't know the answer to that question but it's a good question. as wilson himself notes, he has never before been in the public light - despite the awesome story of him 'bringing his own rope', literally, to saddam, at a time of war.

another thing i might point o ut - just cos i've always found it curious - is the narrative that Wilson debunked the uranium claims when he went to niger. i don't know if the wingnuts accept the narrative (cos i can't deal with hanging in the wingnutosphere) but the official left blogistan version is that wilson went to niger and had tea with some folks and categorically certified that there was no such deal. i'm certain that there was no deal - but it's odd that the wingnuts chose to focus on the dubious claim that his wife him, rather than say, corruption is endemic in africa, or that 'he was just a diplomat' or 'a UN pansy' or some such.

remember, these people are masters of message AND this issue occupied the OVP for months before the story broke. the message we received from the rightwingnoisemachine was the one they wanted us to hear.

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