"An important and provocative report has just been published that suggests that Iran was the target of much of Valerie Plame's covert investigative work and that outing her identity had far worse consequences than has thus far been acknowledged.quoted in full. i trust that steve doesn't mind.
This information also dovetails with information TWN has been digging up on Iran's interests in Niger uranium.
This is rather huge news. TWN had some knowledge of this Raw Story article before it hit the net and mentioned it was on the way on the WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show earlier today.
There are different directions this story may go.
The first might be that one of the reasons that Plame was outed had to do with bureaucratic and/or political enemies who were predisposed against the intelligence results of her team's Iran WMD-watching efforts. I would have to be further convinced of that case -- as I think that internal pettiness inside the Bush White House over Joe Wilson's public outing of the contrived Iraq-Niger-Uranium gambit is a pretty compelling rationale for Cheney's machine to out Plame.
But another dimension of this story has to do with an assessment of the damage that her outing caused this nation. As we now start down a path towards harder-edged threats against Iran, allies will naturally question the quality of our intelligence given our failures on Iraq WMDs.
If Cheney & Co. outed one of the key intelligence operations monitoring the inputs and outputs of Iran's nuclear program -- then Cheney & Co. did vast damage to our ability to know what is real and contrived inside Iran.
One other piece to this that TWN needs to go back to in notes -- so please take the following with a grain of salt until further sourced -- has to do with Joe Wilson's findings in Niger.
Someone with knowledge of the classified report that Joe Wilson "orally" filed after his now famed investigative trip to Niger shared with me that there were two notes in that report that had nothing to do with Iraq and its purported activities in Niger.
These two notes focused on Iran's interests and possible activities in Niger.
The question is "why would Iran be interested in Niger uranium when it has more than adequate domestic sources of uranium?"
The response that has come from various intelligence sources that I have consulted is that if Iran was trying to access external sources of uranium -- somewhere like Niger -- it is because those "secret efforts" would be outside the international intelligence monitoring of Iran's domestic mining operations.
I do not have the fully articulated "notes" from Joe Wilson's Niger report (in fact, I have just learned that those written "notes" were destroyed), but I have just learned that these Iran-Niger references appear in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on Joe Wilson's Niger trip.
What is fascinating is that one of the staffers of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence mistakenly recorded in the published report that Iraq -- rather than Iran -- attempted to purchase 400-500 tons of uranium. Wilson apparently made clear that it was Iran and not Iraq attempting to make such purchases.
The Washington Post, which reported this inaccuracy -- had to issue a correction that the purchase effort, as reported by Joe Wilson, was made by Iran and not Iraq.
More soon."
I don't know what to make of the Wilson/iran claims.
It looks like this story is about to go BANG
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