Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Sibel, plame and Brewster Jennings

here are some more thoughts on larisa's story

I'm just looking back over some old posts of mine, trying to see if there's anything that ties it all up... so here are some random thoughts.

I haven't pointed to a lot of my posts related to this issue - so it's probably not a bad idea to go (re)read them. (they didn't come up in any of the conversations with sibel)

This is probably the most significant post related to this issue:
"My question then, given that the egadmin spent 2 months planning the leak of her name, is it more likely that they did it to:
a) discredit Wilson (which failed spectacularly, and could never have succeeded), or
b) shine the light on BrewsterJennings (which succeeded spectacularly, and could never have failed)?

[snip]

Surely the maladministration knew the implications, exactly - they'd been thinking obsessing about it for months, and they went out of their way to cover their tracks. Not only did they know that it was illegal to do what they were doing, they surely also knew that BrewsterJennings would be exposed - surely we need to consider that the purpose of the outing was to out BJ, rather than some silly attempt to undermine Joe Wilson. In fact, given the extent to which they devised elaborate cover stories, surely we should at least consider the possibility that the 'get wilson' story is really just another level of cover..."
the rest of the post tries to rescue just about everyone from the apparently universal idiocy that Plame was outed to get at Wilson, and more specifically, that the long-set-in-stone idea that thePlame leak was "Clearly... meant purely and simply for revenge" - as reported in the 'blockbuster' Sep29 front-pager in the WaPo.

The problem with that story is that the Senior Administration Official who was the source for planting that meme is anonymous - and we don't know what their intentions were. The best guess is that it was Grossman, who Sibel fingered as being one of the main culprits. In other words, they got busted trying to protect their arms & drug trafficking network, and they VERY successfully claimed that they were just being childish (despite the fact that the story doesn't make any sense.)

similarly, i take the knife to this post by Steve Clemons where he asks who the "white knight" source is for the article.

and i basically end with:
"if sibel is anywhere near on-the-money, and if emptywheel is right that grossman is the source, and if i'm right that plamegate doesnt make any sense if you look at the outing of plame as an attempt to undermine Joe Wilson, then we have ourselves a helluva scandal. if my hypothesis is correct - the intent was actually to out brewsterjennings - presumably because they (BJ) were getting too close to something."
and then there's this post - again looking at that same WaPo article by Priest & Allen:
"If it was Grossman, is there any evidence (apart from this) that he 'turned on' the Bush Administration? (actually i'm sure they all turn each other on in some weird way) or was this all for show? We didn't see him get SwiftBoated or hounded out of office (although he left and went to work for Cohen). There were no reports of him being woodshedded or anything - so if Grossman was the 'leaker', then he apparently didn't get thrown off the reservation, and he apparently hasn't done any other 'negative' leaking since. In fact, nobody appeared to get in trouble for this leak...
My guess is that Grossman was asked to leak this to the press in order to codify an existing rumour that ms wilson was outed as punishment for joe wilson, and to throw people off the possibility that Plame was outed for reasons to do with Brewster Jennings - because that trail would lead directly to mr grossman himself."
Here's a post called "Outing Plame? or Outing Brewster Jennings?":
"At a minimum, if the outing of Plame was a 'shot across the bow' - then the leakers must have known that Plame was undercover, and not a deskjockey - otherwise they were just shooting blanks. And if they knew that she was undercover, and they had been investigating her for 2 months, then they surely would have known that she was working for BrewsterJennings *and* that she was working on WMD and counter-proliferation, and they must surely have known that outing her "would have compromised every operation, every relationship, every network with which she had been associated her entire career, " as David Corn realised immediately."

In this post, i point to a quote from Wilson's book
"Throughout the two years I was at European Command, our relations with the Turkish military needed constant attention. [ deputy commander in chief, U.S. European Command] Jim Jamerson was on the phone several times a week with the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Marc Grossman, working on the most trivial details."
Grossman et al micro-managing the Turkish military? odd, huh.

I also wrote:
"larisa's latest articles have been frustrating - it's easy to triangulate and see what she's actualy thinking/investigating, but she has been very careful not to make any statement that she can't support, and she apparently doesn't wanna scoop herself on the *real* story."
and back in early January when Larisa wrote about Feith possibly planting WMD in Iraq, I wrote:
"I've been hoping that Larisa would break a story about BJ - she's chosen an odd entree piece to tiptoe into the waters."
I'm very glad that she has broken the story :-)

m.o.r.e.s.o.o.n.

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