hot on the heels of my post yesterday asking about the curious last para in Novak's July 14 Plame-outing article:
"The story, actually, is whether the administration deliberately ignored Wilson's advice, and that requires scrutinizing the CIA summary of what their envoy reported. The Agency never before has declassified that kind of information, but the White House would like it to do just that now -- in its and in the public's interest."Murray Waas has a new article out:
"Vice President Dick Cheney directed his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on July 12, 2003 to leak to the media portions of a then-highly classified CIA report that Cheney hoped would undermine the credibility of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, a critic of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, according to Libby's grand jury testimony in the CIA leak case and sources who have read the classified report.except novak was still pushing for a declassification a couple of days later in an article dated July 14.
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The previously unreported grand jury testimony is significant because only hours after Cheney reportedly instructed Libby to disclose information from the CIA report, Libby divulged... that Plame was a CIA officer, and that she been involved in selecting her husband for the Niger mission.
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A relatively small amount of information derived from the March 2002 report was revealed on July 11, 2003, when then-CIA Director George Tenet released a statement regarding Wilson's trip to Niger in which he disclosed some aspects of the debriefing described in the document. But other portions remained highly classified at the time that Cheney directed Libby to leak portions of the report, two senior government officials said in interviews. These officials say the White House abandoned its attempt to declassify all or part of the March 2002 report when Tenet released his statement.
the question remains - what is in Wilson's report that is still too important for it to be declassified? So important that the WH backed off even though they didn't really undermine Wilson, or maybe they'd already achieved what they wanted because they already had Novak on board to out Plame - but then, Novak was still pushing for declassification once Plame was outed, and once the WH had apparently backed off.
4 comments:
Yours isn't the only blog that's led with a similar headline in writing about the latest Waas article, but having read it closely I don't see him making that claim. In fact, he points out that the Wilson debriefing report Cheney told Libby to leak doesn't mention Plame. Instead, Waas writes that, according to two sources who have seen it, the report "made no mention of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, then a covert CIA officer, or any role she may have played in her husband's selection by the CIA to go to Niger..."
Waas does point up the fact that Libby leaked Plame's name to reporters Miller and Cooper within hours of being instructed to leak the Wilson debriefing, but as far as reporting Cheney gave the green light to the Plame leak, I don't see that Waas has reported that yet. -- cs
cs - you are correct - the headline isn't technically true. waas also says: "But the disclosure that Cheney instructed Libby to leak portions of a classified CIA report on Joseph Wilson adds to a growing body of information showing that at the time Plame was outed as a covert CIA officer the vice president was deeply involved in the White House effort to undermine her husband."
cheers
the question remains - what is in Wilson's report that is still too important for it to be declassified?
Betcha $20 (CA or AU, your call) it has something to do with a nation whose name starts I-R-A but doesn't end in Q...
aha - you aren't gettin my money!
theres more here
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