"To me it says that Novak has another source -- one that told him Plame Wilson was an operative in the CIA.Bottom line... I'll repeat myself: The question remains of whether there was a concerted effort to out Valerie Plame Wilson and Brewster Jennings.
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Bottom line: Fitz has not closed his investigation. Armitage is just a distraction from the real inquiry. I'll repeat myself: The question remains of whether there was a concerted effort to use Valerie Plame Wilson's undercover or classified employment status with the CIA in an attempt to smear Joe Wilson and his public statements that Iraq was not attempting to acquire uranium from Niger, as Bush erroneously claimed in his 2003 State of the Union Address."
* christy:
"But this leaves me wondering what the FBI and/or Patrick Fitzgerald may or may not have ultimately gotten from Richard Armitage. And others in this investigative mess.
But the second thing is this: no matter how much of a "decent guy" Richard Armitage may have been considered by colleagues (and reports from a number of people are that he’s a "good guy," fun at work, considerate of colleagues, tough when he needs to be, he and his wife have taken in hundreds of foster kids through the years, etc., etc.), he opened his yap and outed a covert CIA operative through careless gossip. On multiple occasions.
Shameful. Wrong. Deadly careless."
* our very own mamayaga at fdl quotes the nyt: "White House officials wanted to know how much of a role (Plame) had in selecting (JW) for the assignment." - and adds:
"This suggests that they knew Wilson’s wife worked for CIA BEFORE they requested the INR memo, and that Wilson’s wife was the/a major motivation for the request. How does this jibe with what is known about the timeline and the memo?"
* swopa:
"Think about this: Armitage ‘fessed up to the Justice Dept. in October, back when John Ashcroft was still on top of the totem pole.
By late December, not only did everyone not manage to coordinate their stories and let Ashcroft put the whole thing in a box by blaming Armitage, but instead the Justice Dept. investigators have convinced Ashcroft to recuse himself and appoint Fitzgerald.
Obviously, there’s more to this story."
* more from the comments at FDL:
"Armitage’s involvement all along, beginning with his being one of the people who can claim he saw the briefing paper for the Africa trip which initially named Wilson’s wife by name, is no accident. Nor is the way this is uraveling.
Armitage goes way back to Vietnam, Laos, Burma and Thailand with such shady characters as Richard Secord and John Negroponte. All three of these guys have a history of setting up front operations for arms and drug smuggling.
The remnants of Secord’s company, Technology Trading, Intl., which had ties to Armitage’s Bangkok business, are out there. I have a hunch Brewster-Jennings had gotten a whiff of that company’s remains.
Armitage went from Laos to Tehran to Bangkok to Central America in the space of five very busy years during which all sorts of crazy stuff happened in Iran, including the Iran-Contra mess which ties together Armitage, Secord, Negroponte, Ghorbanifar, Khashoggi and the BCCI gang.
As soon as Armitage came into this mix, it struck me that Plame had discovered more about the history of emerging nuclear programs in Pakistan and Iran than the Bushistas and their compadres could handle."
2 comments:
Some of the answers may lie in the still largely-untold history of the 1990's. Secord's final great Iran-Contra-style adventure in Azerbaijan, for example, which is detailed here, is well worth reading about. (If only because it so aptly demonstrates the "second time as farce" rule of history.)
Fascinating things turn up when you start to check out what was going on in Azerbaijan in the 90's. Drug-smuggling, for example. (Largely handled by the Azeri Grey Wolves, who are closely connected with the Turkish Grey Wolves.)
And al Qaeda.
And David Kimche -- the Mossad agent who established Israeli connections with the Kurds back in the 1960's, then plotted with Robert McFarlane to set up both ends of Iran-Contra and also vouched for Ghorbanifar -- was involved in obscure intrigues in Azerbaijan along with Secord in the early 90's
Armitage, of course, ties in with Azerbaijan through his membership in the US-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce (as well as the American Turkish Council) -- but I've never known whether that bunch links up with the Secord-Kimche cluster or not. It's been a couple of years since I was looking at these materials though, and Sibel Edmonds' charges certainly suggest the subject is worth a fresh look
thnx again starroute. you are a wealth of information.
i didnt know that Secord was plying his wares so recently - and that Azerbaijan /MEGA story is indeed well worth the read. it's difficult to know whether to laugh or cry - farce, yes. tragedy, too.
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