CIA Asks for Criminal Probe of White House Treason

[MMMMMM]

"It's just fodder for die-hards that refuse to believe anything negative about Bush."

OK what about die-hards that refuse to believe anything positive about Bush?;-)

[Chris Alger]

"Novak said the CIA asked him not to disclose Plame's name, 'but never indicated it would endanger her or anybody else,' and that he was led to believe that she was 'an analyst, not a spy, not a covert operative, and not in charge of undercover operatives.' Novak was wrong on those accounts, according to the CIA. 'We wouldn't file a crimes report' if the case didn't involve an agent undercover, a U.S. official said.

Today's LA Times

[Wake up CALL]

[ QUOTE ]
"Novak said the CIA asked him not to disclose Plame's name, 'but never indicated it would endanger her or anybody else,' and that he was led to believe that she was 'an analyst, not a spy, not a covert operative, and not in charge of undercover operatives.' Novak was wrong on those accounts, according to the CIA. 'We wouldn't file a crimes report' if the case didn't involve an agent undercover, a U.S. official said.

Today's LA Times


[/ QUOTE ]

You want to have your cake and eat it too I see. First we should believe the CIA on this matter and not Novak but we should believe Novak or Wilson about the source off the leak being from the current administration. Any other topics where we need to use selective reasoning in order to believe you?

[Chris Alger]

None of what you just wrote makes any sense at all.

[Wake up CALL]

[ QUOTE ]
None of what you just wrote makes any sense at all.

[/ QUOTE ]

I agree since what I wrote is what you expect us to believe. Hard to believe we are on agreement on this matter. Does this mean you have changed your opinion?

[Cyrus]

"What about die-hards that refuse to believe anything positive about Bush?"

You mean, you mean there is actually something positive about Bush? Whoa.

What, what, what?

[Chris Alger]

10,000 dead and counting for no good reason? Our cup runneth over.

[MMMMMM]

"...for no good reason"

I guess that about sums up your views on the subject, eh, Chris?

[yellowjacket]

For those who don't think that this is a big deal, Larry Johnson, a Republican CIA analyst, was on Newshour last night and he, shall we say, slightly disagreed:

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This not an alleged abuse. This is a confirmed abuse. I worked with this woman. She started training with me. She has been under cover for three decades. She is not as Bob Novak suggested a "CIA analyst." Given that, i was a CIA analyst for 4 years. I was under cover. I could not divulge to my family outside of my wife that I worked for the CIA until I left the Intelligence Agency on Sept. 30, 1989. At that point I could admit it. The fact that she has been under cover for three decades and that has been divulged is outrageous. She was put undercover for certain reasons. One, she works in an area where people she meets with overseas could be compromised...

For these journalists to argue that this is no big deal... and if I hear another Republican operative suggesting that, well, this was just an analyst. Fine. Let them go undercover. Let's put them go overseas. Let's out them and see how they like it...

I say this as a registered Republican. I am on record giving contributions to the George Bush campaign. This is not about partisan politics. This is about a betrayal, a political smear, of an individual who had no relevance to the story. Publishing her name in that story added nothing to it because the entire intent was, correctly as Amb. Wilson noted, to intimidate, to suggest that there was some impropriety that somehow his wife was in a decision-making position to influence his ability to go over and savage a stupid policy, an erroneous policy, and frankly what was a false policy of suggesting that there was nuclear material in Iraq that required this war. This was about a political attack. To pretend it was something else, to get into this parsing of words.


I tell you, it sickens me to be a Republican to see this.

-Larry Johnson, a former counter-terrorism official at the CIA and the State Department.

[adios]

Political Intelligence

[b]REVIEW & OUTLOOK

Political Intelligence
The agenda behind the kerfuffle over Joe Wilson's wife.

Wednesday, October 1, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT

We've been knocking our heads trying to figure out how a minor and well-known story about an alleged CIA "outing" has suddenly blossomed into a Beltway scandal-ette. The light bulb went off reading Monday's White House press briefing.

Right out of the box, Helen Thomas asked if "the President tried to find out who outed the CIA agent? And has he fired anyone in the White House yet?" OK, the point of this exercise is to get President Bush to fire someone. But whom? That answer became clear when the press corps quickly uttered, and kept uttering for nearly an hour, the name "Karl Rove."

Of course! The reason this is suddenly a story is because Mr. Rove, the President's political strategist and confidant from Texas, has become the main target. Joseph Wilson, the CIA consultant at the center of this mini-tempest, had recently fingered Mr. Rove as the official who leaked to columnist Robert Novak that Mr. Wilson's wife works for the CIA. Mr. Wilson has offered no evidence for this, and he's since retreated to say only that he now believes Mr. Rove had "condoned it." The White House has replied that the charge is "simply not true." But no matter, the scandal game is afoot.

The media, and the Democrats now slip-streaming behind them, understand that the what of this mystery matters much less than the who. It's no accident that Tony Blair's recent and evanescent scandal over WMD evidence concerned his long-time political aide and intimate, Alastair Campbell. We're also old enough to recall what happened to Jimmy Carter's Presidency once his old Georgia friend Bert Lance was run out of town. If they can take down Mr. Rove, the lead planner for Mr. Bush's re-election campaign, they will have knocked the props out of his Presidency.

The political goals must be paramount here because the substance of the story is so flimsy. The law against revealing the names of covert CIA agents was passed in 1982 as a reaction against leaks by Philip Agee and other hard-left types whose goal was to undermine CIA operations around the world. This case is all about a policy dispute over Iraq. The first "outing" here was the one Mr. Wilson did to himself by writing an op-ed in July for the New York Times.

An avowed opponent of war with Iraq, Mr. Wilson was somehow hired as a consultant by the CIA to investigate a claim made by British intelligence about yellowcake uranium sought in Niger by Iraqi agents. Though we assume he signed the routine CIA confidentiality agreement, Mr. Wilson blew his own cover to denounce the war and attack the Bush Administration for lying. Never mind that the British still stand by their intelligence, and that the CIA's own October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, since partly declassified, lent some credence to the evidence.

This is the context in which Mr. Novak was told that Mr. Wilson had been hired at the recommendation of his wife, a CIA employee. This is hardly blowing a state secret but is something the public had a right to know. When an intelligence operative essentially claims that a U.S. President sent American soldiers off to die for a lie, certainly that operative's own motives and history ought to be on the table. In any event, Mrs. Wilson was not an agent in the field but is ensconced at Langley headquarters. It remains far from clear that any law was violated.

The real intelligence scandal is how an open opponent of the U.S. war on terror such as Mr. Wilson was allowed to become one of that policy's investigators. That egregious CIA decision echoes what has obviously been a long-running attempt by anonymous "intelligence sources" quoted in the media to undermine the Bush policy toward Iraq. Mr. Bush's policies of prevention and pursuing state sponsors of terror overturned more than 30 years of CIA anti-terror dogma, and some of the bureaucrats are hoping to defeat him in 2004.

As recently as Monday, the New York Times hung its lead story around a leak that the Pentagon had somehow not got its money's worth from the $1 million it had spent mining some of Ahmed Chalabi's intelligence tips. We'd love to see a declassified bang-for-the-buck analysis of the tens of millions the CIA has spent paying sources who claimed to have Saddam Hussein in their sights. If CIA Director George Tenet can't control his bureaucracy, then President Bush should find a director who can.

Which brings us back to the politics. The Democratic Presidential candidates are naturally all over this pseudo-story, calling for a "special counsel" and Congressional probe. They can suddenly posture as great defenders of the CIA and covert operations, though some of them spent the decades before 9/11 assailing both. And if they can't get Mr. Bush to give up Mr. Rove, perhaps they can keep the story going through next November.

At least we can be thankful that Democrats buried the independent counsel statute during the Clinton years. "Leak" investigations are notoriously fruitless in any case and typically a waste of Justice Department resources. It's especially amusing to see the media whose lifeblood is leaks feigning outrage. We trust that Mr. Bush and Republicans on Capitol Hill understand that if they throw Mr. Rove over the side, the blood in the water will really be theirs.[b]