Gratitude
We woke this morning to considerably cooler temps and stillness … not the kind that scares the bejesus out of you, not the retreat of normal sound overlaid by the whir of helicopter blades and the roar of wind — in fact I heard birds this morning for the first time since last weekend. The stillness is that of normality … no tree’s chattering and thrashing, no gusts tunneling through the streets. The fires are not contained, but they’re not spreading now — we’re not under threat, here, and God/dess please, the worst is over.
Here’s link to the article I did for the cover, Fire In The Wind.
There is so much to be grateful for today — those Wavers I mentioned yesterday have checked in and they’re ok, as well. I can feel the tension begin to leave my body, revealing the exhaustion that has been lurking there from too much adrenalin and the constant sense of alert that did not allow for rest. Time to fall down, now — for a bit, anyhow. So, lots of gratitude today — and pride in the California spirit. Thanks, everybody, for the good thoughts and prayers.
Meanwhile, the Dubby is expected today, rerouting himself from another speaking gig in St. Louis — he’s anxious to put a “this is not Katrina” happy face on this disaster … but lack of resources has played into the Fed’s ability to respond to this, and certainly lack of military assist. Here are some reads — here, here and here.
Having ignored politics for the immediacy of life these last days, now I don’t know where to start. I’m posting a few reads on Plamegate, before the story gets away. Since her book came out, Valerie has been blogging over at Huffy, BuzzFlash and others have done interviews; her story has gotten out … how she was working on identifying Iranian WMD — not the little “secretary” the NeoCon’s all insisted she was. But then … very LITTLE is what they insisted it was, now that the worms are all crawling away from the can. Plame’s outing was treasonous … but we will never NEVER hear them admit it, and nobody seems poised on holding them accountable.
Jude
The spy comes in from the cold
Valerie Plame Wilson has written a personal account of helplessly observing her career being shattered, as in an out-of-body experience.
Sidney Blumenthal
October 23, 2007
None of Valerie Plame’s elaborate training to become an elite covert operative for the CIA prepared her for the byzantine, vicious and dispiriting smear campaigns directed against her and her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, in George Bush’s Washington.
When he felt compelled to tell the truth about President Bush’s false rationale for the invasion of Iraq - the infamous 16 words in his 2003 State of the Union address claiming Saddam Hussein was securing yellow cake uranium for nuclear weapons - vice president Dick Cheney ordered the defamation of Wilson’s reputation. When the White House apparatus was instantly set in motion, with Cheney’s chief of staff Lewis “Scooter” Libby serving as the action officer on the op, and Karl Rove and Ari Fleischer relentlessly pressing the “scoop” on reporters, Plame still toiled away unknowing at her job at the CIA, seeking information about the existence of weapons of mass destruction, not only in Iraq but also Iran and other dangerous places.
In the blink of an eye, as quickly as Rove says to Chris Matthews, the host of MSNBC’s Hardball, “Wilson’s wife is fair game,” Plame’s carefully constructed secret identity, her worldwide network of informants and the vital flow of intelligence on WMDs were blown apart.
Valerie Plame Wilson’s book, Fair Game - My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House, is her personal account of helplessly observing her career being shattered, as in an out-of-body experience. Fair Game is rife with long redacted passages that the CIA censors insisted upon, though the information they blacked out was mostly on the public record. The publisher, Simon & Schuster recruited investigative reporter Laura Rozen to fill in these blanks in an indispensable afterword. The omissions only heighten the intrigue.
In the beginning Plame appears as Jane Bond. She describes her schooling in the arts of spycraft at the CIA’s “farm,” where she discovers among other things that she is a crack shot, unafraid of diving out of planes and crawling through enemy fire. The details of her training discredit the long propagated falsehood by a host of conservative spinners, from the columnist Robert Novak to the attorney Victoria Toensing, that Plame was never a covert operative. Plame’s account of her clandestine work based at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, which also required trips abroad, further demolishes the lie.
After years in the field, Plame is assigned to a new group called the Counterproliferation Division within the Department of Operations, dubbed as the “island of misfit toys” within the agency. The search for WMDs becomes a concentrated goal. In the run up to the war in Iraq, Plame is one of the key officers tasked to locate them. One of the most knowledgeable operatives, she continues to believe that it is highly likely that Saddam indeed has WMDs and is hiding them. Moreover, CIA director George Tenet sends around a memo, which also is intended for the Congress then voting on the authorization for the use of military force, claiming that there are proven links between Saddam and al-Qaida - false information that Plame (and Congress) has no way of knowing is wrong. Plame works night and day to attempt to make the case, but fails to unearth evidence.
On February 5 2003, secretary of state Colin Powell presents the “facts” before the United Nations security council. Tenet sits behind Powell to underscore the reliability of his speech. “When the program ended and we all drifted back to our desks,” writes Plame, “I was deeply upset, my head spinning. I was experiencing what I can only call cognitive dissonance … I had been tracking Iraqi WMD efforts carefully for some time [redacted] and the facts I knew simply did not match up with what Powell had just presented.” Later, of course, Powell’s presentation was revealed as utter disinformation.
At the time, Plame wondered: “Perhaps someone had managed to recruit a source deep inside Saddam’s innermost circle who was providing alarming evidence of his plans.” She has no knowledge that what Powell says is true. “The idea that my government, which I had served loyally for years, might be exaggerating a case for war was impossible to comprehend. Nothing made sense.”
After Bush’s declaration of “mission accomplished,” Wilson discloses in a New York Times opinion piece, What I didn’t find In Africa, that the administration’s justification for war was rooted in falsehood. Having been sent to Niger to uncover Saddam’s nefarious uranium buying scheme, he reported to the CIA that he could find no such evidence. The supposed documents used to prove it turned out to be forged. Who forged them remains a mystery. Immediately upon publication of Wilson’s op-ed, Cheney swings his underlings into action. Plame becomes collateral damage.
The reason for destroying the cover of a CIA operative was purely political. Cheney, et al showed absolutely no concern for protecting national security. Rather, they were intent on defending the administration and their policies from Wilson’s truthful revelation. Wilson had to be besmirched, and so they outed Plame. Systematically, they told reporters that she was behind sending her husband on the mission, a “junket,” as Cheney calls it, in order to distract and discredit. With her identity exposed, Plame’s utility was at an end. There can be no doubt that this breach seriously compromised national security.
One abiding mystery unaddressed in Plame’s book remains the role of former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who corroborated Novak’s story (Rove being his main source) and leaked Plame’s name to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward for potential use in a book to be published later (not for a current newspaper article). The close friend and number two to Powell, Armitage was not one of the neoconservatives or part of Cheney’s bureaucratic machinery.
Why Armitage? Armitage himself has yet to explain. Nor do we know the full contents of his grand jury testimony, though it may be unlikely that his exact motives were subject to interrogation by the special prosecutor. Sources in the intelligence community tell me that Armitage wished to be appointed CIA director in Bush’s second term. Armitage also had a long relationship with Rove.
Moreover, Armitage had never before deigned to speak with or even return a phone call from Novak. Yet he called Novak himself to confirm Plame’s identity. It seems inconceivable that Armitage did this completely at his own initiative. Pointing to Armitage as a leaker settles nothing. Libby, Rove and Fleischer, meanwhile, were all leaking furiously. And Armitage has yet to explain.
After her outing, Plame enters a bewildering world. The spymaster becomes the prey. Her government degrades the valued agent. The lies come so fast they are impossible to rebut. Detailed explanations exploding the falsehoods are ignored by a complicit press.
The Republican-controlled Senate select committee on intelligence summons Plame and her CIA colleagues, only to issue a false report, given credence by the editorial page of the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. The testimony of her fellow operative at the CIA who actually recommended Wilson for his Niger mission is deliberately omitted. Distressed, he tells Plame, “They twisted my testimony … I recommended Joe for the trip, don’t you remember. I told the committee this, but they didn’t include it in the report.” This officer writes a memo asking for permission from the CIA “that he be allowed to testify again to the committee to correct the record, but was told unequivocally that that was not possible.”
Her career is ruined, his business has dried up. The lies rain down. The Washington Post editorial page, a stalwart ally of Libby throughout his trial, publishes an editorial on September 1 2006, blaming Wilson for the outing of his wife, and repeating lock, stock and barrel the falsehood of the Republican propaganda from the Senate intelligence committee. “I suddenly understood what it must have felt like to live in the Soviet Union and have only the state propaganda entity, Pravda, as the source of news about the world.”
Even before the Libby guilty verdict, the CIA begins censoring her manuscript. She is not permitted to write the birth dates of her children: “It was the bureaucratic equivalent of Groundhog Day … ”
Wilson and Plame do not attend the trial, of course, but follow it on the internet through the assiduous courtroom reporting of the team for Firedoglake.com. The documentation introduced by the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, demolishes Libby’s defense - and the smear campaign - though those publications that perpetrated it make no amends, including the Post’s editorial page.
Instead, on the weekend before the closing arguments, the Post’s Outlook section publishes Victoria Toensing’s mendacious article accusing Wilson of “misleading the public about how he was sent to Niger,” insisting that Fitzgerlad has no reason for an investigation and that Plame was “not covert.” The Post makes no effort to publish another piece in Outlook containing the facts.
With the verdict finding Libby guilty of obstruction of justice and perjury, the case is closed. But the truth remains to be known. Libby has successfully covered up for Cheney. According to Fitzgerald, a “cloud” remains over the vice president. Then Bush pardons Libby, completing the obstruction. Cheney escapes.
Fair Game is one of the essential documents of the Bush era, a harrowing personal account of betrayal. The betrayals of the Bush administration have become so numerous that they seem almost casual by now. Yet for Valerie Plame Wilson the personal was more than political. Betraying her was not just another lie, another smear, another Swift-boating. It was a breach of national security.++
VIDEO: Valerie Plame on 60 Minutes - ‘Bush Is Not a Man of His Word’
Outed, Covert CIA Spy - Who Had Been Working on WMD in Iraq and Iran - in Her First Broadcast Network Interview
PLUS: A Former Colleague Says She Was Held Hostage and Tortured, And When Threatened by Al Qaeda, the White House Refused to Take Action…
Brad Friedman, Bradblog
10/21/07
Yes, she was covert until being outed by the White House.
Yes, she was monitoring nuclear weapons and other WMD going into and coming out of Iraq and Iran, as RAW STORY’s Larisa Alexandrovna correctly and originally and exclusively reported in February of 2006.
Yes, her outing led to a still-classified CIA damage assessment and “serious” consequences” to other members of her CIA intelligence network.
No, despite Bush’s promise, no one has ever been held accountable for leaking her identity in the first such outing of a covert CIA operative by agents of the U.S. Government itself.
No, Bush “is not a man of his word,” as Valerie Plame Wilson told 60 Minutes tonight in her first broadcast network interview. Here’s the video in two parts… [open link]
Some of what Plame is still not allowed to say, including details about “being taken hostage and subjected to torture for two days,” is covered by her former CIA colleague, Larry Johnson, right here…
And in another posting today, Johnson gives us some details from Plame’s new book, Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House, in which it’s disclosed that “In 2004 the FBI received intelligence that Al Qaeda hit teams were en route to the United States to kill Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Valerie Plame.”
So what did the White House do about it? Johnson tells us…
When the White House learned of these threats they sprung into action. They beefed up Secret Service protection for Vice President Cheney and provided security protection to Karl Rove. But they declined to do anything for Valerie. That was a CIA problem.
Valerie contacted the office of Security at CIA and requested assistance. They told her too fucking bad and to go pound sand. They did not use those exact words, but they told her she was on her own.
Amazing. ++
Plame Book Reveals Imperial Washington
Chris Lehmann, New York Observer
October 23, 2007
This article was published in the October 29, 2007, edition of The New York Observer.
Toward the end of Fair Game, Valerie Plame Wilson recounts how, in the midst of the furor over Washington journalists Matt Cooper of Time and Judith Miller refusing to cooperate with Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation into the White House-orchestrated leak of Wilson’s identity to the press, she and her husband ran into Cooper and his wife, former Clinton White House adviser Mandy Grunwald, on the streets of Georgetown. As Valerie Wilson—known forevermore as “Plame” in D.C. circles thanks to the Bob Novak column leaking her identity—walked ahead, Cooper buttonholed her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, and made a pitch: “After opening pleasantries, Cooper paused for a moment, obviously struggling to say something. Finally he asked, ‘Could you do something for me?’ He wanted Joe to write the judge on the leak case and request clemency for Matt in the hopes it would help keep him out of jail.”
Once they were seated at the restaurant they’d been walking toward, the couple and their dinner companions “marveled over this strange request. … A request from Joe for leniency on Joe’s behalf would carry little or no weight with the presiding judge. More pointedly, it was obviously in our interest to have the reporters testify. … We wanted to know what sources in the administration had leaked my name to the media.”
Wilson doesn’t linger any further on this desperate little set piece, but it speaks volumes about how business is done among the lords of Washington consensus. The native dialect of journalists at the court society of the Bush administration such as Cooper is the argot of the deal. It was, after all, one such deal—the granting of anonymity to his own White House Source, the Plame-bashing Karl Rove—that had landed Cooper in this legal plight in the first place. One can almost hear the wheels spinning in his flailing effort to charm Wilson’s husband: Surely there’s a deal somewhere I can cut to get myself out of this mess. (It’s also quite revealing of the protocols of this deal-making set that Cooper would approach Wilson, who had only provided the inadvertent cause in the case involving his wife’s outing—a New York Times Op-Ed denouncing the Bush White House’s fraudulent claim that Saddam Hussein had sought to purchase weapons-grade uranium from the African nation of Niger—rather than his wife, the person actually wronged in the legal proceeding. Should the jail-averse Cooper seek to win the couple’s mercy in any meaningful sense of the term, she would have been the proper target for his appeal, and his apologies.) But of course, once a gavel and a contempt citation come into play, the deal-making stops. Matt Cooper was, quite literally, spinning out of control.
Cooper ultimately was spared a jail sentence at the 11th hour, when Rove coughed up an anonymity waiver.
The entire effort to smear the Wilsons grew out of similar petty, self-interested overtures. Bush apparatchiks from the office of the vice president on down used their own access to the D.C. press corps to mount the whispering campaign against the Wilsons, which was itself predicated on the uninformed assumption that exposing the former ambassador’s wife would show Joe Wilson up as an anemic D.C. girly man.
As most Americans now know—and as Plame makes painstakingly clear across the detailed course of her “why-is-this-happening” narrative—the Plame outing, like the war that midwifed it, wound up showcasing the low-minded, truth-averse culture of imperial Washington. A career covert operations officer who went on to head the Counterproliferations Division’s search for WMD’s in Iraq, Plame would have actually supplied useful counsel to the war-making councils of the White House, had they chosen to listen; while convinced that Hussein posed an ongoing threat to regional security and U.S. interests, Plame and her division could never confirm that he had fulfilled—or really, even successfully revived—his long-standing ambitions to obtain WMD capabilities. No matter—by the reasoning of the assorted bullies and toadies making the case for invasion, the invasion would do the effective work that human intelligence and U.N. weapons inspections teams couldn’t. The unofficial Bush slogan on verifying WMD caches may as well have been “Bomb it, and they will come.”
From her perch as a professional, Plame consistently marvels at the shabby lies fueling both the war and the campaign to out her—registering, for example, genuine wonder at the first Bush White House’s premier press flak, Ari Fleischer’s trial testimony showing up his total ignorance of C.I.A. protocols and the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which he and other senior Bush officials had carelessly violated. When Fleischer announced before the court, “[Never] in my wildest dreams would I have thought the information was classified,” Plame’s reaction is admirably sharp and to the point: “If he was so surprised that his actions might have adverse national security implications, then he’s not smart enough to work at the White House. That goes for all the officials who thought that using my name as catnip was just playing the Washington game as usual.”
That would be a suitable last word to the whole sordid business—but of course that wouldn’t be in character for the D.C. deal-makers. As is the routine with all books by former intelligence officials, Plame submitted the manuscript for Fair Game to the C.I.A.’s Publications Review Board for prepublication vetting. Expecting to field—and accommodate—some agency request to suppress compromising information here and there, Plame was shocked to find that the PRB reviewers had blocked out long stretches of the book outlining the rather unexceptional events of her career prior to the period covered by her involuntary outing by the White House. After a threat to halt publication altogether, and a lawsuit from her publisher, Simon and Schuster (currently under appeal), the book was published with the redactions intact, so that the initial chapters—covering the career material the C.I.A. deemed verboten—sport page-long stretches of nothing but black bars, and the reader never hears Plame’s account of such key narrative matters as her first meetings with her husband—absurdly, he pops up initially in the biographical narrative as the father of the couple’s twins. Initially, the reader feels like the book may be a big Nabokov-style jest. But in a clever end run around the C.I.A.’s strictures, Plame’s publisher hired national security journalist Laura Rozen to compose an “afterword” that fills in the many narrative blanks with information that was already, after all, in the public record. Despite the disjointed character of the text, it serves to underline an important point: Power in Bush-era Washington is all about who gets to tell what kind of redacted story. ++
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
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