J's Cafe Nette

Archive for the ‘Plame’ Category

Perhaps we can put this baby to bed once and for all.

WASHINGTON (AP) – A federal judge dismissed former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s lawsuit against members of the Bush administration Thursday, eliminating one of the last courtroom remnants of the leak scandal.
Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had accused Vice President Dick Cheney and others of conspiring to leak her identity in Plame said that violated her privacy rights and was illegal retribution for her husband’s criticism of the administration.

While Bates did not address the constitutional questions, he seemed to side with administration officials who said they were acting within their job duties. Plame had argued that what they did was illegal and outside the scope of their government jobs.

“The alleged means by which defendants chose to rebut Mr. Wilson’s comments and attack his credibility may have been highly unsavory, ” Bates wrote. “But there can be no serious dispute that the act of rebutting public criticism, such as that levied by Mr. Wilson against the Bush administration’s handling of prewar foreign intelligence, by speaking with members of the press is within the scope of defendants’ duties as high-level Executive Branch officials.”

Story here.

Judge Bates full opinion here.

On a side note. If you checked in earlier, yes there was a post by J on this topic with the same title. We decided to update and as the original story now had more information, this is how we chose to do so. Sorry if we made you think you were seeing double.

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More from the never ending story.

Simon & Schuster has joined with its author Valerie Plame Wilson to file a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against the CIA, charging that the agency is interfering with Plame’s efforts to write her memoir. The suit, which names the CIA; the director of the CIA Michael Hayden; and J. Michael McConnell, director of national intelligence, alleges that the executive branch of the government is trying to stop Plame from using the dates she served in the CIA in her book even though those dates have been made public.

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MSNBC is reporting Valerie Plame really was covert when Robert Novak published her name.

We now know that because Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has an attachment to his memorandum to the court supporting his recommendation that I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Cheney’s former top aide, spend 2-1/2 to 3 years in prison for obstructing the CIA leak investigation.

The nature of Plame’s CIA employment never came up in Libby’s perjury and obstruction of justice trial.

Why didn’t it, since that was the basis of the investigation conducted by Fitzgerald anyway?

Why was the so-called lie more important to Fitzgerald than the actual crime of outing a covert CIA agent?

We know now it was Richard Armitage who leaked the information to Robert Novak, by Armitage’s own admission and by Novak’s.

Armitage claims he didn’t know she was covert, but ignorance of the law is no excuse. At least that’s what I was taught in school.

The unclassified summary of Plame’s employment with the CIA at the time that syndicated columnist Robert Novak published her name on July 14, 2003 says, “Ms. Wilson was a covert CIA employee for who the CIA was taking affirmative measures to conceal her intelligence relationship to the United States.”

[...]

The employment history indicates that while she was assigned to CPD, Plame, “engaged in temporary duty travel overseas on official business.” The report says, “she traveled at least seven times to more than ten times.” When overseas Plame traveled undercover, “sometimes in true name and sometimes in alias — but always using cover — whether official or non-official (NOC) — with no ostensible relationship to the CIA.”

From an editorial in Investors Business Daily we read this item in the next to last paragraph:

The Washington Times’ Bill Gertz has reported that U.S. officials said her identity was first disclosed to Russia by a Moscow spy in the mid-1990s. She returned to the U.S. in 1994 because the CIA suspected her cover was blown by turncoat Aldrich Ames.

Interesting. So, that leads me to this Washington Times Gertz piece dated 7/22/04, according to the archives date in the URL.

The identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame was compromised twice before her name appeared in a news column that triggered a federal illegal-disclosure investigation, U.S. officials say.

Mrs. Plame’s identity as an undercover CIA officer was first disclosed to Russia in the mid-1990s by a Moscow spy, said officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

In a second compromise, officials said a more recent inadvertent disclosure resulted in references to Mrs. Plame in confidential documents sent by the CIA to the U.S. Interests Section of the Swiss Embassy in Havana.

The documents were supposed to be sealed from the Cuban government, but intelligence officials said the Cubans read the classified material and learned the secrets contained in them, the officials said.

So, in the 90s it is suspected Aldrich Ames outed her to the Russians and somebody in the CIA itself later outed her to the U.S. Interests Section of the Swiss Embassy in Havana, as in Cuba, as in Castro rules there, and the Cubans got their hands on the information somehow and read it!

Gertz’s article goes on to say:

However, officials said the disclosure that Mrs. Plame’s cover was blown before the news column undermines the prosecution of the government official who might have revealed the name, officials said.

“The law says that to be covered by the act the intelligence community has to take steps to affirmatively protect someone’s cover,” one official said. “In this case, the CIA failed to do that.”

A second official, however, said the compromises before the news column were not publicized and thus should not affect the investigation of the Plame matter.

So, the justification by at least one official is since she wasn’t outed in the US where she should be safe anyway, it should be irrelevant that Russia and Cuba knew her status because they didn’t announce it. Clear?

To summarize, we now supposedly have a real crime committed by Richard Armitage, who wasn’t charged, and Scooter Libby is going to the big house for not remembering which reporter he talked to when.

In the meantime, since the 90s her identity has most likely been known to the Russians and at some point the CIA itself put her name to paper and sent it to Cuba where the Cubans got their grubby little paws on it and knew too.

So, was she outed by Armitage? She wasn’t by Libby. Was she outed by Ames? It appears so. Was she outed by the CIA to Cuba? It looks like it.

I admit to not being the most intelligent person in the blogosphere, but even I can’t buy this story. Somebody please help me.

Others blogging this story: Captains Quarters who says:

So now we have confirmation that Plame did get her cover blown. I suppose the only reason that Fitzgerald didn’t bother to indict Richard Armitage for the crime was that it would have meant explaining how the CIA tried to hide its NOC asset in plain sight.

Macsmind, who isn’t buying the story she was covert at all.

Follow the links and read what others are saying on this topic.

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Kimsch at Musing Minds has transcribed the Valerie Plame statement to the House Committee today.

She mentions by title the Vice President and Scooter Libby by name, but somehow doesn’t mention the one who has admitted to outing her name: Richard Armitage.

Plame would have us believe she was still a covert agent at the time her name was publicly mentioned, when in fact, no one was ever charged with that crime. If she had been covert Armitage would have stood trial for outing a covert CIA agent.

Instead Scooter Libby was convicted of perjury for not remembering who he told about Plame and when.

If Plame’s husband Joe Wilson hadn’t written the article in the New York Times that lied about his mission to Niger none of this would have even been an issue.

I’ll say one thing for Mrs. Wilson: she can certainly pour it on.

I’ve served the United States loyally and to the best of my ability as a Covert Operations Officer for the Central Intelligence Agency. I worked on behalf of the National Security of our country, on behalf of the People of the United States until my name and true [emphasis Plame-Wilson] affiliation were exposed in the national media on July 14th 2003 after a leak by administration officials.

Today I can tell this committee even more. In the run up to Iraq, I worked in the Counterproliferation Division of the CIA, still as a covert officer whose affiliation with the CIA was classified. I raced to discover solid intelligence for senior policy makers on Iraq’s presumed Weapons of Mass Destruction programs. While I helped to manage and run secret worldwide operations against his WMD target from CIA headquarters in Washington, I also traveled to foreign countries on secret missions to find vital intelligence.

Valerie, dear, if you were still covert why was no one ever charged with outing you? Instead we get a runaway jury to convict a man simply because he was a member of the Bush Administration.

His memory was no better and no worse than many of the reporters who testified in the case, but the judge wouldn’t allow a memory expert to testify. That was one of the questions asked in the jury room during deliberations.

The judge also wouldn’t allow testimony about what Libby was working on in detail at the time of the trial because Libby exercised his right not to testify.

No, I don’t feel sorry for Plame-Wilson. I feel sorry for Scooter Libby who faces time in jail and a loss of his savings to protect his name, while still having young children living at home.

Justice would be served if he gets a new trial, the verdict is tossed or he gets the same type of punishment President Clinton got when he was found guilty of perjury to a grand jury—a slap on the wrist and a chance to go on the speaking circuit to make some money after having served his country.

Others blogging on the Plame hearing:Conservative Times, Sister Toldjah,and Powerline.

UpdateYou can see Victoria Toensing’s testimony and reference material here. Victoria Toensing was the attorney working for Goldwater when the law making covert agents names public was written. She wrote the law. Very interesting read.

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