Okay this might sound completely stupid

[michigandem2]

but I feel like I am not fully aware of the Valerie Plame issue..I just started posting on this site about a month ago...can someone just quickly run down the story for me? I cna't believe this isn't being looked into fully...but I am not aware of what went on..thanks..I feel stupid! LOL!

[WilliamPitt]

1. A NOC at Bush's Door

http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/6/3671

A NOC at Bush's Door
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Tuesday 24 February 2004

Her name was Valerie Plame, and she was a NOC.

NOC is a designation within the Central Intelligence Agency which means "non-official cover." It denotes an agent working under such deep cover that said agent cannot be officially associated with the American intelligence community in any way, shape or form. In order to keep covered, a NOC will work for the CIA out of a front company, which provides the illusion that the agent is just an ordinary accountant, lawyer or businessperson.

Between the CIA and the agent, a process is created to construct an identity which obscures completely the reality of the agent's true employment. The training of these NOC agents, along with the creation of the cover stories which are known as "legends" within the agency, requires millions of dollars and delicate work. It is, quite literally, a life and death issue. Little or no protection is given to an exposed NOC agent by the American government, an arrangement that is understood by all parties involved. A blown NOC can wind up dead very easily. Because of this, the cadre of NOC agents is small and elite.

Valerie Plame was a NOC working out of a front company named Brewster-Jennings & Associates. To any and all uninformed observers, she was an energy analyst who spent a good deal of time working overseas. In fact, she ran a covert international network dedicated to tracking any person, group or nation that would put weapons of mass destruction into the hands of terrorists.

That is, until the Bush administration got in the way.

The same administration, which invaded Iraq after bullyragging the American people with dire predictions of biological and chemical weapons flooding out of that nation and into the hands of al Qaeda, reached out and crushed the career of an undercover agent working to keep that exact nightmare scenario from unfolding.

The end of Valerie Plame's career came about a week after her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, took to the pages of the New York Times with an editorial that badly embarrassed George W. Bush. Bush, you will recall, stated in his 2003 State of the Union Address that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger to develop nuclear bombs. Wilson had been dispatched to Niger the previous February to determine if that charge, which had been floating around at the time, was valid. He returned after completing his investigation to inform the State Department, the National Security Council, the CIA and the office of Vice President Cheney that the uranium claims were bogus. It was later revealed that the claims were based on crudely forged documents out of Italy.

This didn't stop Bush from using the fraudulent data to terrify the American people into supporting his Iraq invasion during his 2003 Address. Ambassador Wilson replied with a July 6, 2003 editorial which categorically humiliated the administration for allowing this claim to appear in the speech. "America's foreign policy depends on the sanctity of its information," wrote Wilson. "For this reason, questioning the selective use of intelligence to justify the war in Iraq is neither idle sniping nor 'revisionist history,' as Mr. Bush has suggested. The act of war is the last option of a democracy, taken when there is a grave threat to our national security. More than 200 American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq already. We have a duty to ensure that their sacrifice came for the right reasons."

For the record, the number of dead American soldiers in Iraq is now 547. Many thousands more have been grievously wounded. There is no accurate accounting of the number of civilians killed in Iraq, but all estimates run into the tens of thousands. No anthrax, botulinum toxin, sarin gas, mustard gas, VX gas or uranium has been found there.

A week after the Wilson editorial was published, some six journalists along with columnist Robert Novak received telephone calls from two Bush administration officials. The sum and substance of the calls: To inform the journalists that Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent.

It is an open question as to the ultimate purpose behind these calls. One school of thought says the calls were meant to smear Wilson by claiming he only got the Niger assignment because his wife was an agent, thus tagging him with nepotism and undermining his criticisms of the administration. The other school of thought, espoused by Wilson himself, says these administration officials deliberately annihilated the career of Wilson's wife as a warning to Wilson, and to any other insider who might come forward with data damaging to the administration officials. As the old saying goes, kill one and warn one hundred.

In the end, the result was the same. Valerie Plame's career with the CIA is over. Her network, the one that was working to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists, is destroyed. The members of that network are now in mortal peril. The front company Plame worked through, Brewster-Jennings, was exposed as well, destroying the networks of any and all agents besides Plame working from that cover. The American intelligence community is disgusted and furious.

Larry Johnson, former CIA and State Department official who was a classmate of Plame's in the CIA's training program at the Farm, said when the CIA's internal damage assessment is finished, "at the end of the day, (the harm) will be huge and some people potentially may have lost their lives."

"This is not just another leak," said former CIA officer Jim Marcinkowski, who also did CIA training with Plame. "This is an unprecedented exposing of an agent's identity. There's only one entity in the world that can identify you. That's the U.S. government. When the U.S. government does it, that's it."

A February 5 report by UPI titled 'Cheney's Staff Focus of Probe' begins as follows: "Federal law-enforcement officials said that they have developed hard evidence of possible criminal misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick Cheney's office related to the unlawful exposure of a CIA officer's identity last year. The investigation, which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a Justice Department official said. According to these sources, John Hannah and Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, were the two Cheney employees. 'We believe that Hannah was the major player in this,' one federal law-enforcement officer said."

Lewis Libby is one of the most important people on Cheney's staff. Along with John Hannah, who served as one of Cheney's Middle East Policy advisors, Libby was deeply involved in the activities of Rumsfeld's hand-picked Pentagon group, the Office of Special Plans. This group was put together specifically to re-engineer data regarding the threat posed by Iraq so as to manufacture justification for a decision to make war that had already been made. On several occasions, Libby visited CIA headquarters at the behest of Cheney to browbeat CIA analysts into "toughening up" their assessments of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Given all the work Libby and Hannah put in to make sure Bush got his Iraq war, it is no wonder they were less than thrilled with what Ambassador Wilson had to say.

Did these men out a CIA agent and destroy a network that tracked weapons of mass destruction? We may soon know. Attorney General John Ashcroft has recused himself from the investigation. A bulldog of a U.S. Attorney named Patrick Fitzgerald is special prosecutor investigating the matter. Several members of the Bush administration have been dragged before a Grand Jury, including White House spokesman Scott McClellan, McClennan deputy Claire Buchan, former press aide Adam Levine, Republican consultant Mary Matalin, who served as a counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney, White House communications director Dan Bartlett, former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer and Cheney aide Cathie Martin.

According to a Newsday report from February 22 titled 'Panel Questions White House Aides,' during the grand jury sessions, "Press aides were confronted with internal White House documents, mainly e-mails and telephone logs, between White House aides and reporters and questioned about conversations with reporters. The logs indicate that several White House officials talked to Novak shortly before the appearance of his July 14 column. According to the New York Times, the set of documents that prosecutors repeatedly referred to in their meetings with White House aides are extensive notes compiled by I. Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff and national security adviser."

Further reports indicate the journalists who were called may be questioned. Fitzgerald's first act as special prosecutor was to ask White House staffers to sign a waiver which allows those journalists to speak without violating confidentiality. This would determine, immediately, which administration official violated national security, destroyed a WMD network, and endangered the life of an agent. George W. Bush has promised to cooperate with Fitzgerald's investigation, but as of this date, those waivers have not been signed.

Her name was Valerie Plame, and she was a NOC. She was keeping weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists. What was the Bush administration doing?

==================

http://truthout.org/docs_03/093003A.shtml

The Most Insidious of Traitors
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Tuesday 30 September 2003

"Even though I'm a tranquil guy now at this stage of my life, I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors."

-- George Herbert Walker Bush, 1999

Karl Rove, senior political advisor to George W. Bush, is a very powerful man. That is not to say he has never been in trouble. Rove was fired from the 1992 Bush Sr. campaign for trashing Robert Mosbacher, Jr., who was the chief fundraiser for the campaign and an avowed Bush loyalist. Rove accomplished this trashing of Mosbacher by planting a negative story with columnist Bob Novak. The campaign figured out that Karl had done the dirty deed, and he was given his walking papers.

Demonstrably, Rove is back in the saddle again. The January 2003 edition of Esquire magazine carried an article by Ron Suskind which quoted comments from John DiIulio, a domestic policy advisor to the White House who had just retired from his post. On October 24, DiIulio had sent a letter to Suskind describing what he had seen while working for the Bush administration. The meat of the letter described an administration far, far more interested in raw political triangulation and ruthless spin than in actual policy and government functionality. Some excerpts from DiIulio's letter:

"Some are inclined to blame the high political-to-policy ratios of this administration on Karl Rove...some staff members, senior and junior, are awed and cowed by Karl's real or perceived powers. They self-censor lots for fear of upsetting him, and, in turn, few of the president's top people routinely tell the president what they really think if they think that Karl will be brought up short in the bargain. Karl is enormously powerful, maybe the single most powerful person in the modern, post-Hoover era ever to occupy a political advisor post near the Oval Office."

Even a casual political observer would have trouble missing the fact that this is one of the sharpest political outfits ever to reside in the Oval Office. Bush's team is a unified wall, cemented to their message-of-the-day, and they have done very well for themselves because of this. All of this can be laid at the feet of Karl Rove, the senior political advisor to George W. Bush. According to DiIulio, the preeminence of political considerations within this administration is so complete that any and all policy considerations or contemplation of actual issues are not so much in the back seat as they are in the trunk below the spare tire and the jack. This, again, can be laid at the feet of Mr. Rove.

All of Washington and the country has been buzzing for the last few days over a report that the CIA has asked the Justice Department to investigate the White House regarding a matter of important national security. The wife of a former ambassador named Joseph Wilson, it has been alleged, was 'outed' as an active CIA agent to columnist Robert Novak by this White House in an act of political revenge.

Joseph Wilson was the man dispatched to Niger in February of 2002 by the CIA, after Vice President Dick Cheney asked CIA to figure out whether there was any substance to the charge that Iraq was attempting to procure uranium "yellow cake" from that nation for the purpose of starting a nuclear weapons program. Ambassador Wilson went, investigated, and returned eight days later to state flatly that the evidence was garbage. He has claimed since that his analysis was one of three intelligence reports debunking the Niger story. Ambassador Wilson told this to Cheney's office, the CIA, the State Department, and the National Security Council. Despite the fact that Wilson made it clear that these allegations were untrue - it was revealed that the 'evidence' to support the Niger uranium charge was a pile of crudely forged documents - George W. Bush used the Niger uranium evidence dramatically in his 2003 State of the Union address.

In July, Ambassador Wilson went very public, criticizing the White House for using evidence to support war that they knew was patently false. One week later, Robert Novak reported that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative. As it turns out, two senior White House officials cold-called six different journalists and informed them of Valerie Plame's status as a CIA agent, according to an anonymous administration official quoted by the Washington Post. None of the journalists ran the story. That same administration official was quoted about these revelations as saying, "Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge." Joseph Wilson likewise charges that this act was done as an act of revenge for his vocal criticism of George W. Bush and the administration's actions leading up to the Iraq war. Specifically, he views Karl Rove as being possibly involved in, or at least condoning, the cutting down of his wife.

The facts of this story are singularly grotesque. Taken at the top layer, you have a White House that appears perfectly willing to go after the family members of its critics. Valerie Plame's career is destroyed, period. The act itself displays a level of viciousness that is dangerous to the functioning of this, or any, democracy.

Peel the second layer and you discover the rank illegality of it all. Section 421 of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 reads as follows:

"Whoever, having or having had authorized access to classified information that identifies a covert agent, intentionally discloses any information identifying such covert agent to any individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship to the United States, shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both."

The third layer is where the darkness truly lurks, and where the deadly importance of this situation lies. Valerie Plame was not simply an analyst or a data cruncher. She was an operative running a network dedicated to tracking any person or nation that might try to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. That sentence deserves to be written twice. She was an operative running a network dedicated to tracking any person or nation that might try to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.

The Bush administration pushed very hard the idea that America is in danger from WMDs being placed into the hands of terrorists. This was one of the central arguments behind the war in Iraq. Yet in order to protect Bush's political standing, a couple of "administration officials" blew Valerie Plame, and by proxy her network, completely out of the water in an attempt to shut her husband up. In short, in order to protect Bush from the ramifications of using fake evidence to support his war, this White House destroyed an intelligence network that was protecting us from the threat posed by chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons.

We are less safe now that Valerie Plame is no longer performing this vital task, and the members of her network are in mortal danger of being revealed and destroyed. Beyond that, we are facing a level of hypocrisy that shatters any and all previously known boundaries. This administration ginned up a war in Iraq based upon manufactured evidence and wildly overstated threats, all of which was painted over with rhetoric about defending the country from terrorists and weapons of mass destruction. The fate of Valerie Plame, and her network, shows without doubt that the moral standing of this administration is as empty as Saddam Hussein's WMD cache.

In Ambassador Wilson's words, "Naming her this way would have compromised every operation, every relationship, every network with which she had been associated in her entire career. This is the stuff of Kim Philby and Aldrich Ames."

The current spin from administration defenders within and without the mainstream media is that Valerie Plame was only an analyst, and not an operative. This, somehow, is supposed to lessen the blow of an administration willing to attack the families of its critics. Yet the characterization of Plame as an analyst is factually incorrect. For one, Robert Novak himself indicated that she was an operative in the original report that birthed this scandal. "Wilson never worked for the CIA," wrote Novak, "but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction."

Ray McGovern, who was for 27-years a senior analyst for the CIA, further confirms the status of Plame within the CIA. "I know Joseph Wilson well enough to know," said McGovern in a telephone conversation we had today, "that his wife was in fact a deep cover operative running a network of informants on what is supposedly this administration's first-priority issue: Weapons of mass destruction."

McGovern further elaborated on the damage done when such an agent has their cover blown. "This causes a great deal of damage," said McGovern. "These kinds of networks take ten years to develop. The reason why they operate under deep cover is that the only people who have access to the kind of data we need cannot be associated in any way with the American intelligence community. Our operatives live a lie to maintain these networks, and do so out of patriotism. When they get blown, the operatives themselves are in physical danger. The people they recruit are also in physical danger, because foreign intelligence services can make the connections and find them. Operatives like Valerie Plame are real patriots."

Mr. Rove has done this kind of thing before, specifically using Robert Novak in that one notable attempt to cut down Mosbacher. Rove is a disciple of the undisputed heavyweight champion of political assassins, Lee Atwater, and has often reached into a deep bag of dirty tricks to accomplish his political ends. He knows no ideology beyond power, and has no bones about using it to wreak havoc on anyone who gets in his crosshairs. The Esquire article about DiIulio finds him recounting a singular Rove moment, as he overheard a conversation happening in another room: "Inside, Rove was talking to an aide about some political stratagem in some state that had gone awry and a political operative who had displeased him. I paid it no mind and reviewed a jotted list of questions I hoped to ask. But after a moment, it was like ignoring a tornado flinging parked cars. 'We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We will fuck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him!'"

Guess who was doing the cursing and threatening.

One last bit of inside baseball. When the Niger scandal erupted, the Bush administration went out of its way to blame the CIA for the mess, despite the fact that the CIA, along with the entire intelligence community, had been cut out of the loop by Don Rumsfeld's Office of Special Plans. The OSP, and its pet Iraqi Ahmad Chalabi, became the source for all of the information regarding Iraq's weapons capabilities, and a number of intelligence insiders have publicly blamed that group for the preponderance of highly erroneous data about Iraq. For the Bush administration to completely usurp the CIA by depending solely on data manufactured by the Office of Special Plans, and then to turn around and blame CIA when the OSPs data did not turn out to be true, is as insane as it is laughable. Yet this is what they have done. The CIA's calling for this investigation is nothing more or less than the Agency defending itself, proving out the oft-repeated warning that one scapegoats the CIA at their mortal peril.

Also, the fact that this data came to the Washington post from a White House official means that another Deep Throat may have just been born.

The White House has denied the allegation, and promises a full investigation. A great many people find it laughable to believe this White House is capable of investigating itself, and are demanding an independent investigation. A quick look at the White House telephone logs will reveal who called whom, and when. It may well be the case that Rove was not involved; there are several administration officials - Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Rice, Card - along with a constellation of administration associates and media mouthpieces, who had a vested interest in shutting Ambassador Wilson's mouth. The White House phone logs will be revelatory. If this administration fails to hand those logs over, they will stand in taint of high treason.

J'accuse.

[21winner]

2. Its under investigation.

The latest news is that the leaker has testified before the grand jury. These things are supposed to be secret so its hard to know how wide the net will be.

[johnnie]

3. Don't feel stupid

That's what DU is for, to learn and communicate. If you knew everything that all 50,000 DUer's knew combined, your head would explode.

[stellanoir]

4. it doesn't sound stupid at all.

so many illegalities. . .so little time.

All the info is in the articles above but in essence. . .

Someone in the WH committed treason and cost a woman her security & anonymity. The act of treason was based solely on revenge for her truth telling husband's revelations regarding the pRes's deceit in the '03 SOTU which led us (in part) into an illegal and disastrous war. They also compromised all the contacts she had made around the world over her 20 year career.

There have been no firings or indictments.

Meanwhile. . . Robert Novak still has a job and thinks Dan Rather should reveal his sources.

go figure. . .