I orginally posted this on October 28th, 2005:
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FIRST - POOR POOR POOR POOR POOOOOOOR Li'l Plame just wants her privacy:
WRONG!
Here we see a picture of the
very very very shy valerie in the July Issue of Vanity Fair!
The photo was taken at the magazine's annual dinner for the Tribeca Film Festival, and Plame's and Wilson's fellow guests included Robert deNiro, Nicole Kidman, Barry Diller, Willem Dafoe, John McEnroe, and many others. A "low key social life" indeed! Poor poor poor pooor poooooooooor li'l Plame!
SECOND - Pooor Poooooooor Poooooor li'l Plame was not "Outed"
Since "
Straight Shootin'" Fitzgerald won't touch the issue, let's ask our friends in the Main Stream Media whether Plame was a secret agent at the time Robert Novak "outed" her:
"The nation's largest news organizations and journalism groups" filed a brief in federal court Wednesday arguing that "a federal court should first determine whether a crime has been committed in the disclosure of an undercover CIA operative's name before prosecutors are allowed to continue seeking testimony from journalists about their confidential sources," the Washington Post reports:
The 40-page brief, filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, argues that there is "ample evidence . . . to doubt that a crime has been committed" in the case, which centers on the question of whether Bush administration officials knowingly revealed the identity of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame in the summer of 2003.
But don't take their word alone.
Authors of the Law Say No Law Broken – Plame Doesn’t qualify
THIRD -
Bush's 16 words were WELL FOUNDED:
The British government yesterday bolstered President Bush's assertion that Iraq sought uranium from Niger, casting further doubt on former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV's claims to the contrary.
The conclusion was reached by Robin Butler, who once was Britain's top civil servant, in a major report on prewar intelligence that came five days after the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reached a similar conclusion in its report.
Taken together, the British and U.S. reports appear to undermine Mr. Wilson's criticism of Mr. Bush, which led to a criminal investigation of the White House and made the retired diplomat a media darling.
"It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999," the British report said. "The British government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring uranium.
"Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger's exports, the intelligence was credible," the report added.
That buttressed an assertion by Mr. Bush in his 2003 State of the Union speech: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Yesterday, the British report called that assertion "well founded." The report was cited by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who told Parliament: "It expressly supports the intelligence on Iraq's attempts to procure uranium from Niger in respect of Iraq's nuclear ambitions."
The State of the Union assertion rankled Mr. Wilson, who said he found no evidence of such an attempted purchase during a CIA-sponsored trip to Niger. Mr. Wilson arrived in the African nation in late February 2002.
"I spent the next eight days drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people," he wrote in the New York Times 18 months later. "Niger formally denied the charges."
FOURTH- Why are we even having this debate? Because Joe Wilson, attempting to bolster his credibility, claimed that Cheney was responsible for sending him to Niger. That's a lie.
It was his wife:
Wilson was on CNN's "American Morning" the day after his column ran, spinning his straw into golden fabrications:
HEMMER: It's a wonderful day for us here at American Morning! You went to Niger several years ago. You concluded essentially that Iraq could not buy this uranium from that country. Why not?
WILSON: Well, I went in, actually in February of 2002 was my most recent trip there — at the request, I was told, of the office of the vice president, which had seen a report in intelligence channels about this purported memorandum of agreement on uranium sales from Niger to Iraq.
The Senate Intelligence Committee also found that Wilson lied about the role played by his wife, Valerie Plame, in his trip to Niger. Wilson wrote in his book, ironically titled The Politics of Truth, "Valerie had nothing to do with the matter. She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip." In fact, however, the Committee reported at p. 4:
[D]ocuments provided to the committee indicate that [Wilson's] wife, a CPD employee, suggested his name for the trip. The CPD reports officer told Committee staff that the former ambassador's wife "offered up his name" and a memorandum to the Deputy Chief of the CPD on February 12, 2002 from the former ambassador's wife says, "my husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity."
The former ambassador was selected for the 1999 trip after his wife mentioned to her supervisors that her husband was planning a business trip to Niger in the near future and might be willing to use his contacts in the region.
FIFTH - More Lies from Joe Liar Wilson (note: there are more than this even):
The Senate Intelligence Committee's report says about Wilson's trip to Niger - The following, at p. 8 of the report's "Niger" section:
The intelligence report based on the former ambassador's [Wilson's] trip was disseminated on March 8, 2002 ... The intelligence report indicated that former Nigerian Prime Minister Ibrahim Mayaki...said that in June 1999, [redacted] businessman, approached him and insisted that Mayaki meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations" between Niger and Iraq. The intelligence report said that Mayaki interpreted "expanding commercial relations" to mean that the delegation wanted to discuss uranium yellowcake sales.
When Wilson talked to the Committee's staff, he related a version of events that was different from the official CIA report that summarized his oral debriefing, and it also contradicted the recollections of the relevant CIA employees. The committee wrote, at p. 9 of its report:
When the former ambassador spoke to Committee staff, his description of his findings differed from the DO intelligence report and his account of information provided to him by the CIA differed from the CIA officials' accounts in some respects. First, the former ambassador described his findings to Committee staff as more directly related to Iraq and specifically, as refuting the possibility that Niger could have sold uranium to Iraq and that Iraq approached Niger to purchase uranium. The intelligence report...did not refute the possibility that Iraq had approached Niger to purchase uranium.
See also p. 38 of the report, where the Committee notes that most analysts understood Wilson's report from Niger as supporting the original CIA concerns about a possible uranium deal between Niger and Iraq.
And that's not all. The Senate committee also found that Wilson falsely leaked to the Washington Post the claim that certain documents purporting to show uranium sales between Niger and Iraq were forgeries because "the names were wrong and the dates were wrong," when in fact, he had never seen the documents and was not familiar with their contents. See p. 10 of the Committee's report:
Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong" when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports. The former ambassador said that he may have "misspoken" to the reporter when he said he concluded the documents were "forged." He said he may have become confused about his own recollection....
To Sum up:
The Senate Intelligence Committee's report shows that:
1) Wilson lied in the New York Times about what he told the CIA after he returned from Niger. In fact, far from debunking the concern that Iraq may have tried to buy uranium from Niger, Wilson reported that Niger's former Prime Minister told him that Iraq had made just such an overture in 1999.
2) Wilson lied when he leaked a report to the Washington Post about documents he had not even seen.
3) Wilson lied when he said that his wife Valerie "had nothing to do with" his being chosen to go to Niger.
More to come....
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And I orginally posted this on November 3rd, 2005:
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Joe Wilson October 2003 on "Meet the Press":
"My wife has made it very clear that -- she has authorized me to say this --
she would rather chop off her right arm than say anything to the press and she will not allow herself to be photographed.".
The reason, said Wilson, is that "she's still employed" by the CIA "and has obligations to her employer." Then in December of 2003.....
2 MONTHS LATER:
October 2005:
BLITZER: Even though some of your supporters... they say your decision and your wife's decision to let her be photographed represented a major mistake because if there were people out there who may have been endangered by her name certainly when people might have seen her picture, they would have been further endangered.
WILSON: Her contacts and her network was endangered the minute Bob Novak wrote the article. The photograph of her did not identify her in any way anybody could identify.
To give you an indication of how effortlessly this guy lies, CNN was at that moment displaying the Vanity Fair photo of Wilson and Plame on a huge screen right behind him. So Wilson was asserting that no foreign intelligence service would be clever enough to see through the sunglasses-and-scarf "disguise" Plame is wearing in the photo.
WILSON: Let me just get this very clear. When one is faced with adversity, one of the ways that one acts in the face of adversity is to try and bring a certain amount of humor to the situation. It's called irony. And uh, if uh, people have no sense of humor or no sense of perspective on that, my response is it's about time to get a life. But in no way did that picture endanger anybody. What endangered people was the outing of her name, her maiden name, and subsequently the outing of the corporation she worked for...
BLITZER: So you don't have any regrets about the Vanity Fair picture?
WILSON: I think it's a great picture. I think...
BLITZER: It's a great picture, but I mean...
WILSON: I think someday it too will be in the International Spy Museum.
"HUMOR"!?! "IRONY"!?! What happened to "chopping off her right arm"?! I thought she was "still employed" by the CIA "and has obligations to her employer." "HUMOR"!?! "IRONY"?!?
July 2005:
"She's still employed" by the CIA "and has obligations to her employer." "She would rather chop off her right arm than say anything to the press and she will not allow herself to be photographed." "HUMOR" "IRONY"
Wait a tick! This poor poor poooooor woman's "cover" has been blown, her career is ruined.....right?
"She's still employed" by the CIA "and has obligations to her employer." Right?
"HUMOR"? "IRONY"?
BULLSHITBoth are worth revisiting since we've recently learned that
Rove will not be indicted, and
Novak got Plame's name from the 2002 Who's Who in America. How is that for a compendium,
Tim? :)
