If confirmed, I look forward to the remaining Bush defenders explaining this bit of info that David Shuster released just now on Hardball (I have changed the transcript from all-caps to normal text):
Intelligence sources say Valerie Wilson was part of an operation three years ago tracking the proliferation of nuclear weapons material into Iran. And the sources allege that when Mrs. Wilson’s cover was blown, the administration’s ability to track Iran’s nuclear ambitions was damaged as well.
Don’t hold your breath for a named source to step forward and confirm. Beside the obvious national security concerns, the administration has a penchant for classifying information with the potential for political embarrassment. Anything this damaging will be classified higher then next week’s launch codes.
***Update***
True to form, Tom Maguire claims that Shuster is not credible because he belongs to something that amounts to a journalistic conspiracy to defame the president. Considering that Mentally Imbalanced didn’t fit, Shuster is not an Ex-Employee and he does not have a Book coming out, Maguire did not have many options.
You can tell a serious response from a partisan appeal to the Big Four credibility smears by the fact that Maguire never mentioned how he would react if the allegation were proven true. If one takes for granted that Plame did in fact work in Iran WMD intel and burning her identity/front company compromised active sources in Iran, would Maguire still consider exposing her identity “no big deal?” You could argue that the answer is so obvious that no response is necessary, which is fine if true. You could interpret the silence less charitably and observe that letting that possibility go unmentioned gives some room for retreat if Shuster’s information turns out to be accurate. Maguire would show more confidence in his conclusions if he also stated how he would feel if they were false.
Ancient Purple
Not to worry, Tim. Fitzgerald will be getting an indictment this week for Joe Wilson, the man who outted his wife as a CIA agent because… um… well… er… because …
You Lefties are all liars!!!!
Par R
Stop and think about this for just one moment. Do you really believe that if there were any truth to this story that Joe Wilson wouldn’t have leaked it years ago? Get real.
ppGaz
Actually, this theme was out there a long time ago, and the response to it was, IIRC, basically “She outed herself! Who’s Who! ” And all that crap.
I don’t remember who advanced the idea, but it was someone in the leftish blogorama-blahpaloozasphere. Not a sourced story, but a suggestion that was reasonable based on what the general nature of her work was.
I figured, at the time, that the notion had been advanced by Wilson, as Par suggests … and rightly so. Because if there is any truth to the suggestion, it’s additional evidence that these crapheads have consistently abused the intelligence resource since they took office, in a variety of ways, but always for self-serving, self-justifying reasons.
terry chay
You mean speak out what his wife did at Directorate of Operations Counterproliferation Division in a manner that would open both him and her up to prosecution? Especially considering the scant evidence that Joe Wilson ever mentioned his wife’s job before this point?
Whether or not it is true, it is obvious who the one with the implausible story is.
chopper
Stop and think about this for just one moment. Do you really believe that if there were any truth to this story that Joe Wilson wouldn’t have leaked it years ago?
wow, your logic is incredible. you’ve got me convinced.
Perry Como
Valerie Wilson was actually part of a French operation to provide Iran with nuclear weapons. Shuster misread “trafficking” as “tracking”.
Oh, and Joe Wilson is a liar.
Par R
Why not a thread on Anna Nicole Smith’s victory at the Supreme Court today?
Pooh
Why not a blog by Par R? I’d visit!
Par R
You probably already have visited many times.
ppGaz
Heh. Spoofapalooza!
Well played.
tBone
Huh. Who would have guessed that Par Rot was a member of the Douglas Chamber of Commerce?
KC
Remember guys–the president and his boys can do no wrong. Once you start reasoning from there, everything else will fall into place. The Dems will all become traitors, the President will be free to alter and break laws at will, everything will be the fault of the intelligence agencies (or FEMA, or EPA, or whatever executive branch agency), or things will just happen.
Pb
Yeah, I’ve heard this reported before, and speculated before that, but it’s nice to get some confirmation.
That’s great for them, this time around they won’t have any pesky factual WMD intelligence to counter their bogus WMD intelligence / speculation / rumor-mongering. How do you say ‘Curveball’ in Persian…
Jon H
“How do you say ‘Curveball’ in Persian”
Same as before, it’s pronounced “Chalabi”.
Mr Furious
We knew this a loonnnng time ago. It is the primary reason this whole thing was so outrageous (to me at least).
They burned an asset in the one most important fight we should be waging. rendering Plame and any contact in her network obsolete.
Heckuva job.
Zifnab
This works out well. Now they can go back to using Curveball and there won’t be anyone to contradict him.
r4d20
pesky factual WMD intelligence
I’m so sick of liberals and their “Facts”.
America didn’t elect “facts” for President – we elected our lord and savior, from terroism, GEORGE W. BUSH (peace be upon him)!
Zifnab
*salutes*
demimondian
When are we going to start hearing the good facty things about fake facts? Why do facts hate America?
Pooh
As Colbert teaches us, facts have a well known liberal bias.
slickdpdx
I though the IAEA was tracking those. What do you suggest we do about them? If only Plame Wilson had remained undercover, I’m sure things would have tunred out differently. Maybe Valerie should have seen to it that her husband kept his mouth shut.
Ancient Purple
Here. Let me roll my eyes again.
Paddy O'Shea
Well if that is the case, the Bushies will have to classify the new Gallup poll. It shows Bush’s approval number falling to a treasonous 34% (lowest ever for Gallup), while the Democrats lead in the 2006 midterms is now a pro-Saddam 15%.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-01-gallup-poll_x.htm
The Other Steve
Well obviously whoever leaked that piece of info is gonna get fired.
Why?
Because it’s damn depressing!
Keith
“Anything this damaging will be classified higher then next week’s launch codes.” (I have no idea how to quote via WordPress)
In the corrective spirit of the comments board here, it’s “than” rather than “then”.
The Other Steve
Paddy,
That’s interesting. The bits in the bottom about whether or not the Republicans or Democrats pander more.
The wheels have come off the bus.
Zifnab
This is horrible. You’re saying the press has revealed Valarie Plame was working undercover as a CIA agent on Iran?! How could the media reveal such a sensative piece of information? You can’t just go leaking classified CIA material like that willy-nilly. Now the entire operation code-named “Make Valarie Plame not look like a CIA agent” is a complete bust! Thanks alot.
ppGaz
Thus the expression, “Try throwing me that Chalabi again, sucker!”
In Persian baseball, I mean.
TBone
Sorry to rain on your theme…but just because one CIA employee is out of the job, it doesn’t mean we are going to lose one bit of intelligence. When one person leaves, another steps up to take his/her place. The previous officer has all the documentation and paperwork necessary for the new guy to continue.
This story is a bunch of bullshit. Please ask any person who has ever been in the HUMINT business to fill you in on the details.
Also, launch codes and HUMINT data are in two seperate classification categories. One isn’t necessarily “higher” than the other…just different.
Zerthimon
1. So far it has not been proven that Bush personally was involved in outing Plame. In fact Fitz says in his briefing that the President wasn’t aware of the leak at the time. So I’m not really sure how this article is an attack on Bush personally.
2.Shuster has made questionable comments on MSNBC before. I refer you to The Daily Howler, which isn’t known for being a Bush mouth-piece
http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh041106.shtml
Mac Buckets
This might be the dumbest story I’ve heard in a month. Is there anyone (besides blogs and blog commenters) so utterly gullible as to believe that Val Plame had any type of unique, exclusive intel on Iran… while sitting at a desk in Langley?
I expect this brilliant supposition from Raw Story and MSNBC to be countered by an equally weighty rebuttal from Drudge and NewsMax.
Zerthimon
After doing a bit of research on lefty sites it seems that the reason Plame’s outing would have hurt our Iran intel was because the CIA front company that Plame was working for, Brewster Jennings, was also exposed, and THAT was what was involved in investigating Iran.
Slide.
bucket boy never fails to demonstrate his profound cluelessness:
Whyy is that hard to believe? She has been in the covert field for decades working on issues of WMD. How many agents do you think we have running around getting info like this? Not too many apparently in Iraq since we got it all wrong. You guys NEVER NEVER admit when its clear you got dupped by the right wing noise machine. The meme that she was just a “glorified clerk” at Langley is old and discredited bullshit, but then again bucket boy that is your providence isn’t it, discredited bullshit? Talk about gullible? You and your ilk believe everything this lying adminstration feeds you even after its demonstrated ttime and time again that they have lied to us all. Gullible? lol.. yeah, someone around here is gullable.
Oh.. and everyone.. remember bucket boy’s defense of the Iraq war. He cited over and over and over again ONE poll from Iraq to justify the death of 2,400 Americans and the incredible damage to this country’s national security. The poll, he argued, showed how much better things were going in Iraq than the LIBERAL media have been telling us. How optimistic the Iraqis were. How much better off they were. How hopeful they were of the future. How great the economy was. yada yada yada. Guess what? New poll in Iraq conducted by a CONSERVATIVE organization tells another story:
But fear not, bucket boy will come up with some other inane argument for supporting the the Worst President in History and the Biggest Foreign Affairs Blunder. Maybe he’ll turn to astrological charts next for his justification.
Par R
Ms. Plame had not been out of the country on Company business for well over a year before her name surfaced. In case you have forgotten, she was pretty much confined to the Washington area since the birth of her kiddos.
don surber
Yes, it is all Karl Rove’s fault that Iran is getting nukes (eyeroll)
Tell me, on her trip to Niger with her hubby, how did that track Iran’s nuke research?
Tuesday TV Funhouse
TBoner and Bucketbutt. The Unambiguously GOP Duo.
demimondian
Don, you misspelled “lie”. An “eye” is a part of one’s body with which one sees. A lie is something you, personally, spread in order to keep other people from seeing the truth.
You meant “lie to john’s blogroll”, shortened as “lieroll”, right?
Tim F.
Rather than a reasonable response from Bush defenders we get a series of weak arguments from incredulity. As Darrell might say (and that’s why we love him), how better to illustrate the fundamental unseriousness of the right when it comes to national security.
gratefulcub
How are you so sure that the leaking of Brewster Jennings didn’t jeopardize intelligence gathering?
tBone
Yeah. Because obviously an agent leaving is exactly the same thing as an agent (and her front company) being exposed, right?
Faux News
Is Don Surber or Brian “The Decider” here on Ballon Juice?
Right now probably Don Surber is. Brian has yet to weigh in to sneer at Cole’s Plame post, and then tell all the Lefties here on BJ to “suck a donkey’s dick”. Talk about being OWNED! He sure showed us…
So Don, you “The Decider” here or what?
TallDave
Allow me to demonstrate the idiocy of this argument in caps:
SHE DROVE TO FREAKING CIA HEADQUARTERS EVERY FREAKING DAY!!!
She was NOT undercover.
TallDave
And before anyone gets too excited about “anonymous CIA sources” (who are (once again) breaking the law by leaking this, and wasn’t it a leak that they were supposedly upset about? oh, the irony!), let’s remember they have a history of being very misleading.
Short Dave
:snicker:
Pathetic.
David
And I’m sure all of the contacts in the Middle East she communicated with using a false name and a front company saw her do that. By your logic (using the term loosely, of course), any field agents who get promoted to a desk job may as well publish their real names and the aliases and false pretenses they used over the course of their careers on the front pages of half the newspapers on the planet. After all, it’s the same thing, right? They’re driving to Langley, so anyone who’s ever collaborated with an operation they set up half a world away is as good as exposed anyway. We’d never need to talk to them again, make sure they stay in power and/or alive, or keep a credible front company going for further use. That’s just nonsense.
LITBMueller
Yep. They just don’t have the Iranian intelligence assets anymore.
‘Cuz they’re dead n’ stuff.
Yeah! Everyone one knows CIA people fly to work in their invisble jets! Sheesh!
TallDave
And I’m sure all of the contacts in the Middle East she communicated with using a false name and a front company saw her do that.
Probably, that’s what counter-intellgence operations do. But it’s irrelevant anyway. The CIA was making no serious effort to keep her identity secret. Anyone who wanted to know who she was could find out with a 30-second phone call to her nonexistent front company — which is exactly what happened as soon as someone bothered to look into her.
Brian
I’ll let Tom speak on this, as he’s been tracking this story better than anyone out there.
After reading the link, do you out there still believe Shuster? Does he seem even a little credible? Not to me.
gratefulcub
Funny. The whole point of the post is that Shuster is not credible, and Bob Woodward is.
Is Shuster credible? I don’t know. Neither does Tom M. If the best he can do is to compare statements by Shuster with those of Andrea Mitchell and Bob Woodward, then he isn’t going on much.
TBone
Yes, right. Exposed, fired, quit, dead, or whatever; the employee is gone and is then replaced. Please allow me to clear up the myth about Agency employees.
First, you guys have been watching too much spy-television. The CIA doesn’t have “agents” per se. They have “operations officers”, which is a term used for people in the Operations Directorate who go out and talk to people and convince them to report information to them. That is about as sexy as it gets folks. Yes, sometimes you go out into an exotic location (like the ever popular embassies in Africa and other garden spots) to find people to talk to; but for the most part (except for target language) the process is the same wherever you may be. She wasn’t a Station Chief as far as I know, which means one thing: she was a workerbee, period – not some super spy by any stretch of the imagination.
When someone is “under cover”, that doesn’t mean they are super spies sneaking around all cloak and dagger-like in the shadows. It means their name and/or Agency affiliation may not be known to every Tom-Dick-and-Ahmed on the street. Trust me, if her “cover was blown”; I’m sure her supervisors had all her contact information to continue the mission. And unless she was talking to the Head Nuclear Physicist in Charge of the superduper secrets of Iran, I’m sure her outing didn’t cause any irreversible damage to National Security, or a loss of much information for that matter. Now, if her contacts were “blown”, perhaps we’d have a different situation; people get dead when that happens.
As far as the “front company” business goes. I have no knowledge of what the company did, or who they associated with. Does anyone out there in Balloon Juice world have first-hand knowledge of it? If not, then it sounds like there is no “there” there. Speculation, conjecture, and another tidbit for the conspiracy theorists in fantasyland to sink their teeth into.
Ancient Purple
The absolute, bona fide stupidity of this statement is clear.
No one – repeat, no one – who ever steps foot inside the “freaking CIA headquarters” is undercover.
Ever.
The Other Steve
And once again, Brian leaps in to defend the indefensible, solely for partisan purposes.
Seriously, Maguire’s link claims that Schuster is not credible because two partisan journalistic hacks claim something different? Mitchell and Woodward?
It’s amazing how you guys whine about media bias and then turn around and utilize it when it suits your needs.
LITBMueller
To hell with Shuster, Woodward, et. al: I’ll take the word of the guy doing the prosecuting:
Fitz’s point there is that, it doesn’t matter if Plame was doing Super Double Top Secret stuff to prevent an invasion from Mars – her identity was classified, pure and simple. When the CIA decides to classify an officer’s name, there is a reason behind it, and no one should go around blabbing her identity to the press just to smear her husband. Especially not people in high positions who should know better.
But, now, the thing is, folks, this discussion is academic: Fitz is going after Libby and Rove for the cover-up. We’ve gone into Nixon territority.
Ancient Purple
That is about as relevant as saying, “Tell me, on her trip to Aspen with her husband for a ski vacation, how did that track Iran’s nuke research?” People can be doing more than one thing at once, Don.
Honestly, could you PLEASE refrain from skipping your Lithium doses?
Otto Man
The importance of her cover/contacts lay in the Middle East. Do you think the bad guys in Tehran somehow managed to see her drive into Langley in the morning?
This is almost as dumb as the “her picture was in Who’s Who” idiocy of last year. Do you guys have one man assigned to working out these half-assed excuses, or does the job rotate?
demimondian
Formally, Brewster-Jennings was in the consulting business. Informally?
Anyone who knew what Brewster-Jennings did or did not do overseas is legally bound to not talk about it. As TBone knows fully as well as I do, those people take their oaths very seriously, and won’t be here discussing it.
Otto Man
JAMES BOND WALKED INTO M’S OFFICE EVERY FREAKING MOVIE
He was NOT undercover.
LITBMueller
Heh. Now we know why tBone isn’t running the CIA – in his version, there are only Station Chiefs, and a bunch of people who file reports and get coffee.
Sheesh. Ever bother to consider that in the not so distant past, she was involved in finding new intelligence assets in Iran? And that those assets were still providing us with information, so her name was kept classified even though she was working at Langley? And that, perhaps, just perhaps, those assets have gone silent because Plame’s name made the papers and was tied to a former Ambassador?
Tim F.
This is the first that I have heard that VPW joined JW on his trip to Niger. If you can support that, Don, I would be interested to know more.
Mr Furious
I mean, he announced his name to everyone he met. His last name twice!
ppGaz
Bwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahahahahahaha!
Priceless. Did you cut and paste that from Scrutator?
OMG, Tall Dave doing a satire of Tall Dave.
demimondian
It isn’t true. Don knows that, but he’s trying to establish a new meme, that the trip to Niger was a family vacation that the Wilson’s profited from illegally.
Janus Daniels
Wow! Thought everybody knew this ever since Novak (accessory to BushCo) first committed treason. For those who need a half decade to wake up, I’ve tried to make it simpler:
Burning a covert agent also burns the agent’s cover and colleagues. Burning Plame also burnt her cover, Brewster Jennings, a CIA front company. Burning Brewster Jennings also burnt all the “employees” and all their contacts, destroyed them as sources, incidentally endangered their lives, and supported the Bushreps lies for war by eliminating contradictory (i.e. true) intelligence. Joe Wilson’s contribution may have had less importance.
Unlike the Bushwars, we don’t get to know anything about who or how many got killed in this fiasco. Why? Simple. Revealing the damage done to our military intelligence would do even more damage to our military intelligence, incidentally endangering more lives. This is why the CIA doesn’t and can’t simply state and demonstrate the crimes and damages and reward us all with presidential perp walks. We have to wait for the Fitzmas feat of pursuing convictions without presenting the most damning accusations and evidence… in fact, pursuing convictions while actively concealing the most damning accusations evidence.
Thus far, Fitzgerald’s necessarily crippled prosecution “Look! No hands!” appears improbably successful. He deserves the constant approbation that he receives from the notoriously anti-Bush mass media’s daily analysis and praise on front pages and in prime time… Oh.
Note the ingenuity of committing crimes so treacherous as to make prosecution exceptionally difficult. Incidentally, how many covert ops and investigations have Bushreps blown? Maybe half a dozen so far? If anyone has kept track, please post it and email it to me. I’d like to compare lists, may need an emetic, etc. Also, if I can make this simpler still, let me know.
Understand now??
TBone Says:
Sorry to rain on your theme…but just because one CIA employee is out of the job, it doesn’t mean we are going to lose one bit of intelligence. When one person leaves, another steps up to take his/her place. The previous officer has all the documentation and paperwork necessary for the new guy to continue.
Anderson
LOL, Otto Man!
gratefulcub
She used the name Valerie Plame when she was undercover. Anyone she came into contact with, now knows she was undercover, collecting information. Anyone that was working with her, is now known to be, or suspected of being an agent. Anyone working with those that were working with VWP…..
Anyone that had used Brewster Jennings as a front, is now known to be an agent. Anyone working with anyone that used BJ as a front is now known to be, or suspected of being an agent. Anyone working with………
I don’t personally know what she did, or if her name being leaked damaged intel. But those that claim that it absolutely did not damage intel believe they know more than they do.
demimondian
W00t! Hey, boys and girls, M00NB4ts are among us!
I hate to interrupt factiness with anything less compelling, but, um…(1) Novak didn’t commit treason. “Aid and comfort” has a much more specific meaning than “was the accomplice of someone who did something underhanded and *might* have helped an enemy”. (2) In fact, it’s unlikely that the original “outing” was a crime. Bush and company unquestionably had the right to selectively declassify the material in question; ironically, if the Great Decider said “release whatever you need to stop this story, now”, then with that act, the information was legal to disseminate.
tBone
That was Tbone (capital “T”) – although I can see how you might think that it was just me spoofing. I’d like to think I could come up with better material than that, though.
For the record, tBone’s version of the CIA is staffed entirely by nuclear physicists who look just like Denise Richards, and have bad double-entendre names. Oh, and the parking garage is full of Audis that can be driven via handheld remote.
tBone
PS – how ’bout a new handle, Tbone? As far as I know I was here first.
LITBMueller
Sorry, tBone!!! :) Although, TBone could be a good name for a super duper secret spy in your CIA. “My name is Bone. TBone. And you are?” “Chu Mi…” [with apologies to Roger Moore]
Steve
This is a hilarious string of comments. Some of you are practically dripping paste all over the floor.
What amuses me is that the people who are convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Plame outing did no harm are the same people who took about .01 seconds to decide that the NSA leak and the secret prisons leak clearly must have harmed national security. No need to even think it over, it’s obvious! Must be fun.
Marcus Wellby
Has Rush told the idiotic Bush Cultists what to think of this yet?
The Other Steve
I buying stock in Elmer’s paste.
Over the next 2 years, I predict a growth market.
demimondian
“dripping paste”? Whazzat?
ppGaz
In case anyone runs out, here’s an extra jar.
Krista
demi – I’m not sure what he’s getting at either, unless it’s some sort of oblique reference to a conspiracy theorist pasting up walls full of clippings and whatnot that support his/her whackjob theories?
slickdpdx
No what’s ridiculous is the notion giving this story its extra breathless quality. The idea that but for Joe Wilson writing about his secret mission and setting in motion a chain of events that led his wife’s bosses to expose her, things would be different in Iran.
Perry Como
And here’s a spoon that should be up to the task.
Krista
Is that you in the picture, Perry? You look adorable. :)
Brian
Okay, let’s try another link, with more info. In the end, you can believe what you want to believe, and you seem determined to believe that she was a super-spook who had the weight of the security of the Western world on her shoulders. Does any reasonable person believe this? I doubt it, especially when the source of this information is an apparently lazy journalist quoting anonymous sources. For all we know, it’s either A) a trap set for the reporter and the anonymous sources, or B) Shuster’s wet dream.
Tim F.
More evidence that the War on Straw has become an unwinnable quagmire.
Krista
Oh for heaven’s sake — I zoomed right past the obvious, simple answer, in favour of something convoluted. No wonder I’m so terrible at riddles (love them, am just terrible at them.)
Paste-eating. Right.
Perry Como
Thanks Krista. It was really tough to climb to the top of the spoon and hold that position for so long ;)
demimondian
I think she was referring to the spoon itself, not the cherry you were hiding behind.
Perry Como
Hrm. I need to keep practicing How Not To Be Seen.
Krista
Can we call you Cherry Como now? No? Well…thought I’d ask…
JoeTx
Facts that reflect poorly on the President are false by definition
Glenn Greenwald pretty much nails it in explaining the BushBots.
I encourage you to read the rest!
Steve
Let’s go back to the original claim made by Shuster.
I don’t see this as a hysterically overblown claim; I see it as appropriately qualified. But no one is willing to say “oh, who cares if our ability to track Iran’s nuclear program was damaged,” so instead, there is this need to elevate the argument to a ridiculous strawman position where Plame is a super-spy who singlehandedly would have defused the entire Iran situation. I don’t see anyone making that claim so, even though this is a blog comment section and all, we could at least try to hold our debate in the real world.
Surely Plame was working on something having to do with proliferation; I see no reason why it would be inherently implausible to claim she was working on Iran specifically. And I think the argument that if one operative is exposed, you just seamlessly plug a new one in and go from there with no loss of effectiveness, has been pretty well debunked above.
I don’t buy the crazy conspiracy theories that say the administration purposely wanted to undermine Plame so that she wouldn’t be an obstacle to their efforts to trump up the state of the Iranian nuclear program down the road. There are those on the left who buy into this, and there are those on the right who seem to buy it as well since they portray Plame as part of a rogue faction within the CIA which had to be stopped before it undermined the administration, but I have my doubts. I think it’s far more likely that the folks who outed Plame simply didn’t know and didn’t care what her specific job was.
Larry
Please turn to page 3 in your Hymnal.
Everyone sing!
searp
The claim that there is no harm when an agent is publically exposed is idiotic on its face. Here is what happens when an agent is exposed:
(1) Foreign intel agencies start counterintelligence investigations.
(2) Dossiers are built on the exposed agent.
(3) Dossiers are built on anyone known to be an associate or acquaintance of the exposed agent.
(4) Dossiers are built on any organization used as part of the cover of the exposed agent.
(5) The foreign agencies then take all appropriate counterintelligence action.
Shutting down Brewster is almost undoubtedly the least of it.
JoeTx
{snark} Come on guys, you know the only reliable sources are “a former hill staffer” or “a person close to the administration” or “somebody familar with the case”! {/snark}
It is utterly amazing how this administration will not go on the record for ANYTHING. Its always leaked and then put through the spin cycle.
gratefulcub
And, to quote myself:
You want to tell everyone what I believe again?
How about, she was part of the intelligence apparatus responsible for tracking WMD, and leaking her name may have had negative consequences in regards to that effort. I don’t know, but you have no way of knowing that her name being public did absolutely no harm, except that Shuster is a lazy journalist.
The Other Steve
No really, Brian. You believe what you want to believe. You seem determined to believe that someone wasn’t a CIA operative even though the CIA claims they were.
The amount of paste you had to eat to get yourself to believe that convoluted logic is tremendous, which is why I’m buying stock in Elmers.
gratefulcub
If she wasn’t covert, why didn’t Ashcroft squash the investigation? Instead, he eventually recused himself.
Pooh
I find it useful at times like this to imagine what set of facts would bring me around on Bush’s goodness, and how hard I would fight against them. But that’s just crazy talk, there’s no way Bush would ever give everyone a pony, so it’s a purely academic exercise.
Jon H
Ancient Purple writes: “No one – repeat, no one – who ever steps foot inside the “freaking CIA headquarters” is undercover.”
Actually, according to the CIA website’s bios of the administration, some people in top-level administration positions are not identified, because they are under cover and their identities are secret.
So, you’re wrong.
The Other Steve
Bad News Everybody.
Apparently in 2001, Borden Chemical sold off Elmer’s consumer adhesives. It’s now owned by a private investment group called Berwind.
In 2004 Borden Chemical changed it’s name to Hexion Chemicals.
So there’s no hope of us investing in Elmer’s paste. Unless we can somehow get in contact with Berwind and negotiate something.
Steve
Maybe ponies would be a good solution to the immigrant problem. No one expects an immigrant to have a pony.
The Other Steve
I don’t know. If you shout loud enough, Bush might think giving everyone a pony will improve his poll ratings. These are the guys who came up with the $100 cash payout to ease complaints about gasoline prices, after all.
Personally I think I’d rather have a puppy. I’ve got no room in the garage for a pony.
gratefulcub
Forget the legality of it.
They leaked a name. The CIA’s response was to recommend an investigation.
At the very least, they made information public that the CIA didn’t want to be made public. In the CIA’s opinion, the leak negatively affected their ability to collect information.
Andrew
Everyone calm down. This is so not a big deal.
Like Jeff Goldstein says, there are probably at least 6 other people working on this. What’s one spy, here or there? You people are so focused on the minor details that you’re totally missing the bigger picture: we’ve got people, working really hard. People. Working. Hard.
gratefulcub
We will give you $100 to vote for us in November….pretty please…pretty pretty please, we don’t want to give up our watergate hookers
Pooh
And then that work is collected. And
stovepipedpassed along to the Decider who Decides, it then trickles to the newly minted Pronouncer who Pronounces (presumably as nu-ku-lar) and the Stenographers are supposed to Stenograph. As Colbert sings, it’s the Circle of Life. And when Shuster doesn’t play is roll, the Circle breaks, life as we know ends, and Thursday becomes the Day After Tommorow. DAMN YOU DAVID SHUSTER, I WANT TO LIVE!Krista
Let’s not talk about ponies again — didn’t one of the posters here lose his pony in a tragic fashion when he was but a wee tyke?
slickdpdx
Tim:
Fair enough. Perhaps I read too much into your post and the reactions.
If true, this certainly lends additional weight to the argument that a political ‘leak’ could have had a geopolitical cost of some kind.
I sensed people were latching on to this as an argument that her efforts would have made some kind of significant difference and that the ‘leak’ had some role in creating the current nuclear situation in Iran.
On the other hand, can anyone else recognize that the damage you’re talking about should also have been considered by Wilson and Plame prior to Wilson setting off on his press junket?
Brian
That’s a rather large thing to take for granted, is it not? And it’s the entire crux of this effort to get Plame back on the table as a bona fide CIA spook. Since you know so much, and are willing to make such great leaps, would you mind telling me what her qualifications were for dealing with nuclear intelligence? If she has some history in the area, it might well help me see the connection with Iran. I’m open-minded to seeing that she was really involved with nuclear intel, but the only thing you’re willing to put forth is Olbermann’s sidekick quoting anonymous sources. Then you jump on Tom Maguire for being partisan?
If you want to be taken seriously, Tim, then be serious.
Ancient Purple
Uh… Jon?
It was sarcasm based on the statement I was responding to.
Slide
what does a CIA agent have to say about the “she can’t be undercover, she drove to Langley” stupidity?
.
Tim F.
You must have used your sixth sense because that did not come from the other five. It shows an extremely weak sense of causality to think that the most important role for an intelligence agent is to personally pick up the nuclear warheads and carry them to safety, or whatever it is you thought we were saying.
Imagine for a second that American leaders are anxiously weighing whether to start an unprovoked bombing campaign against Iran. I know that it sounds crazy, but bear with me. We cannot allow Tel Aviv or Haifa or Chicago to go up in smoke because we were foolishly sanguine about Iran’s nuclear prospects, but at the same time it will do exactly zero good for America’s interests to kick off another unprovoked war based on limited and faulty intelligence. Does Iran have a reasonable chance of assembling a bomb in the next year? Do we know where Iran’s main nuclear pressure points are located? How vulnerable are they to aerial bombardment? Knowing the answer will tell us whether bombing is a necessary sacrifice or a counterproductive snipe hunt. Not knowing the answers on the other hand forces reasonable people to diplomacy and unreasonable people to act on unsupported fever dreams. I hope you will understand now why some of us dislike being governed by unreasonable people.
jg
If her front company hadn’t been exposed 3 yearts ago we n=might know more about Iran’s nuclear program.
So Wilson shouldn’t have mentioned that Bush exagerated the yellowcake issue because he should have anticipated the administration exacting revenge on him by outing his wife? Frankly I have no problems believing that the Wilson’s never anticipated the administration would do something so childish and stupid.
Brian
And, Tim, here’s another link from an actual ex-spook. (I know, I know….he’s just pretending to be one, and is really a graveyard-shift forklift operator only PRETENDING TO BE EX-CIA SO THAT HE CAN BE A DAYTIME PROPAGANDIST FOR BUSHCO).
Let it go, Tim. Let it go. Isn’t this a tad bit of a waste of time and energy. I mean, come on…..PLAME? Don’t you feel that you’re beating a dead horse by now?
Tim F.
You cannot bring yourself to do it either, Brian. Amazing.
Slide
no jg.. you see the thinking of the right (well, thinking might be too strong a word) was that when Wilson wrote his op-ed in the NY Times, that be blew his wife’s cover because how else would he had gotten such a boondoggle of an assignement if it wasn’t for a wife that worked for the CIA…lol.. yes, ladies and gentlemen.. this is what passes for thinking on the right these days….
Brian
Tim, since you’re into imagining today, can you imagine that the government, if so fully involved with intelligence gathering on a member of the Axis of Evil, would deliberately out an agent assisting with that gathering effort just to score a political point? Does that make sense to you?
Faux News
SHHHH! Quiet! Don Surber and Brian are CONVINCED that the Liberal Media recommended this investigation, not the CIA.
Please don’t bother “The Deciders of Balloon Juice” with any other FACTS.
Tim F.
Chalk up an appeal to an anonymous blogger and an argument from incredulity. You’re on a tear today, Brian.
tBone
That was me. Let us never speak of this again.
slickdpdx
Tim:
The war on straw IS a quagmire! I tried to get out and got sucked back in. That’s how quagmires are I suppose.
Brian
You pick at me and Tom Maguire for not taking the issue head-on, then you resort to the above comments. Looks like the thread is now officially dead.
You get the commentators you ultimately deserve, Tim. Go huddle with your fellow conspiracy theorists and enjoy your Kool Aid.
Tim F.
slickdpdx,
Too bad if that is your only response to my comment. I think that I described fairly clearly why some feel concerned about losing a WMD-related intelligence asset. If that is exactly the same as what you thought people were arguing then say it in a less circumlocutory way.
Brian,
You made an appeal to an anonymous blogger whose site reads like a bad rightwing parody, and an argument from incredulity. It is not my fault if all that you have are logical fallacies.
Krista
Sorry, tbone. (Hugs).
tBone
It would just be one item in a long list of shit this administration has done that doesn’t make sense.
How much or how little damage Plame’s outing did is beside the point anyway. The real issue is that a CIA agent’s cover was blown for cheap political payback. If you’re really concerned about national security, that seems like a dangerous precedent to set, don’t you think?
Brian
And if Krista’s out there, here’s a link I hope you read. I saw it today, and it made me think about the “morals” comments we inartfully batted around yesterday. See what yet another Democrat has realized about the party, and why she’s leaving it.
There’s all this talk about how Repub’s are the moralizers, but you can see in the link how firmly the Left wants to direct the morals and the propriety of private and public life in America. And, you can also see the utter contempt that comes from the party in a general sense.
If you won’t listen to a conservative, maybe you’ll listen to a Democrat. Or, maybe you won’t.
jg
Does it make sense to burn an asset that Pakistan turned? An asset that was the communication link between OBL and his Al Qaeda leaders? Dpoes it make sense for the administration to use info from him, that would identify that we had him, in order to steal the headlines back from the democratic convention that recently ended? Three year old info that isn’t actionable, that only allows you to raise the color alert? Does that make sense?
tBone
Brian – interesting read. I’m a beer-drinking family man myself. Personally I’d take a few stereotypical pointy-headed liberal elitists looking down their nose at me over a bunch of Bible-thumping Creationists who want to enshrine their personal beliefs in law, but that’s just me.
gratefulcub
Both extremes of the political spectrum want to control the lives of americans. That’s the Left that you talk about. They are as bad as the Fallwell’s and Robertson’s.
What you refuse to accept is that they aren’t running the democratic party.
Slide
Brian.. great link to an anonymous blog by a supposed ex-intelligence officer. Yeah… that should settle things…lol
Krista
Brian – it IS an interesting read. And they do have a point. I think, however, that both parties have become rather exclusionary, and are turning off a lot of voters who do not fit into the niche. Obviously, I can’t vote for either Dem or Repub, but if I could, I believe that I would still prefer the Dems, because even if some of them do have contempt for stay-at-home moms, or other “traditional” choices, that contempt does not seem to be translating into “Let’s pass laws against it.” The Republicans, on the other hand, appear to try to pass laws against that which does not meet with their approval, which would definitely not sit well with me, were I an American voter.
Tim F.
Anybody who converts from Democrat to whatever is swimming upstream.
Without much effort I could get five hundred testimonials from former Republicans; these days it’s one of the five or six successful Kos diary templates. Many of them feel pretty indignant about the muck through which today’s conservatives have dragged America, the idiotic Iraq adventure, the rise of the theocons, and so on. But who cares? All it amounts to is a bunch of anecdotes. Which as everybody knows becomes a logical fallacy if I try to spin it into an argument.
gratefulcub
Brian,
And you might want to read a little more Caitlan Flannigan before you start linking to her. I have seen her interviewed and she believes:
The man should run the family, while the wife stays home
The wife should be willing to have sex when the man wants it
Women fighting for the chance to work outside the home have ruined it for ‘real heartland american women’
So, yes, the democratic platform leans towards letting women work, have sex when THEY want to, and being an equal part of the family. Sorry to intrude on your 18th century lifestyle.
Par R
Tim should be ashamed for his abject dishonesty in characterizing Tom Maguire’s comments on this issue. Tom noted several independent sources whose views were at total variance with those of David Shuster, whose reputation for accuracy is only slightly better than that of Baghdad Bob. Here is an example from Tom’s post:
“They did a damage assessment within the CIA, looking at what this did that [former ambassador] Joe Wilson’s wife [Plame] was outed. And turned out it was quite minimal damage. They did not have to pull anyone out undercover abroad. They didn’t have to resettle anyone. There was no physical danger to anyone, and there was just some embarrassment. So people have kind of compared — somebody was saying this was Aldrich Ames or Bob Hanssen, big spies. This didn’t cause damage.” From Bob Woodward
gratefulcub
That really is the key. Both sides say the other wants to control the lives of Americans, but….
Abortion – Rs want to tell you that you can’t; Ds want to make it illegal, but not force anyone to have one
Gay Marriage – Ds say you can, but you don’t have to; Rs say you can’t
Freedom of Religion – Ds say you can worship whatever you want, but the state can’t force it on you; Rs want to force everyone to acknowledge the 10 Commandments
Pick and issue, any issue, and it plays out like this.
Tim F.
Par R,
Woodward’s statement was followed two days later by an article in hiw own newspaper that reported this:
If you want to find hacks with a partisan axe to grind, start with Bob Woodward. He has profited immensely from the inside access that the White House grants him in exchange for…what? Rack your brain and I’m sure that you will come up with some sort of favor that Woodward might do to earn his exclusivity. Think real hard.
Bruce Moomaw
In the comments on Mark Kleiman’s blog, Maguire repeats his theory that the most likely leaker was Richard Armitage. I don’t quite understand this theory. Armitage and the Cheney gang, to put it mildly, were not fond of each other — why would he spill Plame’s identity to help them out, and why would Libby engage in what even Maguire (and Byron York) regard as probable perjury to help Armitage out?
But then, I’m still trying to figure out why — if the Senate Intelligence Committee report is correct in saying that Wilson’s account of his Niger findings to the CIA was entirely different from what he then told the NY Times — the White House didn’t discredit him simply by revealing that fact, instead of taking the irrelevant and legally dangerous step of spilling Plame’s identity. Something still just don’t add up — and if the Dems regain control of either house of Congress, we might find out what it is.
Officious Pedant
Brian,
I want to run a thought experiment with you. You are involved in a conflict with a Middle East nation, and intelligence is absolutely critical. You need translators and analysts, experts on their economy, their culture, their religion, and you need it RIGHT NOW!
Kind of odd, then to wait until midway through 2006 to approach schools for help on the issue, huh? http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/01/04/language
Even odder to care what their sexual orientation was, huh? I mean, this is a war for survival, right? Do you care one whit what the sexual orientation of the person who uncovers the plot happens to be? http://www.atsnn.com/story/111582.html
These are just two of the examples, Brian, of the idiocy that this administration is capable of. You would be wise to remember that.
What if the government expected that invasion/overthrow of Iraq to be so quick, so clean, that its neighbors would be taken aback? What if it thought that a possible consequence of the pre-determined goal of invading Iraq would be the cowing of countries like Iran, Syria, Jordan, etc. In fact, weren’t people calling Bush a hidden genius when Libya gave up their production facilities, but before Hamas got elected in Palestine? Scare the crap out of them, and they’ll be willing to negotaite, right? Which makes the career and contributions of one WMD specialist of little interest, who happens to be married to the guy causing problems, of little import against the larger political backdrop.
Par R
So Bob Woodward is now a “hack?” How quickly the loony Left turns on its heroes once they depart in any fashion from the latest meme out of moonbat heaven. Pathetic losers. I am coming around to the view that whoever said that the Left is largely comprised of anti-American pond scum has it down pretty accurate.
slickdpdx
Tim: I actually refrained from commenting on the rest because I didn’t want to argue that your comment at 12:56 supported the sense of my initial post. Now I am.
What is giving this story its hyped attention is not mainly that it adds something to the Plame leak debate, its the idea that things would be different in Iran.
Your comment (we could possibly know more and avoid a potential nuclear holocaust or terrible pointless war) is about that very subject. And a little breathless. That makes your snarky comment less charitable and corroborates my sense of the post and the comments.
For what its worth, I don’t think there’s anything anyone can do or is willing to do to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons capabilities so the belligerent talk from Bush is not helpful.
Tim F.
slickdpdx,
Your postings suggested that I expected something to be different in Iran today if Plame had not been blown. That is obviously ridiculous. Intelligence does not exist to stop Iran from acquiring nukes, it exists to tell us whether Iran is proceeding with nuclear weapons and how close it is to completing them. That you think that our leaders are not contemplating striking Iran, or else that knowing versus not knowing the state of Iran’s weapons program makes little difference, genuinely surprises me.
If you think that nothing that we can do will prevent Iran from acquiring nukes, fine, but you cannot possibly believe that our leadership thinks the same thing.
Par,
Thank you as always for an insightful and content-rich post.
Par R
Tim says:
Actually, this post and his other recent ones, strongly suggest that Tim should stick to “Beer Blogging,” a subject about which he actually appears to know something. Clearly, he’s at sea with anything more complicated.
Steve
This quote of Brian’s is just too rich to let pass without comment. Here’s what his link says:
I don’t know who the fuck Barbara Ehrenreich is, but Brian has a point; I rue the day I ever elected her to represent the Democratic Party. Yes, friends, you should vote Republican, because there are some sanctimonious people who vote Democrat! That’s the brilliant revelation Brian wants to highlight for you.
Faux News
rian,
And you might want to read a little more Caitlan Flannigan before you start linking to her. I have seen her interviewed and she believes:
The man should run the family, while the wife stays home
The wife should be willing to have sex when the man wants it
Women fighting for the chance to work outside the home have ruined it for ‘real heartland american women’
So, yes, the democratic platform leans towards letting women work, have sex when THEY want to, and being an equal part of the family. Sorry to intrude on your 18th century lifestyle.
chopper
So Bob Woodward is now a “hack?” How quickly the loony Left turns on its heroes once they depart in any fashion from the latest meme out of moonbat heaven. Pathetic losers.
if you payed any attention at all, you’d know that the left gave up on woodward many years ago. not recently or quickly; he’s been called a ‘hack’ for some time.
seriously, were you dropped on your head at birth?
Par R
The Other Steve
I never liked Woodward. As I wrote early on in my mini-blog, I blame him for much of what’s wrong with the media today.
Woodward isn’t that good of a reporter. The identify of deep throat confirmed this, that he simply got lucky and was in the right place at the right time when someone called.
And I don’t like Bernstein either, just so you know.
Nice strawman, but well straw is easy to burn.
The Other Steve
Par – I take it the answer is yes?
Brian
John Cole,
I suggest replacing Tim with a machine similar to this. You can set it up to auto-generate a new post every hour or so, thereby supplying his commentariat with fresh meat (wrapped in the same package) to gnaw over.
Bruce Moomaw
Dear Mr. Par:
If you hadn’t noticed, it’s been routinely commented for some time that Woodward — for years — has made a journalistic career out of simply repeating, as gospel truth and without stating who told it to him, whatever anonymous leakers within an administration tell him for their own (and, frequently, the administration’s) benefit. Whatever this is, it ain’t journalism, and it got him into some trouble after his downright hagiographic book on Bush. It’s become painfully clear in retrospect that both the brains and the integrity of the Woodward-Bernstein team lay with Bernstein.
Paul L.
Two interesting links:
http://www.proteinwisdom.com/index.php/weblog/entry/20246/#158852
“What kind of idiot goes international superstar when their wife is deep cover? According to you, Joe Wilson does. The whole thing stinks to high heaven.
After a multi-year multimillion $ investigation, nobody is charged with ‘outing’ VP. Strike against you.
She was working at Langley, nowhere near Iran. Strike against you.
She is part of Joe Wilson’s story. She vouched for him. Strike against you.
Joe Wilson went on a trip that had no classification status. That is not SOP. Strike against you.
Joe Wilson gave an oral report. Not a written report, an oral report. That is not SOP. Strike against you.
Wilson confirmed suspicions of Iraq’s nuclear shopping. Strike against you.
Wilson lied about it. Strike against you.
The Brits back up the claim. Give me MI5 any day of the week over the Christians-in-action. Strike against you.
Add up the columns, tough guy. They ain’t looking so good for your side. Your sainted Wilson is fishy. Your Plame 00XX super agent wasn’t. ”
Is MSNBC Lying About Damage Done By Plame’s Outing?
Brian
Typically condescending, and WRONG. But I won’t waste any more time deluding you from believing that you’re carrying the torch for feminism and modern living.
And I would like to focus on the part you mention about the wife having sex when the husband wants it. May I ask what is wrong with that? I have been married many years to an awesome, independent, highly intelligent woman, who also happens to understand the concept of give and take in a relationship. Sometimes, I want to have sex when she is not particularly in the mood. Other times, it’s the opposite. Most times, we’re both into it. But in those times when one is doing it for the other, once things get moving along (so to speak) the person who wasn’t into it enjoys it as much as the one who is. And that’s what Flanagan was taling about: love, sacrifice, being more concerned about the other’s happiness and welfare than our own selfish desires. And that thinking has kept my wife and I very happy and very satisfied for so long. It’s called A MARRIAGE. I doubt you have much success in this area, based on your beliefs.
Steve
Well, Brian, it all comes down to how good you are at detecting spoofing.
tBone
If by “interesting” you mean “retarded bullshit,” I’m right there with you.
chopper
After a multi-year multimillion $ investigation, nobody is charged with ‘outing’ VP. Strike against you.
dude, fitzgerald notoriously takes many years to get to the point in an investigation where he nails to top criminal. look at how much time he spent to nail ryan.
She was working at Langley, nowhere near Iran. Strike against you.
so what? so she was behind a desk at one point, that means its perfectly okay to blow her cover and that of the front company? and people she worked with? i guess it doesn’t matter what kind of secret sh1t you did, you sit behind a desk for one day and its totally cool to leak your sh`t?
She is part of Joe Wilson’s story. She vouched for him. Strike against you.
yeah, she vouched for him. she didn’t go with him. wife vouches for husband, news at 11.
Joe Wilson went on a trip that had no classification status. That is not SOP. Strike against you.
what does the classification of his trip have to do with her security clearance?
Joe Wilson gave an oral report. Not a written report, an oral report. That is not SOP. Strike against you.
again, so what?
Wilson confirmed suspicions of Iraq’s nuclear shopping. Strike against you.
he confirmed some suspicions, but flat out disproved the yellowcake story.
jesus, all the rest just gets worse. that has to be the most retarded attempt i’ve read all week. i’ll bet your head whistles in a crosswind.
Pooh
Par said:
I love it when Par accidentally deletes the body of his argument and just posts the conclusion.
Paul L.
No, “retarded bullshit,” is when Joe Wilson speaks, a David Shuster report, a Larry Johnson post or a Tim F. post here.
I do not remember your side wanting to give the same amount of time to Ken Starr.
Let’s also look at some of his current work.
Who’s The Prosecutor? (Ongoing…)
Anyone Can Make A Mistake
So you have no problem with George W. Bush vouching for his wife for Supreme Court Justice?
B.S. Clueless Joe Wilson
Bruce Moomaw
Brian: “John Cole, I suggest replacing Tim with a machine similar to this. You can set it up to auto-generate a new post every hour or so, thereby supplying his commentariat with fresh meat (wrapped in the same package) to gnaw over.”
You’re going to be disappointd on that one, Brian. Quoting John’s Dec. 20 E-mail to me:
“I really, really like Tim. I never had any intention of ever turning my personal website over to anyone, conservative or liberal, but I just really like Tim’s commentary. I respected him because he was honest, and he was clearly a bright fellow. It was just on a lark one night, I thought to myself that it would be nice to have someone posting there to provide some different perspective. I decided he would be a pretty good fit.
“And, in all reality, he is a very moderate Democrat, and we agree on virtually everything, so he has turned out, IMHO, to be a perfect fit. There are very few issues about which we have more than procedural disagreements. “
Bruce Moomaw
Postscript on Woodward: Lest we forget, he got into serious trouble with his editors (by their own statement) because he concealed from them for over a year the fact that he was intimately ensnarled with the Plame affair.
Par R
Bruce Moonbat writes:
He should have added: Lest we forget, the editors of the Washington Post are “intimately ensnarled with the Dana Priest illegal affair.”
Par R
PoopHead writes:
Frankly, I was merely following the pattern so well established by the likes of yourself.
Bruce Moomaw
Please, Under Par. As the first of the four judges who ruled that Judith Miller must reveal her source to Fitzgerald pointed out, what the Plame leaker was doing was trying to CONCEAL possible misconduct by the government, instead of exposing it (“whistleblowing”, to quote Judge Hogan’s precise phrase). Whereas the leaker (or leakers) in the CIA who told Dana Priest about our network of torture camps WAS trying to expose government misconduct, which of course is why Priest got the Pulizer for it — and why the White House itself has told the Post that any criminal prosecution of the leaker in this particular case is “extremely unlikely”.
Bruce Moomaw
I did commit one error, though: As Jack Shafer points out today in “Slate”, Woodward concealed his involvement in the Plame affair from his own editors for more than TWO straight years, not one.
Par R
Sorry, PoopHead, but you are totally wrong in blithely stating that “…the White House itself has told the Post that any criminal prosecution of the leaker in this particular case is ‘extremely unlikely.'” The leaker clearly did not follow the applicable statute whereby he/she would have qualified for “whistleblower” status (among other provisions, the statute requires involvement with the appropriate Congressional Committee having jurisdiction over the “leaked data.”)
I should also add that Judge Hogan was not making a dispositive conclusion on the facts, as you have chosen to present them.
With respect to Woodward, it does seem to me that the revisionist view of him and his work traces solely to the recently received wisdom on the Left that he has become a captive of the Bush administration. In his many books and “exposes” that were harshly critical of conservatives and Republicans prior to his Bush pieces of a few years ago, he was regularly worshiped on the mostly Leftish DC cocktail circuit.
Bruce Moomaw
*sigh*
(1) Washington Post (Apr. 22): “CIA Officer is Fired for Media Leaks”: “Intelligence officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the dismissed officer identified by others as [Mary] McCarthy has not been charged with any crime and is not believed to be the subject of a Justice Department investigation.” Andrew McCarthy at National Review Online hit the ceiling over this statement — to which Kleiman replied (as did several other anonymous CIA officials) that in the event of such a trial the revelations of just what we’ve been doing in those places will come out. Especially since, according to a Post article the next day (“CIA Officer’s Job Made Any Leaks More Delicate”):
“A former intelligence official, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue, said he knew of CIA officials who had refused to attend meetings related to the rendition — or capture and transfer — of suspected terrorists, because of opposition or anxiety about the legality of the practice. ‘They believe that if one chamber of Congress goes to the other party, there will be investigations, and those involved could be impoverished by legal fees.’
“Other sources described mixed initial reactions inside the agency to the disclosure of McCarthy’s firing: a widespread condemnation that an intelligence officer was allegedly involved in leaking classified information, in clear violation of CIA rules, coupled with frustration at the set of events that may have provoked it.
“Several sources who know her said they were disappointed. Others were sympathetic, saying many feel frustrated by a lack of debate over policies on the treatment of detainees that are seen as radical by many officers. ‘They’re thinking Mary had nowhere else to go,’ said one former official who would only discuss the issue on the condition of anonymity.”
Any indictment of McCarthy “would force a trial that several former intelligence officials said could wind up airing sensitive information as well as policy dissents.” No doubt.
(2) Washigngton Post, July 7, 2005, “Reporter Begins Jail Term for Protecting Source”: “[Judge] Hogan said [Judith] Miller was mistaken in believing that she was defending a free press. He stressed that the government source Miller ‘alleges she is protecting’ had already waived her promise of confidentiality. He said her source may have been providing information not to shed light on government secrets, but to try to discredit an administration critic.
” ‘This is not a case of a whistle-blower’ revealing secret information to Miller about ‘dangers at a nuclear power plant,’ Hogan said. ‘It’s a case in which the information she was given and her potential use of it was a crime. … This is very different than a whistle-blower outing government misconduct.’ “
TBone's War Journal
I’m not going to say anything more about this topic but will leave you with a few questions and final comments.
1. Has anyone commenting here ever been employed by the Central Intelligence Agency?
2. Has anyone commenting here ever attended formal schooling to become a Human Intelligence collector?
3. Has anyone here ever held a Top Secret clearance with the appropriate caveats enabling them to handle HUMINT material?
If the answer is “NO”, then you have “debunked” nothing. Why? Because you have no clue what is going on in that world. Meither do any of the reporters of “the news”. People who truly know, aren’t going to say much about the specifics of the job for obvious reasons, unless of course they are idiots or traitors; and the CI Scope/lifestyle polygraph tends to weed those idiots out.
HUMINT collectors leave the CIA everyday for a variety of personal and professional reasons (better job, wife bitching about separations, etc). Additionally, employees are posted to a variety of different places around the globe on a regular basis (i.e. new posting, new project, promotions, etc). They leave and don’t come back to the people they previously worked with. Obviously their “accounts” aren’t neglected because their replacement takes over, and the information continues to flow…seamlessly plugged. That’s the way it works.
As far as “cover” being blown and contacts being blown…it depends on the manner in which he was “blown”. If the local security forces discover him with an asset, I suppose the asset is in danger; but if the collector was stupid enough to openly associate with his/her assets (i.e. not employing security measures, etc.) then they really weren’t a very good collector in the first place and deserve to lose their jobs. If they were outted by someone (as in this case) then there isn’t much danger in their assets being exposed unless of course the collector was a doofus (may be the case; don’t know for sure). You have to understand that the opposition counterintelligence folks all around the world know, or suspect, that many folks aren’t who they say they are. That is why folks who go to work in that kind of field (HUMINT) don’t advertise what they do to their friends and family. It’s a job, but also a game of sorts. Exposure is always a risk.
Sure, exposing her was personally bad for her ability to operate in the future, but it didn’t mean that classified information was lost or compromised (except for the fact that she was employed by the Agency). She was just another cog in the wheel. Move along people, there is nothing to see there.
chopper
I do not remember your side wanting to give the same amount of time to Ken Starr.
what’s ‘my side’?
So you have no problem with George W. Bush vouching for his wife for Supreme Court Justice?
first off, you’re an idiot. secondly, valerie plame vouched for her husband regardin the trip to niger because he was completely qualified to do the job. which is why he was asked to do it in the first place. if laura bush was qualified for the SCOTUS the way wilson was qualified or the trip to niger and somebody asked g-dubs if she’d do a good job, i’d expect him to vouch for her. hell, i’d vouch for her.
B.S. Clueless Joe Wilson
wow, a hitchens hit piece claiming all wilson did on the trip was drink tea and hang out. you’ve got me convinced.
chopper
mostly Leftish DC cocktail circuit
hah! have you ever actually been to DC before? cause i find that hilarious.
Par R
Chopper, I recognize that for trailer trash such as yourself, a big night out constitutes a trip to Burger King. Some of us have more developed tastes and prefer to avoid the risk of associating with such obvious scum as yourself. Accordingly, we tend to mingle at more sophisticated places, even though one runs the risk of bumping into a Lefty from time to time; at least those encountered on the cocktail circuit tend to smell satisfactorily as compared with an odoriferous person such as you.
Bruce Moomaw
Of course, when it comes to intolerance of torture chambers and deliberate distortions of intelligence to trick the nation into agreeing to a poorly chosen war, Par R’s definition of “Lefty” includes John Cole himself (not to mention Andrew Sullivan, Greg Djerejian, and numerous other subversives of the same ilk, including a substantial number of military officers). I tell you, smelly people like that are EVERYWHERE these days.
Krista
Par – Your attempt to portray yourself as a sophisticated individual with refined tastes would probably be more believable if you knew how to spell “satisfactory”.
chopper
Chopper, I recognize that for trailer trash such as yourself, a big night out constitutes a trip to Burger King.
ah, the right-wing’s utter disdain for the common man gushes forth. let us know next time you rightist ivory-tower types decide to come down from olympus and grace us with your presence. i’ll make sure to tidy my trailer.
and, you’re stupid.
slickdpdx
Re: Bruce’s email excerpt above
Adding Tim F. to the Balloon Juice team really livened up the blog. Not that it was moribund before, but the extra viewpoint makes it even more interesting to visit.
Darrell
What were the “deliberate distortions” of intelligence which ‘tricked’ us into war? Not differences of opinion, but deliberate distortions.. I realize such talk makes you feel ’empowered’ and all.. but please give us details on the intentional distortions you refer to. Let me guess – Bush ‘knew’ there were no WMDs but wanted to invade anyway.
Par R
Krista, you really, really do need to study English grammar, particularly as it relates to the use of adverbs and adjectives, before making your snarky and ill-informed comments. I suspect that your trailer is next door to that of “chopper.”
Darrell
No, Tom M provides specific citations where Shuster has misreported (intentionally or unintentionally) stories to a significant degree, omitting or changing key facts in his reporting. Given those examples, his credibility should be questioned.
Bruce Moomaw
Darrell: “What were the ‘deliberate distortions’ of intelligence which ‘tricked’ us into war? Not differences of opinion, but deliberate distortions.. I realize such talk makes you feel ‘empowered’ and all.. but please give us details on the intentional distortions you refer to. Let me guess – Bush ‘knew’ there were no WMDs but wanted to invade anyway.”
Darrell, I’ve been over this subject repeatedly on this blog in the past. Since you seem to have missed it: virtually everyone thought Saddam really DID have CBWs. (Although, even there we had the Curious Affair of the Fake Germ Warfare Trailers –where we have now conclusively learned that the Administration covered up strong contrary evidence — and the fact that, had the UN inspectors been allowed to operate a little longer, they would unquestionably have learned that Saddam’s fandance routine as to whether he had CBWs was really a fake to obscure the fact that he definitely did NOT have them.)
Where the Bush Administration unquestionably DID filter and rig the evidence was on whether Saddam had an active nuclear-weapons program — and nuclear weapons are still tremendously more dangerous than biological, let alone chemical, weapons (although a few more decades of genetic engineering may change that where germs are concerned). This wasn’t a matter of “difference of opinion”; we now know beyond doubt that — just as with those supposed biowarfare trailers, but on a vastly bigger scale — the Administration deliberately rigged the evidence by playing up feeble (and in some cases glaringly fake) pro-Bomb information, and concealed very strong contrary information. Believe me, the files on that subject are huge, and in a few hours (at the moment I have other things to do) I’ll be happy to dig out all the quotes you could ever want (from non-leftists) on the subject.
Why did they do it? because of their utterly loony absolute confidence that it occupying Iraq and reforming it into a stable and pro-Western democracy would be (in Kenneth Adelman’s immortal phrase) “a cakewalk”, taking (to quote both Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz) only a few months and costing just a few billion dollars — after which we could use Iraq as a base of operations to carry out similar quick-‘n-easy pro-American coups in Iran and Syria. (Lest we forget, one popular slogan of the neocons before the war was: Men go to Baghdad. REAL men go to Teheran and Damascus.”) Moreover, the damn fools were so absolutely confident of this that they didn’t even make ny contingency plans if it DIDN’T
Bruce Moomaw
Darrell: “What were the ‘deliberate distortions’ of intelligence which ‘tricked’ us into war? Not differences of opinion, but deliberate distortions.. I realize such talk makes you feel ‘empowered’ and all.. but please give us details on the intentional distortions you refer to. Let me guess – Bush ‘knew’ there were no WMDs but wanted to invade anyway.”
Darrell, I’ve been over this subject repeatedly on this blog in the past. Since you seem to have missed it: virtually everyone thought Saddam really DID have CBWs. (Although, even there, we had the Curious Affair of the Fake Germ Warfare Trailers — where we have now conclusively learned that the Administration covered up strong contrary evidence — and the fact that, had the UN inspectors been allowed to operate a little longer, they would unquestionably have learned that Saddam’s fandance routine as to whether he had CBWs was really a fake to obscure the fact that he definitely did NOT have them.)
Where the Bush Administration unquestionably DID deliberately filter and rig the evidence was on whether Saddam had an active nuclear-weapons program — and nuclear weapons are still tremendously more dangerous than biological, let alone chemical, weapons (although a few more decades of genetic engineering may change that where germs are concerned). This wasn’t just a matter of “difference of opinion”; we now know beyond doubt that — just as with those supposed biowarfare trailers, but on a vastly bigger scale — the Administration deliberately rigged the evidence by exaggerating feeble (and in some cases glaringly fake) pro-Bomb information, and concealed very strong contrary information. Believe me, the files on that subject are huge, and in a few hours (at the moment I have other things to do) I’ll be happy to dig out all the quotes you could ever want (frequently from non-leftists) on it.
Why did they do it? Because of their utterly loony absolute confidence that occupying Iraq and reforming it into a stable and pro-Western democracy would be (in Kenneth Adelman’s immortal phrase) “a cakewalk”, taking (to quote both Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz) only a few months and costing just a few billion dollars — after which we could use Iraq as a base of operations to carry out similar quick-‘n-easy pro-American coups in Iran and Syria. (Lest we forget, one popular slogan of the Neocons before the war was: Men go to Baghdad. REAL men go to Teheran and Damascus.”) Moreover, the damn fools were so absolutely confident of this that they didn’t even make any contingency plans if it DIDN’T work out — something that would have roused, say, Eisenhower to uncharacteristic obscenity.
So what have the consequences been? Why (as several miliary men recently confirmed to the Washington Post), that the US military is now stuck in Iraq at precisely the time when we are likely to need it to snuff a REAL, and very dangerous, Bomb-making effort in Iran — and also to deal with any crisis caused by the fact that North Korea and Pakistan already have the Bomb. Stupid overconfidence, leading to deliberate dishonesty and to frantic after-the-fact attempts to cover up both the stupidity and the dishonesty — it’s the oldest government story in the book. But the consequences are frequently disastrous — as now.
Bruce Moomaw
I see I accidentally hit the “send” once before completing my message. Sorry. The perils of fast typing…
Darrell
Here are some inconvenient facts which directly contradict that position:
And more where that came from. Many (most?) analysists believed Saddam had an active nuclear program. But “Bush lied people died”, right?
By all means, quote someone else although Bush repeatedly warned of a long war in his speeches. How honest of you to ignore what Bush actually said again and again
So you are in favor of military intervention in Iran?
HH
Thank you for providing a link as Maguire’s analysis is far more detailed than your pounding of the table shows. There is even more here – http://media.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NGU0NGExYjBjYmUxYjBjOTYzNjY3MmIyYWEyM2I2ZGI=
Bruce Moomaw
Please, Darrell. At least have the minimal honesty to quote ALL the relevant passages in Ken Pollack’s “Guardian” article:
“Nevertheless, the preliminary findings of the Iraq Survey Group will probably not change dramatically. The then head of the ISG, David Kay, summarised those findings in testimony to Congress last October [including that] Iraq had preserved some of its technological nuclear capability from before the Gulf war. However, no evidence suggested that Saddam had undertaken any significant steps after 1998 towards reconstituting the programme to build nuclear weapons or to produce fissile material…
“The intelligence community’s overestimation of Iraq’s WMD capability is only part of the story of why we went to war last year. The other part involves how the Bush administration handled the intelligence. Throughout the spring and fall of 2002 and well into 2003 I received numerous complaints from friends and colleagues in the intelligence community, and from people in the policy community, about precisely that.
“According to them, many administration officials reacted strongly, negatively, and aggressively when presented with information that contradicted what they already believed about Iraq. Many of these officials believed that Saddam was the source of virtually all the problems in the Middle East and was an imminent danger to the US because of his perceived possession of WMD and support of terrorism. Many also believed that CIA analysts tended to be left-leaning cultural relativists who consistently downplayed threats to the US. They believed that the agency, not the administration, was biased, and that they were acting simply to correct that bias.
“Intelligence officers who presented analyses that were at odds with the pre-existing views of senior administration officials were subjected to barrages of questions and requests for additional information, and were asked to justify their work sentence by sentence. Reportedly, the worst fights were over sources. The administration gave greatest credence to accounts that presented the most lurid picture of Iraqi activities. In many cases intelligence analysts were distrustful of those sources, or knew unequivocally that they were wrong. But when they said so, they were not heeded.
“On many occasions administration officials’ requests for additional information struck the analysts as being made merely to distract them. Some asked for extensive historical analyses and requests were constantly made for detailed analyses of newspaper articles that conformed to the views of administration officials – pieces by conservative newspaper columnists, who had no claim to superior insight into the workings of Iraq.
“Of course, no policymaker should accept intelligence estimates unquestioningly. Any official who does less is derelict in his or her duty. However, at a certain point curiosity and diligence becomes a form of pressure.
“As Seymour Hersh, among others, has reported, Bush administration officials also took some actions that arguably crossed the line between rigorous oversight of the intelligence community and an attempt to manipulate intelligence. They set up their own shop in the Pentagon, called the Office of Special Plans, to sift through the information themselves. To a great extent OSP personnel ‘cherry-picked’ the intelligence they passed on, selecting reports that supported the administration’s pre-existing position and ignoring all the rest.
“Most problematic of all, the OSP often chose to believe reports that trained intelligence officers considered unreliable or downright false. In particular it gave great credence to reports from the Iraqi National Congress, whose leader was the administration-backed Ahmed Chalabi. It is true that the intelligence community believed some of the material that came from the INC — but not most of it. One of the reasons the OSP generally believed the INC was that they were telling it what it wanted to hear — giving the OSP further incentive to trust these sources over differing, and ultimately more reliable, ones. Thus intelligence analysts spent huge amounts of time fighting bad information and trying to persuade officials not to make policy decisions based on it.
“The Bush officials who created the OSP gave its reports directly to those in the highest levels of government, often passing raw, unverified intelligence straight to the cabinet level as gospel. Senior officials made public statements based on reports that the larger intelligence community knew to be erroneous (for instance, that there was hard evidence linking Iraq to al-Qaida). The machinations of the OSP meant that whenever the principals of the National Security Council met with the president and his staff, two different versions of reality were on the table.
“The CIA, the state department, and the uniformed military services would present one version, and the Office of the Secretary of Defence and the Office of the Vice President would present another. These views were too far apart to allow for compromise. As a result, the administration found it difficult, if not impossible, to make important decisions. And it made some that were fatally flawed, including many relating to postwar planning, when the OSP’s view — that Saddam’s regime simultaneously was very threatening and could easily be replaced by a new government — prevailed.
“The problems discussed so far have more to do with the methods of officials than with their motives, which were often misguided and dangerous, but were essentially well-intentioned. The one action for which I cannot hold officials blameless is their distortion of intelligence estimates when making the public case for war.
“As best I can tell, these officials were guilty not of lying but of creative omission. They discussed only those elements of intelligence estimates that served their cause. This was particularly apparent in regard to the time frame for Iraq’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon — the issue that most alarmed the American public and the rest of the world. Remember that the NIE said that Iraq was likely to have a nuclear weapon in five to seven years if it had to produce the fissile material indigenously, and that it might have one in less than a year if it could obtain the material from a foreign source. The intelligence community considered it highly unlikely that Iraq would be able to obtain weapons-grade material from a foreign source; it had been trying to do so for 25 years with no luck. However, time after time senior administration officials discussed only the worst-case, and least likely, scenario, and failed to mention the intelligence community’s most likely scenario. Some examples:
“(1) In a radio address on September 14, 2002, President Bush warned, ‘Today Saddam Hussein has the scientists and infrastructure for a nuclear-weapons programme, and has illicitly sought to purchase the equipment needed to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon. Should his regime acquire fissile material, it would be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year.’
“(2) On October 7, 2002, the president told a group in Cincinnati, ‘If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year.’
“(3) Vice President Cheney said on NBC’s Meet the Press on September 14 2003: ‘The judgment in the NIE was that if Saddam could acquire fissile material, weapons-grade material, that he would have a nuclear weapon within a few months to a year.’
“None of these statements in itself was untrue. However, each told only a part of the story — the most sensational part. These statements all implied that the US intelligence community believed that Saddam would have a nuclear weapon within a year unless the US acted at once. Some defenders of the administration have reportedly countered that all it did was make the best possible case for war, playing a role similar to that of a defence attorney who is charged with presenting the best possible case for a client. But a defence attorney is responsible for presenting only one side of a dispute. The president is responsible for serving the entire nation. For the administration to withhold or downplay some of the information for its own purposes is a betrayal of that responsibility.
“What we have learned about Iraq’s WMD programmes since the fall of Baghdad leads me to conclude that the case for war with Iraq was considerably weaker than I believed. I had been convinced that Iraq was only years away from having a nuclear weapon — probably only four or five years. That estimate was clearly off, possibly by quite a bit. My reluctant conviction that war was our only option (although not at the time or in the manner in which the Bush administration pursued it) was not entirely based on the nuclear threat, but that threat was the most important factor.
“The war was not all bad. But at the very least we should recognise that the administration’s rush to war was reckless even on the basis of what we thought we knew in March 2003. It appears even more reckless in light of what we know today.”
Yes indeed, and since then we’ve learned even more about the extent to which the Administration was carefully filtering the evidence regarding Iraq’s nuclear program to make it appear that his likely acquisition of a Bomb was far more imminent than it actually was — and deliberately concealing very strong evidence to the contrary. More on that subject, as I say, later.
Do I favor military action to prevent Iran from acquiring a Bomb? Absolutely, if there is no other way to do it. Given the extent to which the Administration has been caught crying Wolf in the case of Iraq, however, absolutely all outside observers can be pardoned for a certain degree of skepticism in this case, at least as regards the speed with which Iran can supposedly acquire the Bomb (and thus the amount of time we have to try out other kinds of intense pressure). Especially given the fact that — as Josh Bolten freely told “Time” last week — ginning up the military threat from Iran will be a major part of the GOP’s Congressional campaign this year. We’ve been through this before.
I remain convinced that at SOME point we would have to deal with Saddam, who would never have given up trying to reqcauire WMDs when the world finally started turning its back on him again. But he was not our first priority; he was our third or fourth one. We are now paying the penalty for that blunder by the Administration, which goes way beyond the zone of forgivable accidental mistakes into the realm of willfully and outrageously stupid ones — accompanied, as Pollack says, by a huge dose of deliberate dishonesty.
Darrell
Hold on, we were talking about your BS accusations that Bush deliberately “rigged the evidence” regarding Saddam’s nuclear program before invading Iraq at a time when many/most analysts in fact believed Saddam had an active nuclear program. You are quoting from the Kay investigation, which was made AFTER the invasion.
The rest of your post is just blather, quoting subjective opinions on how the intelligence was vetted between conflicting sources and interpretations. Fact is, it appears most analysts at the time of invasion believed Saddam to have a nuclear program going forward. You have yet to refute this
Ëveryone, including Hans Blix and most Democrats believed Saddam had WMDs. Shall I produce the quotes for you? Sorry if the facts don’t match with your “Bush lied” narrative
chopper
besides:
“could”? wow, how factual.
wow, not only another ‘could’, but with an ‘if’ thrown in for good measure.
‘could’s and ‘if’s and ‘might possibly want to’s are not evidence. they’re conjecture.
Darrell
But Dems told us
Did you hear that? “Unmistakeable” evidence of nuclear weapons. And
But “Bush lied”, right? You people are dishonest down to your core.
Bruce Moomaw
Uh, Darrell. First, Rockefeller and Hillary both said that when they made those statements on the day of the Senate’s vote giving Bush permission to invade Iraq, they were working on what the Administration told them, which turned out to be biased as hell. See my upcoming quotes on that subject.
Secopnd, you seem to have VERY serious reading comprehension difficulties. I explicitly denied that Bush was lying (much) about Saddam’s posession of “WMDs”, defined as chemical and biological weapons, which “virtually everybody” thought he did have — although even there we have what we now know to be deliberate exaggeration by the Administration of the strength of the evidence in the case of the “germ warfare trailers.” The point I’ve always been making is that the Administration did deliberately and grossly rig the evidence that Saddam had a large-scale NUCLEAR weapons program, which would have been tremendously more dangerous than his possession of a biological-weapons arsenal — let alone a chemical-weapons arsenal.
As for “most analysts believing at the time of the invasion that Saddam had a major nuclear-weapons program going forward”: you’re simply wrong. And you’re even more wrong when it’s considered that the UN inspectors were upon the verge of proving that Iraq did NOT have such a program (which is tremendously harder to conceal from inspectors than CBW programs are) at the time that Bush decided to invade. More on all that, as I say, shortly.
Bruce Moomaw
Note for tonight: I haven’t forgotten you, Darrell, nor am I ducking your challenge. At the moment I’m going over a total of 17 documents on the subject (complete with hyperlinks) to see which ones seem to sum up the case best and with least mess.
Keep in mind that my own argument — and the argument of a lot of people who agree with me on this, and like me initially supported the war (such as Kevin Drum and Mark Kleiman) is not so much that the Bush Administration is being too hawkish as that it’s being hawkish IN THE WRONG PLACE and in very inefficient, counterproductive ways. Very few of us are dumb enough to think that Islamic Fascism is going to simply disappear if we ignore it — and thinking that one battle in a war has been fought in the wrong place or in the wrong way is, to put it mildly, not the same thing as opposing the war. (For that matter, Kos — that bete noire of right-wing bloggers — got downright apoplectic at least once himself at leftists who think that wishful thinking and kneejerk pacifism are enough to handle this crisis.)
Similarly, while there are plenty of good solid moral arguments against torturing our prisoners (regardless of whatever the hell we officially call them), there are cold-bloodedly strategic reasons to avoid it that are every bit as good. The US government flatly forbade the torture or abuse of Japanese POWs, despite the fact that the Imperial Japanese government refused to reciprocate in the slightest and indeed took demonic glee in the wholesale torture and slaughter of our POWs — and despite the fact that, if ever there was a war in which the US public would have happily tolerated the torture of POWs, it was that one. Why didn’t FDR’s administration allow the abuse of Japanese POWs? Because they knew perfectly well that we could not occupy Japan forever afer the war, and that we needed it to be an independent but non-hostile nation — and that torturing its soldiers was not exactly the way to encourage that. How much more important is that goal in the current worldwide campaign, in which we can’t even begin to think of occupying the entire Moslem world? But the arrogant nitwits who are currently running this war never thought of that for a second — just as they never gave a thought to what might be necessary if their initial flowers-and-lollipops vision of how the Iraq War would go proved incorrect.
chopper
“There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years … We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction.”—Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D, WV), Oct 10, 2002
Did you hear that? “Unmistakeable” evidence of nuclear weapons. And
“In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al Qaeda members … It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons.”—Sen. Hillary Clinton (D, NY), Oct 10, 2002
yet we still haven’t seen this ‘unmistakeable’ evidence. looks to me like both clinton and rockefeller were repeating bush’s assertions that there was ironclad evidence. because they both stupidly took him at his word.
But “Bush lied”, right? You people are dishonest down to your core.
yeah, he lied. and clinton and rockefeller and others believed him. why is this that hard to figure out?
what i find so funny is that your type automatically lobs HRC quotes as if everyone you argue with is some democrat who fawns over her and quoting her is like kryptonite. i’m no democrat, and i don’t like HRC at all. the fact that she believed the lies about iraqi WMDs and voted for the war only reinforces my disdain for her.
Darrell
Yet every quote in bold that I presented dealt specifically with the intelligence community’s assessment of Iraq’s NUCLEAR program, not just general WMD programs. But I’m the one with a reading comprehension problem, right?
You can spend all day and night researching whatever to try and square your irrational dogma with factual reality, but it ain’t gonna happen, because the overriding opinion at the time of invasion really was that Saddam was aggressively pursuing a nuclear weapons program.
It was discovered that he was further along with his nuclear program than estimated in the 1991 Gulf War, and analysts reasonably believed he had not abandoned those efforts, especially after ejecting inspectors out of the country in 1998
Darrell
I love it.. Rockefeller is one of the senior members of the senate intelligence committee, but he along with so many others was swayed by Bush’s “lies”, rather than overrding intelligence community opinion at that time.
And I’ll bet you consider yourself to be rational and intelligent, right?
Darrell
Wow Moomaw, I’m taking notes from you.. whenever losing an argument badly, just change the topic and move on without acknowledgment. Works every time, right?
And you call yourselves the “reality based” community, right?
chopper
I love it.. Rockefeller is one of the senior members of the senate intelligence committee, but he along with so many others was swayed by Bush’s “lies”, rather than overrding intelligence community opinion at that time.
well, since the bush administration didn’t share the full intelligence with congress, sure. remember, the CIA was chock-full of dissent about WMDs. that of course didn’t make it to congress. neither did the remarks on the untrustworthiness of various sources.
so don’t give me this garbage about ‘overrding intelligence community opinion’. george ‘slam dunk’ tenet is not the intelligence community.
And I’ll bet you consider yourself to be rational and intelligent, right?
as much as you consider yourself not to be a complete retard, sure.
Bruce Moomaw
Relax, Darrell. My reply is coming, complete with 17 URLs (which all connect to a network of other news sources and which, among other things, prove totally ridiculous your claim that “overriding opinion at the time of the invasion was that Saddam was aggressively pursuing a nuclear weapons program.”) The one thing that’s holding me up right now is that I want to make absolutely sure I have the procedure right to include those links in John’s comment section without accidentally blowing up his site in the process, for which I have shown an embarrassing aptitude in the past.
As for my mention of torture being “an attempt to change the subject”: hogwash. It was just a further demonstration that this war is being run by a collection of nitwits whose self-destructive nitwittery takes a whole variety of forms. (Their type of destructive stupidity in this war also has nothing at all to do with conservatism per se — as George Will keeps pointing out in his anti-Iraq War newspaper columns — but, boy, does it have a lot to do with their personal arrogance.)
Darrell
Try and make sure at least 1 of those URLs addresses this Bush “lie”, ok?
HH
Interestingly our dear blogger refuses to quote from Bob Somerby on the subject of Shuster and/or this specific story.
Or is he a neocon spinner too?
Bruce Moomaw
Don’t worry, Darrell. SEVERAL of them address that fact. Specifically, the facts that (1) by the time of Bush’s later public statements on the subect, the US intelligence community was already starting to change its mind; and (2) by the time of the invasion itself, the inspectors, having been grudgingly readmitted, were almost finished entirely disproving the statement — with the result that Bush ended up discussing with Tony Blair (as revealed in a classified British government document which was leaked in late March and whose authenticity the British government admits) how to frame Saddam for fake offenses in order to justify the invasion anyway.
Bruce Moomaw
To HH: Actually, Somerby is — like Christopher Hitchens — a first-class eccentric, rather than a neocon toady. What he says about Shuster, to be precise, is that the latter’s statement that Plame’s exposure “damaged” America’s ability to track Iran’s nuclear program MAY, perhaps, have been a reference to only “slight” damage. Which Tim doesn’t deny at all; note that rather important little phrase of his: “if confirmed”.
Bruce Moomaw
Here we are, at last. Follow the bouncing hyperlinks to these men’s own original sources (mostly in chronological order):
One:
Two:
Three:
Four:
Five:
Six:
Seven:
Eight:
Nine:
Ten:
Eleven:
Twelve:
Thirteen:
Fourteen:
Fifteen:
Sixteen:
Seventeen:
And, as an important side branch:
Eighteen:
Nineteen:
Twenty:
A few additional notes:
(1) While there some deception going on earlier, the really outrageous deliberate deceptions occured during the period AFTER the release of the October 2002 NIE and before the invasion started, as it was becoming clearer and clearer that the evidence for Saddam’s nuclear program was extremely feeble and that the evidence for his owning a large stockpile of CBWs was also weakening.
(2) Regarding item “Six”, note Paul Pillar’s comment from his “Foreign Policy article:
“The administration’s rejection of the intelligence community’s judgments became especially clear with the formation of a special Pentagon unit, the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group. The unit, which reported to Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, was dedicated to finding every possible link between Saddam and al Qaeda, and its briefings accused the intelligence community of faulty analysis for failing to see the supposed alliance.”
…a fact which blows to utter bits the ridiculous claim of the Senate Intelligence Committee that the big bad warmongering CIA tricked the innocent, peaceloving White Houe into war by feeding it erroneously pro-war information. Befor the war, the Cheney-Rumssfeld-neocn faction — which totally domiated Bush’s stratgy-making — was constantly livid with rage at the supposedly peacenik, antiwar-biased CIA. Laurie Mylroie, an eccentric aacademic who was one of the prowar Neocons’ most notable figures, wrote an entire book attacking the CIA on these grounds — which, with exquisitely bad timing, came out just when it was becoming clear that the exact opposite was true.
(3) Regarding item “Nine’s” passage:
“The question of whether the Administration misrepresented the intelligence presented to it (as opposed to the question whether the intelligence itself was flawed) was not addressed in the Senate Intelligence Committee report. That report reflected only Phase I of what was supposed to be a two-phase operation, with the question of Administration misrepresentation of intelligence deferred to Phase II. It was the Republicans’ attempt to indefinitely postpone Phase II that led to Harry Reid’s demand for a closed session two weeks ago. Presumably that stalling reflects the GOP’s judgment that the results of such an inquiry would be devastating.”
…note that Roberts is now also trying to subdivide the NEW inquiry to delay its most anti-Bush likely findings until after the 2006 election:
Twenty-one:
(4) Regarding item “Thirteen” — Andrew Sullivan’s discovery of Stephen Cambone’s handwritten notes on Rumsfeld’s determination, mere hours after the 9-11 attack, to use it as justification for an invasion of Iraq whether the evidence justified it or not — it’s puzzling that it took Sullivan so long to find out about this, since CBS had reported it more than a year earlier.
(5) Also note that, in the key passage of those notes on Rummy’s powwow — “Go massive…Sweep it all up. Things related and not” — Cambone underlined “AND NOT”, presumably because Rummy himself had forcefully emphasized that part in his talk.
(6) Last but definitely not least, note the conclusion from item “Sixteen” — the New Republic’s Nov. 2005 editorial on what the Duelfer Report really said, as opposed to Bush’s lies about what it said: “When a president says we need to take preemptive action to prevent a genuine threat from acquring nuclear weapons, will the American people ever again give their assent?”
Well, judging from the Apr. 30 Gallup poll, the answer is “no”. Asked: “Suppose all economic and diplomatic efforts fail to get Iran to shut down its nuclear program. If that happens, do you think the United States should or should not take military action against Iran?”, they said “no” by 57-36. The main point in the story of the boy who cried “wolf”, after all, is that eventually a real wolf did show up…
Bruce Moomaw
Looks like I still haven’t quite mastered the art of linking — that first sentence, despite being underlined, is not a valid link. (Those start with “One”.)