Plamegate a Chronology ET AL
By jkelly
Irish Pennants
The two great questions in PlameGate are:
1. Why is the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, pursuing this case so vigorously, when there is little likelihood that the leaker or leakers committed a crime?
2. Who is New York Times reporter Judith Miller protecting? Why?
These questions may be answered in the fullness of time, but they also may not.
Lots of stuff is popping in this case, so it is helpful to me to organize my thoughts -- and I hope it is helpful to you -- to begin at the beginning.
This brouhaha began on October 15th, 2001, when the CIA received from a foreign intelligence agency (probably Britain's MI6, but the name was redacted in the report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, from which I have taken this chronology) a report that Iraq had arranged to buy uranium ore "yellowcake" from Niger. Analysts at the CIA and the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research doubted the accuracy of the report.
On Feb. 5th, 2002, British intelligence provided a more detailed report on Saddam's alleged efforts to buy uranium in Africa (this report contained information on two other countries besides Niger). CIA and INR were still skeptical, but the Defense Intelligence Agency agreed with the British report, and wrote a report of its own on the matter. Vice President Dick Cheney saw the DIA report, and mentioned it during the briefing he gets each morning from a CIA officer.
The CIA interpreted Cheney's question as a request for more information. At the suggestion of Valerie Plame, an officer in the WMD section of the Operations Directorate, her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, was dispatched to Niger to find out if a deal had been struck to sell yellowcake to Iraq.
Wilson arrived in Niger Feb. 26th, 2002. According to the account he wrote a year later in the New York Times, he spent the next eight days at his hotel, "sitting around the pool, drinking sweet mint tea, talking to dozens of people." Wilson concluded in his report to the CIA that Niger had not sold uranium ore to Saddam, but that Iraqi officials had approached Nigerien officials about trying to buy some.
On September 24th, 2002, the British government published a white paper in which it claimed Saddam was trying to buy uranium in Africa. A month later, the CIA received from a source in Italy documents purporting to show that Niger had indeed inked a deal with Saddam. (These turned out later to be forgeries.)
There then followed a couple of months of back and forth between White House officials and the CIA about whether President Bush and other administration officials ought to mention Saddam's alleged efforts to get uranium from Africa in a major speech. The CIA continued to doubt the British reports. The DIA -- bolstered by a report from the Office of Naval Intelligence that uranium stored in a warehouse in Benin was destined for Iraq -- continued to support the British.
In his State of the Union address in January, 2003, Bush said:
The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein
recently sought significant quantities of uranium from
Africa."
On May 6th, 2003, two days after having had breakfast with Wilson, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote:
"In February, 2002, according to someone present at the
meetings, that envoy reported to the CIA and State
Department that the information (about an Iraq-Niger
uranium deal) was unequivocally wrong and that the
documents (that purported to show such a deal) had been
forged."
I took the paragraph above almost verbatim from an article Matthew Continetti wrote in the Weekly Standard July 26th, 2004. Continetti's superb article, which can be found here (http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/337paflu.asp), is also from whence I retrieved the quote below from a story Walter Pincus, who covers intelligence matters for the Washington Post, wrote on June 12th after talking with Wilson:
"During his trip, the CIA's envoy spoke with the president
of Niger and other Niger officials mentioned as being
involved in the Iraqi effort, some of whose signatures
purportedly appeared on the documents. After returning to
the United States, the envoy reported to the CIA that the
uranium-purchase story was false, the sources said. Among
the envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have
been forged because 'the dates were wrong and the names
were wrong,' the former U.S. government official said."
This was of great interest to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, because Wilson returned from Niger in March, and the CIA didn't receive the forged Italian documents until October. Wilson was not a CIA officer, was in fact no longer in government service, and was not authorized to see classified information. He either made up what he told Kristof and Pincus, or he had received an unauthorized leak of classified information.
Wilson outed himself in his July 6th, 2003 op-ed in the New York Times, beginning the sequence of events that has led to today's media brouhaha.
Bob Novak wrote a column July 14th on his search for an answer to a reasonable question: Why was Wilson, who had no intelligence background and was a vocal opponent of the Bush administration, sent on the mission to Niger? In that fateful column, Novak wrote:
Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie
Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass
destruction. Two senior administration officials told me
Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to
investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-
proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his
wife to contact him. "I will not answer any question
about my wife," Wilson told me.
A "senior administration official" could be a political appointee like Karl Rove. It could be a political appointee journalists like former Secretary of State Colin Powell, or one of his key aides. Or it could be a career bureaucrat in CIA or State.
In a glowing January, 2004 profile of Wilson and Plame in Vanity Fair, there is this revealing paragraph:
Wilson was caught off guard when around July 9 he
received a phone call from Robert Novak who, according to
Wilson, said he'd been told by a CIA source that Wilson's
wife worked for the agency.
This suggests that whoever outed Plame to Novak (who outed Plame to the general public) wasn't Karl Rove. But Wilson says lots of stuff that isn't true.
Rove was the source for a story co-written later by Time Magazine's Matthew Cooper, who is married to Democratic political operative Mandy Grunwald, who is the daughter of Henry Grunwald, who for many years was Time's managing editor.
According to Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, Cooper initiated the conversation. Rove told Cooper that Wilson's wife had gotten him the Niger gig, but added Rove didn't say Valerie Plame's name, because he didn't know it at the time.
Luskin also made this pertinent observation:
Look at the Cooper e-mail," Luskin continues. "Karl
speaks to him on double super secret background...I don't
think that you can read that e-mail and conclude that
what Karl was trying to do was to get Cooper to publish
the name of Wilson's wife."
Kudos to Byron York of NRO for his excellent reporting.
Judith Miller of the New York Times is one of the few reporters in Washington who did not write a story naming Valerie Plame. Yet she is the only reporter sitting in jail.
John Podhoretz speculated in NRO's The Corner that Judy Miller might herself be the leak:
What if the original source for the "Wilson got the job
from his CIA wife" was, in fact, a reporter? After all,
we know that the vice president's chief of staff, Lewis
Libby, has testified he learned of Plame's identity from
a journalist.
Wilson had gotten very cozy with a couple of them --
Walter Pincus of the Washington Post and Nicholas Kristof
of the New York Times among them. What if he spilled the
beans to enhance his own standing in the story somehow,
to bolster his supposed findings?
What if -- and here's where it gets really interesting --
what if the real object of interest where Fitzgerald's
investigation is concerned is now none other than the
jailed Judith Miller of the New York Times? What if she
let it all slip and in the giant game of telephone around
the nation's capital, Miller was the original source of
the "Plame's in the CIA" info? What if Fitzgerald needs
her notes to discern whether Miller knew or didn't know
of Plame's supposedly covert status?
Or maybe, Podhoretz said, Fitzgerald is just pissed at her:
Fitzgerald already has a major bone to pick with Miller.
He believes she materially and dangerously impeded his
investigation into a terrorist-financing scheme run by
the Holy Land Foundation.
When Miller found out that Fitzgerald was on the verge of
indicting Holy Land, she called the Foundation for
comment -- and right after her call Fitzgerald believes
the Foundation may have commenced a shredding party that
ensured prosecutors would find little paperwork to go on
when they raided the Holy Land offices.
Fitzgerald's motivations are key. There is nothing in his biography to indicate that he is either an idiot, or a left-wing zealot.
If Fitzgerald is not an idiot, he must know that it will be all but impossible to prove that the leaker or leakers committed a crime.
To prove a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which was passed in 1982 in response to rogue CIA officer Philip Agee's publication of undercover CIA officers, one of whom was later assassinated, Fitzgerald must prove:
First, that the leaker obtained his or her information
about the covert status of a CIA operative from
authorized sources. Cocktail party gossip doesn't count.
This is why I don't think Miller is the leaker. I'm sure
she knew of Plame's identity. But as a journalist, she
has no authorized access to classified information. And
if Luskin is telling the truth, it also takes Rove off
the hook. If he didn't know Valerie Plame's name, he must
have found out about her from an unofficial source. No
one is listed on the NOC list as "Joe Wilson's wife."
Second, Fitzgerald must prove that the purpose of the
leak was to out Valerie Plame. The context of Rove's
conversation with Cooper, as recounted both by Luskin and
by Cooper's own notes, indicates that that wasn't his
purpose. It's highly doubtful that Judy Miller or Novak's
CIA source intended for harm to come to Plame, either.
Third, Fitzgerald must prove that Plame is a "covert
agent" under the statute. The statute defines a covert
agent as someone who is operating under cover overseas,
or who has done so in the last five years. But Plame --
who was outed by (CIA traitor) Aldrich Ames in 1994 --
has been manning a desk at Langley since 1997. Math is
not a long suit for most journalists, but it isn't hard
to determine that 2003 is six years after 1997.
Finally, Fitzgerald has to prove that Plame's occupation
was a secret until Novak disclosed it. Since an awful lot
of journalists on the D.C. cocktail party circuit knew
it, that's a tough row to hoe.
So if Fitzgerald isn't pursuing a vendetta against Miller, he must be pursuing a related crime. Perhaps someone fudged, or lied outright, in grand jury testimony, and Fitzgerald can hang them on a Martha Stewart offense.
If so, I doubt that Rove lied. A first year law school student should be able to get him off on the leaking rap, so he'd be a fool to lie. The worst that could happen to him is that he'd get fired, and he'd have no difficulty finding other, more lucrative employment.
It's also pretty plain that Miller is protecting someone else, and -- if Fitzgerald isn't just being a jerk -- he's done something pretty bad. I think the biggest shoes are yet to drop in this case, and that the news media won't like them when they do.
irishpennants.com
townhall.com
msnbc.msn.com
jimgilliam.com
nationalreview.com |
