Plame vows to battle CIA over free speech

#1

Plame vows to battle CIA over free speech

Outed former covert agent plans to press lawsuits against Cheney, agency

NEW YORK - An ex-spy whose unmasking led to the conviction of Vice President Dick Cheney™s top aide vowed on Saturday to press on with lawsuits against Cheney and the CIA for the sake of freedom of speech.

œJust as we have to be vigilant to protect our national security”something I believe in passionately”we have to be vigilant to protect our freedom of speech and First Amendment rights, Valerie Plame Wilson said in a speech at a book convention.

Plame and her publisher, Simon & Schuster, filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in New York on Thursday against top CIA officials for blocking publication of her memoir on national security grounds.

Plame™s cover as a CIA agent was blown when her identity was leaked to reporters and appeared in a newspaper column in July 2003, shortly after her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, emerged as an Iraq war critic.

Plame said she had no intention of endangering national security with the book but was entitled to tell her story.

œThis has nothing to do with national security and everything to do with political influence and manipulation, Plame said of the CIA™s demand that she not discuss her service before 2002.

The CIA has argued her book could hurt operations and affect its ability to conduct intelligence activities in the future.

œI™m not seeking carte blanche to reveal all the details of my government service, Plame said.

The book, œFair Game, is set to be published on Oct. 21.

The leaking of Plame™s identity prompted an investigation to determine if government officials had broken any laws.

Nobody was charged with blowing her cover, but Lewis œScooter Libby, Cheney™s former chief of staff, was found guilty in March of lying and obstructing the investigation. He is due to be sentenced on Tuesday and faces up to three years in prison.

˜Troubled times™

Evidence at Libby™s trial showed he and several other White House and State Department officials leaked her identity to discredit her husband, who had accused the administration of twisting intelligence to build a case for invading Iraq.

Plame has since filed a lawsuit against Cheney and other top administration officials, seeking money damages for violating the couple™s constitutional free speech, due process and privacy rights.

She said initially she was reluctant to sue, but did so for three reasons.

œThe first one is to get the truth, she told the audience of publishers and booksellers in New York who gave her a standing ovation even before she spoke.

œSecondly, to hold our government officials to account for their words and their deeds ... Finally it™s to prevent future abuses.

œWe are living in very troubled times and it™s imperative that we all understand what our rights are and understand when we are being trampled on, she said later, answering a question from the audience.

Plame said she expected a judge to rule by the end of the summer on a motion by Cheney to dismiss the suit.

All publications by current and former CIA agents must be approved by a review board, which says its only objective is to prevent classified material from being released to the public.

Simon & Schuster is a unit of CBS Corp.

#2

An article published in Newsweek on 13 February 2006 construes the information in the released documents as implying that Fitzgerald had indeed determined Valerie Plame was a covert agent.[21][22]

Plame's husband, Joe Wilson, stated in a July 14, 2005 interview with Wolf Blitzer of CNN that "My wife was not a clandestine officer the day that Bob Novak blew her identity."[23] When asked by Wolf Blitzer "But she hadn't been a clandestine officer for some time before that?", Wilson responded by saying "That's not anything that I can talk about. And, indeed, I'll go back to what I said earlier, the CIA believed that a possible crime had been committed, and that's why they referred it to the Justice Department." Wilson later claimed to the Associated Press what he had meant was something different than the way the comment was received: "In an interview Friday, Wilson said his comment was meant to reflect that his wife lost her ability to be a covert agent because of the leak, not that she had stopped working for the CIA beforehand. His wife's 'ability to do the job she's been doing for close to 20 years ceased from the minute Novak's article appeared; she ceased being a clandestine officer,' he said."[24]

In the Washington Times, Bill Gertz states that, according to anonymous U.S. officials, "The identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame was compromised twice before her name appeared in a news column that triggered a federal illegal-disclosure investigation.... Mrs. Plame's identity as an undercover CIA officer was first disclosed to Russia in the mid-1990s by a Moscow spy," and, "n a second compromise...a more recent inadvertent disclosure resulted in references to Mrs. Plame in confidential documents sent by the CIA to the U.S. Interests Section of the Swiss Embassy in Havana.I hope that the truth will hit the national media

#3

Source Unkown

It was emailed to me awhile ago

Valerie Plame Outed Valerie Plame
Let™s take a look at the chain of events, and the title will, eventually, explain itself.

First: The President made claims on national television, including in the 2002 State of the Union address, crediting British intelligence, that Iraq had sought to obtain yellow-cake uranium from Niger to help its nuclear program, which it denies ever existed.

The key word here is sought. In other words, tried. Whether or not they actually obtained the uranium was irrelevant to Bush™s claim.

Second: Valerie Plame sends her husband Joe Wilson to Niger to not find out if there™s any evidence of yellow-cake transfer. I can™t put it better than that. Wilson returns findings prejudicial to the œPresident™s argument about Iraq having purchased uranium, even though Bush never claimed that Iraq had actually purchased uranium from Niger, just that they™d tried to do so. He also fires off a guest editorial at the New York Times, taking intelligence findings public. If that™s not illegal, it™s definitely unethical, and yet there was the New York Times backing Wilson up and giving him plenty of space for his attack. But who amongst us is surprised anymore to see that the New York Times plays around with the rules of ethics when an opportunity to attack the President comes up?

Wilson, incidentally, later admitted that no less a person than the Iraqi Minister of Information, œBaghdad Bob himself, went on a trade deputation to Niger and discussed the purchase of uranium. Meaning that Wilson lied in public in an effort to discredit the President. And the New York Times printed that lie

It™s important to mention at this point that the popular view was that Wilson had been sent to Niger by the government, presumably under the orders or with the consent of the President, on a mission designed primarily to find out the actual truth.

Third: Rove reveals that Wilson™s mission was politically motivated because his wife was the one who sent him, without revealing Plame directly. He did this to squash the story that Wilson had been sent into Niger by the Administration, or more specifically under the orders of Dick Cheney.

In other words, whatever happens, Rove did what he had to do to clear himself of the letter of the law, as his stated intent, corroborated by the events of the day, was evidently political damage control, not retribution.

Fourth: Someone in the media does his homework, putting the tidbit Rove leaked in order to prevent Wilson™s attack against the President from striking home together with other data in order to discover the identity of Valerie Plame. We do not know who this journalist was, why he tried to find this information out, or how he did so. This is the part of the story that Judith Miller went to jail to conceal. It could be that the investigative part of the story was Robert Novak, the journalist credited with actually revealing Plame™s identity to the public, but it appears more likely that it was someone else, and the story started scuttling around the back rooms of various press offices until Novak assumed it was common knowledge, and thus harmless to print.

An article in the National Review by Clifford D. May pins the ultimate blame for the fact that the information became so widespread amongst the media on the shoulders of Plame™s husband, the above-mentioned non-investigator Joseph Wilson. He suggests that Wilson leaked the information that Plame was a secret agent to David Corn, a writer for The Nation, as it was Corn™s article, apparently, that mentioned Plame™s status as a onetime secret agent in the first place, despite Novak™s more discreet references to her as an operative (which is a word that can have many definitions, one of which is a spy, but another of which is a mere employee) who worked for the CIA.

If Wilson leaked to one reporter he likely leaked to others as well, particularly if he wanted to start stirring up rage against the President or the President™s staff. If Clifford D. May is correct, we might know the identity of the unnamed source Judith Miller has gone to jail to keep secret. It would make a great deal of sense and solve a lot of questions at once if that source was Joe Wilson, Plame™s husband, particularly since we already know that Wilson, unlike the other characters involved in this barring Rove, has been in contact with the New York Times, having been given space for a guest editorial by that paper.

Fifth: Somewhere along the grapevine, the story reached Novak while the Wilson findings are still hot news, and by his own admission, he assumed that the information he was presenting was common knowledge and fired away in his article, revealing her identity but not her status as a secret agent. It™s questionable whether he even knew that that™s what she was. If he did, and he™d intended to reveal her identity, he wouldn™t have settled for a word like ˜operative, I suspect, not if he could have called her an ˜agent or œofficer just as effectively. I suspect he thought he had a desk-worker at the end of his line. But in a media desperate enough to bring down a President that it runs week-long media blitzes on every little negative thing about Bush, what he revealed was enough (combined with whatever Wilson leaked) to hand them a rather dry, tasteless scandal to inject as much juice into as they possibly could.

At this point, if Plame is to be considered œouted, she is œouted by now.

There are people responsible at each stage in the chain of events. Those people are as follows, in reverse order.

David Corn, for being the first reporter to specifically mention Valerie Plame as an operative(as per the National Review article linked above).

Bob Novak, for his reporting on part of her identity and, according to Karl Rove, for giving Rove the information he later leaked to New York Times reporter Matt Cooper

Wilson (her husband), for leaking to the media

Plame herself, for putting Wilson in a position where he could leak to the media.

Ultimately, the fact that Plame was outed traces back to her decision to play partisan politics with the CIA apparatus, assuming that her actions would give her the chance to score a political point against the President while at the same time allowing her to hide behind an institutional smokescreen, and be several parties removed from the actual fallout of her actions.

Unfortunately for Plame, her methods were inadequately thought out, and she used an agency far too personal to herself to carry out the first stage of the operation. If an unrelated ally had been sent into Niger instead of her husband, it would have been impossible for Rove to reveal the tidbit that the investigative journalist later used to put the pieces together and hand Novak an œout. Furthermore, if Plane had not engaged in a political game to discredit the President, none of the subsequent events along the chain that led to her exposure would have occurred.

In other words, the real person who outed Plame, was Wilson, by going to Niger and then publicly releasing his findings, and then again by leaking to the media. By that argument, the man who should go to jail if ANYONE goes to jail, is Joseph Wilson. The real decision that resulted in Plame™s exposure, was made by Plame herself when she chose her leaky husband for that mission to Niger and trusted him with too many facts about herself.

#4

Hey, Buff in [2003] reported in The New York Times) the C.I.A. suspected that her name may have been on a list given to the Russians by the double agent Aldrich Ames in 1994."