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November 07, 2005
If one could actually find Ted Kennedy's petard
Tim Russert brilliantly let Uncle Teddy hoist himself.
MR. RUSSERT: You talked about Iraq. There's a big debate now about whether or not the data, the intelligence data, was misleading and manipulated in order to encourage public opinion support for the war. Let me give you a statement that was talked about during the war. "We know [Iraq is] developing unmanned vehicles capable of delivering chemical and biological warfare agents...all U.S. intelligence experts agree they are seek nuclear weapons. There's little question that Saddam Hussein wants to develop them. ... In the wake of September 11th, who among us can say with any certainty to anybody that those weapons might not be used against our troops, against allies in the region? Who can say that this master of miscalculation will not develop a weapon of mass destruction even greater--a nuclear weapon. ..."Bravo. Not that I expect this exceedingly rare instance of actual journalism to be repeated much in the MSM. ButAre those the statements that you're concerned about?
SEN. KENNEDY: Well, I am concerned about it, and that's why I believe that the actions that were taken by Harry Reid in the Senate last week when effectively he said that we are going to get to the bottom of this investigation, this had been kicked along by the Intelligence Committee, by Pat Roberts for over two years. And Harry Reid did more in two hours than that Intelligence Committee has done in two years. And the American people are going get this information.
And it's important that they get this information about how intelligence was misused because of the current situation. It's important to know where we've been, but it's important to know where we are today, because we're facing serious challenges over in Iran. We're facing serious challenges in North Korea. And we cannot have a government which is going to manipulate intelligence information. We've got to get to the bottom of it, and that is what the Democrats stood for on the floor of the United States Senate last week. That was a bold stroke, one that has the overwhelming support of the American people. It's about time they get the facts on it. They haven't got the facts to date. They deserve them, and they'll get them.
MR. RUSSERT: But, Senator, what the Democrats stood for on the floor of the Senate in 2002--let me show you who said what I just read: John Kerry, your candidate for president. He was talking about a nuclear threat from Saddam Hussein. Hillary Clinton voted for the war. John Edwards, Joe Lieberman, John Kerry. Democrats said the same things about Saddam Hussein. You, yourself, said, "Saddam is dangerous. He's got dangerous weapons." It wasn't just the Bush White House.
Bravo.
Posted by Darleen at November 7, 2005 10:35 AM
Comments
The trouble is that the democrats believed the lies that the Bush admin. was feeding them. (Through Judy Miller in part.)
It was easy to beleive some of them at the time since England and the U.S. gave Iraq chemical weapons before, so you would think they would still be there too.
Posted by: Tillman at November 7, 2005 06:20 PM
The problem with your assertion is that the intel in question was the same intel used by the previous administration not to mention a number of other countries. If they were lies by Bush, they were lies for Clinton as well.
Posted by: J Rob at November 8, 2005 02:34 AM
Tillman
Kerry, because he was on the Intelligence Committee, got the exact samed intelligence that the White House did.
Find fault with the world's intelligence but for crissakes, stop calling it LIES.
And I'm not comfortable with the CIA deciding IT gets to decide foreign policy. IE the NON-crime of Valerie Plame (NOT a covert agent) and their NEW leaks of absolutely secret intel to the NYTimes about "secret" prisons.
Why isn't Uncle Teddy putting down the bottle to scream about THAT in the press?
Why is it that it appears that distorting and outright LYING about the Bush Admin and aggitating for defeat in Iraq is more important that American national interest to much of the MSM and Democrats?
Posted by: Darleen at November 8, 2005 06:44 AM
J Rob, true - there where a lot of people who believed that Iraq had WMD. But the specific up-to-date evidence that was fed to us by the WH was bullshit. We went to war with bad evidence and the WH is to blame.
Kerry did not get the same intelligence that the WH did Darleen. The WH got to cherry pick the evidence and present that subset of evidence. The lies fed to Miller by Libby are a case in point. Cheney was involved in this scam too.
You swallaw that kool-aid hook, line and sinker don't you Darleen? You're wrong. All of this is coming out now. Ever read Kevin Drum or anything besides right wing propaganda?
Posted by: Tillman at November 8, 2005 12:49 PM
- Oh yes comrade Tillman. It most surely will "all" come out with any luck at all. Your leftwing plant, Benedict Wilson, has gotten his little lying tit in a ringer. Seems General Vallily doesn't take kindly to being lied about and has sent a retraction demand to Wilsons lawyer. When Wilson somehow "forgets" to follow through on the suit threats, we'll be seeing another case of pravaricating Liberals, similar to Kerrys form 180 problem.
- I keep thinking at some point the Libs are going to stop opening "disaster-gates", It seems theres a "Rovian tiger" behind door number anything for these guys. *chuckle*
Posted by: Big Bang Hunter at November 8, 2005 04:27 PM
D,
I have never forgiven Clinton for that vote. I listened to her speech and the whole way through I thought she was going to vote "no", but she didn't. It was shocking given everything she said. Lieberman is useless - never liked him.
One of the reasons I love Tom Harkin was that he voted no. He had a great speech about sending 3,000 inspectors, and then the next week 3,000 more until there were as many inspectors as we needed to establish whether the weapons were there or not. We were not in immediate danger he argued so take the time to find the weapons.
What I am stunned about all the time is that the people on the right, well many of them are now, are not calling for the head of the person who revealed Plame's name. Can you imagine if it was a Democrat who did this? The right would have his head before breakfast. Talk about unpatriotic. Talk about treason.
It doesn't matter that she wasn't in a covert operation at the time. Her entire career was undercover. If you read more about it, you'll see that the CIA has been scrambling to assess the damage done by the leak not only of her name (by Novak) but he also announced on CNN the name of the cover business she was employed by which in turn endangered many others. This is much bigger than you are allowing yourself to believe. Not to mention the law is the law is the law and it is against the law to reveal the name of CIA agents. 28 years of her work went out the window.
Why is Novak getting off scott free?
I called Frist's office today to ask why he hadn't issued an equally damning statement or call for an inquiry into the Plame leak as he did yesterday about the CIA secret torture camps. He can't have it both ways.
Darleen, are your people so flawless? Always? I have no problem admitting when people on my side do stupid things or are morons, but you never ever seem to give an inch on these issues. You defend defend defend.
Posted by: Mieke at November 9, 2005 10:00 PM
Also we are at war. This CIA agent's cover was blown in a time of war. WAR! And Plame was a covert agent. She just wasn't working on a covert assignment at the time. She wasn't undercover, but she had been and would have been again. She lived in Europe for years as a spy.
You may not like the source but there is no denying the testimony of the two CIA agents they interviewed or the common-sense things they said.
Here's more:
“It's a spy agency. And you don't expose people working for a spy agency. And no one knew that she was working for a spy agency until she was exposed,” says Jim Marcinkowski, a deputy city attorney in Royal Oak, Mich. In the late 1980’s, he was a covert CIA agent spying in Central America. Like all recruits, he was sent to the agency’s top-secret training facility in Virginia known simply as “the farm.”
That’s where he first met a 22-year-old graduate of Penn State University named Valerie. Marcinkowski says he knew her simply as Val P., since recruits went by the initial of their last name. And he says she was a natural
As the investigation into who leaked her name got underway in Washington, more details about Valerie Plame’s life emerged. She spent her early years in the CIA in Europe, where she received advanced degrees from the London School of Economics and the College of Europe, in Bruges, Belgium.
In recent years, she told people she worked at an energy consulting firm called “Brewster-Jennings & Associates.”
Robert Novak, the columnist who first printed her name, revealed that, too. “And she listed herself as an employee of Brewster-Jennings & Associates. There is no such firm, I'm convinced,” Novak said on CNN.
He was right. Even though the business directory Dun & Bradstreet had a listing for the firm in a Boston office building, Brewster-Jennings & Associates was a CIA fiction, created to provide cover for agents like Valerie Plame.
The problem, says Marcinkowski, is that exposing Brewster-Jennings could lead foreign intelligence agencies to other spies. “There is a possibility that there were other agents that would use that same kind of a cover. So they may have been using Brewster-Jennings just like her.”
Valerie Plame was also exposed as a “NOC,” an agent working under non-official cover. That means she wasn’t attached to a U.S. Embassy or any other government agency when she worked overseas, which would have provided her protection if she was caught spying. In other words, she had no diplomatic immunity.
Working overseas as an NOC, without official cover, was a dangerous assignment, says Marcinkowski. “With diplomatic immunity, the worst that can happen is you get kicked out of the country. You don't have that kind of a protection when you're a NOC. You're out there, what they would call naked.”
“Out there” like Hugh Redmond, a NOC who was caught spying in Shanghai in 1951 and died after 19 years in a Chinese prison. To this day, the CIA denies he was an agent.
“We give our most sensitive cases to those officers serving under non-official cover,” explains Melissa Mahle, who spent 14 years in the Middle East as a covert CIA operative maintaining a series of fictitious “legends,” or cover stories, created by her superiors.
“People have said, ‘Oh, well, Valerie wasn't serving in a sensitive position. So it's not really that serious.’ Well, I would say that's a very fallacious way of looking at this because a cover is for a clandestine officer can be different things at different times. We change cover. We modify cover based on how we need it,” says Mahle. “If you start to unravel one part of that, you can unravel the whole thing.”
Mahle says Valerie was working on important national security issues, like keeping tabs on nuclear material and the world’s top nuclear scientists. “She is an expert on weapons of mass destruction. These are the kind of people that don't grow on trees.”
What do agents in that division do? “They're trying to figure out, really, the hard questions of who has the capability obtaining and deploying a biological weapon. Or a chemical weapon. Who's doing it? What are those networks? What are the financial trails?” says Mahle.
The CIA has yet to conduct a formal damage assessment. The agency wanted to wait until the investigation by the special prosecutor was over.
But agency representatives have come to Capitol Hill to brief the intelligence committees about steps they’ve taken to “mitigate the effects of the leak.”
...And the damage to Valerie Plame Wilson was serious, as spelled out by the special prosecutor. “Valerie Wilson’s friends, neighbors, college classmates had no idea she had another life,” Fitzgerald said.
...Former agent Jim Marcinkowski says one of the worst things about the leak is that it gives America’s enemies clues about how the CIA operates. “She is the wife of an ambassador, for example. Now, since this happened, every wife of an ambassador is going to be suspected. Or they'll know there's a possibility that the wife of a U.S. ambassador is a CIA agent.”
“I get the impression you get really angry about what happened,” Bradley asked Melissa Mahle.
“Of course I do, because we're talking about lives and we're talking about capabilities. We do our work. We risk our own lives. We risk lives of our agents in order to protect our country. And when something like this happens, it cuts to the very core of what we do. We're not being undermined by the North Koreans. We're not being undermined by the Russians. We're being undermined by officials in our own government. That I find galling,” Mahle said.
Valerie Wilson still reports to work every day at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. Friends say her status as America’s most famous spy makes it impossible for her to remain in the clandestine service of the CIA, a place where she’s spent her entire working life.
Posted by: Mieke at November 9, 2005 10:18 PM