Excellent article by Chris Kincaid that spells out some of the reason’s why Joseph Wilson lied:
One of the fascinating questions about the Valerie Plame affair is why Joseph Wilson lied about his wife’s role in sending him on that mission to investigate the Iraq-uranium link.
…As Romerstein put it in an article for Human Events, when answering the question about who really exposed Wilson’s wife, “The culprit was Joe Wilson?with some help from his wife.”
He wrote, “When Wilson wrote an op-ed in The New York Times in July [2003] and revealed that he had gone to Niger on a CIA assignment, he called attention to his wife. CIA people who are really undercover are very careful about not identifying themselves or their families with the agency. They wait until their children are old enough to keep their mouths shut before revealing, even to them, that they are CIA officers. Wilson listed his wife’s maiden name in the biography he put on the web site of the Middle East Institute.”
The nepotism was bad enough. But Romerstein is saying that Plame’s role in arranging the mission for her husband is solid proof that she was not concerned about having her “cover” blown because she was not truly under cover.
…Romerstein, who had a hand in drafting the bill, explained, “When a CIA officer under deep cover is assigned to a hostile country, he knows that the enemy counter-intelligence service will do a background check. Any involvement of a relative with the CIA will endanger the officer’s cover.” Those facts mean that Plame was not under deep cover and that there must have been no plan to send her abroad under deep cover. She was certainly not deployed overseas at the time that her identification with the agency was disclosed. Furthermore, Romerstein says that “Mrs. Joe Wilson also helped shred her cover when she made a contribution to the Al Gore for President campaign and listed her cover company in the Federal Election Commission filing. If she were ever posted overseas under cover, that would provide the hostiles with a lead to unravel her CIA connection.”
When Wilson went public with his column in the New York Times, he had to know that such an article would lead to scrutiny of his wife. Equally significant, it might lead to scrutiny of her role in arranging his trip, in violation of federal nepotism laws. Therefore, he had to try to get his wife off the hook. That’s why he absolved her of any role in arranging his mission in his book. The media initially accepted what he had to say with no questions asked. Eventually, however, his cover-up fell apart when the Senate Intelligence Committee uncovered evidence that Plame had a role in her husband’s mission.
…In retrospect, it’s clear the Plame and Wilson pulled off a monumental deception, with the help of the media. The facts suggest that Plame and her husband were determined to undermine the Administration’s Iraq policy and were prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to accomplish that. Together with their media allies, they created such a firestorm over the naming of Plame that the White House panicked into seeking a special prosecutor.
When Bush official Karl Rove warned Matt Cooper of Time away from the story, on the ground that Plame had arranged the trip by her husband, he was on to the hard truth about this case. But the media were not really interested and the White House did not pursue this line of inquiry to its logical conclusion-a full-fledged investigation into the Plame-Wilson plot and who else in the CIA was behind it. Perhaps the White House was fearful of starting a war with the CIA.
Simple and straight to the point, just as I stated in my last update. People are going so deep into the minutiae of this event they are missing the big picture which Kincaid spells out beautifully. Then the NYT prints an article today that wonders about Novak’s source:
One of the most puzzling aspects of the C.I.A. leak case has had to do with the name of the exposed officer. Why did the syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak identify her as Valerie Plame in exposing her link to the C.I.A. in July 2003 when she had been known for years both at the agency and in her personal life by her married name, Valerie Wilson?
Mr. Novak offered a possible explanation for the disconnect on Monday, suggesting in his column that he could have obtained Ms. Wilson’s maiden name from the directory Who’s Who in America, which used that name in identifying her as the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador.
Mr. Novak did not explicitly cite the directory as his source. Nor was this his first public reference to the Who’s Who listing. In a column in October 2003, three months after he had first disclosed Ms. Wilson’s name and her role, Mr. Novak cited the published listing as evidence that Ms. Wilson’s identity was “no secret.”
The article is kinda silly actually since we know the Who’s Who is not Novak’s source by his own admission:
I didn’t dig it out, it was given to me. They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it.
But the bigger question, and one which ties the two articles together….how is it that Joseph Wilson is so upset that his wife’s maiden name was broadcast worldwide when he had her listed in the Who’s Who book in the first place? Furthermore, he goes on and on in the press about his trip to Niger, and even writes an op-ed piece that stated he was selected by the CIA for the trip. Which by the way he must of known was gonna make people wonder why the CIA would send him since, well you know….HE ISN’T AN EMPLOYEE OF THE CIA! Those facts lead to the only sane conclusion:
The facts suggest that Plame and her husband were determined to undermine the Administration’s Iraq policy and were prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to accomplish that. Together with their media allies, they created such a firestorm over the naming of Plame that the White House panicked into seeking a special prosecutor.
The Captain put it better then I could:
This just caps an already-ridiculous meme, one started by the media and one which indicts no one but themselves. The media demanded to know who leaked Plame’s name to Novak, but none of them wanted to reveal their inside sources to resolve the mystery. Now we know why. None of them can read a book or do their own research, except for Robert Novak — which explains why Patrick Fitzgerald seems to have lost interest in him.
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