- WayneMadsenReport:
March 2007, "Former Iranian Deputy Defense Minister Ali Reza
Asghari may be a further casualty of the outing by the Bush White
House and its neo-con media allies of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame
Wilson and her Brewster Jennings and Associates front company,
according to knowledgeable Turkish sources. "Asghari may have
been a CIA 'HVA' (high value asset)," according to one source
close to the Turkish intelligence service, MIT. Asghari was
definitely a big fish for Western intelligence. Asghari was involved
with Hezbollah in Lebanon as Iran's Syria-based liaison with the
group. As Deputy Defense Minister, Asghari was also closely involved
with Iran's short-range and long-range missiles, as well as nuclear
materiel procurement. Asghari had traveled extensively to Russia,
North Korea, Pakistan, and India. Once sidelined by corrupt Iranian
government officials because he blew the whistle on graft within the
Defense Ministry, Asghari was relieved of his defense ministry duties,
jailed, and was likely tortured. After his charges against the
corruption in the Defense Ministry were proven to be true, Asghari was
rehabilitated and later put in charge of overseeing the Iranian-Syrian
defense agreement. Asghari's arrest and imprisonment may have
attracted the interest of U.S. intelligence, which hoped to turn him
into an asset or an agent."
-
Media Matters
Novak wondered why Waxman, others didn't ask
about baseless Plame assertions In his March 22 column, syndicated
columnist Robert D. Novak asserted that Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and
the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform failed to ask
"pertinent questions" in their March 16 hearing
investigating the leak of former CIA operative Valerie Plame's
identity. Two of Novak's "pertinent questions" hinged on
baseless claims suggesting Plame was not a covert operative "when
her identity was revealed." (Novak's use of the passive voice
obscured the fact that his own July 14, 2003, column disclosed her
identity.) Novak also noted that former Reagan administration deputy
assistant attorney general Victoria Toensing testified that Plame was
not covert under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA)
"if only because she was not stationed overseas for the CIA the
past five years." But the statutory definition does not provide
that the operative must have been "stationed" overseas to
qualify as covert; rather, the statute uses different tenses of the
verb "serv[e]."
Novak argued that Waxman and others should have
asked Plame: "How could she be covert if, in public view, she
drove to work each day at Langley [the CIA's Virginia headquarters]?
... What about testimony to the FBI that her CIA employment was common
knowledge in Washington?"
Novak's suggestion that Plame's "dr[iving] to
work each day at Langley" meant she could not be covert echoed a
claim he made on the day of Plame's testimony. As Media Matters for
America noted, on the March 16 edition of Fox News' America's
Newsroom, Novak asserted that "the idea that [Plame] was a covert
operator working on covert operations when she was going to the CIA
building every day is absurd." On the October 26, 2005, edition
of CNN's The Situation Room, former CIA agent Larry Johnson addressed
such claims: "People saying that just demonstrate their further
ignorance of the CIA. At least 40 percent of the people driving
through those gates every day are undercover."
Regarding Novak's claim that there was
"testimony to the FBI" that Plame's "CIA employment was
common knowledge in Washington," Media Matters has previously
debunked several iterations of this rumor (here, here, here, and
here). While it is unclear to what specific "testimony"
Novak was referring, an October 26, 2005, Los Angeles Times article
reported that "neighbors [of Plame's] contacted by The Times said
they told the FBI agents that they had no idea of her agency
life."
The indictment of former vice presidential chief of
staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby Jr. also stated: "At all
relevant times from January 1, 2002 through July 2003, Valerie [Plame]
Wilson was employed by the CIA, and her employment status was
classified. Prior to July 14, 2003, Valerie Wilson's affiliation with
the CIA was not common knowledge outside the intelligence
community."
Further, Novak uncritically reported Toensing's
claim in her March 16 testimony that Plame "was not a covert
operative as defined by the Intelligence Identities Protection Act,
which she [Toensing] had helped draft as a Senate staffer in 1982, if
only because she was not stationed overseas for the CIA the past five
years." Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) asked Toensing about her
previous assertion in a February 18 Washington Post op-ed that "Plame
was not covert. She worked at CIA headquarters and had not been
stationed abroad within five years." Toensing responded that that
being "stationed abroad" was "the same concept as
'serving outside the United States,' " referring to the IIPA's
definition of a "covert agent" as someone "who is
serving outside the United States or has within the last five years
served outside the United States." Toensing added, "That was
the whole concept that we had when we passed the law." However,
as Media Matters noted, regardless of Toensing's interpretation, the
IIPA does not use the word "stationed," instead defining a
"covert agent'' in part as someone "who is serving outside
the United States or has within the last five years served outside the
United States" [emphasis added]. Apparently no court has ruled on
the question of what constitutes "serving" overseas under
the statute.
Moreover, during her March 16 testimony, Plame
agreed with Rep. John Yarmuth (D-KY) that she had been "covert
... [o]n July 13," 2003, and that Novak's "July 14 column
destroyed [her] covert position and [her] classified status."
Further, she agreed with Cummings that she had "conduct[ed]
secret missions overseas ... [d]uring the past five years."
In his March 22 column, Novak also falsely reported
that the "White House from the start has treated the Plame leak
as a criminal case not to be commented on." In fact, Bush
administration officials have occasionally offered details regarding
the case:
As Media Matters repeatedly noted, then-White House
press secretary Scott McClellan, in an October 7, 2003, press
briefing, stated that neither Libby nor White House senior adviser
Karl Rove were "involved" in outing Plame -- an assertion
later proven to be false. As the weblog Think Progress has documented,
in an October 18, 2005, press briefing, McClellan stated that
"our policy is not to comment on an investigation while it's
ongoing," including answering "any question relating to
it." But when questioned later in the briefing as to whether Bush
and Cheney had been asked to appear before Fitzgerald a second time,
McClellan answered that they had not. A November 20, 2005, Associated
Press article noted that then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
denied he was the source who first disclosed Plame's identity to
Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward. From Novak's
March 22 column:
Claims of a White House plot became so discredited
that Wilson was cut out of Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign by
the summer of 2004. Last week's hearing attempted to revive a dormant
issue. The glamorous Mrs. Wilson was depicted as the victim of White
House machinations that aborted her career in intelligence.
Waxman and Democratic colleagues did not ask these
pertinent questions: Had not Plame been outed years ago by a Soviet
agent? Was she not on an administrative, not operational, track at
Langley? How could she be covert if, in public view, she drove to work
each day at Langley? What about comments to me by then CIA spokesman
Bill Harlow that Plame never would be given another foreign
assignment? What about testimony to the FBI that her CIA employment
was common knowledge in Washington?
That decision left the field to such partisan
Democrats as Rep. Chris Van Hollen, chairman of the Democratic
Congressional Campaign Committee. Rep. Diane Watson, Waxman's fellow
Californian, mimicked the chairman's inquisitorial style. She
repeatedly interrupted lawyer Victoria Toensing, the lone rebuttal
witness granted the Republicans by Waxman.
Toensing testified that Plame was not a covert
operative as defined by the Intelligence Identities Protection Act,
which she had helped draft as a Senate staffer in 1982, if only
because she was not stationed overseas for the CIA the past five
years. Waxman hectored Toensing, menacingly warning that her sworn
testimony would be scrutinized for misstatements.
Waxman relied on his support from [CIA Director Lt.
Gen. Michael] Hayden. When Hayden's role was pointed out to one of the
president's most important aides, there was no response. The White
House from the start has treated the Plame leak as a criminal case not
to be commented on. The Democrats still consider it a political
blunderbuss, aimed at Karl Rove and his boss.
—B.J.L.
|
Rove-gate: Who
Leaked to the Leakers? chronology
This isn't about Karl Rove
by Justin Raimondo
July 15, 2005
What if Karl Rove isn't guilty of knowingly leaking Valerie Plame's name
as a covert CIA agent involved in nuclear proliferation issues? What if
Rove's lawyer, Robert Luskin, is correct when he says that he's been
assured by prosecutors that his client is not a target of the ongoing
investigation into Plame-gate? I'm going to swim against the tide, here,
and against the expectations of my readers, by suggesting that this
investigation isn't about Rove – and, furthermore, that Rove is a
victim, in an important sense, someone who was used and abused by the real
culprits. And who are these mysterious culprits? We'll get to that in a
moment, but first some background…
One thing that has always struck me as odd about this whole affair – and
I wasn't the only one – is a seemingly minor detail: why did Novak's
original column, which started all this brouhaha, identify Valerie Plame
by her maiden name? After all, most married women – even in this era of
Women's Liberation – defer to the tradition of taking their husband's
name, but I have to admit that, even after wondering about it for a brief
moment, I shrugged and moved on. As it turns out, however, this is an
important detail, because now we have Rove's lawyer saying that he at no
time gave out Valerie Plame's name: but if Rove identified her as Joe
Wilson's wife, what the heck is the difference?
The difference is that, as Valerie Plame, Mrs. Wilson was affiliated with
a CIA front company, Brewster-Jennings & Associates, engaged in
tracking and stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons. As soon as her
name was made public, the implications for U.S. national security amounted
to a grave breach – far more of a crime than merely violating the
Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which has only had a single
prosecution since its passage in 1982. As the Washington Post reported
when the Plame scandal broke:
"A former diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity said yesterday
that every foreign intelligence service would run Plame's name through its
databases within hours of its publication to determine if she had visited
their country and to reconstruct her activities. 'That's why the agency is
so sensitive about just publishing her name,' the former diplomat
said."
The publication of her maiden name not only endangered Valerie Wilson, but
also blew the cover of a CIA front and imperiled anyone she might have
come in contact with during her stint overseas. This isn't just a matter
of of violating a statute that, at most, entails a 10-year jail sentence
and a fine – this is a question of possible espionage.
What also seems fairly clear is that Karl Rove would not have had direct
knowledge of Plame-Wilson's covert activities on behalf of the CIA, and
that only a very few people high up in the national security bureaucracy
had the clearance to get access to her name. So who was it? If Rove leaked
to Novak, and half a dozen Washington reporters, then who leaked to the
leakers?
This isn't about Rove.
It's about a cabal of war hawks inside the administration who passed on
this information to others without telling them about Plame-Wilson's deep
cover status, perhaps suggesting that she was just an analyst working at a
desk rather than a covert operative involved in a vitally important
overseas operation, the knowledge of which was highly compartmentalized
and only dispensed on a need-to-know basis. When Rove and his shills
blabbed to reporters and anyone who would listen, they didn't realize that
they were aiding and abetting an elaborate ploy to stick it to the CIA.
Seen against the backdrop of the fierce intra-bureaucratic war that broke
out in the administration in the run-up to the Iraq war – with the CIA
and the mainline intelligence and diplomatic communities pitted against
civilian neoconservatives in the upper echelons of the Pentagon and the
Office of the Vice President – the outing of Plame and her colleagues
amounts to an act of espionage committed out of a desire to exact revenge.
The leakers meant to retaliate not just against Joe Wilson, through his
wife, but against the "old guard" that was resisting the
campaign to lie us into war. When the CIA wouldn't go along with the
neocon program and "spice up" their analyses with Ahmed
Chalabi's tall tales and the outright forgery of the Niger uranium
documents, the War Party struck back at them with the sort of viciousness
for which the neocons are rightly renowned.
The neocons had a fix on their target; now the question was how to get
someone else to pull the trigger. The leakers, in order to protect
themselves, "laundered" the leak through journalists (Judith Miller,
one of their favorite conduits) and Bush operatives – Rove. In his book,
The Politics of Truth, Joe Wilson says as much:
"Apparently, according to two
journalist sources of mine, when Rove learned that he might have violated
the law, he turned on Cheney and Libby and made it clear that he held them
responsible for the problem they had created for the administration. The
protracted silence on this topic from the White House masks considerable
tension between the Office of the President and the Office of the Vice
President.
Go
to Cheney, Bolton, Wurmser, Hannah....etc for the rest
"The rumors swirling around Rove, Libby, and Abrams were so pervasive
in Washington that the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, was
obliged to address them in an October 2003 briefing, saying of Rove: 'The
president knows he wasn't involved. … It's simply not true.' McClellan
refused to be drawn into a similar direct denial of Libby's or Abrams's
possible involvement, however."
Suddenly, the complacent – and often complicit – American media seems
to be waking up. Reporters are now publicly pillorying White House
spokesman Scott McClellan:
"QUESTION: You're in a bad spot here, Scott…
"(LAUGHTER)
"… because after the investigation began – after the criminal
investigation was under way – you said, October 10th, 2003, 'I spoke
with those individuals, Rove, Abrams and Libby. As I pointed out, those
individuals assured me they were not involved in this,' from that podium.
That's after the criminal investigation began. Now that Rove has
essentially been caught red-handed peddling this information, all of a
sudden you have respect for the sanctity of the criminal investigation.
"MCCLELLAN: No, that's not a correct characterization. And I think
you are well aware of that."
Reporters who heard McClellan's assurances back in October 2003 weren't
being deceived so much as lulled to sleep, and that really didn't take
much of an effort on the part of the administration, now did it? They were
basically asleep anyway, and weren't really listening to what was being
said. Some people were paying attention, however, and taking notes, Joshua
Marshall for one:
"So, when McClellan was asked to be more clear, he opted for a
meaninglessly vague statement and then fell back on the 'leaking of
classified information' dodge. Can we all take note of this now? That
denial wasn't what it seemed to be. In fact, I doubt it was a real denial
at all.
"There's more there. Why not find it?"
Patrick J. "Bulldog" Fitzgerald is now in the process of finding
it – and Rove is not his real quarry, although he and some others in the
White House could wind up as collateral damage. By all indications,
Bulldog's real target points more in the direction of the Office of the
Vice President. Ambassador Wilson knows who his enemies are, and he
pointed to them in his book and in an interview with Joe Conason in Salon:
"Gleaned from all those crosscurrents of information, the most
plausible scenario, and the one that I've heard most frequently from
different sources, has been that there was a meeting in the middle of
March 2003, chaired by either [Cheney's chief of staff] Scooter Libby or
the vice president – but more frequently I've heard chaired by Scooter
– at which a decision was made to get a 'work-up' on me. That meant
getting as much information about me as they could: about my past, about
my life, about my family. This, in and of itself, is abominable. Then that
information was passed at the appropriate time to the White House
Communications Office, and at some point a decision was made to go ahead
and start to smear me, after my opinion piece appeared in the New York
Times."
"Salon: You mention two other names: John Hannah, who works in the
Office of the Vice President, and David Wurmser, who is a special
assistant to John Bolton, the undersecretary of state for arms control and
national security. Last Wednesday, their names both appeared on a chart
that accompanied an article in the New York Times about the Pentagon's
Office of Special Plans and the war cabal within the Bush administration.
Did these people run an intelligence operation against you?"
"Wilson: I don't know if it's the same unit, but it's very clear,
from what I've heard, that the meeting in March 2003 led to an
intelligence operation against my family and me. That's what a work-up is
– to try to find everything you can about an American citizen."
After the War Party met in solemn conclave, and the command went out from
Cheney: "Bring me the head of Joe Wilson!", there was only one
logical place for Cheney's minions to go. Who in the administration
would've had access to the specific information regarding Plame-Wilson's
role in a deep-cover CIA operation involving nuclear proliferation? Why,
the man who was the State Department deputy secretary in charge of
"weapons of mass destruction" – the somewhat irritable if not
downright reckless John Bolton, would-be ambassador to the UN, who played
a central role in promulgating the Niger Uranium Myth.
Conveniently, two of Bolton's assistants, David Wurmser and John Hannah,
also worked in Cheney's office. A story by UPI's Richard Sale, published
last year, points at Cheney's office and specifically at Hannah as having
played a key role in all this:
.....
"Federal law-enforcement
officials said that they have developed hard evidence of possible criminal
misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick Cheney's office related
to the unlawful exposure of a CIA officer's identity last year. The
investigation, which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a Justice
Department official said.
"According to these sources, John Hannah and Cheney's chief of staff,
Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, were the two Cheney employees. 'We believe that
Hannah was the major player in this,' one federal law-enforcement officer
said. … The strategy of the FBI is to make clear to Hannah 'that he
faces a real possibility of doing jail time' as a way to pressure him to
name superiors, one federal law-enforcement official said."
Hannah is Cheney's Middle East policy point-man, and before that was
director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). Middle
East expert Juan Cole shines his reportorial flashlight on what's under
that particular rock:
"Libby and Hannah form part of a 13-man vice presidential advisory
team, sort of a veep NSC [National Security Council], which helps underpin
Cheney's dominance in the US foreign policy area. Hannah is a
neoconservative and old cold warrior who is really more of a Soviet expert
than a Middle East expert. But in the 90s he for a while headed up the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a think tank that
represents the interests of the American Israel Political Action Committee
(AIPAC). Hannah is said to have been behind Cheney's and consequently
Bush's support for refusing to deal with Yasser Arafat. But he was also
deeply involved in getting up the Iraq war.…"
The AIPAC connection should raise a red flag: AIPAC is already at the
center of a case involving espionage conducted by Israel against the
United States, with Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin indicted [.pdf] for
passing classified information on to longtime AIPAC leader Steve Rosen and
his aide Keith Weissman, with an Israeli embassy official, chief political
officer Naor Gilon, directly involved. In both cases, which involve the
unlawful dissemination of sensitive U.S. secrets, the defense is claiming
that "everyone does it" and that the classified information
they're accused of leaking – or, in AIPAC's case, directly handing over
to the Israeli government – is supposedly "common knowledge."
Treason is nothing to these people, because their real allegiance is not
to the U.S., but to their own cause, which is perpetual war. Libby and
Hannah were the enforcers who made sure that the lies put out by this
administration to bamboozle us into war with Iraq were strictly adhered to
within the government. Libby was a frequent visitor over at CIA
headquarters, along with his boss, and, as Juan Cole writes:
"[H]annah had fingers in all three rotten pies from which the worst
intel came – Sharon's office in Israel, the Pentagon Office of Special
Plans (for which Hannah served as a liaison to Cheney), and fraudster
Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. Hannah had probably been the one
who fed Cheney the Niger uranium story, triggering a Cheney request to the
CIA to verify it and thence Joe Wilson's trip to Niamey in spring of 2002,
where he found the story to be an absurd falsehood on the face of
it."
In short, Hannah was at the center of that vortex of deception that swept
us into a disastrous war. When Ambassador Wilson came out with his famous
debunking of the infamous "16 words," Hannah was well positioned
to go after the heretic.
If we look at the passing of this leak as we would a ball game, as
"super smart commenter Sara" pointed out on Digby's blog, the
probable trajectory of the ball as it makes its way to the goal goes
something like this: "Bolton to Wurmser and Hannah, to Cheney (and/or
Libby) to Rove."
In this case, however, unlike soccer or basketball, possession of the ball
is not an asset: according to the rules of this game, the last man holding
it loses.
I do not believe for a moment that this lengthy and increasingly
controversial investigation is centered around alleged violations of a
rarely invoked statute, incurring a penalty that hardly seems
proportionate to the energy expended to get a conviction. It is extremely
hard to prove that someone has violated the Intelligence Identities
Protection Act; there are all sorts of conditions and sub-clauses that
provide a legal escape route for anyone so charged: that can't be what all
this is about.
If, however, Fitzgerald can prove there was a conspiracy inside the
government to collect and selectively reveal classified information in
order to crush political opponents, and shape U.S. policy, then the
charges could be much more serious. By all accounts, the Plame
investigation is said to be widening, and I would venture to say that by
this time is wide enough to include charges of espionage. The mere
existence of a highly placed cabal that was engaged in collecting and
utilizing highly sensitive information – a kind of intelligence bank
that existed outside of normal governmental channels – would be of great
interest to the FBI's counterintelligence unit, and word is out that
they've been plenty busy lately. Who made withdrawals from this
Intelligence Bank, and did any of these account holders include foreign
governments – such as Iran, which received an intelligence treasure
trove from neocon poster boy Ahmed Chalabi, and Israel, which is already
under suspicion because of the Franklin affair, and has close links to
several of the suspects in the Plame-gate investigation?
And then there is the question of the Niger uranium forgeries themselves:
who forged the documents that fooled a president? Wilson's exposure of the
Niger uranium ploy angered whoever introduced those documents into the
U.S. intelligence stream – it was Hannah and Libby, by all accounts, who
fought to keep these allegations in the president's speech, in spite of
opposition from the CIA and the State Department. The same crowd that
pushed this phony intelligence must have known something about the murky
origins of what turned out to be a crude forgery.
Forging "evidence" that helped get us into a war – what are
the penalties for that?
The fast developing scandal seemingly centered around Rove and a few
journalists has only begun to unfold. By the time it is over, we'll have
the War Party – or, at the very least, a few high profile
representatives – in the dock, and then the fun will really begin. So
forget "Rove-gate" and get ready for "Cheney-gate."
I'll gladly forgo the pleasure of seeing the president's chief political
advisor frog-marched out of the White House for the prospect of seeing our
vice president, along with his top staffers, led out of the Eisenhower
Executive Office Building in handcuffs.
– Justin Raimondo
http://antiwar.com/justin/
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