The Wilson-Plame kerfuffle continues this week. Interesting new info is coming out for us to ponder while the FBI does its thing. For starters, columnist Bob Novak tells his side of the story in today's editions.
This story began July 6 when Wilson went public and identified himself as the retired diplomat who had reported negatively to the CIA in 2002 on alleged Iraq efforts to buy uranium yellowcake from Niger. I was curious why a high-ranking official in President Bill Clinton's National Security Council was given this assignment. Wilson had become a vocal opponent of President Bush's policies in Iraq after contributing to Al Gore in the last election cycle and John Kerry in this one.During a long conversation with a senior administration official, I asked why Wilson was assigned the mission to Niger. He said Wilson had been sent by the CIA's counterproliferation section at the suggestion of one of its employees, his wife. It was an offhand revelation from this official, who is no partisan gunslinger. When I called another official for confirmation, he said: "Oh, you know about it." The published report that somebody in the White House failed to plant this story with six reporters and finally found me as a willing pawn is simply untrue.
At the CIA, the official designated to talk to me denied that Wilson's wife had inspired his selection but said she was delegated to request his help. He asked me not to use her name, saying she probably never again will be given a foreign assignment but that exposure of her name might cause "difficulties" if she travels abroad. He never suggested to me that Wilson's wife or anybody else would be endangered. If he had, I would not have used her name. I used it in the sixth paragraph of my column because it looked like the missing explanation of an otherwise incredible choice by the CIA for its mission.
How big a secret was it? It was well known around Washington that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA.
via the Houston Chronicle
Larry Johnson, identified by PBS as "a former CIA analyst and counterterrorism official at the State Department" said Tuesday on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer that he's outraged.
Let's be very clear about what happened. This is not an alleged abuse. This is a confirmed abuse. I worked with this woman. She started training with me. She has been undercover for three decades, she is not as Bob Novak suggested a CIA analyst.So the fact that she's been undercover for three decades and that has been divulged is outrageous because she was put undercover for certain reasons. One, she works in an area where people she meets with overseas could be compromised. When you start tracing back who she met with, even people who innocently met with her, who are not involved in CIA operations, could be compromised. For these journalists to argue that this is no big deal and if I hear another Republican operative suggesting that well, this was just an analyst fine, let them go undercover. Let's put them overseas and let's out them and then see how they like it. They won't be able to stand the heat.
Clifford D. May in National Review Online says the Plame disclosure is a non-issue and the real issue is what are Wilson's motivations.
Mr. Wilson had long been a bitter critic of the current administration, writing in such left-wing publications as The Nation that under President Bush, "America has entered one of it periods of historical madness" and had "imperial ambitions."What's more, he was affiliated with the pro-Saudi Middle East Institute and he had recently been the keynote speaker for the Education for Peace in Iraq Center, a far-Left group that opposed not only the U.S. military intervention in Iraq but also the sanctions and the no-fly zones that protected Iraqi Kurds and Shias from being slaughtered by Saddam.
I think the real problem will turn out to be the general distraction and sound-bite memory of the public, at a time when getting the word out on what's working well in Iraq and elsewhere is important.
The New York Times reports on this aspect:
Already, the matter has prompted rare intramural sniping from anonymous administration officials and at least tentative expressions of concern from Republicans on Capitol Hill. "It reopens all the old tensions, between the White House and the C.I.A., between the foreign policy types and the political types, between the different parts of the Administration that saw the Iraqi threat differently," one senior administration official said. "That's why it poses the threat of making a real mess."Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, summed up what appeared to be the prevailing view in his party: "It all may be perfectly innocent, but I think it calls for an investigation."
Representative Peter T. King of Long Island said the controversy "shouldn't have legs" but expressed concern that political damage had already been done. "Over all, politically, I think the White House has to go on the offense," Mr. King said. "For the entire campaign and the first two years and six months of this administration, they were an incredibly lean and mean fighting machine. For the last 10, 11 weeks or so, they've just been floundering."
He added: "Something is missing. Maybe they miss Karen Hughes there, or they just weren't ready for something that started off below their radar screens and grew."
The communications crisis in the administration is becoming serious and may be at an important juncture right now.
Posted by Alan at October 1, 2003 12:15 AM