Side Issue in the Plame Case: Who Sent Her Spouse to Africa?

[cal04]

The origin of Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV's trip to Niger in 2002 to check out intelligence reports that Saddam Hussein was attempting to purchase uranium has become a contentious side issue to the inquiry by special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who is looking into whether a crime was committed with the exposure of Valerie Plame, Wilson's wife, as a covert CIA employee.

After he went public in 2003 about the trip, senior Bush administration officials, trying to discredit Wilson's findings, told reporters that Wilson's wife, who worked at the CIA, was the one who suggested the Niger mission for her husband. Days later, Plame was named as an "agency operative" by syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak, who has said he did not realize he was, in effect, exposing a covert officer. A Senate committee report would later say evidence indicated Plame suggested Wilson for the trip.


Over the past months, however, the CIA has maintained that Wilson was chosen for the trip by senior officials in the Directorate of Operations counterproliferation division (CPD) -- not by his wife -- largely because he had handled a similar agency inquiry in Niger in 1999. On that trip, Plame, who worked in that division, had suggested him because he was planning to go there, according to Wilson and the Senate committee report.

The 2002 mission grew out of a request by Vice President Cheney on Feb. 12 for more information about a Defense Intelligence Agency report he had received that day, according to a 2004 report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. An aide to Cheney would later say he did not realize at the time that this request would generate such a trip.Wilson maintains that his wife was asked that day by one of her bosses to write a memo about his credentials for the mission--after they had selected him. That memo apparently was included in a cable to officials in Africa seeking concurrence with the choice of Wilson, the Senate report said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/10/AR2005081001918.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/10/AR2005081001918_pf.html

[seemslikeadream]

1. Oh my the indictments must be close at hand

WP setting the record straight

[Lerkfish]

4. interesting...

could the too-good-to-be-true accounts of impending indictments be true? do I dare to hope?

God, I pray so.

[Pirate Smile]

2. What exactly was new in that article? I've think I've read all of that

before so what was the point - although I'm always happy when the CIA Leak case reappears in the headlines.

I just don't see any relevance regarding the specifics of how exactly Wilson got sent to Niger. The crime was committed long after that happened and all of those facts are actually irrelevant to the crimes of outing a CIA undercover agent, conspiracy, etc.

Am I missing something or is this just a continuation of the Rove game of trying to muddy up the waters? I don't see how it muddies anything. The water is still crystal clear.

[Bumblebee]

3. A very strange article, if you ask me

Pincus knows a lot, he is one of the players but he is being careful and so it's all written, again, in a very tortured kind of a way. The message should be clear -- she did not send him, Rove et al made it up to discredit Wilson, and GOP is lying
through their collective teeth to muddy the waters. That's what the article basically does say but in such a cautious and muddled manner...

[Pirate Smile]

6. Diary on Daily Kos trying to decipher the meaning:

WaPo on Plame tonight: Why did Libby/Rove story match State Dept. memo?

by Swopa
Wed Aug 10th, 2005 at 19:48:55 PDT
I just wrote a post at Needlenose about a curiously written story by Walter Pincus in the Washington Post tonight.

Taken at face value, the story examines the conflicting accounts of why Joseph Wilson was sent to Niger in 2002 -- was it because his wife suggested him, or not?

Although the article doesn't make this point explicitly, I think Pincus is intentionally noting that the version of events Rove, Libby, and whoever were blabbing to reporters before Novak outed Valerie Plame matches the classified State Dept. memo they claim wasn't their source ... and no other known account of how Wilson's trip happened.

-snip-
In other words, in the course of an apparent inquiry into who sent Joseph Wilson to Niger, Pincus seems to "accidentally" stumble onto the discovery that the only document backing up the White House/Republican viewpoint is ... the State Department memo.

You know, the same State Department memo that would get Karl Rove and Lewis Libby in deep trouble if it was shown to be their source of information about Valerie Plame Wilson.

Why did the story they told reporters match the State Dept. memo, but not any other known account of how Joe Wilson's trip was arranged? It's not such an innocent question when you think about it, is it?

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/8/10/224855/781

[Bumblebee]

8. makes sense -- it did feel like he had a hidden agenda. Thanks!

[kodi]

5. the time line is wrong

check out the SSCI report on Niger. it states that plame wrote the memo on her husband's credentials on 2/12/02, the decision to send wilson occurred the next day. the first meeting wilson attended at CIA with CIA and State Dept INR staff was 2/19/02. the notes of the INR staffer is what another state dept analyst used for the information in a footnote in the State Dept memo that was the source of the leak.

it might have been that wilson was considered for the trip because of his past experience with investigating niger press cake sales in 1999, but there is no evidence in the official documents that CIA made the decision before plame submitted to her supervisor the bona fides about her husband.

SSCI report... see section on Niger.

http://www.gpoaccess.gov/serialset/creports/iraq.html

[Norquist Nemesis]

7. Good catch!

Still smelling a rat.

[gpandas]

9. one question i've not seen answered, or even asked-

who forged the documents?