In February 1999, Wissam al-Zahawie, Iraq’s ambassador to the Vatican, travelled on a multinational trip to Africa. While in Niger, he met with the President. Many intelligence agencies were aware of the trip, and I am sure his movements were monitored.
In the fall of 2001, after the 9/11 attacks, the Italian intelligence service, SISMI, contacted the United States and said they had evidence that the purpose behind al-Zahawie’s visit was to pursue the purchase of uranium oxide, a substance used in some nuclear weapons.
That evidence was a rank, obvious forgery. Sources that saw the documents told Seymour Hersh they were “amateurish and unsubstantiated”. The CIA briefed Dick Cheney on their assessment but were told to take a second look.
In February, the CIA decided to send Wilson to Niger to check into the allegations. It is obvious that the CIA chose to send someone to Niger, not because they thought the documents were real, but to satisfy Cheney’s demands.
Cheney didn’t ask for Wilson, he asked for a second look. The CIA chose Wilson, not the VP. But they wouldn’t have chosen anyone without the VP directing them to follow-up.
Therefore, Wilson was not lying when he said, “In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney’s office had questions about a particular intelligence report.”
Nor was he lying when he said, “The vice president’s office asked a serious question. I was asked to help formulate the answer. I did so, and I have every confidence that the answer I provided was circulated to the appropriate officials within our government.”
The GOP talking points are deceptive.
They are also making a big deal out of the fact that Valerie Plame Wilson may have recommended her husband for this trip. Even if she did, a fact she denies, someone else agreed and authorized Wilson for the mission. Niger is not a wonderful vacation spot. It’s a horribly impoverished country. It’s absurd to suggest that Wilson was looking for a cheap vacation.
The Rove machine is also trying to minimize the damage done to national security, and to Wilson’s wife, from the disclosure of her identity. To do this, they are suggesting that she was not a non-official cover (NOC) operative at the time of her outing. And they are using her presence at CIA headquarters as evidence in support of that theory.
This morning I contacted an ex-CIA intelligence analyst. He told me that NOC’s come and go from headquarters all the time. NOC’s work at Langley at desk jobs. Her presence at Langley is not an indicator that she was not a NOC.
Moreover, he told me, thousands of employees come to work at Langley everyday that are undercover. Most have official cover. But some have non-official cover. It’s wrong, and possibly illegal, to blow any of their covers.
Lastly, he pointed out, that Plame could have resumed her career with official cover by taking a diplomatic position overseas. Perhaps she could have been made a Chief of Station in a foreign capital. The leak destroyed that possibility. It severely damaged her career.
Taken all together, there is no legitimacy to the GOP talking points. It’s all bullshit.
It is all bullshit…
Certainly in the long term this story and it’s eventual outcome are larger then just Karl Rove.
However, the only talking point or real point I see is that at this particular moment, today, there are three possible scenarios and Mr. Bush has six possible answers to them:
1a. Rove is guilty and Bush is equally guilty by knowingly covering for him.
1b. Rove is guilty and Bush knowing this, fires him.
2a. Rove is innocent and Bush knowing this is disloyal by not divulging this to the prosecutor and public.
2b. Rove is innocent and Bush knowing this proves it to the rest of us.
3a. Bush doesn’t know if Rove is guilty or not and Bush is negligent in his duties by not removing a suspected traitor from his administration and revoking his access to sensitive and classified information.
3b. Bush doesn’t know if Rove is guilty or not and therefore performs his duties as defender of the nation by requiring Rove to temporarily step down until such time as he is proven innocent or guilty.
At the moment, given the current statements and actions of Bush and the administration, option 3a is the operative one which means that Mr. Bush is negligent in his duties and obligations to the nation by not removing a potential high security risk from his government.
This is the only talking point and the immediate response to whatever bushit the gop and rwnm spews.
I agree, but for one point: Niger may be poor, but it is one fascinating country. Niamey is a wonderful city, chock full of things to explore and see–including Tuaregs wandering about on camels. There’s much of the country I haven’t seen (Agadez, for example, where the silversmiths are), but I have taken the bus from Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso to Niamey several times, so have seen that countryside (the savannah just south of the Sahel–itself right below the desert). It’s harsh and bleak, yes, and deforestation has taken its toll… but it still has grandeur.
Though my first choice for a vacation just south of the Sahara would be Mali, Niger is no piker of a vacation destination.
off topic, I’m afraid, but I would be very keen to hear more about your experiences / impressions in sub-Saharan Africa. Sounds fascinating…
Thanks for setting this out so concisely-I’ve run into the gop talking points a few times this week and need to hone my response.
The excellent Raw Story has a copy of the official RNC talking points memo on the Rove thing here.
Here’s my understanding of the whole NOC or not NOC situation:
Regardless, it is a FACT that she ran a number of NOC operations at some point through the cover company that was closed down in 2003, yes? This means that the possibility of CURRENT (2003) NOC operatives in those systems were put at risk. And that is unacceptable. Period.
(comment from Man Eegee’s diary:
But outing Plame was itself a distraction – what mattered when Novak published his column was that the Bush administration had decided early on that the best way to sell the war that they had been planning and lobbying for since 1998 was to terrify the American people that deadly chemicals, horrifying disease, and nuclear holocaust would be the price of not invading Iraq. And of course, people were vulnerable to this strategy because of 9-11. . . .
Now we have an attempt to distract us from the distraction. Our attention moves farther and farther from the critical issue. Bush/Rove/et al. manipulated the public discourse for the purpose of committing our troops to an illegal, unjustified, and dangerous war.
Their propaganda efforts and manipulation of information – and even of our memories of events that did, in fact, happen have reached truly Orwellian proportions.
Further comment in that thread We must never cease to refuse to let them define what is being discussed. We must resist taking the bait – wasting our time answering their talking points. It does not matter if we are right about who sent Wilson to Niger. As long as we are talking about that, we are doing exactly what they want.
We must insist on changing the topic back to the essential point – Bush lied us into a horrible war.
[Sorry for double posting a comment, but I feel that it’s an important point. Chastise me if necessary.]
Janet,
Thanks soooooo much for cutting to the main issue: “Bush lied us into a horrible war” IT would read a bit more accurately as the ‘Bush administration lied us into a horrible war’ Also soooooooo obvious but usually ignored, the bush administration is getting filthy rich over this “horrible war”. Could you imagine if the bush gang, actually got what they deserved for their war crimes….
Larry Johnson is a colleague of Valerie Plame’s and has known her since training. In case you missed the TPM link on other posts, it’s important reading for details about her career (and those confusing CIA labels).
http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/7/13/04720/9340
Someone in the Democratic Party needs to be honing a message that will play to the middle: Moderate/Libertarian Republicans, Independents, Moderate/Libertarian Democrats. This is the market the Dem’s need to aim at. This is also where the balance of power is with the electorate divided roughly into thirds.
The average hard-core Republican wingnut couldn’t care less what the Bush administration did, does, or will do. No way are we going to convince them of anything. It’s a waste of time and resources to try.
The average hard-core Democrat doesn’t need convincing although some resources thrown into this area isn’t a bad idea.
There is one more piece of faulty intel that, in combination with the Feb 1999 trip, is still used to fan misconceptions and disinformation about Wilson and what he found – it is about a Jul 1999 meeting in Algeria the details of which are shamelessly transposed and misquoted as to who the parties were and what was discussed, and how the meeting came about, and where and when it happened. In most cases (redstate, powerline, Susan Schmidt etc.) the parroters do not even know what the original facts are.
I wrote the following waaaay back and it got overlooked, mostly. Take a look at the second section (businessman – Niger PM story). The first section details a bit more what you bring up here about the Feb 1999 trip.
BOGUS: no Iraq-Niger uranium link
All this research was done only using Google and common sense.
If a trip to Niger was a “cheap vacation boondoggle”, was golfing with DeLay on the itinerary?
I get my GOP talking points all mixed up.
Official business: golfing, DeLay, $150,000
Boondoggle: refuting obvious sham evidence Cheney thinks would make good propoganda for war. So good, he used it in spite of the evidence from the trip.
Anyone else get the issue of Newsweek after the election that touted Rove’s key role in “winning” the election? Anyone else remember the tidbit about how his role before his current official White House post was going over all the intelligence (with Cheney, IIRC) to put together a convincing war story for the UN and the nation?
Where did Karl Rove see Valerie Plame’s name? Gee, I wonder…
I still can’t believe in his post-election euphoria he let it be known that as a mere political consultant with no official role in the US Govt, he was playing with raw intelligence data to create a false story to support a vanity-war.
Treason, much?