Update [2005-7-27 17:11:57 by susanhu]: Admiral Inman was misquoted by the National Review, Larry Johnson learned this afternoon when he spoke directly with Adm. Inman. Updated text below fold.
Today’s LAT editorial, “Operation Coverup,” tells it like it is:
However they came to learn about this juicy factoid, people in the Bush administration misused an intelligence secret to discredit a critic of its Iraq policy. And outing Plame, whether illegal or not, did harm to our national security. Plame may work in Langley, Va., but she worked with others who work in more dangerous locales. You only need to imagine how Republicans would have treated such a leak in the Clinton administration to dismiss their protestations that it’s all no big deal.
It’s a good bet that there has already been some lying under oath. …
It’s no surprise, however, that the rightwing continues to pile on the counter-arguments and lies.
Larry Johnson, the former CIA/State Dept. intel anlayst, writes this morning at his blog No Quarter:
BELOW THIS SECTION, is the updated text based on Larry Johnson’s conversation with Admiral Inman this afternoon.
Over on the not-to-be-missed NRO Media Blog, Stephen Spruiell interviews Adm. Bobby Ray Inman, former deputy secretary of intelligence and briefly a Clinton nominee for Defense Secretary, about Valerie Plame. Money graf: “[The leaking of Plame’s identity] is still one I would rather not see, but she was working in an analytical organization, and there’s nothing that precludes anyone from identifying analytical officers. I watch all the hand-wringing over the ruining of careers… there are a lot of operatives whose covers are blown. It doesn’t mean the end of their careers. Many move to the analytical world, which is where she already was. It meant she couldn’t deploy back off to Africa, but nothing I’ve seen indicated that was possible in the first place.”
Now for the Truth: …
Johnson fires back, and — below — journalist Robert Parry, who helped uncover the Iran/Contra scandal, adds his rather STRONG views on the outing of covert CIA agents.
Johnson continues:
It may be that Inman was quoted out of context. However, if true Inman is allowing himself to be used as a tool for Republican smears. Valerie Plame was not working as a CIA analyst, she was undercover, per press reports, as an Energy Analyst for Brewster Jennings. Inman not only misstates her position, he has no firsthand knowledge. This speaks very poorly about the journalistic standards of the NRO.
To show how pathetically ignorant Inman is on the matter, there have been CIA officers who started off as an analyst, who like me were undercover. They later switched-over to an operations officer career track and are now serving overseas in undercover positions.
What is so despicable about all of this is that the conservative movement, which was born in part from the efforts of Whittaker Chambers to expose communist treachery, is now serving as apologists for political operatives who have destroyed an intelligence network and at least one case officer’s distinguished career.The new standard for the Republican National Committee–Karl Rove didn’t commit a crime. Boy, there’s a slogan to run on, “At Least I Wasn’t Indicted”
Johnson’s quip reminds me of Laura Rozen’s comment re Fitzgerald’s investigation yesterday at her blog, War & Piece: “Welcome to the modern Republican Party.”
Update [2005-7-27 17:11:57 by susanhu]:
Johnson writes this afternoon:
Admiral Inman was quoted out of context. I spoke with him this afternoon after alerting him to the National Review online quote. He takes very seriously the compromise of Valerie’s cover. He was telling Mr. Spruiell that anyone in the intel community would not be in a position to intuitively know whether Valerie was or was not undercover at first glance. However, since they are in the intel community they have clearances and should not be out and about talking about people they do not know.
For the record, Valerie Plame was not working as a CIA analyst, she was undercover, per press reports, as an Energy Analyst for Brewster Jennings. Inman did not misstate her position, and told me he has no firsthand knowledge of her cover status. This speaks very poorly about the journalistic standards of the NRO.
…
Robert Parry, interviewed this morning on Democracy Now!, has a highly revealing article, “Rove’s Backers Use ‘CounterSpy Defense’” at his publication, Consortium. About outing CIA agents, Parry — a decades-long journalist who has reported for the Associated Press and Newsweek — observes:
In the Plame case, Rove’s defenders are suggesting that the identities of CIA officers are everyday fodder for Washington cocktail parties, after which journalists supposedly rush back to the office to spice up their stories with “secret” CIA identities.
But that just isn’t true. As a journalist who has covered intelligence issues for a quarter century, I have never encountered that kind of cavalier attitude toward the naming of CIA officers. In interviews and conversations that I’ve had even with government officials I’ve known for years, they steer clear of naming CIA personnel they work with
The rule of thumb is to assume that a CIA officer’s name is a national security secret unless you specifically know otherwise. At the CIA, public identities are mostly limited to employees in the press office and senior agency officials, such as the director and deputy directors.
Not only do most government officials take pains to protect the identities of CIA employees, but so do most journalists who may learn the names of CIA officers while working on articles. CIA identities are only used in stories if the countervailing principle of the public’s right to know is so compelling that use of the name can’t be avoided.
Novak’s column was an aberration from these longstanding Washington ground rules. Plus, the violation was striking because the justification for disclosing Plame was so weak – that she may have recommended her husband for the trip to Niger.
Since Wilson was otherwise qualified for the assignment and since his conclusion about the bogus Niger claims turned out to be true, it’s never been entirely clear why the White House considered his wife’s role in the trip important enough to override the mandate for protecting the identity of CIA officers.
It’s also still a mystery why the discrete secret of Plame’s identity would have been shared with political operative Rove – and by whom.
Wilson concluded that the outing of his wife was an act of retaliation – and there is evidence to support that suspicion. In September 2003, a senior White House official told the Washington Post that at least six reporters had been informed about Plame before Novak’s column appeared. The official said the disclosures about Plame were “purely and simply out of revenge.”
(The myth that Plame was not a clandestine officer at the time of Novak’s column gained traction because of a mistaken report on July 15, 2005, by the Associated Press, which misinterpreted a comment that Wilson made during a CNN interview. The AP took Wilson’s comment that “my wife was not a clandestine officer the day that Bob Novak blew her identity” to mean that she had already left the covert world, when Wilson actually meant that Novak’s column ended her covert career. AP ran a correction but conservatives widely circulated the erroneous report.)
Parry’s article, “Rove’s Backers Use ‘CounterSpy Defense’,” also dissects the rightwing counter-attack, focusing heavily on how The Washington Times has performed.
For instance, six months ago, Tony Blankley, editorial page editor of the Washington Times, suggested prosecuting New Yorker investigative reporter Seymour Hersh on espionage charges (carrying a possible death penalty) for disclosing secret U.S. military reconnaissance operations inside Iran.
In a Jan. 19, 2005, column entitled “Espionage by any other name,” Blankley argued that Hersh had given sensitive secrets to the enemy by describing U.S. preparations for war with Iran. Blankley cited the precedent of the government using the Espionage Act to convict Navy analyst Samuel Morison for selling photos of a Soviet ship to a Jane’s military publication in the mid-1980s.
Yet Hersh’s article had an obvious importance to a national public debate about whether the Iraq War should be extended to Iran. Hersh’s New Yorker article was alerting the American people to how advanced the war planning already was.
No similar argument could be made about an overriding need for the public to know the identity of Valerie Plame. Yet, the Washington Times – along with other conservative news outlets – decried the Hersh leak while defending the Rove-Novak leak.
There is also irony in the Washington Times making pronouncements about espionage when it has been kept afloat since 1982 with secret financing from Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who was unmasked in a 1978 congressional investigation as a covert agent of the South Korean government trying to penetrate U.S. media and politics.
LINKED at Crooks & Liars. Thanks, C&L!
