It may turn out — in the great war being waged by disaffected members of the intelligence community network against the Neocon cabal inside the Bush administration — that Valerie Plame Wilson is as incidental as Monica Lewinsky was in the unending campaigns against Bill Clinton.
While the White House-spoonfed pundits nitpick over Joseph Wilson’s veracity and Valerie Wilson’s photo in Vanity Fair, the intelligence community is in a full-court press to undo the Bush administration’s gross mishandling of intelligence information, officers, agents, and agencies.
Imagine you’re in that community, and you witness the following:
- Neocon ideologue David Wurmser and the members of the post-9/11 newly created Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans — none of whom are experts in analyzing and assessing raw intelligence — are given carte blanche to cherry-pick and artificially produce “evidence not only linking Iraq to Al Qaeda, which we now know was false and which the CIA all along believed was false,” said Mother Jones reporter Robert Dreyfuss in an interview with his subject former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman on Democracy Now!, Nov. 6, 2003.
- “As the campaign against Iraq intensified, a former aide to Cheney told me, the Vice-President’s office, run by his chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, became increasingly secretive when it came to intelligence about Iraq’s W.M.D.s. As with Wolfowitz and Bolton, there was a reluctance to let the military and civilian analysts on the staff vet intelligence,” writes Seymour Hersh in an October 2003 New Yorker interview of V.P. Cheney’s spokesperson Cathie Martin who — like Wurmser — is being eyed by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.
- “[E]ven before [9/11], a number of senior White House officials sought to brand the CIA as soft in its analysis and unwilling to offer more clear-cut views on the threats to America.” WSJ, Oct. 28, 2005
- There are endless more examples of which you are also aware.
The retired/active intelligence community will not stand down and allow a Neocon cabal to dismantle its historic structure — allowing ideologues to place sensitive intelligence in the hands of wholly unqualified amateurs such as David Wurmser.
Any indictments would be a “huge deal … because they will help restore hope that the system works,” said Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst and counterterrorism official at the State Department.
Beyond the very large, and networked, community of retired intelligence officers, there are all of the active agents and analysts who were pressured or coerced in the run-up to the war. Many of them are joined in gunning for the Neocon cabal that created and marketed its own fictional rationales for the Iraq war.
The intel community also sees grave danger in the erosion of power of the CIA — and the rearranging of the deck chairs on Bush’s Titanic:
Pressed by Congress to revamp the nation’s intelligence agencies after the 2001 terrorist attacks, Mr. Bush this year created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, putting intelligence agencies under one roof. The director, John Negroponte, has been stripping out some units of the CIA and placing them under his direct control. He has also been seeking to institute standard procedures across the intelligence community, such as ways to handle clandestine agents. […….]
[S]ome inside the intelligence community see the changes as unwarranted attacks on their operations. They also see it as adding another level of bureaucracy that impairs quick response to terrorist threats.
“There’s been a huge wedge between what the analysts think and what the Bush administration wants them to say,” said Michael Scheuer, who headed the CIA’s special unit targeting Osama bin Laden before quitting in 2004. WSJ
Just as the Republicans seized on Monica Lewinsky as a convenient, scandalous, and easy-to-sell story, so too, in a way, has the intelligence community, and those of us opposed to the war in Iraq, seized on the story of Valerie Plame Wilson.
But make no mistake about my foci. Besides countering the inevitable quibbling counterpoints of desperate Republicans, I think it’s critical to keep this all-out war — against the selling of wholly bogus reasons for the Iraq war — foremost in our minds.
As for the Wilsons, as I wrote the other day, Joe Wilson’s civil rights have been violated. By the way, I found it fascinating to hear Pat Buchanan, last night on MSNBC, bring up Joseph Wilson’s civil rights issue as a possible indictment charge. And Valerie Wilson Plame’s career has been badly damaged, and her sources compromised:
[A]ny sources she may have drawn, the current career, those people who were in real trouble. Any future work she might have been able to do as a 20-year veteran, very experienced, is lost. Plus, and most importantly, all around the world anybody who is thinking of working for U.S. intelligence as a spy now sees that from time to time, at least, the U.S. hurts the home team and that’s not good. (Patrick Lang on CNN, Oct. 27, 2005)
And, below, Larry Johnson tells us the chilling account of what happens to you when your husband crosses the Bush administration — your life is threatened, but you can’t get any protection:
BLITZER: Were you surprised that, after her name was revealed, that she posed for pictures, that famous picture in “Vanity Fair,” that she posed for pictures elsewhere with her husband? Because a lot of people have suggested, you know what? This was no big deal.
JOHNSON: Well, that’s…
BLITZER: It’s small potatoes. And look at her. She’s sort of flaunting it.
JOHNSON: Yes. With the benefit of hindsight, I don’t think Joe and Valerie would have done that again.
But they also recognized, at the time when they did it, her career had been completely destroyed. And she had received death threats overseas from al Qaeda. So, as a result of that outing…
BLITZER: How do you know she got death threats from al Qaeda?
JOHNSON: I have heard it directly from people that have been told that there was a threat.
BLITZER: Because she is a…
JOHNSON: Because…
BLITZER: … a former CIA operative?
(CROSSTALK)
JOHNSON: … operative and outed by Robert Novak.
There were three people that were identified as having a threat. And she was contacted by the FBI.
BLITZER: Does she get security protection…
(CROSSTALK)
JOHNSON: She did not.
BLITZER: Why didn’t she?
JOHNSON: She called…
(CROSSTALK)
BLITZER: She still works for the CIA.
JOHNSON: She called CIA and was told, you will have to rely upon 911.
BLITZER: Larry, we will continue this conversation.
Larry, thanks very much.
JOHNSON: Thanks, Wolf.
BLITZER: Larry Johnson, former CIA officer, worked at counterterrorism at the State Department as well.