Victoria Toensing, Cliff May, Byron York and the other rightwing apologists who have long insisted that Valerie Plame Wilson was not undercover have some “splaining” to do. [UPDATE: Check out Glenn Greenwald’s rogues gallery.] Federal Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s latest filing in the Scooter Libby case leaves no doubt about Valerie Wilson’s status–she was covert and undercover and served overseas. Thanks to a heads up from McClatchy’s Jonathan Landay, followed in short order by a note from John Amato at Crooks and Liars, I got my hands on the Fitzgerald filing. [Update: David Corn posted the first piece on this Friday night. He needs to do more self-promotion.] Man, the rightwing stooges are getting their collective asses handed to them on all fronts (e.g., a bird shits on Bush, Wolfowitz gets bounced from the World Bank, and rightwing bloggers, Flopping Aces and Charles Johnson in particular, were exposed making fraudulent claims). As Jackie Gleason used to say, “how sweet it is!”
Download fitz_filing_declaring_val_was_undercover.pdf
See also p. 5 of
Download libby_guidelines_calculations_memo1.pdf
[Note: Fitzgerald says that the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA) applied to Valerie at the time of her outing. Suck on that you rightwing hypocrites.]
Fitz makes the following points:
- Valerie Wilson was an operations officer working in the Counter Proliferation Division (CPD) of the Directorate of Operations and headed a unit that covered weapons proliferation issues concerning Iraq.
- While in CPD Valerie traveled overseas seven times to more than ten countries always, repeat always, undercover.
- Valerie was a covert officer on 14 July 2003, when Novak identified her as a CIA employee.
- The CIA was taking “affirmative measures to conceal her intelligence relationship to the United States.”
So far the CIA will only admit that Valerie worked there starting in January 2002. But those of us who trained with her know the truth–Valerie was undercover and covered by the Intelligence Indentities Protection Act since September 1985. According to the Intelligence Identities Protection Act:
(4) The term “covert agent” means:
(A) a present or retired officer or employee of an intelligence agency or a present or retired member of the Armed Forces assigned to duty with an intelligence agency—
(i) whose identity as such an officer, employee, or member is classified information, and
(ii) who is serving outside the United States or has within the last five years served outside the United States; or
(B) a United States citizen whose intelligence relationship to the United States is classified information, and—
(i) who
resides and acts outside the United States as an agent of, or informant
or source of operational assistance to, an intelligence agency, or
(ii) who
is at the time of the disclosure acting as an agent of, or informant
to, the foreign counterintelligence or foreign counterterrorism
components of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; or
(C) an individual, other than
a United States citizen, whose past or present intelligence
relationship to the United States is classified information and who is
a present or former agent of, or a present or former informant or
source of operational assistance to, an intelligence agency.
Oh! Let’s not forget Mr. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. He’s going to jail because he obstructed justice and perjured himself. He deserves to be tried for treason, but, as Mick Jagger sang, “you can’t always get what you want, but you find sometimes, you get what you need.”
UPDATE: Here is the link to Patrick Fitzgerald’s submission to Judge Walton:
Download libby_governments_sentencing_memo.pdf
