by Larry Johnson
The Richard Cohen piece in today’s Washington Post was outrageous. Here are the facts. – LJ
Federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald understands very well that something beyond a crime was committed when Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, and other White House operatives spread the name of undercover CIA officer, Valerie Plame, around Washington as part of a coordinated effort to discredit her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson.
Someone needs to alert Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen that he is a nitwit and moron for trying to advance White House supplied talking points that no real crime occurred.
Update [2005-10-14 17:4:26 by Larry Johnson]: See also:
Biography:
Larry C. Johnson is CEO and co-founder of BERG Associates, LLC, an international business-consulting firm that helps corporations and governments manage threats posed by terrorism and money laundering. Mr. Johnson, who worked previously with the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism (as a Deputy Director), is a recognized expert in the fields of terrorism, aviation security, crisis and risk management. Mr. Johnson has analyzed terrorist incidents for a variety of media including the Jim Lehrer News Hour, National Public Radio, ABC’s Nightline, NBC’s Today Show, the New York Times, CNN, Fox News, and the BBC. Mr. Johnson has authored several articles for publications, including Security Management Magazine, the New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times. He has lectured on terrorism and aviation security around the world. Further bio details. |
Here are some of the facts that will come out when Fitzgerald ends his investigation:
- Valerie Plame was still a non-official cover officer in July 2003 when her identity was revealed by colostomy bag Bob Novak.
- Valerie Plame had traveled overseas on secret missions using that cover as required under the statute in question.
- Valerie Plame’s exposure also almost compromised the identity of other non-official cover officers.
- Valerie Plame did not have the authority to send her husband on the Niger mission and in fact did not make the decision.
Other mental midgets like Cohen, such as Victoria Toensing, continue to insist that no crime could have been committed because Valerie Plame, “worked at a desk job”. Newsflash for these so-called Washington insiders who have proven they know nothing about the intelligence community–at least 40% of the people working at CIA Headquarters are working undercover. Just because they may physically go to the CIA building in McLean, Virginia everyday does not mean that their relationship with the CIA is acknowledged.
During my four years of sitting at a desk at CIA I was undercover. My position with the CIA was not even known by my own parents. Only my wife was privy to that secret. Many of the undercover folks still working at CIA are at headquarters on a temporary basis. Some travel overseas on temporary assignments that last less than a month. Others await a semi-permanent posting for a two or three year stint overseas.
The point that Cohen and the other White House hacks have missed is that protecting the identities of intelligence officers, whether they are working under official or non-official cover, is part of national defense. To compromise these identities is to commit an act of treason.
Patrick Fitzgerald understands that he must prosecute within the confines of the law. However, he also understands that what was done to the wife of Ambassador Joe Wilson was more than a rough game of inside the beltway hardball. Karl Rove told Chris Matthews that “Wilson’s wife is fair game”. Not only was she an unfair target, but in going after her the White House political crew unwittingly exposed several intelligence assets and caused the loss of intelligence assets overseas.
Richard Cohen is dead wrong to argue that the best thing Patrick Fitzgerald can do is leave town. To the contrary, the best thing Patrick Fitzgerald can do is a send a clear message to politicians in both parties that when it comes to political hardball intelligence assets must be kept out of the game. At the end of the day our nation’s security is no game, it is a matter of life and death.
Larry C. Johnson
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good stuff from you, larry. as always.
this is the serious smackdown. for a little bit more light-hearted but still vituperative take on richard cohen’s humbug opus i posted a diary fisking richard cohen at length. because every single sentence in that pile is worthy of full derision. every single sentence.
he also seemed a little weak on what the concept of “crime” is all about. not just this specific crime, but crime in general. he seems to think that if everybody in DC is spilling national security information, that somehow makes it OK. and that prosecutors should decide whether to indict based on public opinion. so i took him to task on that one too.
oh yeah – here’s one snippet you might like:
fisking richard cohen
Awesome Dairy….Love it. “National Security”..hum..isn’t that what GW Bush ran on? btw/ I really hate that female HACK that you speak of. Every time I see that Hag on TV pimping for BushCo I change the channel. Toensing…Watta Cow.
I have full confidence that Pat Fitzgerald being of sound mind will indict. Based upon then fact that Novak got her fucking name from somewhere. The American people would like a map to the trail of assholes that outed a covert CIA agent.
The real crime behind the outing of Valerie Plame is the mad rush to war in Iraq that act of treason made possible.And for Mr.Cohen’s information, I consider the death of 2000 soldiers and over 100,000 Iraqi civilians in a war based on lies ultimate crimes for which we sent the Nazis to the gallows.
May be a refresher course on Judgement at Nuremberg will do this hack a lot of good.
I read Cohen’s piece this morning and was appalled. The word nitwit also occurred to me. Cohen is a liberal (believe it or not) who usually writes thoughtful columns.
Every once and awhile he writes a column that is so outrageous tbat he seems as tho he has his head up his ass. He is not a White House hack. He is close to Judith Miller and believes that she is a martyr for freedom of the press. He is a do gooder who often does not live in the real world.
I have never forgiven him for a column he wrote in the throes of the Florida recount of 2000. He questionned some action of the Gore campaign in the recount that he thought was unethical, and essentially threw his support to the Republicans (like they were really ethical with their neo-Nazi intimidation tactics).
Keep your eyes on the letters to the editor in the Washington Post. I bet this generates some real anger and outrage.
He sounds like the kind of D.C.er who pays far too much attention to party patter … where, I’ll bet you anything, it’s now in vogue to titter about Fitz….
after all, he hardly looks like Sally and Ben’s type. A bit rough around the edges. Something of the street in his look. Not society material. You know what i mean. Surely.
Richard Cohen is about as liberal as your average Brownshirt. I challenge one to read his last 15 columns and ask oneself: Is this man “really” a liberal? In that small sample of his recent work, you’ll find Cohen defending Miller’s outrageous warmongering articles in the run-up to shock & awe, you’ll find him denying that race had anything at all to do with Katrina & NO, you’ll find him apologizing for and attempting to excuse Bill Bennett’s blatantly racist remarks, and you’ll find him railing against Arafat and unnatural Palestinian terrorists while minimizing Israel’s excesses.
Richard Cohen is a national disgrace.
He is what passes for a liberal in DC these days.
That tells you just how fucked up and out of touch with reality DC is.
I think Cohen should take his own advice and leave town. Wow. I could see this kind of crap coming from some Bush butt-kissing right-wing blogger but WaPo…? Come one guys. What are you doing over there?
My understanding is taht the agency and only the agency makes a dermination about who is and who is not secret and that the 5 year rule is a minimum not a maximum span for secrecy, irrespective of which no one else may declassify an employee.
I wrote Cohen the following e-mail earlier this evening:
Mr. Cohen,
You could not possibly be as naïve as you would have your readers believe in today’s column. If you are you have no business being a columnist for a major American newspaper. If you are not you are a spin-artist and an apologist for a corrupt journalist and a corrupt administration.
Your over-simplification of Plamegate is truly astonishing. Outing an agent is a serious offense, and that was only the tip of the iceberg. This administration employs any and all means at their disposal to discredit their critics. Your attempts to trivialize their tactics is disgusting. Bush is as well-served by hacks like you as the rulers of the Soviet Union were by Pravda and Izvestia.
Your comments are spot on. I continue to have hope that that the insight expressed on sites like this, including yours -(thank you JPOL for your ideas/work),are presenting a counter-balance, no that is not accurate, they are providing the force of the fourth estate as it should be in democracy(as long as we keep integrity intact)-and recognize that many citizens do not have the same access, i.e., intranet access, except via library.
So how to reach those that work two jobs or do not have the economic means to access info beyond MSM? What ideas do you(to all) have to reach people who cannot access intranet and depend on MSM?(not speaking for the 98% of African Americans who are not on the bush bandwagon according to recent polls and to no surprise in historical context-) What ideas/strategies do folks have? We all know- there is serious deprivation of info that is accessible. Calling all strategists! Please share your ideas-
Here is one way, though it takes time and commitment on the part of many people.
http://psstpsstpsst.blogspot.com
The Whispering Campaign
Hey Larry, beautifully put as usual.
But, why doesn’t someone with your reputation and credibility come out and call out Cohen for what he is – another neoconservative shill? Cohen, much like Miller, is simply another paid scribe for the Israeli-firster camp that has assumed power in Washington. Of course he’d like the story to go away. God forbid some true journalist, if there are any left, starts making the connections between the Larry Franklin AIPAC Israeli Spying on America scandal and the troublesome Traitorgate scandal.
God forbid someone draws the obvious connections between Traitorgate and the neoconservative ideology directing our foreign policy at great expense to our nation and its future. Cohen must be outed for what he is and represents – a water carrier for the dangerously naive, hopelessly misguided, and severely self-injurious neoconservative philosophy that pervades our current foreign policy.
I think he just did…call him out.
Yes he called him out, but not as a propagandist for Israel’s Make Someone Else Fight Your War Machine.
Neoconned–Enough with this Israel first line. The issue is what Cohen wrote yesterday, not your own views about how everyone should tow your line.
Consider yourself warned.
House Rules:
Don’t be a prick. Don’t be the thought police.
First and foremost, I challenge you to cite where I am demanding that everyone tow my line?
I didn’t disparage you or comment that your remarks were pathetic, yet you apparently have decided that I am not “towing” YOUR line, have decided that YOU are the arbiter of the discussion boundary here, and have decided that YOU are going to direct what I post. I could say, “enough with” your stupidity DSKinMD, but then I would join you were you are dangerously teetering-on the verge of mega troll-dumb.
I disagreed with one of your posts, and you’ve responded like a child.
the feeling is mutual.
.
Behind the Iraq Dossier Hoax:
Intelligence Was Cooked in Israel
by Jeffrey Steinberg
According to media accounts, the 10 Downing Street “dossier,” cited favorably by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell in his disastrous Feb. 5 report to the United Nations Security Council, was plagiarized from an American graduate school paper, based on information more than a decade old. The scandal that erupted when the Blair dossier hoax hit the press, seriously undermined the credibility of those war party advocates of an immediate Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. As Lyndon LaRouche wrote, Powell was set up by a gang of public relations flacks who can’t think straight.
So far so good. But a deeper probe into the scandal reveals that there was good reason that the spin-meisters at the Coalition Information Center–the Washington-London civilian government propaganda unit that crafted both the Blair dossier and major portions of Secretary Powell’s own lighter-than-air book of evidence–did not reveal the sources of their information. The entire cooked intelligence picture was “Made in Israel”. It was cooked up at a right-wing think-tank complex notorious as a hotbed of radical Likudnik propaganda, and with links to the Office of Vice President Dick Cheney, via his Chief of Staff Lewis Libby and his former client, Marc Rich.
The essential facts are as follows: Two days before Powell’s UN appearance, 10 Downing Street issued a 16-page paper, “Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception, and Intimidation,” purportedly based on high-level British intelligence data. In fact, at least 11 of the 16 pages were lifted, verbatim, from an Israeli journal, Middle East Review of International Affairs, whose sole proprieter is Dr. Barry Rubin , an American-born Israeli citizen. The 11 pages were drawn from two articles, by Ibrahim al-Marashi and Robert Rabil, that appeared in the September 2002 edition of that journal.
Middle East Review of International Affairs– Dr. Barry Rubin
Al-Marashi’s article, a profile of Iraqi intelligence, was drawn, largely, from Iraqi government documents confiscated during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Al-Marashi, in turn, heavily footnoted his article to other, earlier stories published in Rubin’s obscure online journal, by Amazia Baram, the journal’s deputy editor.
Read on »»
posted by tobyflat2 at 8:56 PM PST
Iraq – Its infrastructure of concealment, deception and intimidation (pdf) is Downing Street’s recently released intelligence dossier regarding Iraq, mentioned during Colin Powell’s UN speech. Fair enough maybe, but they copied it pretty much wholesale from here (authored by a postgraduate student from California), without even as much as a thank you. More info here (channel4.com) and here (bbc.co.uk).
Read more »»
Adnan Khashoggi and Manucher Ghorbanifar
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Let the process take its course, Cohen.
You don’t know enough to talk intelligently about the situation right now. You can’t–Fitzgerald’s people are (surprise, surprise) keeping mum.
Don’t try to judge when you don’t know all the facts.
So, Cohen, it’s you who should go home.
We here are so fortunate to have someone like you Larry that is an insider and knows the facts and is willing to call this administration and its hacks out. I for one am extremely grateful. Keep up the great work. Maybe the LA Times will pick this up?
Now he has moved into the realm of irrelevant.
I don’t think this is about the truth. I think it’s about a lot of things including Patrick Fitzgeralds own personal view, which by association would have to be considered to possibly be ultra right wing.
I don’ think he gets it.
.
and Republicans in Congress are forced by We The People to take notice and start a true independent investigation leading to Impeachment Proceedings of P Bush and VP Cheney with rest of their cabal.
“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
Destroy the neocons in Election 2006 & 2008.
Conyers – DSM – UK – Sam Ervin
When will the hearings convene?▼ ▼ ▼
THIS IS MAJOR! ¶ Our Reichstag’s Fire ~
911 Attacks and the London bombing in its true nature is our Reichstag’s fire! The Rise of the Vulcans.
See also the latest coordinated effort of lies by Blair in the so-called Iranian bombing devices of Basra. Complete bs and it sticks in the MSM because it gets repeated and repeated again until it is nestled in people’s mind.
Never forget the Gulf of Tonkin and the USS Liberty.
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