Joe Wilson hearts Clinton

Larry Johnson at his No Quarter blog (Battle-tested 02/12/08) provides the text of an op-ed by Ambassador Joe Wilson of the same title supporting Clinton in the Democratic primaries (original in the Baltimore Sun). He points to a big concern about Obama as the nominee with his "post-partisan" message:

But will Mr. Obama fight? His brief time on the national scene gives little comfort. Consider a February 2006 exchange of letters with Mr. McCain on the subject of ethics reform. The wrathful Mr. McCain accused Mr. Obama of being "disingenuous," to which Mr. Obama meekly replied, "The fact that you have now questioned my sincerity and my desire to put aside politics for the public interest is regrettable but does not in any way diminish my deep respect for you."

Mr. McCain was insultingly dismissive but successful in intimidating his inexperienced colleague. Thus, in his one known face-to-face encounter with Mr. McCain, Mr. Obama failed to stand his ground.

On the other hand, he writes of Clinton:

She is one of the few to have defeated the attack machine that is today's Republican Party and to have emerged stronger. She is deeply knowledgeable about governing; she made herself into a power in the Senate; she is respected by our military; and she never flinches. She has never been intimidated, not by any Republican - not even John McCain.

Tags: barack obama, hillary clinton, joseph wilson

Yes, widening the war to Iran would be really loony

Gary Kamiya may be using "us" a bit broadly. But his comment on Establishment thinking - what liberal bloggers have taken lately to calling "the Village" - is uncomfortably accurate (Iraq taught us nothing Salon 11/06/07):

The U.S. could attack Iran in the next few months. ...

The fact that this sentence can be written with a straight face proves that the Iraq debacle has taught us absolutely nothing. Talk of attacking Iran should be confined to the lunatic fringe. Yet America's political and media elite have responded to the idea of attacking Iran in almost exactly the same way they did to the idea of attacking Iraq. Four and a half years after Bush embarked on one of the most catastrophic foreign-policy adventures in our history, the same wrongheaded, ignorant and self-destructive approach to the Arab-Muslim world and to fighting terrorism still rules establishment thinking.

The disturbing thing is that we have no excuse this time. (my emphasis)

I wouldn't go so far as he does in criticizing Clinton's position on the Iran issue. A couple of recent Huffington Post articles with differing points of view help put the Democrats' position in context, A Reality Check on Iran Policy and U.S. Campaign Politics 11/04/07 by Joe Wilson and Coercive Diplomacy and War: The Vietnam Precedent by Gareth Porter 11/01/07.

Tags: gareth porter, gary kamiya, iran war, joseph wilson

Wilson/Plame Scandal: Other Weblogs on the CIA Front Company Story

Several other Weblogs are weighing in about the exposure of the CIA front company. And not all of them were as restrained as my previous post, especially about Robert Novak.

CalPundit (Kevin Drum):

Well, why would anyone feed Robert Novak information about a CIA front company just so that he can make the point on national TV that Valerie Plame is a Democrat? Is it really worth doing that just to add minutely to the Republican meme that this is all a partisan feud rather than a genuine national security matter?

Why indeed. The bottom line, I think, is that these guys just don't care. When it comes to dealing with enemies, they lash out with everything they've got no matter how trivial it is and no matter what collateral damage it might cause. There's just no sense of proportion at all.

Billmon:

So way to go, Bob! You've not only outed one of the CIA's leading agents in the field of WMD nonproliferation, you just made doubly sure that her front company was exposed, too! ...

Welcome to the complete and total abasement of the Republican Party. By now there must be tears rolling down the cheeks of that statue of Lincoln out at the Lincoln Memorial.

Josh Marshall hasn't commented on this story yet, but I expect he will. Marshall's has been the blog to watch on this story. (Later addition: Marshall's post on this particular story.)

Tags: joseph wilson, kevin drum, josh marshall, robert novak, valerie plame

Wilson/Plame Scandal: The Damage Spreads

President Bush should find the Valerie Plame leakers and get them out of the government, fast. And columnist Robert Novak should re-evaluate what he allows to come out of his mouth.

This Washington Post article by Walter Pincus and Mike Allen, two of the Post's best, describes how revealing Plame's identity also compromised a CIA front firm, Brewster-Jennings & Associates. And Novak gave some extra assistance to that process:

The name of the CIA front company was broadcast yesterday by Novak, the syndicated journalist who originally identified Plame. Novak, highlighting Wilson's ties to Democrats, said on CNN that Wilson's "wife, the CIA employee, gave $1,000 to Gore and she listed herself as an employee of Brewster-Jennings & Associates."

"There is no such firm, I'm convinced," he continued. "CIA people are not supposed to list themselves with fictitious firms if they're under a deep cover -- they're supposed to be real firms, or so I'm told. Sort of adds to the little mystery."
In fact, it appears the firm did exist, at least on paper. The Dun & Bradstreet database of company names lists a firm that is called both Brewster Jennings & Associates and Jennings Brewster & Associates.

In continuing his cooperation with White House attempts to discredit Wilson and Plame, Novak apparently shot off his mouth carelessly, to put the most generous interpretation on it. But the damage to the effectiveness of the front company had probably already been done by the original revelation.

Veteran political reporter Jules Witcover, in an excellent article Friday, addressed the issue of protection of sources in this case:

If Mr. Novak initiated the interview [that produced the Plame exposure], then he clearly has the obligation to protect his source. But if some White House rumormonger undertook, unsolicited, to plant the story with other reporters, I don't see where, unless they had some prior understanding with the leaker, they have any obligation to protect him in his efforts of intimidation.

Tags: joseph wilson, jules witcover, robert novak, valerie plame

Wilson/Plame Affair: More Links

These are a few more links I've come across. Not much time to comment on them right now.

At Newsmax, a really conservative site, a very critical piece about Plame's exposure appears next to an "I Like Bush" t-shirt ad. (Via Atrios.)

At the same Atrios link, he excerpts this panel discussion that includes Larry Johnson, a Republican former CIA analyst, from the PBS Newshour.

Billmon has a number of great comments on this issue. This particular one is not one of the best, but it's intriguing because he goes John Le Carre on us here.

And via Daily Kos, Wyeth Wire focuses on a serious problem that's already come up with how John Ashcroft's Justice Department has handled this.

Tags: joseph wilson, plame case, valerie plame

Wilson/Plame affair: more background

Following are some articles giving explanations of the Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame case. The first is doubly interesting. It explains some of the legal considerations involved, and it is written by John Dean, Nixon's White House counsel whose Congressional testimony gave key evidence in the Watergate scandal. Dean says of the leaks on Plame:

[W]hat has surfaced is repulsive. If I thought I had seen dirty political tricks as nasty and vile as they could get at the Nixon White House, I was wrong. ... Indeed, this is arguably worse. Nixon never set up a hit on one of his enemies' wives. ... This is the most vicious leak I have seen in over 40 years of government-watching. Failure to act to address it will reek of a cover-up or, at minimum, approval of the leak's occurrence - and an invitation to similar revenge upon Administration critics.

This July story from Newsday was one of the first. This July piece from The Hill is a reminder that this was an issue before the Justice Department got a formal CIA referral.
From the last few days, Clifford May in National Review makes the rather odd defense that leaking Plame's name was no big deal, because lots of people knew she worked for the CIA. "Who didn't know?" he asks, which raises even more questions about how careful this Administration is on such security matters. Daniel Drezner, who acted as an unpaid adviser to Bush's 2000 campaign writes:

What was done here was thuggish, malevolent, illegal, and immoral. Whoever peddled this story to Novak and others, in outing Plame, violated the law and put the lives of Plame's overseas contacts at risk. Compared to this, all of Clinton's peccadilloes look like an mildly diverting scene from an Oscar Wilde production.

Tags: daniel drezner, john dean, joseph wilson, valerie plame

Wilson/Plame affair: a tangled web

The Wilson/Plame affair - or is the Plame/Wilson affair - or (groan!) "Wilsongate" - is a very serious matter. It could well become the American version of Tony Blair's Hutton inquiry, in which an occurrence peripheral to the Iraq War winds up dramatically highlighting the degree of deception involved in making the case for war.

Even if this weren't connected to the war the way it is, for the White House to leak the name of an undercover CIA operative would be a big deal. As I understand the law, which was passed at the particular urging of the first President Bush during his time as Reagan's Vice President, this is a felony. It is not a crime for the reporter to receive or publish it, unless it's done repeatedly in a way that shows a pattern intended to damage national security.

In this case, we can certainly question Robert Novak's journalistic decision to publish the information. It was reportedly given to at least five other reporters, none of whom used the information in published stories or broadcasts. So presumably their judgment on the matter was different, whether from ethical reasons or because it was judged not to be a legitimate part of the "uranium from Niger" news story, the context in which it came up.

This story raises many questions. For the other journalists who received the information, is it permissible for them to reveal the leaker(s) on the grounds that Administration officials were breaking the law on a matter unrelated to the uranium story? Can the Justice Department legally require reporters to give the names?

According to White House spokesman Scott McClellan Monday, President Bush knows Karl Rove was not one of the leakers. Yet he also denied that the White House was conducting its own investigation. But why not? And how can Bush know that Rove was not involved unless there has been some kind of White House investigation?

The larger story here is the false prewar claims about "weapons of mass destruction" that the Bush Administration used to justify the Iraq War. When no WMDs were found in Iraq, they had to defend their prewar claims as somehow valid, or at least honestly mistaken. Which led, among other things, to the questions about the Niger uranium claims, which gave rise to the Valerie Plame leak.

Some people would say it's karma. But one way or the other, the WMD lies are coming back on the heads of Bush and his team.

Tags: iraq war, joseph wilson, valerie plame

The Plame/Wilson affair: the column that started it

This is the original column by conservative journalist Robert Novak that presumably blew the cover of Valerie Plume (see previous post): "Mission to Niger".

This is the relevant part to the scandal:

That's where Joe Wilson came in. His first public notice had come in 1991 after 15 years as a Foreign Service officer when, as U.S. charge in Baghdad, he risked his life to shelter in the embassy some 800 Americans from Saddam Hussein's wrath. My partner Rowland Evans reported from the Iraqi capital in our column that Wilson showed "the stuff of heroism." President George H.W. Bush the next year named him ambassador to Gabon, and President Bill Clinton put him in charge of African affairs at the National Security Council until his retirement in 1998.

Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. "I will not answer any question about my wife," Wilson told me.

Bush's critics suggested at the time that leaking information that Plame was an undercover CIA operative was meant not only to create pressure on Wilson to limit his public criticism of Bush's Iraq War policies. But that it was also meant to intimidate other former officials who might be tempted to criticize some aspect of Bush's conduct.

Tags: joseph wilson, robert novak, valerie plame

A story to watch

John Ashcroft's Justice Department will now have a chance to show if it can handle an assignment more substantial than covering up nekkid statues or an undercover operation to find prostitutes in New Orleans. (Not to disparage the latter; it must have taken very skilled and intensive undercover work to locate hookers in New Orleans!)

They just got a case referred by the CIA concerning the exposure of the identity of a CIA agent - by two senior Bush Administration officials. The agent in question is Valerie Plame, the wife of Joseph Wilson, the Ambassador who investigated claims of uranium sales from Niger to Iraq. (At least according to the press reports; neither she, nor Wilson, nor the CIA has publicly acknowledged that she is a CIA employee.) Wilson has been publicly critical of the Administration's use of the Niger uranium claim.

The Washington Post's Sunday story gives a good background on the case, although it oddly understates the matter in saying "intentional disclosure of a covert operative's identity can violate federal law." The Post story is also notable for this:

A senior administration official said two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and revealed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife. ...

"Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge," the senior official said of the alleged leak. ...

It is rare for one Bush administration official to turn on another. Asked about the motive for describing the leaks, the senior official said the leaks were "wrong and a huge miscalculation, because they were irrelevant and did nothing to diminish Wilson's credibility."

Several of the leading political blogs have been on this story, including Josh Marshall, Billmon, and Atrios. See especially this from Daily Kos. This is a story we'll likely be hearing a lot more of the next few months.

Tags: joseph wilson, valerie plame