Economaniac at dKos - excellent Plame Case Diary

[dchill]

An intriguing and well-written diary that claims:

The Plame Case Ain't What You Think

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/6/30/123531/610

The whole affair actually has more to do with the WMD conflict between the CIA and the Bush administration.

[housewolf]

1. Well worth the read

Thanks for posting, it's an article that is well-worth reading.

Nominating.

[Douglas Carpenter]

2. definately -- a must read article

thanks for posting

[icymist]

3. Nominated! This and the DSM should be studied very closely!

From the article:
At the time the administration was flush with success and still confident that they would find illegal weapons. They were sorting Washington into good guys (who supported the war) and bad guys (who questioned it). When Wilson came up they asked around "Who is this guy" and learned he was married to a CIA WMD analyst. That made him a bad guy, so they share the news with Novak, as a way of discrediting Wilson. It wasn't about retaliation, it was about tarnishing Wilson by tying him to the antiwar faction at CIA. The White House knows Plame as an analyst who refused to support their prowar view. They have been fighting these internal battles for months; now that they have won the war those Saddam lovers are out. I doubt anyone even thought about her being covert.

To get a flavor of where the White House was going see this WSJ editorial from October

'Stupid' Intelligence Some of our spooks simply oppose Bush administration antiterror policy. Friday, October 3, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT If there's a silver lining to the controversy surrounding the Valerie Plame "outing," it's that an increasingly poisonous dispute over counterterrorism policy has been outed along with her. We're talking about the disagreement between the Bush Administration and many of the career intelligence officials at the State Department and the CIA.

[enough]

4. What a tangled web they have woven for themselves.

Great article.

snip>

So when Patrick Fitzgerald shows up to investigate the outing of a CIA operative, the White House folks have a problem. They can hardly explain that they inadvertently outed an agent because they wanted to link Wilson to a faction at CIA that thought there were no WMD because, well, that would mean the White House had manufactured intelligence to take us into an unnecessary and increasingly unpopular war. After all they were now blaming CIA for OVERstating the threat from Iraq's WMD.

What did they tell Fitzgerald's investigators? What was their Grand Jury testimony. Bet it was pretty hard to come up with a consistent story that wasn't a political disaster. How many lied?

What started as a potential case of intentionally leaking the identity of an agent has now become about perjury and obstruction of justice in an attempt to conceal White House involvement in fixing the intelligence that led to war. Cooper and Miller were all over the prewar intelligence beat, so they become keys to understanding how the White House went from propagandists fighting CIA skeptics over WMD to triumphal victors haranguing their doubtors to well meaning victims of bad intelligence. The Plame disclosure happened right in the middle of the transformation, which means that it draws attention to both the WH role in the fixing of intelligence and its efforts to deny that role.

snip>