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September 06, 2006



I see that the DNC has swung into action on the "path to 9/11" thing.

Meanwhile, the DUers are planing to flood Technorati with their spin in the hours and days after the mini-series.

So far the only plan missing is to have Michael Moore's masterpiece on 9/11 shown on ABC before and after.

I wonder if there will be physicitrist available after the showing (ala "The Day After") to aid those who can't handle it ? If they include Moore, many will need one.

Other Tom

Check out Byron York today on the gutless behavior of Armitage. http://thehill.com/thehill/export/TheHill/Comment/ByronYork/090706.html


SBW, I love that book jacket stuff..Can we have a blonde in a ripped bodice drawing on the front? (Something very film noirish would work for me.)


OK, Just read the "Pone" at the Nation. Here's my take, for what it's worth.

Corny and Issy were aiming for a Pulitzer level October surprise and ended up with an August Fizzle. (Hint--notice any headlines screaming "SHE WAS COVERT! No, me either) Let me translate the Cornspeak to show why :


V: Note the "may have" here. And Rohn was not under oath now, was he? Sounds like an attempt on Rohn's part to keep from being "cut an shunned" by the right people to me.


V:Kind of sketchy here David. Why was she pulled from the field? Couldn't you give us a sentence or two about that?

DC:"In 1997 she returned to CIA headquarters and joined the Counterproliferation Division. (About this time, she moved in with Joseph Wilson; they later married.)"

V:And she blew her cover to a married man during a third date sex session.

DC: "She was eventually given a choice: North Korea or Iraq. She selected the latter."

V:Yep. And considering Joe's Middle East connections, a much bettter choice for the family business.

DC:"Come the spring of 2001, she was in the CPD's modest Iraq branch."

V:Quite a jump here David. And the CPD's Iraq branch was "modest" grace a Bill Clinton, who like the monkey, didn't want to see any evil. And what was Val doing then? She'd just gotten back from the PPD leave.

DC:" But that summer--before 9/11--word came down from the brass: We're ramping up on Iraq. Her unit was expanded and renamed the Joint Task Force on Iraq. Within months of 9/11, the JTFI grew to fifty or so employees. Valerie Wilson was placed in charge of its operations group."

V:Let's see now, Saddam, the guy guy who gassed the Kurds and had thousands of chemical shells and a documented under seal nuke program and had kicked out the UN inspectors in 1998-and the Bush administration is going to grow the CPD's modest program to 50. That's not a good thing? Oh, I forgot, we're trying to prove that the goal was to invbade Iraq "before" 911.

DC:"There was great pressure on the JTFI to deliver. Its primary target was Iraqi scientists. JTFI officers, under Wilson's supervision, tracked down relatives, students and associates of Iraqi scientists--in America and abroad--looking for potential sources. They encouraged Iraqi émigrés to visit Iraq and put questions to relatives of interest to the CIA. The JTFI was also handling walk-ins around the world. Increasingly, Iraqi defectors were showing up at Western embassies claiming they had information on Saddam's WMDs. JTFI officers traveled throughout the world to debrief them. Often it would take a JTFI officer only a few minutes to conclude someone was pulling a con. Yet every lead had to be checked."

V:So let me get this straight. Val's group was going to Dearborn and looking up the long lost cousins of Saddam's WMD people, in hopes that they would go home and get the goods on his programs. Yeah, that's the ticket! As if, the minute those people hit the tarmak in Baghdad, they wouldn't have had half of Saddam's security force on their tails. By the way, how about that Mahdi Obeidi! Wonder if they knew about the centrifuge buried under his orange tree! Sorry, this sounds like a rather backwater effort to me--kind of proves the point that Val was nothing more than a lower mid level manager with a big job title.


V:Yeah, mainly because a) you had Clinton as Commander in Chief for 8 years and he could have cared less, and b) you had nitwits like Valerie in positions of authority. Can't blame Bush for that.


V:OK, so she was working WITH Jordanian intelligence, which means that they knew who she was. Not exactly NOC, huh. Oops, there goes the covert mess!

DC:"The JTFI found nothing. The few scientists it managed to reach insisted Saddam had no WMD programs."

V:Did they check with the Iraqi scientists in Libya? No, thought not. Say it again--AQ Kahn!

DC:"Task force officers sent reports detailing the denials into the CIA bureaucracy. The defectors were duds--fabricators and embellishers. (JTFI officials came to suspect that some had been sent their way by Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, an exile group that desired a US invasion of Iraq.) The results were frustrating for the officers. Were they not doing their job well enough--or did Saddam not have an arsenal of unconventional weapons?"

V:Saddam played them like a fox! Val and the CIA bumblers were convinced that papa Saddam had hidden the Christmas presents in the attic, and didn't have the skill and brainpower to find out that he had given them to the neighbor for safe keeping in case the kiddies went snooping! By the way, where did all those chemical and biological shells go? Did they evaporate into thin air?

DC:"Valerie Wilson and other JTFI officers were almost too overwhelmed to consider the possibility that their small number of operations was, in a way, coming up with the correct answer: There was no intelligence to find on Saddam's WMDs because the weapons did not exist. Still, she and her colleagues kept looking. (She also assisted operations involving Iran and WMDs.) "

V:Only because they were looking in the wrong places David. My only question is, was it a result of incompetence, or was it intentional?


V:Hey, don't feel too bad. Every intelligence agency in the world thought he had them too--how soon we forget what we don't want to remember! As for eighteen months, do we think that Saddam was sitting on his hands all that time? Sheesh!

DC:"When the Novak column ran, Valerie Wilson was in the process of changing her clandestine status from NOC to official cover, as she prepared for a new job in personnel management. Her aim, she told colleagues, was to put in time as an administrator--to rise up a notch or two--and then return to secret operations. But with her cover blown, she could never be undercover again. Moreover, she would now be pulled into the partisan warfare of Washington. As a CIA employee still sworn to secrecy, she wasn't able to explain publicly that she had spent nearly two years searching for evidence to support the Administration's justification for war and had come up empty."

V:This whole paragraph is horseshit. She had not been NOC since 1997, and there was no way that she would ever be able to go back. And David gives it away when he saiys "go back to secret operations" as in, when all this happened, she was NOT in secret operations.

DC:Valerie Wilson left the CIA at the end of 2005. In July she and her husband filed a civil lawsuit against Cheney, Rove and Libby, alleging they had conspired to "discredit, punish and seek revenge against" the Wilsons. She is also writing a memoir. Her next battle may be with the agency--over how much of her story the CIA will allow the outed spy to tell.

V:Well David, you sure have spilled a lot of beans! But then, you didn't have to get anything vetted by the agency, now did you?

-- Larwyn: Italiacto!
Shouldn't that be
-- Larwyn: Italiacto!
Brilliant, sbw!

Mr. Snitch, I'm afraid I'm too busy to start the petition, but anyone who wants to use the substance of my letter as the basis for one has my permission to do so.

Steve Thill

News Alert: once again- people die in alphabetical order today in the paper.


....(DWILKERS and Herbie, where are you?) ...

/wave TSK9

Been around. Haven't had that much to say I guess. Dave and I have more or less been thinking about how dumb humans are, that we spent so much time on this stupid Plame thing when we could have had a nice plate full of enchilladas and a frozen Margarita.

About the only thing that's changed around here is Dave doesn't feel sorry for Our Gal Val like he used to. Used to be Dave kinda thought poor Val was just another of Joe's victims, but since they came out with the lawsuit he's trying to figure out a new angle on what those people have been up to.

Really, I can't comment because almost any spot I started in would turn into a rant at this point. Don't get me started on what this all means about Powell and Armitage. Or what is says about Bush that he let all this go on in his own State and CIA, etcetera.


York gives us a few more names for our list:

Frank Lautenberg, Doug Hattaway, Al Gore, James Comey, Ashcroft


Oh, sorry. That was actually me. Sometimes I forget to change the monikor when I'm using Dave's confuser.



no one of consequence

[REDACTED] twisted the intelligence to justify the invasion of [REDACTED], which the [REDACTED] had been planning long before [REDACTED]. [REDACTED] was simply and excuse to execute this plan and has been a diversion from the real war on terror. [REDACTED] never had anything to do with [REDACTED] and it is simply unconscionable that real culprit behind [REDACTED], [REDACTED] has not been brought to justice.


The Bushies / Iraq / neocon cabal / 9/11 / 9/11 / Iraq / al Qaeda / 9/11 / Osama bin Laden

Bush / people / died


The left and partisan media outlets / the White House / Democrats / Plame was outed / The Plame kerfuffle / A White House conspiracy to out Valerie Plame to punish the Wilsons / the truth / the Plame kerfuffle / Joe Wilson

Joe Wilson / the media / went along for the ride


Clinton/Monica/horndog/the cigar arrived

Closing the office door/

The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy/BJ's problems

the Impeachment/BJ himself

BJ/people/finally saw him for what he really was.

JM Hanes


"Dave's confuser" LOL! You've been missed (Dave too).

JM Hanes


Book/Blurbs: You are sooo hired!



Sure, sugar. ::as he sneered through a pall of smoke from his Lucky Strike.::


Watching CBS news for the first time in many years solely because Rush will be on in a pre-recorded segment. Armitage goes public with nothing new but the voice-over and Katie repeat the unproven....that Valerie was "undercover".


Noah: This from Armitage's interview:

Armitage adds that while the document was classified, "it doesn't mean that every sentence in the document is classified.

"I had never seen a covered agent's name in any memo in, I think, 28 years of government," he says.

He adds that he thinks he referred to Wilson's wife as such, or possibly as "Mrs. Wilson." He never referred to her as Valerie Plame, he adds.

"I didn't know the woman's name was Plame. I didn't know she was an operative," he says."

Add to that what Novak said about his conversation with Harlow--no indication that she was "covered", just that they would rather that he not print her name etc.

While Val may have been working on a classified program, her "transition" from NOC appears to be for all purposes complete,(and even Corn admits that she was headed that way) so she would not have been covered under the law. Her job was "classified" just like hundreds of other analysts and managers in the building.

And since Fitz has finally given him the OK to talk, I'd say he's done.

Now all he has to do is drop charges against Libby.

And speaking of Libby, how will Wells use the new Classified info that Corn has leaked? If the jury can read it in a book, why should Walton keep it from Libby's team?


I can't imagine hos they can continue to keep his name out of the case now that Armitage has publicly admitted this. Moreover, given all the circumstances, I think if he takes the stand, Libby should be allowed to explore that Fitz evidently didn't, all the other reporters he spoke to during that time and whether he is positive he told no one else.


Not only Armitage Clarice, but a whole lot of other stuff, like that referral letter.

It is insane that the Wilsons, who Fitz did not even dipose under oath, are now allowed to leak what they feel is beneficial to their case through their mouthpiece Corn, and the rest of us are denied the whole truth.

I also guess Novak was right. He did get her name out of Who's Who!


This is how easy it could have been.

The popular Armitage could have gone to Katie Couric 3 years ago and apologized. It would have been over-- as extraneous pointed out-- as fast as Sandy Berger's pants.


Tradesports now figures that the chances of a conviction on even one count is less than one in three. Time to pull the plug if Fitz doesn't.


Oh yeah MayBee. And the stuff about "I hurt the president" was just precious.

And it's all Fitz's fault for not letting him talk!


***And the stuff about "I hurt the president" was just precious.***

With three years to rehearse and prepare it just seems there might have been more "flair."


Would there have been an investigation had
Novak referred Valerie Plame as "Wilson's wife" ?


If he had referred to her as "Wilson's Wife, someone in the blogsphere would have put up "Valerie Plame" about three minutes after it hit the net. It's called "google" and Who's Who is on it.

So really, what's the difference?

If she was NOC, they should not have even mentioned her at all, knowing that her name was in the public domain. But they did, didn't they. And not only in Armitage's memo--but also in a confirm to Novak.

I would still like to know more about CPD's JTFI. Not much out there. There were lots and lots of Intelligence groups involved in Iraq's WMDs, what exactly were they doing? If Corn printed the most important stuff he could dig up(tracking down the families of Iraqi scientists etc.) then they sound pretty lame. I mean really, I can't believe that over a decade after the first Gulf War, they didn't already have all of that--seems pretty elementary, if they had done what they should have in the first place.

The fact that Val's group (that she wasn't even in charge of) was much less than 50 and stuck in the basement should tell us all something...

Also, is CPD to thank for the fact that we had ZERO on the ground intelligence in Iraq? Well done!

Sara (Squiggler)

Does anyone else feel like gagging? I know I do. How can Fitzgerald justify his actions in keeping Armitage silent all these years?

Sara (Squiggler)

The picture S&L has along with the Times article on Armitage is really too much:

Armitage admits he leaked


Yeah Sara, especially when you consider that Woodward came forward and told Fitz that he might have been the "reporter" Libby had confused with Russert.

And with Armitage now out, all of that stuff will come into play in a big way.

I wonder if at this point Fitz will be willing to send any more reporters to jail?


Remember how much time we spent on whether the classified stamp on the INR memo meant that the reference to her meant she was covert? LOL Or how hard we argued that had she been covert she shouldn't have been in the memo or at the mwwting?LOL LOL

Sara (Squiggler)

I just want to know what it is Libby perjured himself with ... that simple little fact?????

That redated memo is going to play a role, mark my words.

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