There have been a few twists and turns in the Plame scandal of late, but it seems every new revelation prompts the president’s supporters to once again try and dismiss the significance of the controversy.
Last week, Bush allies insisted that news of former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage was one of Robert Novak’s sources was proof that there was no concerted effort to punish Joseph Wilson and expose Valerie Plame’s identity. The right’s argument was picked up by outlets like the Washington Post editorial board, but it was still wrong.
In related news, conservative talking points took another hit this week when David Corn reported more about exactly what Plame was doing at the CIA.
Another mystery solved. Last week a Newsweek excerpt from HUBRIS: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War, by Michael Isikoff and David Corn (and out this week), revealed that Richard Armitage was the original source for the Robert Novak column that outed Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA officer. Today, a new excerpt of the book discloses what Valerie Wilson did at the CIA.
She was operations chief of the Joint Task Force on Iraq, a unit of the Counterproliferation Division of the clandestine Directorate of Operations. For the two years prior to her outing, Valerie Wilson worked to gather intelligence that would support the Bush White House’s assertion that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was loaded with WMDs. This means that Armitage — as well as Karl Rove and Scooter Libby — leaked classified information about a CIA officer whose job it had been to look for evidence of Saddam’s WMD programs. During this part of her career, Valerie Wilson traveled overseas to monitor operations she and her staff at JTFI were mounting. She was no analyst, no desk-jockey, no paper-pusher. She was an undercover officer in charge of running critical covert operations.
There were many reports about Plame working on WMD issues, but it turns out that she was, more specifically, working on Iraqi WMD issues. Indeed, within months of 9/11, she had a top leadership role in the Joint Task Force on Iraq.
The larger story is starting to make more sense now.
As Corn explained:
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.
As Kevin Drum noted, “[T]his also sheds some light on why Dick Cheney and the entire White House crew seemed so interested in discrediting Wilson: because her team didn’t find anything. Cheney was visiting Langley, writing memos, demanding answers, and just generally obsessing over Iraqi WMD programs, and it was Valerie Wilson’s team that was failing to find what he wanted.”
And to help provide additional context, Digby added:
Armitage may have just been a gossipy little busybody from way back, but that doesn’t explain Libby and Judy and Rove and Cooper or the “two senior administration officials” who tried to get the Washington Post to print that Wilson’s CIA “wife” had sent Wilson on a “boondoggle.” Rove said she was “fair game.” You simply cannot persuade me that every last person involved in this did not know that the head of the Joint Task Force on Iraq’s WMD at the CIA in 2003 was the person they were busy making sure was publicly outed.
Wilson scared the hell out of them because they knew who his wife was and knew what she knew. This is about Cheney and the CIA, whom he and all the neocons have thought were a bunch of liberal appeasers for decades because they have so often failed to back up the wingnuts’ most fanciful, paranoid wet dreams about the boogeyman of the day — wet dreams, by the way, which were always, every time, proven false in the end.
Rumor has it the Plame scandal, based on the latest revelations, wasn’t as serious as it seemed. These rumors are wrong.