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Title: Valerie Wilson: confirms CIA Damage Assessment Report and roll up of her extensive global counter-proliferation network.
Source:
http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/
URL Source: http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/washeisen.php
Published: Mar 17, 2007
Author: http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/
Post Date: 2007-03-17 14:51:30 by robin
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March 17-18, 2007 -- The testimony of former CIA covert agent Valerie Plame Wilson yesterday before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform put to rest a number of issues concerning Mrs. Wilson's outing as an agent by the Bush White House and their allies in the media. CIA Director Michael Hayden told House Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Sylvestre Reyes that Valerie Plame Wilson had been a CIA covert agent up until July 14, 2003, the day Robert Novak revealed her name and identity. End of story. Period. Victoria Toensing, Mary Matalinesque GOP moll paraded out by the GOP minority on Waxman's committee, has never been an intelligence officer and has no information about the classified work of Mrs. Wilson at the CIA. On the sending of Ambassador Joe Wilson to Niger to investigate the uranium yellowcake story, Mrs. Wilson, under oath, stated she was not involved in that decision and did not have the authority to approve such a mission. Plame Wilson was a GS-14 Step 6. Mrs. Wilson stated that on February 2, 2002, a CIA officer overheard a phone call from the Vice President's office to another CIA officer regarding the yellowcake issue. The CIA officer who overheard the call, knowing that Joe Wilson had been on a previous agency mission to Niger , and suggested he be sent back to verify the yellowcake issue. Mrs. Wilson drafted an email to the Counter Proliferation Division (CPD) chief about setting up a future meeting with her husband. Mrs. Wilson never recommended her husband and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report's "additional views" submitted by three GOP senators were completely false with regard to Mrs. Wilson's involvement in the mission. The "additional views" segment in the Senate report quoted a CPD Reports Officer as stating that Mrs. Wilson offered up her husband's name for the mission. That officer later came to Mrs. Wilson and said his words were twisted by the GOP Senators and he asked in a CIA memo to be re-interviewed by the Senate Intelligence Committee to clear up the record. That re-interview never occurred. Waxman's Committee expressed an interest in obtaining the Reports Officer's memo. At Ambassador Wilson's meeting with the CIA officers, Mrs. Wilson introduced her husband and left the meeting. At the time, Mrs. Wilson was working overtime on the Iraq WMD issue. Mrs. Wilson also stated that a senior CIA officer stated that she was not responsible for sending her husband to Niger. That CIA officer's statement was contained in a CIA memo. The Waxman Committee will also ask for that memo. Valerie Wilson: confirms CIA Damage Assessment Report and roll up of her extensive global counter-proliferation network. Aside from Ranking Member Tom Davis of Virginia and Representative Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia, other Republican members boycotted the Plame Wilson testimony. Westmoreland badgered Plame Wilson about the political party membership of her and her husband. Westmoreland asked, "Are you a Democrat or Republican.?" Plame Wilson answered, "I am a Democrat." Plame Wilson also stated that her husband comes from Republican family roots in California. A number of veteran intelligence officers in the hearing room expressed an interest in helping to defeat both Davis and Westmoreland in the 2008 election. Although Plame Wilson's front company, Brewster Jennings and Associates, was not mentioned during her testimony and questions and answers, it was clear that what WMR has long reported about the firm -- that many of its agents and contacts were put into extreme jeopardy and worse as a result of the disclosure -- was, in fact, the case. Plame Wilson stated that the leak resulted in "ripple effects to go out in wide circles." She added, "Innocent and professional contacts of years were damaged." Washington DC delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton followed up the comments by stating that such disclosures can result in the death of an agent. Plame Wilson concurred with Holmes' assessment. Earlier in her testimony, Plame Wilson stated that leaks, like the one that occurred with her, can result in CIA officers being exposed and entire networks of foreign agents being destroyed. Plame Wilson said that the CIA did a Damage Assessment Report on the leak of her identity. She said she, her family, and her contacts were all put into jeopardy by the leak. She also stated, "if my government cannot protect my identity, future foreign agents will think twice about working for the CIA." Here is what WMR reported on July 10, 2005 about the Brewster Jennings leak and its impact (and how it coincides with Plame Wilson's testimony): And we reported the following on March 8 this year: On June 8, 2004, a year before WMR commenced operations, this editor reported the following, long before any mainstream media reported on the Brewster Jennings side of the story: Plame Wilson said Bush administration officials "destroyed my cover purely for political motives." She pleaded for "politics and ideology to be stripped from our intelligence services." Committee Democrats produced a chart showing over 20 different contacts between Bush administration officials and the media concerning the revealing of Plame Wilson's identity. They included on the administration's side, Vice President Dick Cheney, Irving Lewis Libby, Ari Fleischer, Cathie Martin, Karl Rove, Marc Grossman, and Richard Armitage, the CIA's Bill Harlow and Robert Grenier, and Walter Pincus (Washington Post), David Gregory (NBC News), John Dickerson (Time), Judith Miller (New York Times), Matt Cooper (Time), Robert Novak (Chicago Sun Times), and Bob Woodward (Washington Post). The chart also showed an "Unknown" block, which New Hampshire Democrat Paul Hodes said could be a "person or persons" not yet identified as being part of the leak. Plame Wilson said she could count on one hand the number of people who were authorized to know about her covert status and that her status was "not common knowledge on the Georgetown cocktail circuit."
ROVEGATE -- July 10, 2005 --Newsweek magazine is reporting on the contents of a July 11, 2003 email between reporter Matt Cooper and Time Washington bureau chief Michael Duffy that was handed over, along with other email and notes, to special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. Although the email shows that Rove talked to Cooper about Ambassador Joe Wilson's wife, there is no mention of how columnist Robert Novak obtained the information on Brewster Jennings & Associates, the carve out brass plate firm that was used by Valerie Plame and her colleagues and which was rolled up as a result of the leak. Rove and his lawyer are trying to limit the spin to Rove "not knowing" Plame's name, let alone that she was a covert CIA agent. Yet Plame's association with a non-official cover (NOC), by default, means that she was covert, pure and simple. Brewster Jennings reportedly "suffered greatly" as a result of the disclosure, according to a knowledgeable source. Another source reported that at least one Brewster Jennings NOC operating in a hostile intelligence environment was executed by counter-intelligence agents as a result of the White House disclosure. Other B&JA assets were forced to abandon their ongoing operations to identify networks involved in weapons of mass destruction proliferation. The CIA has been working on a damage assessment report on the Plame/B&JA disclosures. If no indictments of White House officials result from the Fitzgerald investigation, look for parts of that highly classified report to be leaked and then look for more imprisonments of journalists who refuse to divulge the source(s) of those leaks. Word from intelligence sources is that the damage assessment report is "devastating." Make no mistake about it, the CIA Damage Assessment Report on the leak -- one of the hottest documents in Washington, DC, if any copies remain intact and not destroyed on orders from the Bush White House, will show that CIA non-official cover agents and assets -- some working for the Brewster Jennings and Associates CIA front company and others working for foreign intelligence agencies and other firms involved in WMD proliferation -- were identified, quickly extricated, tortured, imprisoned, or executed as a result of the leak. "U.S. intelligence sources have also said that [Patrick] Fitzgerald's investigation has gone far beyond the mere leaking of Plame's name, itself a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, but has expanded to look into the exposure of Plame's colleagues who worked under the cover of a CIA firm called Brewster, Jennings & Associates. The "brass plate" CIA proprietary had offices in Boston and Washington, DC. Active since 1994, Brewster-Jennings was instrumental in tracking the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and had agents or correspondents in a number of countries including Iraq, North Korea, Belarus, Russia, South Africa, Iran, Israel, China, Pakistan, Congo (Kinshasa), India, Taiwan, Libya, Syria, Serbia, and Malaysia. By releasing Valerie Plame’s name, other agents' non-official covers were blown and the lives of U.S. operatives within foreign governments and businesses may have been placed in danger. Therefore, Fitzgerald's investigation has reportedly been expanded to include the issue of whether members of the staffs of President Bush and Vice President Cheney, Cheney and Bush themselves, the National Security Council, and the Departments of Defense and State, may have violated more serious espionage laws.
In July 2003, the covert operations of Plame and her Brewster-Jennings colleagues were rolled up as a result of the White House leak to columnist Robert Novak and other journalists. Observers believe the White House was retaliating for the report by Wilson that the administration was incorrect when it stated that Iraq was shopping for "yellow cake" uranium in Niger. On behalf of the CIA, Wilson visited Niger prior to the Iraq war and determined that the administration's evidence was based on erroneous information and falsified documents.
Recently, CIA Director George Tenet and Plame's ultimate boss, Deputy Director of Operations James Pavitt, suddenly resigned within hours of one another. Intelligence sources have said the two have been cooperating with Fitzgerald's investigation of the Plame/Brewster-Jennings leak and the damage to U.S. clandestine operations which globally track the flow of WMDs.
Sensitive CIA operations that were compromised by the leak included companies, government officials, and individuals associated with the nuclear smuggling network of Pakistan's chief nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. In addition, the identities of U.S. national and foreign agents working within the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, North Korea's nuclear laboratory in Yongbyon, Pakistan's Kahuta uranium enrichment plant, banks and export companies in Dubai, Islamabad, Moscow, Cape Town, Tel Aviv, Liechtenstein, Cyprus, and Kiev, and Kuala Lumpur, and government agencies in Libya, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Iran were severely compromised. The CIA has reportedly given Fitzgerald highly classified details on the damage done to the CIA's WMD tracking network. http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/062504_grand_jury.shtml
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#1. To: robin (#0)
The WORST regime EVER.
I haven't really been following this thing too much as I considered it mostly a sideshow of little consequence- game playing among Beltway factions. But is the "Conservative" line on this still that Plame wasn't covert- that everyone knew she was an agent and that she didn't do anything important at the CIA and that her exposure was no big deal?
#8. To: All (#6)
Henry Waxman grills Victoria Toensing
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#2. To: lodwick (#1)
#6. To: Burkeman1 (#2)
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