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July 06, 2005
Casting the wider net: Plame and Downing Street come together
Conventional wisdom from liberals states that the Plame leak happened to retaliate against Joe Wilson (for speaking up against Administration claims that Saddam Hussein was trying to obtain nuclear weapons material). In the end it may turn out this conventional wisdom is correct.
There is another theory, however.
Set aside for a moment the idea that the outing of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent is about just getting Wilson. What if it was really about tarnishing Wilson by tying him to a faction of the CIA that was fighting the fixing of intelligence and in the process...try to discredit all of them? The Downing Street Memo begins to take on special relevance.
This Kos diary lays out that assertion.
What are the connections?
By now we're all familiar with the "fixing intelligence" claims in the Downing Street Memo. Bush was, according to the memo, determined to go after Saddam Hussein no matter what.
A report released by the Senate claims that intelligence failures on Iraq were the CIA's fault for a number of reasons. The report essentially absolves Bush of wrongdoing and says that the CIA analysts were not pressured to come up with anti-Iraq intelligence. That report is disputed by many Democrats who claim that Republicans published an inaccurate and incomplete report of what really happened.
The Senate was set to publish a follow up report about whether or not CIA analysts were pressured...but no such report has ever been released.
What I'd like to know is why the MSM hasn't gone after the Office of Special Plans and it's clandestine operations in the lead up to the Iraq invasion. Further, why hasn't there been an indepth investigative report on what Cheney and Newt Gingrich were doing up at the CIA offices in the months before the invasion?
It seems pretty clear that there were factions inside the CIA who opposed what Bush was doing and pissing off the powers that be:
'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.
This whiney WSJ piece even cites complaints of CIA operatives about "political interference":
"Intelligence sources" are routinely quoted questioning Administration claims and complaining of "political interference." In yesterday's New York Times, those "sources" admitted to reporter James Risen (their go-to guy) that Joseph Wilson had been chosen for the Niger mission precisely because the CIA did not take Vice President Dick Cheney's interest in pursuing the yellowcake story seriously.
There was an ongoing battle between Bush and the CIA. The Kos diary notes a piece by Josh Marshall which picked up on the battle:
Take a look at the lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal today. I'd summarize their argument as follows … "Fine, maybe this leak did occur. But let's not let these small points obscure the big point: the war between the White House and the CIA. Once the public sees that battle for what it is, they'll side with President Bush." In part, I agree: the war between the White House and the CIA is the big story. It's the feud from which this law-breaking springs. But pushing this story out to this larger policy battle isn't going make things any better for them, only worse. Because they've already lost that battle. They just don't realize it yet.
Through the lens by which Josh was writing that article...it very much looked like the CIA had lost that battle.
But then WMD never materialized in Iraq. The insurgency was much stronger than the Administration believed them to be. In total, the Iraq War and occupation began to unravel. That faction in the CIA turned out to be right.
And now there's an investigation of the leak of Valerie Plame. Newsweek's Isikoff has made it clear that Karl Rove is under some sort of criminal investigation for his role. It's possible that there are others.
What was originally thought to be an investigation of a leak may turn out to be a full blown outing of perjury and obstruction of justice on the part of the White House...in an effort to cover up their intelligence fixing on Iraq.
Posted by Carla at July 6, 2005 09:02 AM
