May 01 2006
More Plame Leaking In Media
*** Update III: Glenn Greenwald has mistaken my dumbfoundness at the stupidity of the leakers and the journalists with anger in this hillariously ironic post. I am a blind Bush supporter because I did not blindly accept Shusters silly claims and because I applied a small dash of common sense! Too funny. ***
*** Update II:I failed to make note of the one thing the Wilsons have in common with LJStrata and myself – their twins. Valerie had her twins in 2000, apparently only a few months after we had ours. I can tell you for sure Valerie was not doing anything regarding work for the first year at least, and I doubt she was travelling much on any missions either. Therefore it is not plausible to think of Val as some desk ridden NOC – she did not have the sleep cycles for that kind of stuff for quite a while. Aldrich Ames had exposed her cover in the mid 1990’s. She met Joe in 1997 and had the twins in 2000. She was out of field ops for a while at least, but probably for good.
Update: Clarice Feldman reminded me about the last big news we heard concerning the CIA and Iran. It was about a Clinton-era CIA leak of supposedly faulty plans for a nuclear trigger to the Iranians. But the CIA did such a poor job of inserting a technical mistake their Russian gopher was able to fix the plans and ended up giving Iran a huge leap towards a Nuclear bomb! Yeah, so was Plame the only one able to stop the CIA from making another hostoric blunder like that one? Wonder if the same blunder-kids that leaked the nuclear triggers to Iran leaked this news to MSNBC? ***
You would think the CIA insiders would know better than to leak more national security information to the media. But looks like another attempt by the shadow CIA and the Wilsons to play games:
On Chris Matthews’ Hardball Monday evening, just moments ago, MSNBC correspondent David Shuster confirmed what RAW STORY first reported in February: that outed CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson was working on Iran at the time she was outed.
…
According to current and former intelligence officials, Plame Wilson, who worked on the clandestine side of the CIA in the Directorate of Operations as a non-official cover (NOC) officer, was part of an operation tracking distribution and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction technology to and from Iran.
I assume these fools will try and claim people in the administration leaked this information to hurt the Wilsons and put Val at risk. Is this the canary trap everyone expected with McCarthy? Whoever ‘leaked’ this pretty damn interesting. The one thing that would get this into the media is the idiotic claim only Valerie, sitting in Langley, VA, could analyze the reports coming in. NBC’s David Shuster took the bait!
AND THE SOURCES ALLEGE THAT WHEN MRS. WILSON’S COVER WAS BLOWN, THE ADMINISTRATION’S ABILITY TO TRACK IRAN’S NUCLEAR AMBITIONS WAS DAMAGED AS WELL.”
What a joke! Valerie was the only analyst who cold track Iran’s ambitions? This is the reason I think this was a canary trap. Only a reporter would be so naive and gullible at the same time! Or are the VIPerS this dumb? Someone tell me this is just a joke and these people are not this stupid.
There is no way Valerie was the only person on the planet who could (or did) review intelligence on Iran! Question is, was it a trap from the CIA cleaning their house or the VIPerS floating one of their delusional ideas?
Update: Make sure to check out Jed Babbin’s piece in the American Spectator today. It explores the parallels between the rogue CIA agents messing with our American democracy and the corrupt Praetorian Guard of Roman times.
The last major success our intelligence community produced was the 1962 appearance before the UN General Assembly in which Adlai Stevenson displayed pictures of Soviet missile sites in Cuba. They were irrefutable, and Stevenson’s moment exposed Soviet lies and helped compel the Soviets to back down. That was forty-four years ago. The CIA’s record since then is a string of failures unblemished by a single notable success. From the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, to the rise of bin Laden and 9-11, the CIA has been a blind watchdog.
I would say death, dumb and blind. And by dumb I do not mean silent. Point in fact is where Babbin notes Larry Johnson ran his mouth too much and probably tipped off investigators into the McCarthy leaks to Dana Priest:
Johnson went on, writing, “[McCarthy] could [only – ajstrata] find out about secret prisons if intelligence officers involved with that program had filed a complaint with the IG or if there was some incident that compelled senior CIA officials to determine if an investigation was warranted.” Johnson has been indiscreet before about what he learns from inside the CIA. His bias is manifest, and his reliability is — at best — questionable. But what he says in this case makes sense.
Yep, now investigators know where to look. If Johnson is right (and I would say the bungle-head is right) the claims to the IG about the CIA safe houses (no one has proven the facilities were anything more than safe places to hold up while transportation was being put in place) is a great place to start looking for accomplices. Crazy Larry screws up in reverse again.
Babbin thinks the internal whistleblowers would be protected. Not likely. Only a few people knew the details, and there are ways to tie them to the IG tips – even anonymously. Once you have a lead, you can investigate all sorts of information which will lead to more information, and more leads, and so on. My guess is the Praetorian guard got cocky, lazy and clumsy.
Update: Tom Maguire has a great rundown of Shuster’s shenanigans
OT: lol, Seixon’s a Bush Administration lackey because he reads the reports.
AJ,
You might want to have a look at this article and see if the modus operandi smells familiar!
In this case it was Kerry in congress, a journalist named Martha Honey (who is now with the Institute for Policy Studies) the issue was Nicaragua and the President was Reagan. Looks a lot like the same scheme to me all the way down to the reporting of material that was never verified to be true in order to make Reagan look bad.
A snippet:
Fed by supportive journalists and Washington-based think tanks that supported the Sandinistas, Kerry put his experience as a former assistant county prosecutor to work in 1986, launching a full-scale “investigation” of his own to discredit the Nicaraguan resistance and the Reagan administration.
His probe, alleging an international criminal conspiracy, coincided with lawsuits against retired Army Gen. John Singlaub and others in what was called a legal harassment campaign against American opponents of the Sandinista regime, alleging bizarre international plots.
The cases collapsed under legal scrutiny but made sensational headlines that fueled Reagan opponents for years. The first significant lawsuit was filed in May of that year by Tony Avirgan and his wife Martha Honey, two U.S. journalists who were open Sandinista sympathizers.
Evidence in their lawsuit, much of which Kerry and his staff recycled as public statements, was based “largely on information from a dead informant whom they never met and identified only as ‘David X,'” the Washington Times’ James Morrison reported at the time. According to Morrison, Avirgan “admitted that he had never met David X,” who “was the source of the information of the entire conspiracy.”
Fed by Honey and Avirgan, who worked closely with his staff, Kerry gave the false allegations credibility in the press. Despite its accomplishments in muddying the waters of the emotional Central America debate, the Kerry probe kept falling apart. One key witness, British soldier of fortune Peter Glibbery, swore that Kerry staffers bribed him to accuse Sandinista opponents of crimes, only to recant the next day. Others, including a former French soldier named Claude Chaffard, said that Kerry staffers promised to help him out with U.S. visa problems and paid him money while he cooperated.
Also found this from 2004.
Scroll down to reply 28 in the comments:
Note to add to the article: I just noticed that one of the alleged ex-CIA agents who assisted Kerry’s CIA-drug investigation, David MacMichael, is now with Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. At the time of Kerry’s investigation MacMichael was linked to the International Center for Development Policy (mentioned above in the article) and the Council for Hemispheric Affairs (COHA), and in connection with this was investigated by the FBI for suspicious contacts at the Nicaraguan embassy.
Comment 34:
MacMichael was also a source for Patti Davis’ book, Deadfall, about U.S. involvement in Nicaragua, along with other notable contributors: actor Mike Farrell; screenwriter David Seltzer; Hollywood producer and veteran cinematographer Haskell Wexler; and Eric Hamburg, a former legislative aide to Sen. John Kerry
Comment 35:
Interesting–Farrell, who is with Human Rights Watch, was linked to the MoveOn.org affiliate Win Without War and Joseph Wilson’s efforts there, as Wilson mentions in his book.
But comment 39 is the meat and it sounds like exactly what people are coming up with these days surrounding the whole McCarthy, Priest, Wilson, Plame ball of snakes. It gives some history of Fenton communications and then says:
Right up to the present, Fenton has been relentless in his support for America-hating organizations. He has become deeply involved with the CIP (Center for International Policy). This organization was set up in 1975 with the support of Orlando Letelier, human rights activist and KGB agent. Letelier, like Fenton, never concerned himself with communist human rights violations, particularly in Castro’s Cuba.
The CIP has strong links to the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington-based Marxist-Leninist group that acted as a front for the KGB during the Cold War.
The America-hating CIP’s main function has been to act as a mouthpiece for Central and South American Marxist groups. It is also one of Castro’s strongest defenders.
Since the war on terror the CIP and ‘Fenton the Patriot’ have come together and set up the IPIP (Iraq Policy Information Program). The aim of the IPIP is to deligitimise the liberation of Iraq and subvert the war on terror. After all, according to the CIP and Fenton the US is the real terrorist.
Naturally, these activities require money. And who is helping to fund these fifth columnists? Why George Soros and Theresa Heinz.
It just keeps getting weirder and weirder. I have a sneaking suspicion that Kerry is a hidden hand in all this. The entire present scandal, the methods, the people, all of it have Kerry written all over it from way back during the Reagan administration.
Crosspatch, There certainly seems to be a common hidden hand in all of this. Sourcing incriminating stuff to virtual folks or dead folks who can’t defend themselves (remember Col Killian, how about “Lucy”) is a tried a true trick used several times throughout these schemes. With a willing and complicit press, this stuff is supposed to slide right by us unwashed masses. I suspect there are backchannel phone lines glowing red in all sorts of places – Kerry camp, Clinton camp, various offices throughout the MSM, CIA, State, etc.
Some of those wires are glowing bright red right now with Libby’s latest filing which has the potential to blow lids off of many of these schemes. If there is a responsible adult left anywhere in the government or judicial, all they need is to start pulling on some loose thread that will soon be exposed since MSM can’t hide behind priviledge or other nonsense in Libby’s criminal case. There are too many loose ends in what these guys have done, because in the past the media could gloss over any inconvenient problems that might arise. They didn’t know the blogosphere would come along and keep pulling at all of those loose ends and make a mess of such carefully woven schemes to unseat a president during war.
The same names keep popping up over and over again. You’ve got a bunch alumni from the Students for a Democratic Society, or other sixties era allied radical marxist hate-america thuggish orgs. who are now in their fifties and in positions of power.
Most of these people have known each other for over forty years.
Since none of them could get elected to any serious office outside of Massachusetts and California, they busied themselves inflitrating labor, the federal government, main stream media and the “non-profit environmentalhumanrightsconsumeranti-globalization community.”
In the seventies and eighties after their “victory” in Vietnam it was nuclear disarmament and the Sandinistas. After the wall fell in 1989, they kind of loss a sense of purpose and turned to the environment (Fenton’s Alar scare for example), and promoting tourist junkets to Cuba using Phillip Agee’s travel agency.
Under Clinton, they were well rewarded with government positions, grants etc.
Now they are reliving their childhood–with a lot of money to back them up.
Their hatred for this administration knows no bounds. They will do anything to get Bush and take America down a notch.
The song remains the same.
Well, I will bet you a donut and a cup of coffee that the VIPS were leaking SOMETHING to Kerry’s journalists and they covered it with some dead source that neither claims to have met. In this case one of the sources got caught, or at least someone (McCarthy) with connections to the same group of people. I have to wonder if Martha Honey, being out of journalism but still in the CIP/IPS community taught Priest her little bit. The one thing that just doesn’t make sense in all that, though, is that Priest seems to make no effort to cover that she has an anonymous source in the IG’s office. THAT is the thing that really has me stumped. One of Priests articles practically outs McCarthy.
Ahhh. Philip Agee. He had a publication called the Covert Action Information Bulletin. CAIB.
Ward Churchill published an article in CAIB in 1985 claiming that FBI-backed death squads murdered 342 Indians at Pine Ridge.
Later, in another book, Churchill changed it to 342 Indians assaulted and 60 murdered. What an idiot, but he got away with it.
The idea was to discredit the FBI and CIA with this publication.
Do a search on my blog for CAIB.
I think the first essay called 342 Indians discusses the CAIB.
http://www.legendofpineridge.blogspot.com
Crosspatch,
Your wrote: I have a sneaking suspicion that Kerry is a hidden hand in all this. The entire present scandal, the methods, the people, all of it have Kerry written all over it from way back during the Reagan administration.
It probably goes further back. Say to Veitnam. Recall Kerry was involved with the Winter Soldiers, then his testimony in front of Congress, Kerry and Ramsey Clark in the anti-war movement etc……………………………………….
They are all connected. http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/Thinkmap%20SDK%202.5%20Standard%20Edition/webapp/TM-1VER/index.asp?keyword=Institute%20for%20Policy%20Studies
Let’s look at this from a slightly different angle. The Kerry hearings were at about the time the whole VIPS thing was getting organized. You have a journalist, this time Martha Honey, who is getting information. Supposedly her “source” is a mysterious individual who is dead who she never actually met. That clears up a lot of potential problems for investigators wanting to go after her “sources”. But the interesting thing is that the information Honey is putting all seems to have some connection to CIA. All the “corroberating” statements from other individuals seem to come from clandestine CIA people. Now how does one get to meet SO MANY clandestine CIA people? I can see running into one, but having just about everyone that offers any verification be some kind of a clandestine CIA ops type seems strange. It turns out that many of these individuals were bribed for their statements. How were they being exposed as CIA? Who was introducing them to Kerry & Co.? Who REALLY fed the information to Honey that supposedly came from this dead guy that nobody met? My gut tells me that it’s the same VIPS that were feeding Priest her stories. Same group, same MO. Only this time it isn’t Kerry in congress pushing hearings. This time it appears that the “think tanks” funded by the Fenton gang have enough political, intelligence, and media contacts to run the operation themselves. They have become a parallel ant-government with a lot of money and a lot of strings they can pull to develop a propaganda policy, get information presented the way they want it from journalists in the most “respected” media outlets and present a picture to the American people of pretty much anything they want.
I was stumped a few months ago about why the administration in general and the war in Iraq was being presented to the people in this manner. It was too consistant from too many different sources to be a coincidence. Not only has the reporting been consistant from its angle of attack, it has been consistant in rhetoric, the phrasing, the style. These think tanks and foundations have almost become central clearing houses for how to run a propaganda campaign.
Now, if all of these organizations were completely separate, I would probably still dismiss it as coincidence but there seems to one common tie to them all, Fenton Communications. They are all apples from the same tree.
What I am wondering at this point is why The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Time, and other papers and magazines don’t seem to be the least bit upset about being used in this way. Their names and reputations have been used by a third party to push an agenda onto the people. Their lack of outrage and being used in this way can only lead me to believe that it was consensual. If it is consensual. Once I reach that conclusion, there is nothing the paper can do to regain my trust. I won’t settle for firing a reporter as I have no trust that the replacement will be any different. Another shill for an outside organization with a drum to beat. Our media institutions have become corrupt. The conventional journalism trade has not only failed our country, they have destroyed their own special place in our society.
Note that when I say “funded by the Fenton gang” I don’t mean funded by Fenton Communications, I mean funded by the folks that all seem to use Fenton as their PR agency or fund those Fenton clients. There’s a certain efficiency about them all using the same agency. The PR agency can act as a force multiplier. If your “think tank” needs access to a certain type of resource, they might know which of the others might provide that. They would also have critical knowlegde of the media, that’s their job. If your group has a resource that wants to “leak” something, Fenton might be very useful in getting your “leak” to the journalist that could provide the best impact for that story.
Nobody seems to have “leaked” to a run of the mill newsroom reporter. It doesn’t seem to be a case where someone has some information they are just dying to unload into the papers and “cold calls” a bunch of papers looking for a reporter who will print it. This appears to be exactly the opposite. In the case of the NSA leak, the prisoners leak … in fact, pretty much all the “big leaks” lately, the leaks seem to be going to just the right person for the job. I would think in the real world when someone just stumbles across something that they think is just terrible and they just need to get the information out, they are probably going to call the newsroom. That doesn’t seem to have happened in a single one of these cases. In each of these cases the information went directly to the journalist in the industry who could do the most damage with the story. Didn’t matter if the reporter was in Washington DC or New York City. Why would someone call an out of town paper? Because they didn’t call an out of town paper, is what my instincts are telling me. They were “put in contact” with the “right” journalist for the story.
Argumentum ad Delusion…
Over at Strata-Sphere, A.J. Strata is overjoyed to find a new opportunity to spread delusions. He follows a quote from the transcript of the MSNBC report with a total fabrication:…