According to Valerie Plame's testimony to Congress, the junior CIA employee who originally got the inquiry from the vice president's office about whether Iraq was looking to purchase uranium from Niger was "upset" that he was being bothered about this. In fact, Plame says it was that employee's griping that caused her to become involved (but only as a conduit).
I can see where a junior CIA employee would have better things to do than deal with this sort of inquiry. Why should our top foreign intelligence service have to worry about whether a hostile nation was trying to purchase material whose most logical use was to develop nuclear weapons? Okay, so it turned out that Joe Wilson's report back to the CIA (which he later misrepresented in the New York Times), supported suspicions that Iraq was indeed inquiring about purchasing uranium from Niger. But think of all the time that was lost on the "Georgetown cocktail circuit."
UPDATE: Plame's testimony is a topic of considerable discussion at the Power Line Forum.
Reader Comments ( Page 1 of 1)
1. More interesting questions about Plame's covert status are those that correlate her return from Europe with the aftermath from the arrest of Aldrich Ames in 1994. If she overseas when the scope of the damage Ames did to our covert networks became known, she was most likely brought back to protect her from assassination. Ames outed every covert agent we had working overseas. Many were killed due to his treason.
Since her return in 1998 she has served as a mid-level bureaucrat. Plame is covert only in the sense that she has a sensitive job with the CIA. She should be asked if she had any covert overseas assignments after 1998.
paddy_wagon at 6:23PM on Mar 16th 2007
2. Of course he was upset. Cheney & the neo-cons had been pestering the CIA to come up with "facts" they could use to justify a war.
Steve J. at 2:04PM on Mar 16th 2007
3. Mirengoff,
Please address why it matters who recommended Joe Wilson be sent to Niger. Right-wingers have been claiming this is really relevant for a long time but I don't understand why. If Valerie Plame somehow personally ordered he be sent--as many of your compadres have claimed--who cares? Does that change the fact that the yellow cake documents were kindergarten forgeries or that every claim Bush's administration has made about nukes and Iraq has been off?
And you do know that the president has said himself that WMD's have not been found, right?
lil_turk at 2:39PM on Mar 16th 2007
4. lil_turk[ey]:
It matters who recommended Joe Wilson be sent to Niger because both Joe and Val appear to have lied about it, which goes to their lack of credibility about anything else they say. (Now that I typed that out, I have to agree that that is not all that important because it’s clear they are both liars anyway.) It may also matter because without Val’s recommendation, the CIA might not have sent Joe and, instead sent someone qualified to do the investigation instead of Joe. (Now that I typed that out, I can’t really say that Joe was not qualified to do the investigation because he was able to obtain intelligence which tended to verify that Saddam was in fact shopping Niger for yellow cake.) Without Val’s recommendation, the CIA may have sent someone who was not so opposed to Bush and upset about being early retired and stuck watching the twins (his and Val’s, not Bush’s), that he would lie about what he found out and then write a false op ed in the NY Times. Most of all, it matters because the egotistical bastard put his own personal pique ahead of the safety and security of the US!!
DCM at 10:59AM on Mar 17th 2007
5. I guess the head of the CIA lied when he also said that Plame was a covert agent. But lets say she was only classified and only had a few foreign lives in her hands, was that ok that her name was given out? P.S. I keep hearing that Wilson and Plame lied, but I have yet to hear any proof.
drew phillips at 6:15AM on Mar 18th 2007
6. I can teach the truth in my high school class. Have a full hour 6 times a day to explain how the democrats have transformed their party to the far left. I explain that if people like Pelosi, Reid, Murtha, and Kennedy were in charge in 1940, we would be speaking German today. These young adults now know that the new Dems are synonymous with defeat. words like Defeat, Cut and Run Home, bring the terrorist home, and that president George Bush has kept out terrorism for 5 years now are the big stories.
David Vail at 12:41AM on Mar 24th 2007