Reply #12: Yes, connecting the dots... [View All]

[Emit]

Here's an interesting, albeit speculative, connect-the-dot piece (It's been posted on a few threads here at DU) that touches upon some of the info that FormerRepublican has hypothesized here in his OP. And below this, I have posted some parts of another thread that also connect to the big picture. This is much bigger than just Rove, IMO.

<<snip>>
This isn't about Rove.
It's about a cabal of war hawks inside the administration who passed on this information to others without telling them about Plame-Wilson's deep cover status, perhaps suggesting that she was just an analyst working at a desk rather than a covert operative involved in a vitally important overseas operation, the knowledge of which was highly compartmentalized and only dispensed on a need-to-know basis. When Rove and his shills blabbed to reporters and anyone who would listen, they didn't realize that they were aiding and abetting an elaborate ploy to stick it to the CIA.

Seen against the backdrop of the fierce intra-bureaucratic war that broke out in the administration in the run-up to the Iraq war – with the CIA and the mainline intelligence and diplomatic communities pitted against civilian neoconservatives in the upper echelons of the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President – the outing of Plame and her colleagues amounts to an act of espionage committed out of a desire to exact revenge. The leakers meant to retaliate not just against Joe Wilson, through his wife, but against the "old guard" that was resisting the campaign to lie us into war. When the CIA wouldn't go along with the neocon program and "spice up" their analyses with Ahmed Chalabi's tall tales and the outright forgery of the Niger uranium documents, the War Party struck back at them with the sort of viciousness for which the neocons are rightly renowned.
<<snip>>

http://antiwar.com/justin /
__________________________________________________________________

That, and, here is some more 'food for thought' related to this, from another poster on this thread:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

First, still_one posted this:

http://s93118771.onlinehome.us/DU/letter.pdf#search= \'Valerie%20was%20involved%20in%20a%20sting%20operation%20...\'

COVER-UP OF
TREASON
Time magazine’s Joe Klein’s July 5 article, page 21 revealed that Valerie Plame
was “active in a sting operation involving the trafficking of Weapons of Mass
Destruction components” when her identity was exposed by the White House. It
also said “Only a high-ranking official could have had access to the knowledge”
that Valerie Plame was a covert CIA agent.

Since the Republicans refuse to hold investigations
on the Plame matter, our study group believes there
is more to the White House revealing Valerie Plame’s
covert CIA status.

Consider this:
1) News records show that in 1995, Vice President
Cheney, then CEO of Halliburton, was fined
$1.2 million for illegal sales of dual-use nuclear
components to Libya. Shortly before becoming
Vice President he bitterly assailed U.S. policy
against selling such components to Syria and Iran.
Apparently the policy hurt Halliburton’s bottom
line.

2) Other countries are investigating Vice President
Cheney for illegal bribery and various other
offenses connected to Halliburton as well as his
paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to secret
Swiss bank accounts

3) The Atomic Energy Commission has said a North
American company is one of 20 being investigated
for black-market sales of WMD materials.

We believe it is possible that Valerie Plame was
outed and the CIA sting operation exposed because
it was coming close to discovering that Vice
President Cheney and the Hallibuton company he
has awarded billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to in
non-bid contracts—violated U.S. laws that restricted
sales of nuclear components to Middle Eastern and
Asian countries, including Pakistan.

In addition, FBI translator Sibel Edmonds—gagged
by Attorney General John Ashcroft—said in her
testimony to the 9/11 Commission that if what she
knows is revealed, it could lead to charges of
TREASON being leveled against elected officials at
top levels of the U.S. government, “Certain elected
officials will stand trial and go to prison”.

If what Sibel Edmonds says is accurate, then
all of those who have been involved in keeping this
information from reaching the public are complicit
in cover-up and this TREASON. The same crime
that brought Nixon down.

There is a question of where the Vice President’s
—and President’s—loyalties lie: to corporate friends
and their companies’ bottom line; or to the laws and
the Constitution of the United States and the security
and well-being of the American people?

In any case, the exposure of Valerie Plame by the
White House was and is TREASONOUS. Americans
should know the truth about Sibel Edmonds and
Valerie Plame.

It is the responsibility of the media and Congress to
investigate and expose these wrongdoings, and safeguard
this country against this type of obstruction
and threat to the American people.

We want to know WHY Congress and the
Justice Department are not fulfilling their
role to the American people?
WHEN will you start ?




Then, on that same DU thread by still_one:

kskiska posted this:
more…
Sent by a friend (cites daily kos as source):

Not only was Plame's cover blown, so was that of her cover company, Brewster, Jennings & Associates. With the public exposure of Plame, intelligence agencies all over the world started searching data bases for any references to her (TIME Magazine). Damage control was immediate, as the CIA asserted that her mission had been connected to weapons of mass destruction.

However, it was not long before stories from the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal tied Brewster, Jennings & Associates to energy, oil and the Saudi-owned Arabian American Oil Company, or ARAMCO. Brewster Jennings had been a founder of Mobil Oil company, one of Aramco's principal founders.

According to additional sources interviewed by Wayne Madsen, Brewster Jennings was, in fact, a well-established CIA proprietary company, linked for many years to ARAMCO. The demise of Brewster Jennings was also guaranteed the moment Plame was outed.

It takes years for Non-Official Covers or NOCs, as they are known, to become really effective. Over time, they become gradually more trusted; they work their way into deeper information access from more sensitive sources. NOCs are generally regarded in the community as among the best and most valuable of all CIA operations officers and the agency goes to great lengths to protect them in what are frequently very risky missions.

By definition, Valerie Plame was an NOC. Yet unlike all other NOCs who fear exposure and torture or death from hostile governments and individual targets who have been judged threats to the United States, she got done in by her own President, whom we also judge to be a domestic enemy of the United States.

Moreover, as we will see below, Valerie Plame may have been one of the most important NOCs the CIA had in the current climate. Let's look at just how valuable she was.

ARAMCO

According to an April 29, 2002 report in Britain's Guardian, ARAMCO constitutes 12% of the world's total oil production; a figure which has certainly increased as other countries have progressed deeper into irreversible decline.

ARAMCO is the largest oil group in the world, a state-owned Saudi company in partnership with four major US oil companies. Another one of Aramco's partners is Chevron-Texaco which gave up one of its board members, Condoleezza Rice, when she became the National Security Advisor to George Bush. All of ARAMCO's key decisions are made by the Saudi royal family while US oil expertise, personnel and technology keeps the cash coming in and the oil going out. ARAMCO operates, manages, and maintains virtually all Saudi oil fields - 25% of all the oil on the planet.

It gets better.

According to a New York Times report on March 8th of this year, ARAMCO is planning to make a 25% investment in a new and badly needed refinery to produce gasoline. The remaining 75% ownership of the refinery will go to the only nation that is quickly becoming America's major world competitor for ever-diminishing supplies of oil: China.

Almost the entire Bush administration has an interest in ARAMCO.

The Boston Globe reported that in 2001 ARAMCO had signed a $140 million multi-year contract with Halliburton, then chaired by Dick Cheney, to develop a new oil field. Halliburton does a lot of business in Saudi Arabia. Current estimates of Halliburton contracts or joint ventures in the country run into the tens of billions of dollars.

So do the fortunes of some shady figures from the Bush family's past.

As recently as 1991 ARAMCO had Khalid bin Mahfouz sitting on its Supreme Council or board of directors. Mahfouz, Saudi Arabia's former treasurer and the nation's largest banker, has been reported in several places to be Osama bin Laden's brother in law. However, he has denied this and brought intense legal pressure to bear demanding retractions of these allegations. He has major partnership investments with the multi-billion dollar Binladin Group of companies and he is a former director of BCCI, the infamous criminal drug-money laundering bank which performed a number of very useful services for the CIA before its 1991 collapse under criminal investigation by a whole lot of countries.

As Saudi Arabia's largest banker he handles the accounts of the royal family and - no doubt - ARAMCO, while at the same time he is a named defendant in a $1 trillion lawsuit filed by 9/11 victim families against the Saudi government and prominent Saudi officials who, the suit alleges, were complicit in the 9/11 attacks.

Both BCCI and Mahfouz have historical connections to the Bush family dating back to the 1980s. Another bank (one of many) connected to Mahfouz - the InterMaritime Bank - bailed out a cash-starved Harken Energy in 1987 with $25 million. After the rejuvenated Harken got a no-bid oil lease in 1991, CEO George W. Bush promptly sold his shares in a pump-and-dump scheme and made a whole lot of money.

Knowing all of this, there's really no good reason why the CIA should be too upset, is there? It was only a long-term proprietary and deep-cover NOC - well established and consistently producing "take" from ARAMCO (and who knows what else in Saudi Arabia). It was destroyed with a motive of personal vengeance (there may have been other motives) by someone inside the White House.

From the CIA's point of view, at a time when Saudi Arabia is one of the three or four countries of highest interest to the US, the Plame operation was irreplaceable.

Third clue: Tenet's resignation, which occurred at night, was the first "evening resignation" of a Cabinet-level official since October 1973 when Attorney General Elliott Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, resigned in protest of Richard Nixon's firing of Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox. Many regard this as the watershed moment when the Nixon administration was doomed.