The Niger / Cheney / Plame / Brewster-Jennings connection

[Junkdrawer]

Considerable effort was put into claiming that no one in the White House saw Wilson's report. I think that's nonsense. Here's why and why I think that's important.

Many, many respectable reporters have commented on how Cheney personally reached around (or Stove-piped) the CIA hierarchy and tried to "fix the intelligence" on the WMD issue. We have credible reports of Cheney visiting the CIA in person during the Iraq war run-up. The Downing Street Memos talk all about this.

Now here comes this phony "Niger Yellow-cake" story. The honest part of the CIA (including Brewster-Jennings) goes to the trouble of sending Joe Wilson to Niger to debunk the story. Do we really believe this was never told to Cheney and Libby?

And if it was, wouldn't the effort to find out who in the CIA was "with the program" begin then and more likely, even earlier. And wouldn't that make Brewster-Jennings a target?

I think the timeline is now clicking into place...

1.) Cheney/Libby put pressure on the CIA to confirm Niger Story.

2.) The honest part of the CIA decides to send Joe Wilson because they know he'll tell the truth.

3.) Bush/Cheney/Libby/Rice decide to ignore Wilson and put the "16 words" in the State of the Union. Investigation begins in Cheney's office to see who did send Wilson. The answer comes back - it's their old Nemesis, Brewster-Jennings et al. And they find Wilson's wife Plame works for Brewster-Jennings.

4.) Wilson publishes the column.

5.) Tweety asks: "If they went to the trouble to sending Joe Wilson all the way to Africa to find out whether that country had ever sold uranium to Saddam Hussein, why wouldn't they follow-up on that?"http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=5221932&mesg_id=5221932">Link

6.) Libby sees his chance. He can kill Brewster-Jennings by "correcting the record". He'll blame Wilson on Plame and thus out Plame as a CIA Agent and destroy Brewster-Jennings in the process.

Perhaps this is why Fitz is so interested in the phony Niger documents?

[Junkdrawer]

1. Kick with new title

:kick:

[Junkdrawer]

12. .

[Spazito]

2. Cheney and Libby micro-managed the phoney run-up to the war

I agree, there is no way they did not see his report. Also, Wilson was only one of three who had reported back that the Niger/yellowcake information was not credible. They saw all three reports, imo, and saw Wilson as a real danger even before he went public.

[Junkdrawer]

3. A conspiracy to kill Brewster-Jennings is at the heart of this case...

it goes way beyond "revenge for the Wilson's NYT op-ed".

[Spazito]

4. I don't disagree with you on Brewster-Jennings

I DO find it very interesting the media has gone completely silent, with very few exceptions, on the question of Brewster-Jennings. One has to wonder why?

[Junkdrawer]

5. Didn't think you did. Just trying to stimulate a discussion.

:hi:

[pilgrimsoul]

6. Has there been anything published

that outlines specific damage done to Brewster Jennings' personnel? I work with this freeptard who refuses to even consider that any CIA personnel associated with B-J were compromised or harmed by the leak. It would be great to have some evidence to throw back in his face.

[Junkdrawer]

7. DailyKos had this...

A possibility has been raised by several sources that a death may have occurred as a result of this leak. Under the Espionage Act, this could lead to a death penalty case. The CIA Wall of Honor has stars representing agents killed on duty. Named stars are used where information is not classified, and anonymous stars are used when the agent's name cannot be released. Below the stars is a chronological Book of Honor. An anonymous star was added to the wall between named stars that can be dated to deaths on February 5, 2003 and October 25, 2003. The anonymous star thus fits the timing of the Plame leak. Wayne Madsen, a reporter and former NSA employee, has claimed, "CIA sources report that at least one anonymous star placed on the CIA's Wall of Honor at its Langley, Virginia headquarters is a clandestine agent who was executed in a hostile foreign nation as a direct result of the White House leak."

...

In February, Circuit Judge David Tatel joined his colleagues' order to Cooper and Miller despite his own, very lonely finding that indeed there is a federal privilege for reporters that can shield them from being compelled to testify to grand juries and give up sources. He based his finding on Rule 501 of the Federal Rules of Evidence, which authorizes federal courts to develop new privileges "in the light of reason and experience." Tatel actually found that reason and experience "support recognition of a privilege for reporters' confidential sources." But Tatel still ordered Cooper and Miller to testify because he found that the privilege had to give way to "the gravity of the suspected crime."

Judge Tatel's opinion has eight blank pages in the middle of it where he discusses the secret information the prosecutor has supplied only to the judges to convince them that the testimony he is demanding is worth sending reporters to jail to get. The gravity of the suspected crime is presumably very well developed in those redacted pages. Later, Tatel refers to "having carefully scrutinized the prosecutor's voluminous classified filings."

Some of us have theorized that the prosecutor may have given up the leak case in favor of a perjury case, but Tatel still refers to it simply as a case "which involves the alleged exposure of a covert agent." Tatel wrote a 41-page opinion in which he seemed eager to make new law -- a federal reporters' shield law -- but in the end, he couldn't bring himself to do it in this particular case. In his final paragraph, he says he "might have" let Cooper and Miller off the hook "were the leak at issue in this case less harmful to national security."


http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/10/22/143214/56

[ribrepin]

8. I've always felt the real target was Brewster-Jennings

It doesn't make sense to go after Wilson over his editorial. If they had ignored the editorial, it would have been a beep on the screen. Scowcroft's editorial was much more damaging to their war dreams.

Secondly, why name her company? Novak knew she worked for the CIA, but he dug out a company name that she had used. He had to know it was a CIA front company. Mrs Wilson may not have been the real target, it may have been someone else who was using Brewster Jennings as a cover.

[Junkdrawer]

9. Wouldn't Brewster-Jennings be in a perfect position...

to see who forged the Niger documents?

Perfect motive for Cheney to out them.

[Junkdrawer]

10. Could someone be blackmailing BushCo?

While I'd like to believe in Fitzmas, Ashcroft caving on an independent investigation is weird. I find it more believable that *someone* got the goods on the Niger forgeries and demanded that Cheney/Libby/Rove be held accountable for outing Brewster-Jennings.

Perhaps the one indictment pause was to see if just getting Libby on perjury was going to satisfy the blackmailers? :shrug:

[Junkdrawer]

11. PS. Here's an interesting piece of inoculation in American conservative..

Forging the Case for War


Who was behind the Niger uranium documents?


by Philip Giraldi


From the beginning, there has been little doubt in the intelligence community that the outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame was part of a bigger story. That she was exposed in an attempt to discredit her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, is clear, but the drive to demonize Wilson cannot reasonably be attributed only to revenge. Rather, her identification likely grew out of an attempt to cover up the forging of documents alleging that Iraq attempted to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger.

What took place and why will not be known with any certainty until the details of the Fitzgerald investigation are revealed. (As we go to press, Fitzgerald has made no public statement.) But recent revelations in the Italian press, most notably in the pages of La Repubblica, along with information already on the public record, suggest a plausible scenario for the evolution of Plamegate.

Information developed by Italian investigators indicates that the documents were produced in Italy with the connivance of the Italian intelligence service. It also reveals that the introduction of the documents into the American intelligence stream was facilitated by Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans (OSP), a parallel intelligence center set up in the Pentagon to develop alternative sources of information in support of war against Iraq.

...


http://www.amconmag.com/2005/2005_11_07/print/featureprint.html

[Junkdrawer]

13. A few choice paragraphs from Seymour Hersh's "The Stovepipe"...

They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information,” Pollack continued. “They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn’t have the time or the energy to go after the bad information.”

....

Eventually, Thielmann said, Bolton demanded that he and his staff have direct electronic access to sensitive intelligence, such as foreign-agent reports and electronic intercepts. In previous Administrations, such data had been made available to under-secretaries only after it was analyzed, usually in the specially secured offices of INR. The whole point of the intelligence system in place, according to Thielmann, was “to prevent raw intelligence from getting to people who would be misled.” Bolton, however, wanted his aides to receive and assign intelligence analyses and assessments using the raw data. In essence, the under-secretary would be running his own intelligence operation, without any guidance or support. “He surrounded himself with a hand-chosen group of loyalists, and found a way to get C.I.A. information directly,” Thielmann said.

In a subsequent interview, Bolton acknowledged that he had changed the procedures for handling intelligence, in an effort to extend the scope of the classified materials available to his office. “I found that there was lots of stuff that I wasn’t getting and that the INR analysts weren’t including,” he told me. “I didn’t want it filtered. I wanted to see everything—to be fully informed. If that puts someone’s nose out of joint, sorry about that.” Bolton told me that he wanted to reach out to the intelligence community but that Thielmann had “invited himself” to his daily staff meetings. “This was my meeting with the four assistant secretaries who report to me, in preparation for the Secretary’s 8:30 a.m. staff meeting,” Bolton said. “This was within my family of bureaus. There was no place for INR or anyone else—the Human Resources Bureau or the Office of Foreign Buildings.”

...


http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031027fa_fact

And yet we're to believe that Cheney's office never heard of Wilson before May 2003... :eyes: