Valerie Plame Leak Sabotaged America's Iran-Watching Intell (TWN)

[kpete]

Valerie Plame Leak Sabotaged America's Iran-Watching Intelligence Effort

.............

There are different directions this story may go.

The first might be that one of the reasons that Plame was outed had to do with bureaucratic and/or political enemies who were predisposed against the intelligence results of her team's Iran WMD-watching efforts. I would have to be further convinced of that case -- as I think that internal pettiness inside the Bush White House over Joe Wilson's public outing of the contrived Iraq-Niger-Uranium is a pretty compelling rationale for Cheney's machine to out Plame.

But another dimension of this story has to do with an assessment of the damage that her outing caused this nation. As we now start down a path towards harder-edged threats against Iran, allies will naturally question the quality of our intelligence given our failures on Iraq WMDs.

If Cheney & Co. outed one of the key intelligence operations monitoring the inputs and outputs of Iran's nuclear program -- then Cheney & Co. did vast damage to our ability to know what is real and contrived inside Iran.

One other piece to this that TWN needs to go back to -- so please take the following with a bit of pause, until I further clarify.

Someone with knowledge of the classified report that Joe Wilson filed after his now famed investigative trip to Niger shared with me that there were two notes in that report that had nothing to do with Iraq and its purported activities in Niger.

These two notes focused on Iran's interests and possible activities in Niger.

The question is "why would Iran be interested in Niger uranium when it has more than adequate domestic sources of uranium?"

The response that has come from various intelligence sources that TWN has consulted is that if Iran was trying to access external sources of uranium -- somewhere like Niger -- it is because those "secret efforts" would be outside the international intelligence monitoring of Iran's domestic mining operations.

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More soon.

-- Steve Clemons
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/001246.php

[hang a left]

1. hmmmm

Color me suspicious.

[Wordie]

2. Great that Clemons has already picked up on this...now for the msm...

I grabbed a bunch of national news sources and their email addresses from the Research Forum, and posted it in the LBN thread on this issue. Here's a link to the post:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=2105487&mesg_id=2105635

And here's a link to the LBN thread:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2105487

I surely hope msm will pick up on this...maybe they need a push from DU.

Recommended.

[Bob3]

3. Well, well, well

This is very interesting. We will have to see what developers here but stuff like this makes you believe in Karma.