500+ dead US soldiers, $500+ billion in federal budget
deficit. The Emperor has no uniform...The children of
America are being born into deeper debt and greater
danger than they would have been born into if a McCain
or a Gore had been in the White House for these last
four critical years...So much damage has been done to
our institutions, to our position in the world, to our
resources, and even in unthinkable ways to our power
itself...The Bush cabal have misused and abused the US
military and the US intelligence community. It is a
disgrace. Numerous, brave individuals who serve the US
Constitution have come forth...There are many more
Daniel Ellsbergs out there...They have a big problem
though...Can the "US mainstream news media" be counted
on to protect them? If your career, and perhaps your
life depended upon the NYTwits or the WASHPs printing
your story, getting it right AND not backing down when
the screws are tightened, AND then more importantly,
on AnythingButSee, SeeBS or SeeNotNews giving the
story any real play, would you come forward? If the
Democrats controlled Congress, or Sen. Tom Duck-It
(D-SD)was more than half the leader he was before the
Anthrax letters, maybe. But now? However, each news
cycle, as the _resident's poll numbers continue to
drop, as his credibility gap widens and deepens, as
the economy continues to go one step forward two steps
back, as we sink deeper into the quagmire in Iraq, as
more of our soldiers blood is shed and our nations
treasure is squandered, it becomes less and less
dangerous for the Joe Wilsons, Karen Kwiatowskis, Rand
Beers, Katherine Guns, Paul O'Neills, etc. They will
be coming out of the shadows in the next few months.
They better...There will be no hope for their sleep
patterns or their consciences or the Constitution they
serve if the Bush cabal gets another four years.
William Rivers Pitt: The other school of thought, espoused by Wilson himself, says these administration officials deliberately annihilated the career of Wilson's wife as a warning to Wilson, and to any other insider who might come forward with data damaging to the administration officials. As the old saying goes, kill one and warn one hundred.
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/022404A.shtml
A NOC at Bush's Door
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Tuesday 24 February 2004
Her name was Valerie Plame, and she was a NOC.
NOC is a designation within the Central Intelligence
Agency which means "non-official cover." It denotes an
agent working under such deep cover that said agent
cannot be officially associated with the American
intelligence community in any way, shape or form. In
order to keep covered, a NOC will work for the CIA out
of a front company, which provides the illusion that
the agent is just an ordinary accountant, lawyer or
businessperson.
Between the CIA and the agent, a process is created
to construct an identity which obscures completely the
reality of the agent's true employment. The training
of these NOC agents, along with the creation of the
cover stories which are known as "legends" within the
agency, requires millions of dollars and delicate
work. It is, quite literally, a life and death issue.
Little or no protection is given to an exposed NOC
agent by the American government, an arrangement that
is understood by all parties involved. A blown NOC can
wind up dead very easily. Because of this, the cadre
of NOC agents is small and elite.
Valerie Plame was a NOC working out of a front
company named Brewster-Jennings & Associates. To any
and all uninformed observers, she was an energy
analyst who spent a good deal of time working
overseas. In fact, she ran a covert international
network dedicated to tracking any person, group or
nation that would put weapons of mass destruction into
the hands of terrorists.
That is, until the Bush administration got in the
way.
The same administration, which invaded Iraq after
bullyragging the American people with dire predictions
of biological and chemical weapons flooding out of
that nation and into the hands of al Qaeda, reached
out and crushed the career of an undercover agent
working to keep that exact nightmare scenario from
unfolding.
The end of Valerie Plame's career came about a week
after her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, took to
the pages of the New York Times with an editorial that
badly embarrassed George W. Bush. Bush, you will
recall, stated in his 2003 State of the Union Address
that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger to develop
nuclear bombs. Wilson had been dispatched to Niger the
previous February to determine if that charge, which
had been floating around at the time, was valid. He
returned after completing his investigation to inform
the State Department, the National Security Council,
the CIA and the office of Vice President Cheney that
the uranium claims were bogus. It was later revealed
that the claims were based on crudely forged documents
out of Italy.
This didn't stop Bush from using the fraudulent data
to terrify the American people into supporting his
Iraq invasion during his 2003 Address. Ambassador
Wilson replied with a July 6, 2003 editorial which
categorically humiliated the administration for
allowing this claim to appear in the speech.
"America's foreign policy depends on the sanctity of
its information," wrote Wilson. "For this reason,
questioning the selective use of intelligence to
justify the war in Iraq is neither idle sniping nor
'revisionist history,' as Mr. Bush has suggested. The
act of war is the last option of a democracy, taken
when there is a grave threat to our national security.
More than 200 American soldiers have lost their lives
in Iraq already. We have a duty to ensure that their
sacrifice came for the right reasons."
For the record, the number of dead American soldiers
in Iraq is now 547. Many thousands more have been
grievously wounded. There is no accurate accounting of
the number of civilians killed in Iraq, but all
estimates run into the tens of thousands. No anthrax,
botulinum toxin, sarin gas, mustard gas, VX gas or
uranium has been found there.
A week after the Wilson editorial was published,
some six journalists along with columnist Robert Novak
received telephone calls from two Bush administration
officials. The sum and substance of the calls: To
inform the journalists that Ambassador Joseph Wilson's
wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent.
It is an open question as to the ultimate purpose
behind these calls. One school of thought says the
calls were meant to smear Wilson by claiming he only
got the Niger assignment because his wife was an
agent, thus tagging him with nepotism and undermining
his criticisms of the administration. The other school
of thought, espoused by Wilson himself, says these
administration officials deliberately annihilated the
career of Wilson's wife as a warning to Wilson, and to
any other insider who might come forward with data
damaging to the administration officials. As the old
saying goes, kill one and warn one hundred.
In the end, the result was the same. Valerie Plame's
career with the CIA is over. Her network, the one that
was working to keep weapons of mass destruction out of
the hands of terrorists, is destroyed. The members of
that network are now in mortal peril. The front
company Plame worked through, Brewster-Jennings, was
exposed as well, destroying the networks of any and
all agents besides Plame working from that cover. The
American intelligence community is disgusted and
furious.
Larry Johnson, former CIA and State Department
official who was a classmate of Plame's in the CIA's
training program at the Farm, said when the CIA's
internal damage assessment is finished, "at the end of
the day, (the harm) will be huge and some people
potentially may have lost their lives."
"This is not just another leak," said former CIA
officer Jim Marcinkowski, who also did CIA training
with Plame. "This is an unprecedented exposing of an
agent's identity. There's only one entity in the world
that can identify you. That's the U.S. government.
When the U.S. government does it, that's it."
A February 5 report by UPI titled 'Cheney's Staff
Focus of Probe' begins as follows: "Federal
law-enforcement officials said that they have
developed hard evidence of possible criminal
misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick
Cheney's office related to the unlawful exposure of a
CIA officer's identity last year. The investigation,
which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a
Justice Department official said. According to these
sources, John Hannah and Cheney's chief of staff,
Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, were the two Cheney employees.
'We believe that Hannah was the major player in this,'
one federal law-enforcement officer said."
Lewis Libby is one of the most important people on
Cheney's staff. Along with John Hannah, who served as
one of Cheney's Middle East Policy advisors, Libby was
deeply involved in the activities of Rumsfeld's
hand-picked Pentagon group, the Office of Special
Plans. This group was put together specifically to
re-engineer data regarding the threat posed by Iraq so
as to manufacture justification for a decision to make
war that had already been made. On several occasions,
Libby visited CIA headquarters at the behest of Cheney
to browbeat CIA analysts into "toughening up" their
assessments of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
Given all the work Libby and Hannah put in to make
sure Bush got his Iraq war, it is no wonder they were
less than thrilled with what Ambassador Wilson had to
say.
Did these men out a CIA agent and destroy a network
that tracked weapons of mass destruction? We may soon
know. Attorney General John Ashcroft has recused
himself from the investigation. A bulldog of a U.S.
Attorney named Patrick Fitzgerald is special
prosecutor investigating the matter. Several members
of the Bush administration have been dragged before a
Grand Jury, including White House spokesman Scott
McClellan, McClennan deputy Claire Buchan, former
press aide Adam Levine, Republican consultant Mary
Matalin, who served as a counselor to Vice President
Dick Cheney, White House communications director Dan
Bartlett, former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer
and Cheney aide Cathie Martin.
According to a Newsday report from February 22
titled 'Panel Questions White House Aides,' during the
grand jury sessions, "Press aides were confronted with
internal White House documents, mainly e-mails and
telephone logs, between White House aides and
reporters and questioned about conversations with
reporters. The logs indicate that several White House
officials talked to Novak shortly before the
appearance of his July 14 column. According to the New
York Times, the set of documents that prosecutors
repeatedly referred to in their meetings with White
House aides are extensive notes compiled by I. Lewis
Libby, Cheney's chief of staff and national security
adviser."
Further reports indicate the journalists who were
called may be questioned. Fitzgerald's first act as
special prosecutor was to ask White House staffers to
sign a waiver which allows those journalists to speak
without violating confidentiality. This would
determine, immediately, which administration official
violated national security, destroyed a WMD network,
and endangered the life of an agent. George W. Bush
has promised to cooperate with Fitzgerald's
investigation, but as of this date, those waivers have
not been signed.
Her name was Valerie Plame, and she was a NOC. She
was keeping weapons of mass destruction out of the
hands of terrorists. What was the Bush administration
doing?
---------
William Rivers Pitt is the senior editor and lead
writer for truthout. He is a New York Times and
international bestselling author of two books - 'War
on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know' and
'The Greatest Sedition is Silence.'
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