Effect Measure

Was Valerie Plame outed to cover up high level treason by a US official?

Posted by revere on January 21, 2008
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We now know that Pakistan sold nuclear secrets to Libya and North Korea and who knows who else. The assumption was that the nuclear secrets were Pakistan’s. AQ Khan, head of the Pakistani nuclear program gets the blame (or the credit; he is considered a national hero in Pakistan). Nuclear secrets sold to the highest bidder by a corrupt government official. Good thing US officials don’t do that. Or do they?

The FBI has been accused of covering up a key case file detailing evidence against corrupt government officials and their dealings with a network stealing nuclear secrets.

The assertion follows allegations made in The Sunday Times two weeks ago by Sibel Edmonds, an FBI whistleblower, who worked on the agency?s investigation of the network.

Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency?s Washington field office.

She says the FBI was investigating a Turkish and Israeli-run network that paid high-ranking American officials to steal nuclear weapons secrets. These were then sold on the international black market to countries such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. (TimesOnline)

The file, whose exact designation is known (203A-WF-210023), does not exist according to the FBI, although other documents exist showing there was indeed such a file. In fact a remarkable amount seems to be known about the operation:

Edmonds had told this newspaper that members of the Turkish political and diplomatic community in the US had been actively acquiring nuclear secrets. They often acted as a conduit, she said, for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan?s spy agency, because they attracted less suspicion.

She claimed corrupt government officials helped the network, and venues such as the American-Turkish Council (ATC) in Washington were used as drop-off points.

The anonymous letter names a high-level government official who was allegedly secretly recorded speaking to an official at the Turkish embassy between August and December 2001.

It claims the government official warned a Turkish member of the network that they should not deal with a company called Brewster Jennings because it was a CIA front company investigating the nuclear black market. The official’s warning came two years before Brewster Jennings was publicly outed when one of its staff, Valerie Plame, was revealed to be a CIA agent in a case that became a cause célèbre in the US.

While Edmonds is under a gag order not to talk about the details (even the details of the gag order), she says she has given them all to Congress and the 9-11 Commission. I guess the rest of us didn’t need to know.

Of course one of the most interesting thing about this is the appearance of the name of Valerie Plame. As the record showed, Plame was indeed a covert agent working on nuclear proliferation. And it sounds like she and her CIA colleagues may have been getting close to some high level treason on the part of a high US official.

Maybe the Bush administration was telling the truth after all. Outing Valerie Plame had nothing to do with getting back at her husband Ambassador Joseph Wilson for criticizing the rationale for the Iraq debacle.

Maybe the reason was to cover up treason. Just can’t help but wonder.

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Comments

  1. #1 marquer
    January 21, 2008

    I learned a while back that there is a colloquial phrase in Turkish, “the deep state”.

    It describes a pattern of intersection and collaboration between high elected officials of the government of Turkey, wealthy private interests, organized crime, and the Turkish intelligence services.

    Suffice it to say that Turkey is by no means alone in terms of having a “deep state” mechanism. I would infer on the basis of available evidences that most prominent modern nations have one, and that different deep-state cabals are at various times and in various ways complicit with one another where it suits their purposes to do so.

    –

  2. #2 Pierce R. Butler
    January 21, 2008

    The Times Online link seems to be foo.

    Maybe this is it: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article3216737.ece

  3. #3 PFT
    January 22, 2008

    Our government has been committing treason for over 40 years under the name of globalization. JFK tried to take back our currency, halt capital outflows and pull back on the Cold War and Vietnam before he was killed and the traitors took control.

    During the cold war we routinely sent aid and did trade with the Soviet Union, even when we were fighting in Vietnam and the Soviets were supplying North Vietnam.
    There was no such thing as Soviet technology, it all came from us, including the nuclear technology we gave them in 1945 (at least they were our ally at the time). Larry McDonald blew the whistle on it in the early 80′s, but was unfortunate to be on KAL 007 which was supposedly shot down by the Soviets. How convenient.

    More on our involvement in the trade of nuclear weapons and Pakistan can be found from Deception, by Adrian Levy & Catherine Scott-Clark.

    Things are not as they seem. But when you control the past (history) and news on current events (MSM control), you can pretty much get people to believe anything.

  4. #4 Lassi Hippeläinen
    January 22, 2008

    “There was no such thing as Soviet technology, it all came from us, including the nuclear technology we gave them in 1945″

    Not quite so. In fact, the Soviets developed their bomb mostly by themselves, while the American bomb was developed by foreign help.

    There were some key details that the Soviets learned from the Americans, but the channel wasn’t espionage, it was the athmosphere. Fallout from US athmospheric tests contained enough radioactive isotopes for the Soviets to identify the details of the chain reaction. When they received information from West (freely given or spied), they didn’t trust it until they had independently verified it.

    Remember that the Periodic Table was first written by the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev in 1869. From there on the Russians/Soviets had a continuing tradition of research in elements. In the 1930s Igor Kurchatov figured out the basic idea of a nuclear reactor. He later lead the Soviet bomb project.

    The US programme was based on emigrated European scientists. There were also a few Americans, like J. Robert Oppenheimer, but even they had usually been educated in Europe. The biggest groups at the heart of the Manhattan project came from Germany and Hungary, not US.

  5. #5 marquer
    January 22, 2008


    “There was no such thing as Soviet technology, it all came from us, including the nuclear technology we gave them in 1945″

    Not quite so. In fact, the Soviets developed their bomb mostly by themselves…

    Allow me to disagree with both of these statements.

    The Soviet nuclear program was not “given” technology by the West. Much of their research was both indigenous and ingenious. Igor Kurchatov combined powerful scientific acumen with strong managerial skills.

    However, there were certain aspects of technology which the Soviets certainly would have learned for themselves in time, but which they instead obtained by espionage, greatly accelerating their effort. Klaus Fuchs, the Soviet mole at Los Alamos, was instrumental in this. Without those artificial leaps forward, the first Soviet fission bomb would have taken several more years to design and build.

    Contrast this to the later Soviet thermonuclear effort. The US had tightened security immensely (this included calling into question the loyalty of innocents such as Oppenheimer). There were no leaks from the American H-bomb program. Yet the Soviet program was technically quite competitive and in some ways more advanced. The USSR had the first “dry” hydrogen bomb utilizing solid lithium deuteride fuel, for example.

    Primary credit for this goes to Andrei Sakharov, at that point in his life not yet a dissenter from the Soviet system, who independently discovered the radiation implosion method called in the West the “Teller-Ulam” configuration. (This should more properly be the “Teller-Ulam-Garwin” configuration, per Teller’s comments in later life in which he gave credit to Richard Garwin.)

    –

  6. #6 M. Randolph Kruger
    January 22, 2008

    Cant out someone unless they are covert Revere. Plame was never covert, it sounded good after an attack on Wilson who for whatever reason changed his story about nuclear materials four times in a year. Valerie on the other hand was an analyst. In fact that is what the investigation committee said. Scooter Libby? Indicted and convicted but not for outing anyone. The crime? Obstruction of justice.

    Gag order? Bad choice of words. Perhaps the invocation of the National Security Act and it likely isnt treason either. There are things the people dont need to know and that includes me. There are some things that when used by the PTB including the Clintons who were listening in on their oppositions phone conversations without a warrant or reason that you should know about.

    So much for FISA huh? We dont need foreigners, we have our own domestic criminals.

    http://home.hiwaay.net/~pspoole/echelon.html

    Wire tap? Shit aint legal here. But you CAN use information gleaned from the wires when they do it from other countries. I never use a phone to discuss sensitive stuff because they have been listening for forty years.

    Outing Valerie? The neighbors that were questioned including their kids said that the Wilson children told them that their mommy was a spy………Quick, get a rope and some cyanide… We have work to do. Dont forget the waterboard. There has to be something the kid knows. Book a flight for her to Gitmo and threaten to kill her teddy bear if she doesnt talk.

    Talk about outing people….

    Revere this operation during the time frame you describe would have HAD to have happened on the Clinton watch. Simply not enough time for the Bushbash to have happened. In fact, you also post that the warning came two years prior…. So who is responsible here for this? Sure as Hell cant be Bush.

    They also below assert a conspiracy. Well guess what? Its going to be very hard to prove a conspiracy because all documentation is classified relating to that. So he said, she said that he said, and then someone else leaked a name of a non-covert operative. Cant get damages if you sue the federal government for someone who isnt and never was. She was a NOC and nothing more.

    http://news.findlaw.com/usatoday/docs/plame/wilsonlibby91306acmp.html

    BTW folks you can keep up with this on this link and the counter to the lawsuits will be filed as they come available. Look Revere and I disagree about many things, but if someone had been outed then there would have been a trail and a trial. Not one. Illegal activity in the interests of the US has always been hard to convict on. Look at Oliver North. If he and Poindexter hadnt done what they had, then you would have seen a mass exodus to the north of refugees from Daniel Ortega’s attacks into Honduras and S. Mexico. He wouldnt have needed a bigger army, just a mass refugee problem on our hands. It would have bankrupted us.

    Did someone give a name to a newspaper? Probably, but not in the way that this is suggested. My best guess is that the Wilsons are going to come up short on this one… Several million short.

  7. #7 revere
    January 22, 2008

    Randy:The CIA said she was covert. Does Fox News know something they don’t?

  8. #8 M. Randolph Kruger
    January 23, 2008

    What they said was that she was an NOC and there is a BIG difference. If she was covert they would have refused to let her testify.

    “We seem to have made some progess today in our efforts to answer the question. James Taranto links to this USA Today article and writes in “Best of the Web Today”:

    Unless we’re missing something, Joe Wilson has disproved his own accusation that someone in the Bush administration violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, USA Today reports:

    The alleged crime at the heart of a controversy that has consumed official Washington–the “outing” of a CIA officer–may not have been a crime at all under federal law, little-noticed details in a book by the agent’s husband suggest.

    In The Politics of Truth, former ambassador Joseph Wilson writes that he and his future wife both returned from overseas assignments in June 1997. Neither spouse, a reading of the book indicates, was again stationed overseas. They appear to have remained in Washington, D.C., where they married and became parents of twins.

    This meant that Plame would have been stationed in the U.S. for six years before Bob Novak published his column citing her two years ago today. As USA Today notes:

    The column’s date is important because the law against unmasking the identities of U.S. spies says a “covert agent” must have been on an overseas assignment “within the last five years.” The assignment also must be long-term, not a short trip or temporary post, two experts on the law say.

    All the Democrats who are braying for Karl Rove’s head can’t be very confident that he’s committed a crime. If they were, they would wait for an indictment, which would be a genuine embarrassment to the administration. ”

    “Here is Joseph Wilson himself, talking to Wolf Blitzer on CNN today: “My wife was not a clandestine officer the day that Bob Novak blew her identity.” Read that again. Now reflect on the fact that there has been an ongoing investigation FOR TWO YEARS conducted, we were breathlessly and rather constantly told in the weeks surrounding the initial controversy, on the basis that the White House and reporters OUTED A CLANDESTINE AGENT. Now we know. She wasn’t. Not then.

    It is certainly possible, based on the poorly drafted wording of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, to take this fact and still somehow to discern a crime somewhere here. Which is what Wilson’s defenders and the blood-in-the-water Democrats and Leftists are arguing and will continue to argue.

    Fine. And for the record, as I said in my book Bush Country, if indeed a clandestine agent was placed in jeopardy by a White House leak, then the administration deserved to go hang. But — now her own husband is saying it — Valerie Plame Wilson WASN’T A CLANDESTINE AGENT AT THE TIME.”

    And not Fox News Revere. On one hand the Administrations hands were tied. On the other unfettered. Plame was an NOC and out of the country some seven times IN HER OWN NAME on at least three. Real covert that. Use your own name. To me it seems that the suggestion that there was a set up are plausible, but IMO it was done by the Democrats and a disgruntled V. Plame about whether WMD’s and yellow cake were at issue in Iraq. The Brits confirmed the yellow cake story and there was apparently some to be had. OTOH, those WMD’s were never found…including the ones that the UN verified. They said they destroyed them, but there was no evidence that they did. Did we fight a war for nothing? Not really. It got rid of Saddam and the boys. History will have to decide whether the trade off was worth it or not.

  9. #9 M. Randolph Kruger
    January 23, 2008

    What they said was that she was an NOC and there is a BIG difference. If she was covert they would have refused to let her testify.

    “We seem to have made some progess today in our efforts to answer the question. James Taranto links to this USA Today article and writes in “Best of the Web Today”:

    Unless we’re missing something, Joe Wilson has disproved his own accusation that someone in the Bush administration violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, USA Today reports:

    The alleged crime at the heart of a controversy that has consumed official Washington–the “outing” of a CIA officer–may not have been a crime at all under federal law, little-noticed details in a book by the agent’s husband suggest.

    In The Politics of Truth, former ambassador Joseph Wilson writes that he and his future wife both returned from overseas assignments in June 1997. Neither spouse, a reading of the book indicates, was again stationed overseas. They appear to have remained in Washington, D.C., where they married and became parents of twins.

    This meant that Plame would have been stationed in the U.S. for six years before Bob Novak published his column citing her two years ago today. As USA Today notes:

    The column’s date is important because the law against unmasking the identities of U.S. spies says a “covert agent” must have been on an overseas assignment “within the last five years.” The assignment also must be long-term, not a short trip or temporary post, two experts on the law say.

    All the Democrats who are braying for Karl Rove’s head can’t be very confident that he’s committed a crime. If they were, they would wait for an indictment, which would be a genuine embarrassment to the administration. ”

    “Here is Joseph Wilson himself, talking to Wolf Blitzer on CNN today: “My wife was not a clandestine officer the day that Bob Novak blew her identity.” Read that again. Now reflect on the fact that there has been an ongoing investigation FOR TWO YEARS conducted, we were breathlessly and rather constantly told in the weeks surrounding the initial controversy, on the basis that the White House and reporters OUTED A CLANDESTINE AGENT. Now we know. She wasn’t. Not then.

    It is certainly possible, based on the poorly drafted wording of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, to take this fact and still somehow to discern a crime somewhere here. Which is what Wilson’s defenders and the blood-in-the-water Democrats and Leftists are arguing and will continue to argue.

    Fine. And for the record, as I said in my book Bush Country, if indeed a clandestine agent was placed in jeopardy by a White House leak, then the administration deserved to go hang. But — now her own husband is saying it — Valerie Plame Wilson WASN’T A CLANDESTINE AGENT AT THE TIME.”

    And not Fox News Revere. On one hand the Administrations hands were tied. On the other unfettered. Plame was an NOC and out of the country some seven times IN HER OWN NAME on at least three. Real covert that. Use your own name. To me it seems that the suggestion that there was a set up are plausible, but IMO it was done by the Democrats and a disgruntled V. Plame about whether WMD’s and yellow cake were at issue in Iraq. The Brits confirmed the yellow cake story and there was apparently some to be had. OTOH, those WMD’s were never found…including the ones that the UN verified. They said they destroyed them, but there was no evidence that they did. Did we fight a war for nothing? Not really. It got rid of Saddam and the boys. History will have to decide whether the trade off was worth it or not.

  10. #10 revere
    January 23, 2008

    Randy: See (among many other sources) this: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18924679/