Verra interesting, Paul

"A former CIA covert agent who supervised Mrs. Plame early in her career yesterday took issue with her identification as an "undercover agent," saying that she worked for more than five years at the agency's headquarters in Langley and that most of her neighbors and friends knew that she was a CIA employee.
"She made no bones about the fact that she was an agency employee and her husband was a diplomat," Fred Rustmann, a covert agent from 1966 to 1990, told The Washington Times." Link via regular coverage at Powerline

another here

I believe the 5 year information has also appeared at the Volokh Conspiracy.

What Stephen wrote because I was just writing (my own blog) that it sure is "covert" to be interviewed in an internationally distributed magazine, complete with photos, make public entrances and exits from your, um, 'secret' employment for years...

Valerie Plame is now revealed to not have been "a secret agent" and was an employee of the CIA, was not an undercover agent, but had a desk job. I'm sure she had/has a security clearance but the nature of her work seems to have been not of the super, duper top secret kind.

Via Instapundit, the Washington Times is claiming in an anonymously sourced quote, that Plame had not been out of the Country for five years previously and so was not a covert agent.

http://www.washtimes.com/national/20050715-121257-9887r.htm

Oh, well.

It seems like "everyone" knew that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA too; that is, until Robert Novak actually put it into print.

Maybe there's some kind of karma here.

I'm not sure I understand. Do you mean to tell me that you'd expect to find a covert operative's travel itinerary in the USA Today? Are you seriously going to say that because you read somewhere that Valerie Plame didn't leave the country for such and such number of years that it must be true. She's a flippin CIA agent for shit's sake. I'm sure lots of stuff they do doesn't end up in the mornin' paper.

No, she works at the CIA. So does my uncle. So do lots of people. Not every CIA employee is a dagger-clenched-in-teeth climbing-walls James Bond secret agent.

Ah, joe outed his uncle!
We want an investigation.
Will joe be fired?
joe should lose his security clearance!

The name "Joe" shares two vowels with the name "Rove." Coincidence?

I think not.

More déjà vu – and oh the irony:

CBSgate: It took Mapes' contact, Paul Lukasiak, years of "digging">http://wizbangblog.com/archives/004507.php">"digging in the minutiae of military records" using his anti-Bush AWOL/Fortunate Son site, only to discover…. Nothing.
In the end, the allegation had to be "proved" with the creation of 8 or more forged/faked docs.

Plame Affair: It took wizbang's and other sites' posters and commenters 9 days to discover the Plame/Wilson/Niger uranium transactions' coverup-by-using-fake-docs.

Wizbang's Plame Affair now has 19 posts from 7/2/05 to present. By the 8th, 9th and 10th threads, the smoke-and-mirrors had been cracked.

*Another Sunday, Another Rove/Plame Story From Newsweek 7/10/05
*Rove Already Convicted In The Press 7/11/05
*Karl Rove and Occam's Razor 7/13/05

More deja vu – and oh the irony:

CBSgate: It took Mapes' contact, Paul Lukasiak, years of "digging">http://wizbangblog.com/archives/004507.php">"digging in the minutiae of military records" using his anti-Bush AWOL/Fortunate Son site, only to discover…. Nothing.
In the end, the allegation had to be "proved" with the creation of 8 or more forged/faked docs.

Plame Affair: It took wizbang's and other sites' posters and commenters 9 days to discover the Plame/Wilson/Niger uranium transactions' coverup-by-using-fake-docs.

Wizbang's Plame Affair now has 19 posts from 7/2/05 to present. By the 8th, 9th and 10th threads, the smoke-and-mirrors had been cracked.

*Another Sunday, Another Rove/Plame Story From Newsweek 7/10/05
*Rove Already Convicted In The Press 7/11/05
*Karl Rove and Occam's Razor 7/13/05

Errata: "8" should be "6".
In CBSgate, there were 6 known fake docs, but a possible 7th, as shown in the link, was discovered at Lukasiak's AWOL site during CBSgate.

This being a thread related to USA Today, Oh irony of ironies – I just remembered, it was by looking at USA Today's online copies of the 6 fake docs with all those "speckles" *, that I noticed the similarity at Lukasiak's site back in Sept. 04.

*(square computer-generated cut-and-paste shadows around the dots and text, most visible from a laptop with plasma screen)

I wrote this on June 29, 2005: One of the elements of the charge is that the outed CIA operative had to be overseas undercover some time during the 5 years before his or her identity was revealed. Based on what we know about Valerie Plame, this is so unlikely to be true, that the essential element is missing, so no crime was committed ... so ... why are we wasting time and effort investigating a non-crime?
I can't believe I was the only one to read the statute and see it.

Well, Paul, it appears the CIA and Trilateral Commission data scrubbers missed a few spots from all the posts above. So you won't have to think you are losing your mind, as they undoubtedly hoped you would.

Just make sure to archive all this before they strike again...

Yep, archive all this speculation. It really must mean something since they say so. Why do these authoritative blogger references remind me of the Rehnquist retirement rumor?

To further emphasize the intrigue, I think that there are people in Hawaii who read USA Today, and that Hawaii is in the United States, but I'm not sure if Valerie Plame has ever gone there. Remarkably, Karl Rove has -- and used a telephone while he was there! It's yet to be established if anyone in Hawaii, however, can yet tell TIME from USA. Now that I think of it, Wizbang has a "w" in it's title, and so does Hawaii!!

RE: BR's post (July 15, 2005 11:40 PM)

BR,

Looks like some of this is channeling to Captain's Quarters (A Primer On The Credibility Of Joseph Wilson - July 15, 2005).

Mirroring our concerns, Ed blogs:

...perhaps we need to revisit the Wilsons and their involvement in the Niger investigation...
...
This information came to the CIA from Wilson himself and wound up being reported to Vice President Dick Cheney. While Niger didn't actually complete the sale to Iraq, this demonstrated that Saddam Hussein attempted at least once, as did Iraq, to transact business with Niger for yellowcake uranium in defiance of the sanctions. Yellowcake could only have interested Saddam for weapons development. This evidence showed that Saddam had continued to violate the sanctions regime and still intended on developing WMD. Moreover, the US (and the British, who had similar intelligence) could not know whether Saddam had successfully transacted for the uranium elsewhere. Wilson did prove that they certainly wanted to buy it, probably with the vast sums of cash the Oil-For-Food program generated for Saddam.
...
Plame didn't just suggest Wilson in an off-hand manner; she presented him both in debates and in memoranda as her choice for the mission. She then contacted him and made the arrangements to bring him into the CIA...

Any of this ring a bell? Now Ed doesn't take this to the next level since his emphasis remains on the partisan aspects of Wilson/Plame behavior, but you'll notice that the Niger/Wilson connection abuts our extrapolations from previous threads.

There's more to this story. As we debated earlier, different people analyzing in different ways coming up with similar conclusions. There may be tangents to the dart-throwing but a bullseye to the target awaits. I hope Fitzgerald doesn't stop after exonerating Rove.

Hi there, AD, my light-years-ahead-of-it friend. I've continued adding pieces to the puzzle at our last conversation, here.

There are 4 things that gives me hope that Fitzgerald is onto the big picture:

1, This excerpt quoted by a commenter at JustOneMinute:

"...on page 6 of the U.S. Court of Appeals decision of Feb 15 of this year. It refers to and quotes from grand jury subpoenas of August 12 and 14 seeking documents and testimony related [to] conversations between her [Judith Miller] and the specified government official 'occurring from on or about July 6, 2003, to on or about July 13, 2003, . . . concerning Valerie Plame Wilson (whether referred to by name or by description as the wife of Ambassador Wilson) or concerning Iraqi efforts to obtain uranium.' "

That last part, hmmm.

2. The LA Times 6/26/05:

"Miller would not ask her sources to waive their anonymity. She said intelligence officials might feel coerced into admitting they had talked to a reporter."

In light of NYT's Kristof's breakfast discussion with Wilson and Plame just before his 5/6/03 article, it looks like Miller is either protecting Kristof and/or Wilson/Plame directly. (Links at "our" thread :)

3. Also, someone mentioned in one of the wizbang threads that Fitzgerald has changed from his original target to a new one. (Can't remember if there was a link.)

4. I remote-viewed Karl, and he's smiling :)

Going to bed now, will look for you at "our thread" later.

It continues to amuse me how you Righties, in the face of mounting evidence against your side, keep trying to declare victory and change the subject. I also think its amusing that the MSM is never to be trusted, until they write something that supports your side, at which point links to the story are posted and reposted all over the Internet as if they came from the lips of God, himself. Unfortunately, the well-known conservative bias of the press continues to lead to a lot of Republican spin making its way into the discourse, and being accepted as fact. In this case, the USA Today article was a product of very sloppy reporting. The reporter's only sources for the story were Victoria Toensing and Bruce Sanford, who, according to USA Today, were among the co-authors of the bill. Sanford's political affiliations are unknown to me, but Toensing is a long time Republican operative, with longstanding ties to the party and to Novak, so she is likely another good soldier being sent out as part of the Republican spin machine. The reason I say this is because she's stating facts that aren't true. Nowhere in the actual legislation does it specify how long an operative has to have worked outside the country to be considered covert. The notion that it must be a long-term assignment is strictly Toensing's invention. If Plame occasionally travels to conferences in other countries, and while there she engages in covert activities, then she's a covert operative. Which is as it should be. If the CIA recruits an Arabic professor as an operative, and he travels to Saudi Arabia to attend a conference and try to make contact with some information sources, do we really want anyone in the US to feel free to blow his cover because he didn't have a "long-term" posting outside the US? Despite everyone's feverish speculation, we have absolutely no knowledge of Valerie Plame's comings and goings in the last few years. We only have senior CIA officials, a Republican federal prosecutor, and at least one Federal judge deciding that there are grave issues that need investigation. I guess they didn't realize that their concerns are illegitimate unless they first make their case to a hysterical, speculative, ill-informed right-wing blogosphere.

There's a great cartoon at RightOn, via wizbang's recent guest host Rob Port's site. Who will it be next? Fitzgerald? I already see little signs of it - Chris, above, adding "Republican" before "federal prosecutor"; leftie on CoastToCoast last night smearing Fitzgerald's reputation, etc.

Positively Nixonian!