According to Bob Woodward, we’re not to worry:
"When the story comes out I’m quite confident we’re going to find out that it started kind of as gossip, as chatter. And that somebody learned that Joe Wilson’s wife had worked at the CIA and helped him get this job going to Niger to see if there was an Iraq/Niger uranium deal. And, there’s a lot of innocent actions in all of this."
Oh yeah?
Well, let’s scroll back to the New York Times column by Nicolas Kristof of June 12, 2003, that triggered panic among the neo-crazies:
"Officials now claim that the CIA inexplicably did not report back to the White House with this envoy’s findings and reasoning, or with an assessment of its own that the information was false.
"I hear something different.
"My understanding is that – while Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet may not have told Mr. Bush that the Niger documents were forged – lower CIA officials did tell both the vice president’s office and National Security Council staff members.
"Moreover, I hear from another source that the CIA’s operations side and its counterterrorism center undertook their own investigations of the documents, poking around in Italy and Africa, and also concluded that they were false – a judgment that filtered to the top of the CIA.”
"Another source"? From the "operations" – i.e., covert – side of the CIA?
But isn’t that where Valerie Plame worked? Didn’t Novak publicly reveal that in his column of July 14?
Yep.
According to Vincent Cannistraro, former CIA counterterrorism operations chief, Plame’s specialty was “recruiting agents, [and] sending them to areas where they could access information about proliferation matters, weapons of mass destruction.”
Like, for example, Pakistan. Or Turkey.
And didn’t Novak reveal on TV a few days later that Valerie Plame’s alleged employer – Brewster Jennings & Associates – was a "nonexistent" CIA front company?
Yep.
So is it possible that the neo-crazies were really out to discredit not Joe Wilson, but the CIA covert counter-proliferation operation? Especially Brewster Jennings & Associates?
But why?
Perhaps Chris Deliso has elicited the answer from Sibel Edmonds.
During the Reagan years, Assistant Secretary Defense for International Security Policy Richard Perle and his deputy Douglas Feith were the leading advocates in the Pentagon and at NATO headquarters of closer military ties with Turkey, and between Turkey and Israel.
After leaving the Pentagon, Feith established a law firm in Israel, and International Advisors Inc. (IAI) in the U.S., which was until at least 1995 a registered foreign agent for the government of Turkey.
Widely regarded as Perle’s idea, IAI was heralded in the Turkish press as presaging a “warmer atmosphere” between Turkey and “the strong Jewish lobby in the United States.”
Perle remained on the highly influential Defense Policy Board throughout the Bush and Clinton administrations, becoming chairman in 2001.
In 1996, Perle and Feith convened a task force at the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies in Jerusalem. The result was a report for Israel’s new government entitled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm."
The report’s principal recommendation was that Israel should "shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, even rolling back Syria,” creating a “natural axis” between Israel, Jordan, a Hashemite Iraq and Turkey that “would squeeze and detach Syria from the Saudi Peninsula.”
Hashemite Iraq?
On the eve of the Bush-Cheney war of aggression to effect regime change in Saddam’s Iraq, Perle was chairman of the Defense Policy Board and Feith was undersecretary of defense for policy.
But to the consternation of Perle, Feith, et al., even before the invasion began, Turkey announced it would not even allow through-passage of U.S. troops.
So, on June 6, 2003, Eric Edelman, until then a national security adviser to Cheney, was nominated to be ambassador to – you guessed it – Turkey.
Now come Edmonds and Deliso to tell us what the Cheney cabal learned about that time. Because of certain of their activities – including arms sales – involving Turkey and Israel, Perle, Feith, and various associates had long been under surveillance, independently, by both the FBI and the CIA.
Now, according to Woodward:
"They did a damage assessment within the CIA, looking at what this did – that Joe Wilson’s wife was ‘outed.’ And turned out it was quite minimal damage. They did not have to pull anyone out undercover abroad. They didn’t have to resettle anyone. There was no physical danger of any kind. And there was just some embarrassment."
Oh yeah?
