The WSJ Appraises Joe Wilson

We appraise the WSJ:

The Yellowcake Con
The Wilson-Plame "scandal" was political pulp fiction.

Take me to Mickey D's, I'm loving it (although I will have indigestion shortly). I'll skip past the discussion of thre Butler report and focus on Joe Wilson:

The news is also relevant to the question of whether any crime was committed when a still unknown Administration official told columnist Robert Novak that Mr. Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA employee and that's why he had been recommended for a sensitive mission to Niger.

Huh?

...In that New York Times piece, readers will recall, Mr. Wilson outed himself as the person who had been sent to Niger by the CIA in February 2002 to investigate claims that Iraq might have been seeking yellowcake ore for its weapons program.

...After the Novak column appeared, Mr. Wilson charged that his wife was outed solely as punishment for his daring dissent from White House policy.

Punishment, revenge, intimidation of other potential whistleblowers - I think all these charges were made, but maybe not all by Wilson. Wilson focussed on intimidation of others, as in the Corn piece. Whatever.

To that end, he has repeatedly denied that his wife played a role in his selection for the mission. "Valerie had nothing to do with the matter," he wrote in his book "The Politics of Truth." "She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip." A huge political uproar ensued.

...But very little of what Mr. Wilson has said has turned out to be true. For starters, his wife did recommend him for that trip. The Senate report quotes from a February 12, 2002, memo from Ms. Plame: "my husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity."

So far, so good - I'll accept their recounting (and I know that "recommend" is controversial; "involved" is a slam-dunk). But here comes the legal analysis:

This matters a lot. There's a big difference both legally and ethically between revealing an agent's identity for the revenge purpose of ruining her career, and citing nepotism (truthfully!) to explain to a puzzled reporter why an undistinguished and obviously partisan former ambassador had been sent to investigate this "crazy report" (his wife's words to the Senate). We'd argue that once her husband broke his own cover to become a partisan actor, Ms. Plame's own motives in recommending her husband deserved to become part of the public debate. She had herself become political.

I'll accept that motive matters in terms of political impact, in terms of plausible explanations to a jury, and to the world's ethicists.

However, Ms. Plame's own motives in recommending her husband deserved to become part of the public debate. She had herself become political." does not jibe with the statute. Especially since neither we now, nor the leakers at the time, seemed to believe that she was strongly involved, and was acting with some political motive.

By which I mean, suppose the leakers seriously believed that Ms. Plame was the sinister mastermind of a plot to embarrass Bush. Her plan - send her hubby to Africa, don't sign him to a confidentiality agreement, then hide behind her covert status while feeding him misleading info which he passed to the press. In that wild, unalleged scenario, the prosecutor might find her behavior to be sufficient reason not to charge the heroic White House aides who risked their careers to thwart her.

I don't think that is what the White House staffers believed, and if they did, there are a lot of ways they could have leaked this without legally compromising themselves. My guess - they didn't know her status and, since most CIA agents are not covert, never checked. Reckless disregard is not a compelling defense, however.

Mr. Wilson also seems to have dissembled about how he concluded that there was nothing to the Iraq-Niger uranium story...

I could listen to this story every night.

The Senate Intelligence Committee found, finally, that far from debunking the Iraq-Niger story, Mr. Wilson's debrief was interpreted as providing "some confirmation of foreign government service reporting" that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger.

OK.

All of this matters because Mr. Wilson's disinformation became the vanguard of a year-long assault on Mr. Bush's credibility. The political goal was to portray the President as a "liar," regardless of the facts. Now that we know those facts, Americans can decide who the real liars are.

OK again.

I disagree with their legal theory, but the summary strikes me as accurate. I may not be the best judge of "fair", of course.

And a point to ponder: It's all very well to criticize the media for its silence, but part of the howling in the press was caused by Dems howling to them. The Bush War Room is not shy about putting its message to the press (and they know it will be an uphill tussle on this one), and Bush is certainly out there speaking - this issue will surely come back if the Bush team wants it to.

My guess - the "16 Words" were true, but Clintonian. If the SOTU speechwriters had proposed "23 Words", starting with "The British Government has learned, but we have been unable to verify...", the clause would almost surely have been dropped as confusing and unconvincing. Darn it.

And yes, it did not take speeches from Kerry to trigger a Judith Miller retrospective at the Times. But that's the way it is.

Comments

[The Kid]

When you describe the 16 words as a Clintonian formulation, it sounds like the Bushies didn’t believe that there was a nuclear threat but wanted to convey the idea that there was. I regard the 16 words as the Bushies’ belief that there was a nuclear threat, but that this was the strongest assertion that the admittedly weak intelligence could support. For years our only real source of information was the weapons inspectors. (In fact, if you look through the SSCI report you’ll find one or two places where “weapons inspectors” fits quite nicely into blanked-out areas where the classification is also blanked out.) The administation believed in the "truth" of the threat but could not muster the facts given available sources, methods, and lethargy.

But I digress. If the outing of a covert agent is the suspected crime, let’s look at some facts that haven’t been reported widely. Like Ambassador Wilson’s role in the outing.

First, lets look at his contribution record (I’m too tired tonight to update the list – the below I pulled in September 2003):
Date Amount Target
3/26/1999 $2,000.00 GORE 2000 INC
5/13/1999 $1,000.00 KENNEDY FOR SENATE 2000
5/20/1999 $1,000.00 BUSH FOR PRESIDENT INC
2/10/2000 $500.00 RANGEL FOR CONGRESS 2000
6/25/2000 $500.00 ROYCE CAMPAIGN COMMITTEE
6/28/2001 $500.00 ED ROYCE FOR CONGRESS
2/13/2002 $1,000.00 HILLPAC
6/12/2002 $500.00 ED ROYCE FOR CONGRESS
9/20/2002 $500.00 BLINKEN FOR SENATE CAMPAIGN 2002 LLC
9/25/2002 $250.00 KEEP NICK RAHALL
5/23/2003 $1,000.00 JOHN KERRY FOR PRESIDENT INC.

Notes: Nick Rahall (Democrat, West Virginia 3rd district), although only 49 years old, is the granddaddy of all the Arab-American members of Congress – go here for juicy details; a good contribution for business purposes.
Blinken, doomed to lose, is a former ambassador.
Royce is House Chair of International Relations Subcommittee – Africa; a good contribution for business purposes.

I put that at $6,250.00 for Democrats, $2,500.00 for Republicans for those keeping score. But what’s more interesting is this:

Wilson, Joseph C. Mr. IV
4/22/1999 -$1,000.00
Washington, DC 20007
J. C. Wilson Intl. Ventures/Strateg -[Contribution]
GORE 2000 INC

Wilson, Valerie E. Ms.
4/22/1999 $1,000.00
Washington, DC 20007
Brewster-Jennings & Assoc. -[Contribution]
GORE 2000 INC

These two records show that GORE 2000 INC refunded $1,000.00 of the $2,000 he contributed on 3/26/99; the limit at the time was $1,000. On the same darn date of the refund, Wilson's wife was credited with a $1K contribution. Perfectly legal as far as campaign finance law goes, but note the employer listed for his wife. As we all should now know, Brewster-Jennings & Assoc was a CIA front company (see below). According to D&B, it was established in Boston, MA in May 1994.

According to NYT Nicholas Kristoff, himself suckered by Ambassador Wilson, in a 10/11/03 column:
First, the C.I.A. suspected that Aldrich Ames had given Mrs. Wilson's name (along with those of other spies) to the Russians before his espionage arrest in 1994. So her undercover security was undermined at that time, and she was brought back to Washington for safety reasons.

Ames was arrested in February, 1994. B-J,A was established in May of the same year? Does it seems likely that B-J,A was set up as cover for Ms. Plame and others in her situation? So did the good ambassador spill some of the beans in order to keep the $1k with Gore? Did he know she was covert, when she was covert, and when did he know it?

BTW, I should add that it was the FEC record and Wilson’s bio at the Saudi-funded Middle East Institute that allowed enterprising journalists to connect “Ms. Valerie E. Wilson” with Valerie Plame and B-J,A, exposing the latter as a CIA front as easy as 1-2-3, A-B-C.

But does this matter? Special prosecutors are known to wander about a bit, to stray from their original path down highways and byways that look promising. Is this special prosecutor taking too much time?

I’m content to wait until the fat lady sings “Devil with the Blue Dress On,” but will refrain from a too enthusiastic welcome.

[TM]

Re: Clintonian - good point, sincerity should count for something, and I can see where "Clintonian" connotes "I don't believe this myself, but I wish you would". I was thinking more as "carefully phrased to reveal only the good parts of 'the truth' ".

On the FEC/Brewster Jennings debacle, I was ,a href="http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2003/10/brad_delong_fas.html">aware of some of that.

A partial response - using the web to find that Joe Wilson was married to Valerie Plame, who worked at Brewster-Jennings (and donated as Valerie Wilson) may have been interesting to a foreign intel service that was rounding out their Wilson file, but did not "out" her as CIA.

Once Novak's column was published, anyone interested would learn about Brewster-Jennings pretty quickly.

But that may not be that big a deal based on the comment in this article:

Former intelligence officials confirmed Plame's cover was an invention and that she used other false identities and affiliations when working overseas. "All it [the B-J office] was was a telephone and a post office box," said one former intelligence official who asked not to be identified. "When she was abroad she had a more viable cover."

This may have been the type of problem someone alluded to in some column I can't place, when they said that her high profile marriage made her cover problematic - anyone foreign intel service studying Joe Wilson, globe-trotting former Ambassador now "consulting" (for whom?), might have also studied her, and wondered why Brewster-Jennings didn't seem to exist.

Or, your point, since she may have been compromised in 1994, B-J could not have been intended as a serious, lifetime, good cover for her and lots of other CIA agents. My guess, based on extensive reading of spy novels - Ms. Plame and very few others (if any) used that name on the business card they handed out at cocktail parties, but never on CIA business.

[Paul Zrimsek]

At the risk of sounding Clintonian myself, I'd call the 16 words "borderline Clintonian". The phrase "has learned", when used in the journalistic sense it was in the SOTU, carries a strong implication that the speaker is not in a position to independently vouch for the truth of the report. But it does quite emphatically vouch for the credibility of the report-- and reasonable people can differ about whather that's appropriate in a situation where a usually very reliable source is offering you a pig in a poke.

[TM]

Condi Rice with Wolf Blitzer, July 13:

As George Tenet has said, accuracy is not the standard. Of course, the sentence was accurate. But we were asking about confidence. And George Tenet rightly says that the agency cleared the speech, it should not have been cleared with that sentence in.

This was not a good PR fight for the Admin. But they should have pushed their own "good faith exception" harder.

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