Rove-a-Palooza
I had drinks last night with a bunch of fellow ex-Amazonians, and while we certainly chatted up the big 10th Anniversary concerts that were about to happen, we also talked a lot of Rove. Due to this little hobby of mine, I was asked to present a history of this situation, and I think I did pretty well. But I decided I wanted to make sure that I got it all straight, cos it's all pretty murky and now is starting to devolve into a political he said/he said catfight. (Just what Rove wants.) And not just the history of it (it's amazing how twisted and elongated it's all become) but also how to handle challenges to the story. Please excuse the length of this--you might need a bit more coffee before you plow into it (go ahead... I can wait).

First from Thursday's excellent article by Sidney Blumenthal in Salon (subscription required, or the viewing of an interminably long flash animation ad to acquire a day pass--I can't say it enough: get a subscription to Salon):

In early 2002, Valerie Plame was an officer in the Directorate of Operations of the CIA task force on counter-proliferation, dealing with weapons of mass destruction, including Saddam's WMD programs. At that time, as she had been for almost two decades, she was an undercover operative. After training at "The Farm," the CIA's school for clandestine agents, she became what the agency considers among its most valuable and dangerous operatives -- a NOC, or someone who works under non-official cover. NOCs travel without diplomatic passports, so if they are captured as spies they have no immunity and can potentially be executed. As a NOC, Plame helped set up a front company, Brewster-Jennings, whose cover has now been blown and whose agents and contacts may be in danger still. After marrying Wilson in 1998, she took Wilson as her last name. [...] Bush backed himself into that corner because of a sequence of events beginning with the ultimate rationale he offered for the Iraq war. Public support for the war had wavered until the administration asserted unequivocally that Saddam Hussein was seeking to acquire and build nuclear weapons. Its most incendiary claim was that he had tried to purchase enriched yellowcake uranium in Niger. An Italian magazine, Panorama, had received documents appearing to prove the charge. ... The CIA subsequently protested inclusion of the rumor in a draft of a Bush speech, and Bush delivered it on Oct. 7, 2002, without it.

Now we head over to a story from today's Blooberg News:

In October 2002, as the White House was reviewing drafts of a speech Bush would give in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, the allegation that Iraq sought "substantial amounts of uranium oxide" from Africa was removed after Tenet called Hadley to raise doubts about the information. On Oct. 5 and 6, the CIA sent memorandums to the White House expressing concerns about the Niger intelligence and differences on it between the U.S. and British spy agencies.

Back to Blumenthal:

When the Italian report on Niger uranium surfaced, Vice President Cheney's office contacted the CIA's counter-proliferation office to look into it. Such a request is called a "tasker." It was hardly the first query the task force had received from the White House, and such requests were not made through the CIA director's office, but directly. Plame's colleagues asked her if she would invite her husband out to CIA headquarters at Langley, Va., for a meeting with them, to assess the question. It was unsurprising that the CIA would seek out Wilson. He had already performed one secret mission to Niger for the agency, in 1999, and was trusted. Wilson had also had a distinguished and storied career as a Foreign Service officer. He served as acting ambassador in Iraq during the Gulf War and was hailed by the first President Bush as a "hero." Wilson was an important part of the team and highly regarded by Secretary of State James Baker and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft. Wilson was also an Africa specialist. He had been a diplomat in Niger, ambassador to Gabon and senior director for Africa on the National Security Council during the Clinton administration. (I first encountered Wilson then, and we have since become friends.) No other professional had such an ideal background for this CIA mission. Plame's superiors asked her to cable the field in Africa for routine approval of an investigation of the Niger claim. At Langley, Wilson met with about a dozen officers to discuss the situation. Plame was not at the meeting. Afterward, Wilson informed his wife that he would be traveling to Niger for about 10 days. She was not particularly enthusiastic, having recently given birth to twins, but she understood the importance of the mission. She had no authority to commission him. She was simply not the responsible senior officer. Nor, if she had been, could she have done so unilaterally. There was nothing of value to be gained personally from the mission by either Joe or Valerie Wilson. He undertook the trip out of a long-ingrained sense of government service. CIA officers debriefed Wilson the night of his return at his home. His wife greeted the other operatives, but excused herself. She later read a copy of his debriefing report, but she made no changes in it. And in his January 2003 State of the Union address, Bush said: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." These 16 notorious words had already been proved false, however (debunked by three separate reports from administration officials, which were apparently ignored ahead of Bush's speech). On March 7, 2003, the International Atomic Energy Agency announced that the Niger documents were "not authentic." The following day, the State Department concurred that they were forgeries. The invasion of Iraq began on March 20.

Now, we skip over to Jonathan Weller at The Gadflyer's Flytrap:

On July 6, 2003, Joseph Wilson wrote an op-ed piece questioning the administration's evidence that Saddam had been seeking Uranium from the African country to which Bush referred in his 2003 State of the Union address, which turned out to be Niger. [Editor's note: here's the op-ed piece, hosted by Common Dreams] On July 11, 2003, as we now know, Time Magazine's Matthew Cooper had a conversation with Karl Rove in which the subject of Joseph Wilson and his wife came up. Cooper has now acknowledged that Rove was his source for information he subsequently published revealing that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA. Cooper's piece appeared after the column in which Robert Novak described Wilson's wife as a CIA "operative" and sent him on the trip to Niger. That story blew Plame-Wilson's cover as a CIA operative.

And now back to Blumenthal:

Attributing Wilson's trip to his wife's supposed authority became the predicate for a smear campaign against his credibility. Seven months after the appointment of the special counsel, in July 2004, the Republican-dominated Senate Select Committee on Intelligence issued its report on flawed intelligence leading to the Iraq war. ... The three-page addendum by the ranking Republicans followed the now well-worn attack lines: "The plan to send the former ambassador to Niger was suggested by the former ambassador's wife, a CIA employee." The CIA subsequently issued a statement, as reported by New York Newsday and CNN, that the Republican senators' conclusion about Plame's role was wholly inaccurate. But the Washington Post's Susan Schmidt reported only the Republican senators' version, writing that Wilson was "specifically recommended for the mission by his wife, a CIA employee, contrary to what he has said publicly," in a memo she wrote. Schmidt quoted a CIA official in the senators' account saying that Plame had "offered up" Wilson's name. Plame's memo, in fact, was written at the express directive of her superiors two days before Wilson was to come to Langley for his meeting to describe his qualifications in a standard protocol to receive "country clearance." Unfortunately, Schmidt's article did not reflect this understanding of routine CIA procedure. The CIA officer who wrote the memo that originally recommended Wilson for the mission -- who was cited anonymously by the senators as the only source who said that Plame was responsible -- was deeply upset at the twisting of his testimony, which was not public, and told Plame he had said no such thing.

And here's a bit more from an article in Blooberg News from today:

The "Wilson/Rove Research & Talking Points" memo distributed by RNC Director of Television Carolyn Weyforth contends, "Both the Senate Committee on Intelligence and the CIA found assessments Wilson made in his report were wrong." Yet the Senate panel conclusions didn't discredit Wilson. The committee concluded that the Niger intelligence information wasn't solid enough to be included in the State of the Union speech. It added that Wilson's report didn't change the minds of analysts on either side of the issue, while also concluding that an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate "overstated what the Intelligence Community knew about Iraq's possible procurement attempts."

Is Wilson a knight in shining armor? No. Here's some chiding by Timothy Noah in his Slate Chatterbox column from Wednesday:

This column has criticized him and his wife for cozying up to the glitterati, even at the expense of allowing Valerie Plame to be photographed without any disguise at the TriBeCa film festival. (Wilson had previously claimed that even after she was outed, Plame couldn't be photographed without a disguise because she needed to be protected from "some wacko in the street." The couple's subsequent decision to position Plame's face before the paparazzi suggests that their previous stance was pure theater.) Furthermore, although Wilson found no evidence that Iraq had purchased yellowcake from Niger, I believe that Wilson ought to have been more forthright about finding evidence that Iraq had indeed made some overtures toward purchasing yellowcake, though not in a way that the Senate intelligence committee deemed terribly significant. ("The language in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that 'Iraq also began vigorously trying to procure uranium ore and yellowcake' overstated what the Intelligence Community knew…") Bush's famous 16 words about this in his State of the Union address remain hooey, but Wilson was sloppy, and perhaps a little dishonest, in criticizing them.

And that last fact is still true today, as reported in that Bloomberg story noted earlier:

Two-year old assertions by former ambassador Joseph Wilson regarding Iraq and uranium, which lie at the heart of the controversy over who at the White House identified a covert U.S. operative, have held up in the face of attacks by supporters of presidential adviser Karl Rove. [...] The main points of Wilson's article have largely been substantiated by a Senate committee as well as U.S. and United Nations weapons inspectors. A day after Wilson's piece was published, the White House acknowledged that a claim Bush made in his January 2003 state of the union address that Iraq tried to buy "significant quantities of uranium from Africa" could not be verified and shouldn't have been included in the speech. While the administration was justified at the time in being concerned that Hussein was trying to build nuclear weapons, "on the specifics of this I think Joe Wilson was right," said Michael O'Hanlon, a scholar of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

So Now Rove and the Republican National Committee and their propaganda machine, FoxNews, are coming out with the gloves off. Blogfather Billmon has a priceless post from Wednesday that sums it all up:

And since everything has to be ass backwards in the Republican reality, we're now being told that Wilson, not Rove, is the "leaker" and Dick Cheney, not Valerie Plame, the dedicated public servant damaged by the leak. Fox News (who else?) takes us through the looking glass: Cooper's e-mail said Rove warned him away from the idea that Wilson's trip had been authorized by CIA Director George Tenet or Vice President Dick Cheney. "He gave proper guidance to a reporter who got disinformation in a leak" meant to assign responsibility to Cheney, former Bush aide Ed Rogers told FOX News. This is starting to resemble that famous Star Trek episode in which Captain Kirk winds up in a parallel universe where the Federation, not the Klingons, are the evil barbarians and Spock has a nasty beard: (Shudders.) I don't know how far the Rovians plan to take this mirror image building campaign. But I won't be too surprised if we wake up tomorrow to find Bill O'Reilly claiming that Karl Rove used to be an undercover CIA operative (a kind of fat, ugly version of Keifer Sutherland) until he was outed by Valerie Plame -- all as part of a left-wing dirty tricks operation masterminded by Jim Carville. What Rove is doing here is an example, albeit an extremely weird one, of his standard tactic of attacking his enemy's strength with his most outrageous lies -- the kind that are simply too big and too brazen for most media chicken shits to call him on. Painting "straight talk" John McCain as a wacked out ex-POW with a druggie wife and a black love child was one example. Turning John Kerry into a cowardly weasel who lied about his war record was another. And now we have Joe Wilson, the reckless, partisan attack dog who leaks classified information.

Another tack that they're using, and essentially a return to the original gambit, is to paint this all in nepotistic terms--his wife (best exemplified by FoxNews doorknob John Gibson's referral of Valerie Plame as "little wify") got Wilson this plumb assignment. And this also gets coupled with the "Wilson sez Cheney gave him this assignment, but he never did" meme. Timothy Noah covers the Cheney angle:

The argument is that Rove did a public service by alerting Time that Wilson had been recommended for the CIA consulting gig by his wife, not by Vice President Dick Cheney as Mr. Wilson was asserting on the airwaves. In short, Mr. Rove provided important background so Americans could understand that Mr. Wilson wasn't a whistleblower but was a partisan trying to discredit the Iraq War in an election campaign. Thank you, Mr. Rove. The biggest problem with this argument is that Wilson never said that Dick Cheney personally chose him to fly to Niger to check out rumors that Iraq was buying yellowcake uranium. To hear the GOP tell it, you'd think Wilson's story had Cheney punching his speed dial and asking, "How's that golf game going, you old so-and-so? What are you doing next Saturday? How'd you like to do me a little favor? Love to Val and the kids." What Wilson claimed in his July 2003 New York Times op-ed piece—the document whose purported falsity Rove was trying to expose—is as follows: I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake — a form of lightly processed ore — by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990's. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office. All true. I don't know what verbal shorthand Wilson used when discussing this matter "on the airwaves," but to the extent he emphasized this trip was instigated by Cheney, his point would have been not to indicate Cheney hand-picked him for the trip but rather to emphasize that the trip itself never would have happened had Cheney not ordered the CIA to assign it. Because the CIA had already concluded, correctly, it turns out, that the Iraqis had purchased no yellowcake. But let's suppose that Wilson did indeed claim, falsely, that Cheney personally selected him to go to Niger ("Go get 'em, tiger!"). To blow the whistle on this lie, Rove still would have no logical need to expose Wilson's wife as a CIA employee. He could merely tell Time's Cooper, "Cheney did not select Wilson for the trip. Cheney has never met or spoken to Wilson in his life. Some faceless bureaucrat at the CIA picked Wilson." For Rove to add (falsely) that Wilson's wife authorized Wilson, or even to add (correctly) that Wilson's wife recommended Wilson to her superiors, would serve merely to castrate Wilson (at least in Rove's overheatedly macho imagination).

Holy cow. My eyes are spinning and Mrs. F is wondering if I'm ever going to head to bed. I think I'll do that now. I'll try to cover some of the other RNC talking points debunking tomorrow.