Your PlameGate Update for Today

Via Salon's War Room:

In a new report in Slate, former Time reporter John Dickerson pretty much establishes that Bush administration officials engaged in a concerted effort to attack Joseph Wilson by claiming that his wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame, had arranged his trip to Niger.

Just after Wilson's Op-Ed appeared in the New York Times, Dickerson found himself in Africa as part of the press pool covering the president's trip there. As reporters tried to follow up on Wilson's criticism and Ari Fleischer's subsequent admission that "incorrect" information about a Niger-Iraq connection had found its way into George W. Bush's State of the Union address, a "senior administration official" told Dickerson that a low-level employee at the CIA had sent Wilson to Niger and that he ought to ask the agency who it was. An hour later, Dickerson says, a "different senior administration official" gave him almost exactly the same tip, saying repeatedly that a low-level CIA employee had sent Wilson to Niger and Dickerson should "follow that angle." Dickerson dutifully made a note to himself: "look who sent."

It turns out, he didn't have to. By the time Dickerson was able to reach his colleague Matthew Cooper back in Washington, Rove had already told Cooper that Wilson's wife had sent him to Niger. Cooper confirmed the story with Libby, who, unbeknown to either Cooper or Dickerson at the time, had already told it all to Judy Miller, too.

If Rove and Libby were dishing out the full story in Washington, why were "senior administration officials" traveling with the president in Africa more circumspect about what reporters would find at the end of the "who sent Wilson" string? Dickerson has a theory. "I came back from the trip harboring a suspicion that only fully made sense when I learned Plame's CIA cover had been blown," he writes. "It seemed obvious that the people pushing me to look into who sent Wilson knew exactly the answer I'd find. Yet they were really careful not to let the information slip, which suggested that they knew at the time Plame's identity was radioactive."

And indeed, it now appears that it was. Portions of a previously redacted opinion by D.C. Circuit Judge David Tatel were released last week, and they show that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has evidence that Plame performed "covert work overseas" within five years prior to her outing and that the CIA was making "specific efforts to conceal" her identity. That's a long way of saying that she may have been a "covert" agent within the meaning of the Espionage Act, and that it would have been a crime for anyone who knew as much to have revealed her identity to others. [ed note - emphasis mine]

Larry Johnson (former CIA) over at TPMCafe adds:

Some of the Bush apologists, such as Byron York of the National Review, are still insisting that Plame's covert status is in doubt and that no damage was done by seizing on a paragraph in a recent letter from Patrick Fitzgerald to Scooter Libby's attorneys. In a December 14, 2005, letter to Fitzgerald, Libby's lawyers asked for "Any assessment done of the damage (if any) caused by the disclosure of Valerie Wilson's status as a CIA employee" in a December 14, 2005 letter to Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald's response stated, "A formal assessment has not been done of the damage caused by the disclosure of Valerie Wilson's status as a CIA employee, and thus we possess no such document."

This much I do know. The CIA, as matter of standard operating procedure, conducted a prelimnary damage assessment once Valerie's identity was publicly compromised. Human intelligence assets who had worked under Valerie's direction were damaged. Their lives were put at risk (I don't know if anyone died) and their ability to serve as clandestine assets reporting to the United States was destroyed. Remember, Valerie was working on projects to identify terrorists and criminals who were trying to procure weapons of mass destruction. Part of this information was the basis for the referral to the Justice Department in September 2003 to investigate this as a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Although the CIA has not completed a formal written report that is available to outsiders, such as the House or Senate Intelligence Committees, it has done a damage assessment. [ed note - emphasis Larry's]

And yet, there's still grumbling over how much attention has been paid to the outing of this CIA agent versus the lack of uproar over the leaking of the BushCo Administration's warrantless wiretapping (aka, "terrorist surveillance") program--see this post on Senator Chuck Grassley's grumbling over at AmericaBlog.