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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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March 17th,
2007 - Plame Sheds Little Light in Leak Case |
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Plame Sheds Little Light in
Leak Case By Julie Hirschfeld Davis The Associated Press March 17, 2007; 5:58 AM Washington - Valerie Plame
put a glamorous face and a personal story to Democrats' criticism of the Bush
administration Friday, telling a House committee that White House and State
Department officials "carelessly and recklessly" blew her CIA cover
in a politically motivated smear of her husband. Plame, the operative at the
center of the leak scandal that resulted in last week's criminal conviction
of a former top White House official, created more of a stir by her presence
on Capitol Hill than by her testimony. She revealed little new
information about the case, which sparked a federal investigation and brought
perjury and obstruction of justice convictions of Vice President Dick
Cheney's former top aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. No one has been
charged with leaking her identity. Still, Plame's appearance
before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee was a moment of
political theater that dramatized Democrats' drive to use their control of
Congress to expose what they see as White House efforts to intimidate
dissenters. "My name and identity
were carelessly and recklessly abused by senior officials in the White House
and State Department," Plame testified in her first public comments
about the case. "I could no longer perform the work for which I had been
highly trained." Under questioning, Plame
recounted feeling "like I had been hit in the gut" on the July 2003
morning when she saw a newspaper story by syndicated columnist Robert Novak
identifying her. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif.,
the panel's chairman, called Plame a victim in a White House drive to
discredit her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, for publicly
disputing President Bush's assertion that Saddam Hussein was on the brink of
acquiring a nuclear bomb. "I find that troubling,
that in the zeal for their political positioning that there (is) a lot of
collateral damage around, including a war that didn't have to be
fought," Waxman said. News cameras whirred and
spectators craned their necks to catch a glimpse of Plame as the blond former
operative took her place alone at the witness table for her 90 minutes of
testimony. Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia,
the committee's senior Republican, called the session a partisan hearing that
would do little to illuminate how Plame's identity came to be exposed or how
such disclosures could be prevented. "It's a terrible thing
that any CIA operative would be outed," Davis said. But "there's no
evidence here that the people that were outing this and pursuing this had
knowledge of the covert status." Plame repeatedly described
herself as a covert operative, a term that has multiple meanings. Plame said
she worked undercover and traveled abroad on secret missions for the CIA. But the word
"covert" also has a legal definition requiring recent foreign service
by the person and active efforts to keep his or her identity secret. Critics
of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation said Plame did not
meet that definition for several reasons and that was why nobody was charged
with the leak. "No process can be
adopted to protect classified information that no one knows is classified.
This looks to me more like a CIA problem than a White House problem,"
Davis said. Plame said she wasn't a
lawyer and didn't know her legal status, but said it shouldn't have mattered
to the officials who learned her identity. "They all knew that I
worked with the CIA," Plame said. "They might not have known what
my status was but that alone - the fact that I worked for the CIA - should
have put up a red flag." Plame said she did not
select her husband for a CIA fact-finding trip to Niger. Wilson later wrote
in a newspaper column that his trip debunked the administration's prewar
intelligence that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium from Africa. "I did not recommend
him. I did not suggest him. There was no nepotism involved. I did not have
the authority," she said. That conflicts with senior
officials at the CIA and State Department, who testified during Libby's trial
and told Congress that Plame recommended Wilson for the trip. Prosecutor Fitzgerald, was
not on the hearing's witness list. He told lawmakers Wednesday that federal
law prohibited him from offering his thoughts on the case. Nobody from the White House
involved in the leak was scheduled to testify. Neither were officials from
the State Department, where the first disclosure of Plame's identity
occurred, or the CIA. James Knodell, director of
the White House security office, did testify that there had been no internal
investigation into the leak, and no disciplinary action against those
involved. Later Friday, Waxman
released a letter to White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten in which he
requested "a complete account" of the steps the White House took
after the disclosure of Plame's identity. The hearing, "raised
new concerns about whether the security practices being followed by the White
House are sufficient to protect our nation's most sensitive secrets,"
Waxman wrote. Columnist Novak has said
that former Deputy State Department Secretary Richard Armitage first revealed
Plame's job to him and Bush's political adviser, Karl Rove, and CIA spokesman
Bill Harlow confirmed it. Wilson has written a book,
and Plame is working on one, "Fair Game." Plame's book is subject
to a mandatory review by the CIA. On Thursday, Simon & Schuster spokesman
Adam Rothberg would say only that the book was "in progress" and
that publication was expected soon. Friday's hearing showed the
intense interest in Plame, who drew autograph-seekers and camera-toting
congressional aides to a hearing on an otherwise quiet morning. Even a member of Congress
confessed to being a bit star-struck. "If I seem a little
nervous, I've never questioned a spy before," Rep. Lynn Westmoreland,
R-Ga. said. "I was here during the steroid hearings, too, and I don't
think any of those baseball stars got this kind of media attention that
you're getting today." © 2007 The Associated Press External link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/17/AR2007031700362.html |