The Intelligence Identities Protection Act defines the term "covert agent" in this section:
(4) The term “covert agent” means—
(A) a present or retired officer or employee of an intelligence agency or a present or retired member of the Armed Forces assigned to duty with an intelligence agency—
(i) whose identity as such an officer, employee, or member is classified information, and
(ii) who is serving outside the United States or has within the last five years served outside the United States; or
(B) a United States citizen whose intelligence relationship to the United States is classified information, and—
(i) who resides and acts outside the United States as an agent of, or informant or source of operational assistance to, an intelligence agency, or
(ii) who is at the time of the disclosure acting as an agent of, or informant to, the foreign counterintelligence or foreign counterterrorism components of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; or
(C) an individual, other than a United States citizen, whose past or present intelligence relationship to the United States is classified information and who is a present or former agent of, or a present or former informant or source of operational assistance to, an intelligence agency.
As the LATimes makes clear (and reprinted here by The Seattle Times:)
Valerie isn't quoted (though the article claims she stated it) about serving "outside of the United States in the last five years," she IS quoted however, and makes it perfectly clear, "I was undercover."
Too bad the Act has more than one conditional requirement for it to be applicable. She also had to have been "outside of the country in the last five years."
Ironically, The Intelligence Identities Protection Act passed the House by a vote of 315–32, with all opposing votes coming from Democrats. The law passed the Senate 81–4, with the opponents being Democratic Senators Joseph Biden, Gary Hart, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Republican Senator Charles Mathias.
As of July 2005, there has only been one successful prosecution involving the statute. In 1985, CIA agent Sharon Scranage was sentenced to five years, and served 8 months, for giving the names of other agents to her boyfriend in Ghana.
What happened in Niger?
Plame Out, Plamegate's Ridiculous Conclusin: by Christopher Hitchens, from Salon.com
Wilson traveled to Niger and returned to file a report with the CIA that he found no evidence backing up the uranium claim. Nevertheless, the allegation was included in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address.
And rightly so, the Niger story is true, always has been true, and here's the scoop, with numerous links in the article to other back articles that have followed the entire story, start to finish.
Now I know some of you aren't able to completely follow the wild brit Hitchens, so here's another source, covering even more startling revelations with the links to back it all up, about Plame and Wilson, the dynamic duo of liars.
Here's just some of what SoundPolitics.com has written:
The partisan furor over this allegation led to the appointment of special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald. Yet after two years of investigation, Mr. Fitzgerald charged no one with a crime for leaking Ms. Plame's name.
What we do know is Pat Fitzgerald had ample time and opportunity to bring charges against any individuals who actually compromised the identity of a covert agent. Amidst the circus that was his investigation, he didn't. That ought to tell us something.
If a crime had been committed in the revelation of Plame's identity charges would have already been brought. Plame's testimony did nothing to change that. Andy McCarthy examines Plame's claim of being "covert" and concludes it doesn't hold water. At one time in her career she clearly was, but not by the time she was working at a desk in Langley after the birth of her twins. For goodness sake, Novak confirmed her identity by looking her up in "Who's Who in America." If this is how "covert" agents secret themselves from prying eyes then the CIA has even more problems than we think.
Quoted by SoundPolitics.com is the Washington Post:
Nevertheless, it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame's CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming -- falsely, as it turned out -- that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush's closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It's unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.
Another Washington post story is credited with this on SoundPolitics.com:
One of the authors of the law protecting Plame suggested had she been covert , Victoria Toensing, spoke to the silliness engulfing the matter in an op-ed prior to the Libby verdict.
SoundPolitics.com also quotes an interview of Wilson by Anderson Cooper of CNN:
Anderson Cooper questioning Joe Wilson on CNN last night. Cooper asked Wilson how charges of a White House conspiracy against he and his wife could hold up when it was revealed that Dick Armitage was the source of the "leak." Wilson responded, "Well, Karl Rove and Dick Armitage are good friends." The journalists to whom Armitage spoke about Plame, Bob Woodward and Novak, both reject any White House tie to his statements. Moreover, anyone familiar with the conflicts between the State Department and the White House at the time cannot help but be amazed at the brazenness with which Wilson continues to lie.
And of course there is Plame herself, testifying before Congress.
"Karl Rove clearly was involved in the leaking of my name, and he still carries a security clearance to this day," said a transparently bitter Plame.
I'm not sure how she thinks she knows that, but I'm pretty darn sure she can't prove it, not even in a civil court.
Then there is this:
Plame offered only a general outline of her 20-year career at the agency, saying she was working in the counterproliferation division of the agency — a branch devoted to tracking the global spread of illicit weapons — when her identity was exposed.
So let me get this straight, she can just say she was out of the country in the last five years, but can't really produce any records to PROVE it?
"Certainly Vice President Cheney's unprecedented number of visits to the CIA in the run-up to the war might be one example" of his efforts to pressure analysts, Plame said.
Again, how could she know without a Vulcan Mind Meld? This is simply her misguided conclusions from known facts.
In short, Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson are obviously insane.
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Comments: 24
These are the people backing Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame (literally). lol
In the end it really comes down to Bush's "new tone". If he were Lyndon Johnson, Plame would have been sent to someplace west of Nome, Alaska and Wilson would have been making little rocks out of big rocks somewhere.
Wilson didn't tell the truth, that's the whole point of the story and link from Salon.com from Christopher Hitchens.
Apparently the lie about Niger
The Niger story is true, whether you like that idea or not.
yes there were some forgeries that Wilson tried to pretend were the originals, so what?
You aren't very well informed on this subject Carolyn, even though I've given you the same information repeatedly.
Just read the Hitchens stories will you? Open your eyes.
Let's put a more believable spin on this. Expose a Democrat caught telling lies and go to jail. Remember Scooter Libby? The scapegoat that Fitzgerald chose to intimidate anyone daring to expose the left wing of politics.
http://mediamatters.org/items/200607210001
Meanwhile, the CIA was so infuriated that Ms. Plame's cover was blown that they specifically requested the justice dept. to open a criminal investigation, the attorney general sat on the request for 48 hours (presumably giving plenty of time for paper shredding and hard drive erasures), and then the white house conspired to lie and obstruct justice so much that the prosecutor assigned to the investigation couldn't even do the job that he was sent to do.
Despite the mind-bending spin that the wingnuts are attempting, make no mistake. A crime was most definitely committed, and a criminal conspiracy to cover up that crime insued. What we must also never, ever forget is the crux of the biscuit (the apostrophe, as it were), that the entire story centers around this corrupt administration's obsession with an illegal, unnecessary war with Iraq, and their criminal abuse of intelligence information and public trust in manipulating their way into it.
Mr. Libby is not a scape goat. He's a fall guy. There's a huge difference. A scape goat would be somebody who is accused and convicted of doing something that he hadn't done. A fall guy is one who commits a crime and takes the hit for it, in order to provide cover for REAL crime by those further up the food chain. Typical crime family shit.
Mr. Libby lied under oath and obstructed justice, and was tried and convicted in a court for those crimes. Regardless of how hard the wingnuts attempt to spin reality, the fact is, Mr. Libby is a convicted felon. That nobody has yet been brought to account for the actual criminal act of treason, in outing Ms. Plame's identity is not because that crime was not also committed, but rather because the white house engaged in such a vicious pattern of lies and obstruction of justice that the real crime that began the investigation was never able to be proven.
Rest assured, Mr. Libby didn't choose to lie and obstruct justice, and therefore expose himself to 30 years in prison because the white house had done nothing wrong. They exposed the name of a critical CIA operative, who just happened to be an expert in WMD. Such was the outrageous audacity of a white house so thoroughly corrupted and abusive of their power that they were willing to dismantle a critical element of America's counter terrorism ability, possibly for decades to come (what foreign contact is going to be willing to align themself with US covert ops now, knowing that, at any moment, their identity could be handed to those who they're spying on, by those who they're spying for, merely for political purposes?), simply as a means of "getting even" with Mr. Wilson for daring to speak the truth, and as a direct warning for anyone else who might've been considering doing the same.
Rather than expend such great energy in trying to spin and defend the indefensible, it's rather curious that the rightwing isn't more interested in finding out why their white house went to such great efforts to create a justifiy an unjust war. Isn't it interesting that, while they will do anything and believe anything in order to pretend that nothing wrong was done (it's the CIA's fault, remember?), there are literally mountains of circumstantial evidence that exist that point to a white houes bent on war with Iraq LONG before 9/11, and in fact, long before they even rose to power.
Beware the smoke and mirrors, folks. They're only there to distract you. Focus on reality, not spin.
When did they do this? Not for nothing, but the CIA could have done a better job of intervening earlier --- and they never did.
Barney - Joe Wilson wrote a damn book and promoted it via every major media outlet. The war of words and politics were started by him.
The problem with that silly statement is, Joe Wilson DIDN'T tell the truth about Niger. He only told what he believed, which was factually in error.
So, he didn't lie, but he didn't tell the truth either.
All this administration does is LIE
Yet you can't prove even one lie has been told, interesting.
The Val Plame story, and oh what a story of lies it was. I got to see more of her on TV then I ever wanted to and she has a very good plastic job now but it still doesn't change the facts of the case. She did have something to do with her husband going on the trip, she was not a spy of any kind {"a paper pusher"]["a desk jockey"] at best"}, And the person that outed her was placed in office by Clinton himself. The only conspiracy here is that the Democratic Party with an inside man leaked a story to the press and started a story about how it was Bush that did it. All the facts were laid out months ago and the dummies leading this witch hunt just want us to over look all the facts for their dog and pony show!
Thanks for the article!