Murray: Do we have any idea how widely known it was in Washington that Joe Wilson's wife worked for the CIA?Sounds fairly material. Her attempt to re-frame the answer came on the "Imus in the Morning Show" (she chose poorly) and ole Don got her to stumble around like a drunk on a bicycle trying to explain herself. The case will never be closed if she doesn't testify.
Mitchell: It was widely known among those of us who cover the intelligence community and who were actively engaged in trying to track down who among the foreign service community was the envoy to Niger. So a number of us began to pick up on that.
However, while daydreaming about Andrea another thought crossed my mind. An evil, devilish thought dark enough to draw liberal respect. Here it is. What if the sudden convergence of Wilson, no WMDs, and an increasingly skeptical press caused the White House to go into a hushed defcon five panic mode in June 2003? Perhaps they realized that leaving Wilson unchallenged would make it very hard to put down the "no WMDs" snowball, which would surely expand exponentially as decision-04 approached.
Switch to Iraq, circa June 2003. The vats of VX and anthrax were not turning up. Judy Miller had just left her embed with a Army weapons hunting task force, who had come up empty. When she got back to DC the White House began pumping her with info about Wilson but she was more interested in the weapons. Where were they? Her resume was chock full of stories about Saddam's evils so career-ending nightmares must have been flashing through her mind at that point, and Wilson's badgering wasn't helping.
Under that cloud she probably chose to stay out of the Wilson game altogether, which might be confirmed when her editor takes the stand and denies Judy ever suggested a story. And why would she? Her reputation was riding on a big discovery.
Now the tinfoil part. Seeing that reporters weren't writing much about Cheney's denials of sanctioning the Wilson trip (think about Libby's angry exchange about Matthews) perhaps the administration felt they had no choice but to release the Plame information, but more in an attempt to throw the MSM dogs off the scent than anything else.
The nuclear issue was secondary anyway. The president never said Iraq had a nuclear program, only that he wanted one, which was indisputable. By June they had already scoped out the nuke program and Plame was supposedly working in the Iraq division at CPD, therefore the potential harm to national security would be minimal.
We could go off on a Richard Armitage bunny trail at this point but it would take too long. Suffice to say he was the most successful in getting Plame her 15 minutes of fame than all the others, probably by working Novak against Woodward to spur the needed competitive juices. There are many alternate theories available at this juncture, including some involving Novak himself. Suspecting Armitage is risky since his boss and hero Colin Powell was up to his neck in the WMD story as well. But we'll leave that for another day.
In closing, the above doesn't require a belief that the pre-war intelligence was shaken and stirred by Bush. On the contrary. Libby told Miller he thought the CIA was playing CYA games by trying to hedge their bets. The media wasn't playing ball in getting out the push-back, so the Plame revelation might have been a pragmatic panic button.
Something worked--because the self-absorbed DC media spent an inordinate amount of time reporting essentially about themselves instead of the missing cauldrons of WMDs. Bush got reelected, thanks in part to Kerry's bonehead notion that Wilson could somehow help him. And nobody got frogmarched. Not yet, at least.
MORE 2/11/07
This is a particularly useful summary for those interested in understanding the patriot games involved in this story. The most interesting assertion was one by Seymour Hersch that VIPS members created the phony Niger docs themselves as a prank to embarrass Bush officials.
One day this might all be explained as a bunch of self-important people trying to out-do each another over their self-important ideologies. Whether Libby outed Plame or not doesn't exonerate Saddam in the least. Even if he wasn't trying to buy a little yellowcake on the side that was small potatoes compared to what we DID know about him, which was contained in the 2002 NIE. One example, we still don't know the whereabouts of Abdul Yasin, wanted for the 1993 World Trade Center attack, nor do we know why Saddam harbored him. Hosenball? Isikoff? Corn?
Fact is, whether Rove used the Plame outing as a diversion to keep DC media tied up in knots doesn't explain why so many people, like Wilson, Cannistraro, and many others who expressed hawkish notions during the Clinton administration became doves after 9/11. Doesn't make much sense, does it?
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