Wilson's covert status

[Mickey Brausch]

Chapter One:

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So life began about 3.5 billion years ago. Eventually more sophisticated organisms developed in an Earth without oxygen in its atmosphere, an atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide and unbreathable, indeed poisonous, to humans. The oxygen in the atmosphere has been mostly biologically generated: For example, countless cyanobacteria breathed in CO2 and exhaled O2 for hundreds of millions of years. Plants, when they settled on the continents, did the same. As a result, the CO2 in the atmosphere has decreased while the O2 has steadily gone up.


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Chapter Two:

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When an extinction event takes place, it is a great opportunity for life's survivors.
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This was the case for the Permian-Triassic extinction. Reptiles "seemed to seize" the "moment" to become the ruling class of Earth. In fact, the Mesozoic (245 - 65 million years ago) is known as the era of the "ruling reptiles." Not only did the dinosaurs dominate Earth's land, but also pterosaurs filled the skies, and swimming reptiles occupied the seas. These giant (and not-so-giant) reptiles prevailed for more than 150 million years, only to be extinguished in a cataclysmic event, [possibly] an asteroid that struck near the Yucatán Peninsula. Not only did dinosaurs die but many other life forms also did so. At this point, birds (which had evolved from coelurosaur-like dinosaurs about 150 million years ago via Archaeopteryx) and, figuratively speaking, mammals "seized" the opportunity to "take control" of Earth.
<font color="white"> . </font>
During the Cenozoic Era (65 million years ago to the present), the mammals, which started out rather small, grew larger, diversified and developed in complexity. Among the mammals were primates, and the among the primates eventually would appear apes, monkeys, australopithecines and man.
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So here we are today. Perhaps now is the time to lift the wineglass and make a toast to our existence.

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link

[whiskeytown]

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The whole thing is so like the dumb let's get Nixon for some maybe accomplice after the fact almost misdemeanor burglary and let's just forget about the fact that he's responsible for maybe millions of deaths.

[/ QUOTE ]You get 'em best way you can. Al Capone was got for tax evasion. Nixon for Watergate.

Both denied they were crooks.

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Long after right and wrong is decided, the lawyers and their defendants will still be saying "but what we did was legal" - the scoundral's defense.

then they'll whine about activist judges when they determine their idea of legality did NOT equal Constitutionality -

I'm almost as sick of hearing "but it was legal" as much as I'm sick of hearing "but it was sooted" - legality isn't determined because their high priced lawyers say so. That's spin

truth is the legality is generally decided years down the road, but gotta get the spin for the pardons ready years before the trial, apparently - [img]/images/graemlins/crazy.gif[/img]

that or buy land in paraguay and move your offices to Dubai [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

Meanwhile, while pundits debate endlessly about the meaning of Covert, it comes out that the White House in it's quest to stifle the leak, did absolutely NOTHING that it said it did in regards to the initial investigation - not a goddamn thing - not even a report filed.

Let us reexamine this - When stressing how important leaks were and how important it was to him, GWB said he would dismiss anyone responsible - and it turns out not only did they not find anyone responsible - they didn't even investigate - political hackery at it's finest.

instead the AG is off dismissing prosecutors who are investigating HIM while doing nothing about those who compromised National Security Secrets within the Administration - (ahem, Rove) -

God bless checks and balances - kinda nice to see them starting to work again - starting with congressional oversight into the biggest goddamn criminal since Saddam himself.

rb

[bdk3clash]

This absolutely shocking--shocking!--revelation about Plame having covert status at the time of Novak's column is making my head spin! I thought Felix had conclusively shown that Wilson was not undercover:

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Valerie Plame was not undercover so [Fitzgerald] could not charge anyone with blowing her cover (she is a mother and her undercover days are in the past. She was strictly an analyst)... Plame was NOT undercover.

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And this was only a month ago. Surely if Felix had been revealed to be so spectacularly wrong he would have commented on it by now. Weird!

[PokrLikeItsProse]

Here is an article discussing just what Valerie Plame did at the CIA. From the description, it seems obvious that the administration warmongers would have been very familiar with her.


(Cliff notes: She was chief of operations of the CIA's Joint Task Force on Iraq. She previously worked overseas recruiting agents for the CIA. When Novak's column was published, she was technically "non-official cover" but was in the process of switching to "official cover" so that she could put in time as an administrator for career advancement, but she planned to return to undercover secret operations.)

There are really two threads here converging.

On the one hand, we have a government official lying in order to maximize Bush's re-election chances (it worked). Whatever you may think of Bill Clinton's lies, I think that this context of pure political gain is clearly a graver situation.

On the other hand, we also have a Bush administration which is known to be vindictive toward people who aren't "with the program." The current scandal surrounding the unprecedented firing of U.S. Attorneys for failing to pursue partisan agendas is similar. We have a CIA officer in charge of a group investigating WMDs in Iraq. This group is not producing the results that the Bush administration wants to see to justify a war.

Mixed together, this is a potent cocktail for political mischief.

We can argue over the legal, precise, technical meaning of the word "covert" in specific legislation, but I think it fairly clear that Plame had some sort of cover, in the plain meaning of the word "covert." The difficulty in prosecuting Libby over leaking classified information is probably not over her covert status, but over Libby's knowledge of her covert status.