Say What You Will About Joe Wilson…
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in General Politics, The War On Terrorism, War…but did Rove all of a sudden forget how to read?
The paragraph identifying her as the wife of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV was clearly marked to show that it contained classified material at the “secret” level, two sources said. The CIA classifies as “secret” the names of officers whose identities are covert, according to former senior agency officials.Anyone reading that paragraph should have been aware that it contained secret information, though that designation was not specifically attached to Plame’s name and did not describe her status as covert, the sources said. It is a federal crime, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, for a federal official to knowingly disclose the identity of a covert CIA official if the person knows the government is trying to keep it secret.
Something tells me that somebody as detailed oriented as Rove would have noticed this.
So what are the key points in this case? Was it to prove the validity of Joe Wilson’s findings? No. It’s whether Rove leaked classified information for political retribution or even “to set the record straight”. That point should not be lost, and I’ve seen a lot of blogs saying just that.
Here’s more.
The memo may be important to answering three central questions in the Plame case: Who in the Bush administration knew about Plame’s CIA role? Did they know the agency was trying to protect her identity? And, who leaked it to the media?Almost all of the memo is devoted to describing why State Department intelligence experts did not believe claims that Saddam Hussein had in the recent past sought to purchase uranium from Niger. Only two sentences in the seven-sentence paragraph mention Wilson’s wife.
The memo was delivered to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on July 7, 2003, as he headed to Africa for a trip with President Bush aboard Air Force One. Plame was unmasked in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak seven days later.
Seven days after Powell got it, the info was reported. Now, Matt Cooper has said that he was told about that information days before the Novak column broke.
Read it all Rove from the Washington Post.
This entry was posted on Friday, July 22nd, 2005 and is filed under General Politics, The War On Terrorism, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 22nd, 2005 at 5:48 pm
Well, all I can say is that things certainly have changed from the standard security protocols of the 1970s (when I was subject to their rules on a daily basis).
Back in the day, anything that contained Confidential, Secret or Top Secret information had to be clearly marked as such at the top of each page and the Secret / Top Secret documents were also identified with a five-letter word designator. As I understand it, that’s still the case. The designators change every so many years and reportedly vary from op to op (I have read, but can’t confirm that - I only ever saw the pair we used in voice intercept op training and actual practice).
So right off the bat, this story sounds really, really fishy. One doesn’t (or at least didn’t) identify truly classified information - certainly not Secret or Top Secret information - with notes in the margins or ‘paragraph markers’. If a document contains ANY classified info, it’s classified. Period.
Pincus is apparently using another anonymous source to spin his innuendo here (in keeping with the practice that started this mess in the first place I might add, i.e., printing Wilson’s original allegations without confirming what the CIA concluded, and determining whether or not Wilson’s perceptions were accurate). That’s problem number two.
Problem three is that without actually reading the paragraph in question, in context with the rest of the document, we have no way of knowing whether the reference to Valerie Wilson’s status was or was not actually the (supposedly) classified information.
Problem four is that even in the absolute worst case, that is if the memo is as described (questionable), and was seen by Rove (pure speculation), his “yeah, I’ve heard that too” is hardly the same as (nor ‘morally’ equivalent to) confirmation of the rumor based on the information in the memo. Regardless of what Rove may or may not have read elsewhere, he had indeed “heard that too” from Novak.
So … here we have a reporter, trying to cover his past errors in judgement, reporting on a document he hasn’t seen, that’s described by (yet another) anonymous source who obviously has an axe to grind with the Bush Administration, in an effort to manufacture substance where none exists. Without blinders, and with no specific additional information, this reads as innuendo and speculation designed to foment suspicion.
Based on that, the media will eat it up. Nothing like performing a special investigation in the press.