1 Boring Old Man

• July 6th, 2003: Joseph Wilson said in his NYT op-ed, "In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney’s office had questions about a particular intelligence report. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake — a form of lightly processed ore — by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990’s. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president’s office."
• Cheney’s responses, written in the margin’s of his copy of the editorial, were pretty clear:

• Cheney wrankled at what he saw as the implication that the Vice President’s Office had sent Joseph Wilson. No one else reading that editorial thought that. What Wilson said was, "I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney’s office had questions about a particular intelligence report." Which is true. Cheney asked the C.I.A. The C.I.A. asked Wilson. No problem. But Cheney wrote out some Talking Points to make sure that no one thought that He [Cheney] sent Joe Wilson to Africa [as if anybody thought that in the first place]:

  The next day, July 7, Cheney crafted talking points to be distributed to the media which emphasized that his office had not requested that Wilson go to Niger, that the CIA had not told him about Wilson’s findings, and that he personally only learned of the matter long after the U.S. invaded Iraq– from press reports. The four talking points dictated by Cheney to his press aide, Catharine Martin, stated:

  1. The Vice President’s office did not request the mission to Niger.
  2. The Vice President’s office was not informed of Joe Wilson’s mission.
  3. The Vice President’s office did not receive a briefing about Mr. Wilson’s mission after he returned.
  4. The Vice President’s office was not aware of Mr. Wilson’s mission until recent press reports accounted for it.

• During the Libby Trial, it was clear that Scooter Libby tried to make it appear that these annotations to the editorial were added by Cheney a few days later. Fitzgerald made short work Libby’s assertion [part of an elaborate cover-up of Cheney’s involvement] by calling Catherine Martin [above].They were written on July 6th, 2003 when the op-ed was published.

• On the next day, July 8th, 2003, Cheney told Libby to get everything out to Judith Miller at their luncheon meeting. That meant Plame’s identity and the N.I.E. that he’d gotten Bush to declassify for the leak. And then, he changed his Talking Points:

  Also that same day, July 8, 2003, Cheney met again Cathy Martin– this time on Cheney’s office on Capitol Hill. During the meeting, according to an account Martin gave federal investigators, Cheney told Martin that he wanted some changes and additions made to the talking points devised the previous day that had already been disseminated to Fleischer and other White House communications aides.

  Martin told investigators that Cheney dictated the changes to her, and in each case, she took down word for word what the Vice President said. (Martin later repeated this same account under oath during Libby’s trial.)

  Cheney told Martin that he wanted the very first of the talking points to now read: “It is not clear who authorized Joe Wilson’s trip to Niger.”

  Cheney, of course, knew that the CIA had authorized Wilson’s trip and had sent Wilson to Niger. Both Cheney and Libby had been told by a large number of CIA and State Department officials by then that such was the case, according to the sworn testimony of those officials at Libby’s trial. And the day before, Fleisher had told the press that Wilson’s mission to Niger was “something that the CIA undertook” and that they had also “sent him on their own volition.” 

• On July 12th, 2003, Bob Novak outed Valrie Plame based on a tip by Richard Armitage with confirmations from Rove and Libby.

Why would Cheney change the talking points from the day before if he knew that the CIA had sent Wilson and he and his staff had encouraged Fleischer to say that the day before? Obviously, saying it was unclear who had authorized Wilson’s trip to Niger was not only untrue, it also pointed reporters in the direction of asking about Plame.

Asked about this during his FBI interview, Cheney was at a loss to explain how the change of the talking points focusing attention on who specifically sent Wilson to Niger would not lead reporters might lead to exposure of Plame’s role as a CIA officer.

There was a matter, as well, as to why Cheney changed the talking points to say it was unclear who sent Wilson when in fact he had admitted earlier during the same interview with investigators that he clearly knew it was the CIA.

Finally, of course, there was the fact that on the very same day that Cheney changed the talking points that Libby was meeting with Miller and telling Miller that Plame worked for the CIA and had sent her husband to Niger.

In his closing argument during the Libby trial, however, Fitzgerald did mention the issue briefly. None of the media covering the trial, however (with the sole exception once again being Dan Froomkin), appeared to understand its significance or broader context, and did not report it.

Noting the change of Cheney’s July 7 and July 8, 2003 talking points, Patrick Fitzgerald said: “The question of who authorized became number one. That’s a question that would lead to the answer: Valerie Wilson.”

The President of the United States of America had told us we were invading Iraq to shut down a clandestine program that was an immediate threat to us. He was not just wrong. about the level of the Iraqi threat. He and his Administration had done exactly what Joseph Wilson said they had done:

Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq? Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.

Their response to Joseph Wilson, spearheaded by the Vice President, was to leak that his wife, Valerie Plame, was a C.I.A. Agent who they implied had arranged his trip as a "junket" – presumabely so he could get a free trip to Africa [a part of Africa that people want free trips from rather than to].

David Corn, an investigative reporter, pointed out that it was a crime to reveal the identity of a covert C.I.A. Agent. It had been made a crime by former C.I.A. Chief, George H.W. Bush, the President’s father. The Administration first claimed they didn’t know who leaked the story. Then they claimed that the leakers were not directed to do so by Bush or Cheney. When that was shown to be false, they then claimed that the leak was inadvertent. Finally, they said she wasn’t covert or that they didn’t know she was covert. Since no one could prove that they knew she was covert, they escaped hanging.

This new piece, that Cheney changed his Talking Points to point people to Valerie Plame’s indentity, indicates that the leak wasn’t inadvertent, and that it came from the top. All that remains to be proved is that they did know that she was a covert agent. We are one whistle-blower away from the end of the story. And the reason I care is that I think they did know. They went to a lot of trouble to leak this story in secret. Please note Cheney’s other note in the figure above:

"not going to protect one staffer & sacrifice the guy the pres that was asked to stick his head in the meat grinder because of the incompetence of others."