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the Pincus rather than the Kristoff article was of the most concern to these traitors (--although there is still a possibility that focus on the Pincus article is misdirection by Libby's defense team, on the matter of Libby's lies--we need more analysis of the memos and their various editings/crossouts/rewrites, and their context, to be sure).
But what strikes me about this Larry Johnson article is the number of assumptions he makes that fit with what I think may be a second layer cover story--that Cheney did it (conspired to out Plame/Brewster-Jennings) for political reasons. (The first layer cover story was that Rove did it for political reasons).
Johnson's assumptions are that Cheney & Co. were taken by surprise, in June 2003--surprise that an insider was publicly criticizing them (Wilson), that his wife was the chief of an important covert WMD counter-proliferation network with world-wide contacts, and that the Niger/Iraq nuke allegation is something that was "cherry-picked" from available information (and not deliberately manufactured, forged documents and all).
His statement about the rising level of panic in Cheney's office, when Pincus began asking questions and published his article, points to Cheney concern about the political debate on the justifications for the war, as it became increasingly clear that there were no WMDs in Iraq. I think the panic has a different origin, that predates Pincus, having to do with the operational end of the promotion of an unjust war. We see a little thread of it, in the insistence of WH operatives on putting the Niger/Iraq nuke allegation BACK into Bush's SOTU speech, after it had it had been removed by the CIA, as completely bogus, in a previous Bush speech. Why did they need that already disproved allegation to be spoken by Bush in a major speech? Condi and Darth could have gone on mumbling about "mushroom clouds," etc., with impunity, in the war profiteering corporate news monopoly newsstream of the time (pre-war), without putting the President in such a position. The effect would have been the same--clouding the horizon with doom. It was all bullshit anyway.
And I think the answer includes the lo-o-ong planning period of the Niger/Iraq nuke allegation (going back at least to the Rome meeting in late 2001, attended by rabid NeoCon Michael Ladeen and others on the Pentagon payroll, the head of the Italian intelligence agency, SISMI, and notorious Iran-Contra arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar). The Niger/Iraq nuke allegation was part of a PLAN--that possibly went like this: 1) have Bush make the allegation in a very public and central way, and (by the deliberate "crudeness" of the forgeries (wrong dates, wrong names--easily detectable)), get the CIA on record with a known "no nukes in Iraq" position; and 2) PLANT the nukes in Iraq, to be "found" by the U.S. troops who were "hunting" for them (notably accompanied by NYT WMD propagandist Judith Miller), to create that "triumphant" moment for Bush and Blair--a "find" of WMDs in Iraq, the war justified, and the CIA (and anyone else in government who thought it was their job to prevent war, not manufacture it) discredited forever.
But something went wrong. The whole plan began to unravel in the April-June period, 2003. No WMDs were found. And Part 1 of the scheme--the basis of the Niger/Iraq allegation (the fake documents)--was beginning to smell real bad.
Proceed, then, into the late June/early July period. One thing that has occurred, in late May, is the BBC whistleblower, who said that the Brits had "sexed up" the prewar intel. (Bush used the Brits in his SOTU speech as the basis for the Niger allegation). No one knew who it was. Talk about panic. IF the Bushites had been up to MORE than just lying, but had been trying to PLANT the weapons, imagine the fear of exposure they must have felt, not knowing who it was or what else he might know. And, once again, I have to stress the lapdog U.S. press corps, with all news and opinion in this country controlled by 5 rightwing billionaire CEOs. Dissenters LOSE in this context. And it has never been worse than in the years 2002 and 2003. Mere dissent about the prewar lies, which are just words, after all--easily fudged, fuzzied, smeared over, and wormed out of--even dissent from insiders--was not likely the cause of what the Bushites and the Blairites did next.
The Blairites went ballistic--and mercilessly hunted David Kelly down within government, interrogated him at a "safe house," threatened him with the "Official Secrets Act," and outed him to the press.
And, while this was happening, David Kelly's old colleague, Judith Miller, was having 'Mata Hari" meetings with Libby, some parts of which she has adamantly refused to disclose. (Fitzgerald had to agree, to get her testimony about Libby's lies). By July 6, when Wilson's article came out, and July 7, the next day, when Tony Blair was informed that David Kelly "could say some uncomfortable things" (could say, not HAD said) (Hutton report), there was full blown panic in the White House, with a top secret memo circulating on AF-1 (over Africa), flurries of activity on this matter, and top Bushites calling at least SIX reporters in one week--to get Valerie Plame outed (or assist with the cover story that "everybody knew")--at high risk of treason charges (not to mention earning the deadly enmity of the CIA).
And this is the kicker--the thing that convinces me that this was more than a political controversy, and that Cheney & Co. were worried about far more than the questioning of their veracity in the run-up to the war. Consider this time-line:
July 6: Wilson publishes his article.
July 7: Blair informed that Kelly "could say some uncomfortable things."
July 14: Plame outed (by Novak).
July 18: Kelly found dead, under highly questionable circumstances; his office and computers are searched.
*July 22*: Novak ADDITIONALLY outs the entire Brewster-Jennings WMD counter-proliferation network--the covert agents/contacts who track nukes and other WMDs worldwide--putting them in danger of getting killed, and disabling all projects.
And I would like to add that the Bush Junta was ALSO wantonly engaged in torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay and at secret torture dungeons around the world, during this same period. Were they torturing and killing any who might know about their nefarious scheme to plant nukes in Iraq--maybe friends/contacts of David Kelly's (who was a UN weapons inspector and had friends in Iraq)? There were several news reports from Islamic sources of botched U.S. efforts to plant WMDs in Iraq during this period--with no follow-up. These reports vanished into the newsstream.
People forget that there were TWO outings--first Plame, then seven days later (after Kelly was found dead), the entire network--so that if any bad guys had failed to connect the dots between Plame and people in their own government who were monitoring illicit WMD movement, they were given this great assist in ferreting them out and destroying their careers or lives, by the publication of the name of the CIA front company in the newspaper.
I think we are looking at an operational crime, not just a political crime, and one that was premeditated over a long period of time, not just a panicky reaction to a newsstream controversy--and this (an operational crime) points to Rumsfeld (notably gone from the government--with no change of policy in Iraq--so why did he go?). The political end of the crime--Cheney & Co. outing Plame/B-J, to punish Wilson and frighten other dissenters--the current part of the picture that we can see--in the Libby trial and elsewhere--may be (and I think probably is) a cover up of the REAL reason for the outingS.
Fitzgerald penetrated the first layer of the cover up (Rove), which is likely why he didn't indict Rove (who was, and remains, very indictable). He's now at the second layer. Someone at DU was wondering why all these people who had a hand in outing Plame/B-J--Cheney, Rove, Armitage, J. Miller, Novak, Fleischer and others--have not been indicted for doing so, and why Libby has only been indicted on perjury/obstruction. The answer may be that Fitzgerald is aware that he is still looking at a layer of the cover up, and that all these people took the great risks that they did, in order to hide a worse crime. What Fitzgerald SAID--in his one press conference on this matter--is that Libby "threw dust in the eyes of the umpire," obscuring both the perps AND their reason for what they did (--very important to Fitzgerald--the WHY.)
It could be a nefarious scheme to plant WMDs on Saddam, hatched in the Pentagon "Office of Special Plans." It could be something else that Plame/B-J was investigating. (A network like that follows leads, and stray threads; they see mid-point or end-point actions; they don't necessarily know who originated those actions. They could have been tracking a number of things--illicit nuke networks, 9/11 money trails--that made them quite dangerous to the criminals and thieves in the White House and the Pentagon.)
However, the events of June-July 2003 point strongly to a specific thing that caused panic in the Bush/Blair inner circles. And I don't think it was a newspaper article.
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