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BUSH, "F**K LEAKGATE"
Fri Oct 3 17:30:17 2003
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BUSH, "F**K LEAKGATE"

Fineman: A CIA-White House War

Howard Fineman has a piece posted at MSNBC offering his take on what is really at the root of the Valerie Plame scandal, and why the issues involved are more than just whether or not a law was broken. He offers a good history of both Wilson's involvement in the first Iraq war, explaining why some in the White House probably weren't happy with the CIA choosing to sent him to Niger in the first place, as well as a history of the relationship between the Bushes and George Tenet. He also provides this bit of insight into the scandal:
Bush presumably trusted Tenet and the CIA to get the goods on Saddam and his WMD. Cheney's staff evidently did too. But why did Tenet send Wilson to Africa? Maybe he just thought he was sending the most qualified guy. But the neo-cons and their allies came to see it as a conspiracy to ignore the truth - especially after Wilson, last July, went public with the essence of his findings, which was that the yellowcake rumors were false.

The moment that piece hit the op-ed page of the New York Times, it was all-out war between the pro- and anti-war factions, and between the CIA and its critics. I am told by what I regard as a very reliable source inside the White House that aides there did, in fact, try to peddle the identity of Joe Wilson's wife to several reporters. But the motive wasn't revenge or intimidation so much as a desire to explain why, in their view, Wilson wasn't a neutral investigator, but, a member of the CIA's leave-Saddam-in-place team. [Emphasis mine, except for the underscore on "did", which Fineman emphasised in his piece]It's a bit of an interesting theory as to why the Plame leak was engineered - I'm not sure what I think of it, but I can certainly see it as plausible. I'm still more of the mind that it was done as a means of intimidating anyone in the CIA who might think of leaking information that might be embarrassing to the President - a kind of "we burned her and we'll burn you too", but I can see that pointing out that Wilson has a reason to side with the CIA could also be a factor.

Of course, the most interesting aspect of the article is Fineman's assertion that he, too, has been told that the White House did want to burn Plame. It'll certainly be interesting when some of the names of who did the leaking - and maybe also who's giving information to the press confirming parts of the story - come out.
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• fineman's take — lll, Sat Oct 4 13:59