Talk Nation Radio for March 21, 2007
Interview with Brad Friedman on Valerie Plame Wilson and US Attorney’s Cases
Produced by Dori Smith, at Pacifica Affiliate WHUS, at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Connecticut
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Welcome to Talk Nation Radio, a half hour discussion on politics, human rights and the environment. I’m Dori Smith
I also traveled to foreign countries on secret missions to find vital intelligence. Valerie Plame Wilson testifying before the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
We don’t know because it’s classified what the real effects of her outing were. Brad Friedman of Bradblog.com
Joining us for the half hour is Brad Friedman of Bradblog.com He was live blogging as Valerie Plame Wilson testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform And we are going to be analyzing some of the testimony that has been taking place on Capital Hill since March 16th.
Dori Smith: Brad Friedman welcome to Talk Nation Radio.
Brad Friedman. Thanks Dori. Great to be here.
Dori Smith: Was it me or did this seem like a surreal montage that could have been from the era of Nixon, Watergate, and other ‘gates’?
Brad Friedman: It could have been although I suspect that back in the era of Nixon and Watergate a hearing like this would have been on every single network prime time and would have lead to the immediate dismissal of very high level administration officials. Such is the Alice in Wonderland world that we now seem to be in, there are so many scandals that go in fact so high they make Watergate seem like child’s play. It’s rather remarkable that even the news cable channels did not carry the entirety of those hearings which were simply astounding, made even more so by the fellow James Knodell who followed Valerie Plame Wilson who admitted that the White House has never done an investigation into the leak of a covert CIA operative’s name.
I mean that’s an extraordinary scandal in and of itself further underscoring the fact that for the first time in the history of this nation a White House has now admittedly outed the name of a CIA covert operative during war time, an operative who was working on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That’s an incredible story. And it was relegated as usual to the back pages and not carried live on all of the news channels much less the networks. So yeah, it’s quite a difference from the Watergate days.
Dori Smith: Let me play that for listeners and we will just refresh our memories as we listen, this is now C-Span and we are going to start with hearing a little bit of Rep. Henry Waxman asking the question was there an investigation:
Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA 30th District) Are you aware if there was any investigation that ever took place in the White House about the release of this classified information?
James Knodell: I am not.
Rep. Waxman: Hmm. Do you know whether Karl Rove, the President’s senior political advisor, came forward and reported what he knew about the breach of Mrs. Wilson’s identity after all we learned, that Mr. Rove talked about her identity with at least two journalists, Robert Novak and Mathew Cooper of Time Magazine?
James Knodell: Mr. Chairman I have no knowledge of any investigation within my office.
Dori Smith: After a brief exchange Rep. Henry Waxman then asked Mr. Knodell if there was a report.
Rep. Henry Waxman: Mr. Knodell wouldn’t there have to be a report that would have been filed in your office?
James Knodell: If, if we were notified there would be Sir. Yes.
Rep. Henry Waxman: OK. So if you were notified a report would be on file. Is that right?
James Knodell: Correct.
Rep. Henry Waxman: And you don’t know if there is one on file?
James Knodell: That’s correct.
Rep. Henry Waxman: Is that correct? You don’t even know there is one on file?
James Knodell: There is not one on file.
Rep. Henry Waxman: There is not one on file. You know that there is no report on file that classified information was disclosed and that report was about Fleicher or Rove or all of the other names?
James Knodell: Mr. Chairman not within the Office of Security and Emergency Preparedness.
Rep. Henry Waxman: OK. Last question to Mr. Knodell. Was any corrective action taken? Was any disciplinary action taken against Mr. Rove for failing to report his knowledge of the breach of Mrs. Wilson’s identity?
James Knodell: No Mr. Chairman.
Rep. Henry Waxman: No, no action was taken or no you don’t know?
James Knodell: No action was taken.
Rep. Henry Waxman: OK. Thank you.
Dori Smith: Brad Friedman it was the no heard round the Washington D.C. area wouldn’t you say?
Brad Friedman: It was heard around the hearing room. How many folks actually heard it outside of the hearing room and around D.C. is still a question that remains. Waxman did follow up that testimony with a letter to the White House demanding to know what they did and didn’t do in regard to an investigation since the lack of an investigation would appear to be in direct conflict of an executive order signed by George Bush in March of 2003 requiring an investigation into any such disclosure of classified information, whether the disclosure was done purposely or not. He appears to have violated his own executive order in not carrying out an investigation of that matter.
Dori Smith: This coincides with his public statement that if he found that someone at the top level, at the White House level, was involved he would fire them right?
Brad Friedman: Well you can’t find that if you don’t look for it and it appears that he has not bothered to look for it. So no wonder there have been no heads that have rolled at the White House. He clearly has gone out of his way to not find out what had happened.
Dori Smith: Just describe what you do as you watch these hearings and what you are looking for, what kinds of key points you are looking for to share with your audience.
Brad Friedman: You know in the case of these hearings in particular, and Valerie Plame Wilson’s testimony, it was in once sense rather remarkable because she made things quite clear that have been frankly obfuscated in the media for years now. That is the fact that she was a covert CIA operative, that she served overseas within the last five years prior to her outing, that she was working on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and then she spoke to that quite directly, and in fact, Waxman also confirmed her covert status by giving us the information that the information that the director of the CIA, General Hayden, had also confirmed that she was a covert operative and that this has never occurred in the history of our country that our own government has outted a CIA operative like that. That was some pretty stark and extraordinary revelations. But in fact, had you been following this story and the facts of this story all of this is information that was known long ago unless you read the Washington Post or the New York Times or MSNBC, CNN, FOX News, where they kept repeating the same disinformation over and over again that she was not covert.
If you looked into the information, if you saw what her husband Joe Wilson said, if you saw what fellow CIA colleagues of hers like Larry Johnson and Jim Marcinkowski had said, you would have known already that she was a covert operative. So it’s been three years on this story trying to get out the real story, and in fact, one of the reasons that I wanted to live blog the hearings was because I knew that the coverage that followed would again be inadequate and its important to get the truth on the record even if Bradblog.com is not the New York Times at least we can get the truth out there and those people who really give a damn about the truth at least have a place to go find it. And that’s what I’ve found myself doing now for the past three or four years now at Bradblog.com is telling those stories, giving the actual evidence, the actual evidence, the actual facts, of all of these stories that have been so overlooked by the mainstream media. It’s been an extraordinary disservice to this country and I believe that is in no small part why this country is currently in the mess that we are in.
Dori Smith: Throughout the time you have been blogging on these cases that have been sequestered in the back room of the corporate press, the Chair of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Henry Waxman, who we saw in action, has been documenting the kinds of details that could be used to hold the Administration accountable. I want to ask you about Henry Waxman’s treatment of Victoria Toensing where he asks her specifically about the way she has been characterizing Valerie Plame Wilson in terms of this law we are discussing:
Rep. Henry Waxman: I am stunned Miss Toensing that you would come in here with absolute conclusions that she was not a covert agent, the White House did not leak it, no one seemed to know in advance that she was a CIA agent. Do you know those facts from your own first hand knowledge?
Victoria Toensing: Well let’s just take those one by one. I, as I said, I was there, I was the chief drafter for chair.
Rep. Henry Waxman: I am not asking you for your credentials. I am asking how you reached those conclusions. Do you have evidence.
Victoria Toensing: As part of my credentials, because I know what the intent of the act was.
Rep. Henry Waxman: I am not asking what the intent of the act was.
Victoria Toensing: Well that was.
Rep. Henry Waxman: Do you know that she was not a covert agent?
Victoria Toensing: She was not a covert agent under the act.
Rep. Henry Waxman: OK. So. So you are.
Victoria Toensing: You can call her anything you want to in the halls of the CIA.
Rep. Henry Waxman: Well. But General Hayden, General Hayden the head of the CIA, told me personally that she was that if I said that she was a covert agent it wouldn’t be an incorrect statement.
Victoria Toensing: (Trying to speak over Rep. Waxman Does he want to swear that she was a covert agent under the act?
Rep. Henry Waxman: I am trying to say this as carefully as I can. He reviewed my statement and my statement was that she was a covert agent.
Victoria Toensing: Well he didn’t say it was under the act.
Rep. Henry Waxman: OK so you are trying to define it exactly under the act?
Victoria Toensing: Well I was..
Rep. Henry Waxman: No no no no no no, I’m not giving you, I’m not yielding my time to you. So that’s your interpretation. She’s not. Do you know that the White House, no one in the White House leaked that information?
Victoria Toensing: I don’t even know how to deal with the word leak here, I know that people in the White House.
Rep. Henry Waxman: Well Karl Rove admitted he leaked it. Do you think he is not telling us the truth?
Victoria Toensing: Well words are important and I’m not sure what this means.
Rep. Henry Waxman: Oh so you want to completely define the words in so narrow a meaning that your statements can be credible but not honest.
Click for PDF file to Waxman’s letter
Dori Smith: That exchange went on for quite some time Brad an we saw an exasperated Henry Waxman and Attorney Toensing seemed to be splitting hairs right?
Brad Friedman: What she was doing was beyond splitting hairs. I would suggest what Victoria Toensing was doing was lying and she has been given a platform to lie about this now for years. While the jury was out in the Libby case deliberating the Washington Post allowed her to once again come on out, and some people have called it jury tampering, that she was able to come out and file a column making all of these false claims. Toensing has been now doing that for years and been given a platform all over the place in the mainstream media and in fact, this was the first time that she was sort of cross examined on her claims and you will notice she mitigated finally, instead of saying Valerie Plame was not covert, well when she was called on that during those hearings she said Plame was not covert according to the statute. She was referring to the IIPA which talks about what the bar is for criminal prosecution of outing a CIA agent. The hair that she was splitting was claiming that because Valerie Plame Wilson did not live overseas in the past five years that she did not meet the statute when she was outted. But in fact if you bother to read the actual statute that she actually had a hand in writing 25 years ago you see that there is no requirement to live overseas, simply to serve overseas. This is something that Valerie Plame Wilson made quite clear that she had done in the five years prior to her outing.
Dori Smith: Let’s listen to that portion of Valerie Plame Wilson’s testimony where she says she worked overseas as a covert CIA agent.
Valerie Plame Wilson: In the run up to the war with Iraq I worked in the counter proliferation division of the CIA. Still as a covert officer whose affiliation with the CIA was classified I raced to discover solid intelligence for senior policy makers on Iraq’s presumed weapons of mass destruction programs.
While I helped to manage and run secret world wide operations against this WMD target from CIA’s headquarters in Washington, I also traveled to foreign countries on secret missions to find vital intelligence.
I love my career because I love my country. I was proud of the serious responsibilities entrusted to me as a CIA covert operations officer and I was dedicated to this work. It was not common knowledge on the Georgetown cocktail circuit that everyone knew where I worked. But all of my efforts on behalf of the national security of the United States, all of my training, all of the value, my years of service were abruptly ended when my name and identity were exposed irresponsibly.
In the course of the trial of Vice President Cheney’s former Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby, I was shocked by the evidence that emerged. My name and identity were carelessly and recklessly abused by senior government officials in both the White House and the State Department. All of them understood that I worked for the CIA. And having signed oaths to protect national security secrets they should have been diligent in protecting me and every CIA officer. The CIA goes to great lengths to protect all of its employees, providing at significant taxpayers expense, painstakingly devised and creative cover for its most sensitive staffers. The harm that is done when a CIA cover is blown is grave but I can’t provide details beyond that in this public hearing. But the concept is obvious. Not only have breaches of national security endangered CIA officers, it has jeopardized and even destroyed entire networks of foreign agents who in turn risk their own lives and those of their families to provide the United States with needed intelligence. Lives are literally at stake.
Dori Smith: And that clip and others we will be hearing today come curtsey of C-Span.
The law in question here about residence is seldom if ever used according to a Washington Post story from September of 2003 by Edward Walsh and Susan Schmidt. It was a law originally written because of concern about a book by former CIA agent Philip Agee and he had named some names.
Brad Friedman: What the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, the IIPA, did was set very specific standards for what needs to be met to bring prosecution for the outing of a covert operative. What I find most troubling, however, is that because no one has yet been prosecuted under the IIPA in the Plame matter the apologists for this outing of a CIA agent have said that that in and of itself is proof that no crime was committed.
Well if you take a look at the Scooter Libby trial and what Prosecutor Fitzgerald made quite clear during the course of that trial is that he was not able to prosecute under the IIPA because Scooter Libby in fact was protecting Dick Cheney. He had perjured himself during the course of the investigation and he had blocked the investigation. So we don’t know ultimately whether a crime was or wasn’t committed here according to that statute because of what happened to block Fitzgerald’s investigation.
You see these folks coming out and saying, there was no crime committed, well we don’t know if there was a crime or not. That was why Scooter Libby was found guilty on four of the five charges that were brought against him.
Dori Smith: Just characterize the meaning of this leak.
Brad Friedman: What it meant was that we lost an incredibly valuable asset. Not just Valerie Plame but her entire intelligence network that had been set up. She had a front company called Brewster Jennings which was set up so that she could basically run this intelligence operation as a NOC a non official cover agent, which is the most dangerous type of covert agent to be. In other words if she is caught spying on foreign soil the CIA will disavow that she works for the CIA, that she has anything to do with the CIA, and someone like her can be summarily executed in a foreign country. If you have ever watched Mission Impossible you know what that has to do with.
When she was outed then not only was her ability to monitor WMD traffic in and out of Iraq and Iran wiped out and the CIA was essentially blinded when that happened, she was not able to continue her business, Brewster Jennings was not able to continue their business as a front company, and all of those people who were ever associated with Valerie Plame or anyone who worked at this outfit was similarly outed and perhaps put in danger.
We don’t know because it is classified what the real effects of her outing was. The CIA typically does damage assessment in these matters and it is possible that people were killed, we don’t know, but what we do know is that a huge section of our intelligence monitoring WMD in the Middle East was completely wiped out by this outing. There was at least 20 different disclosures by the Administration of Valerie Plame’s identification in what appears to be a direct political payback against Ambassador Joe Wilson, Valerie’s husband, simply because he came out and told the truth that there was no Uranium purchased by Iraq in Niger and the fact that the White House knew this when George W. Bush came out in his State of the Union Address and said that Iraq had attempted to buy Uranium from Niger That is what directly helped build public support for the war back in 2003. And the reason that the Administration has been fighting it is because it underscores the entire rationale for going to war in the first place and the fact that it was built on manipulate intelligence that they knew about at the time. They knew in fact those claims of Uranium in Niger were bogus and yet they reported it anyway. Joe Wilson exposed that lie when he wrote his OPED in the New York Times And as payback they had to figure out how to discredit Joe Wilson any way they could even if it meant selling off one of their own most valuable covert CIA operatives in the Middle East. It’s an extraordinary situation. We’ve never seen it before.
Dori Smith: It’s hard to characterize the scale of importance here. In the time since 9/11 this administration has written new laws, formed new agencies, claimed to have national security as an overarching concern, but we find that they were not committed to maintaining the security of the very people who were taking risks in order to get intelligence.
Brad Friedman: You also mentioned that it had been sort of sequestered to the back room, these matters. I would suggest it had been quite literally sequestered to the back room, not just the back room but the basement room of the Capital building where some of these hearings were relegated during the Republican majority.
There was an expressed conspiracy by the Republican majority to not carry out their Constitutional duty of oversight on these matters and many others including the Downing St. memos, what happened in the election of 2004, and in fact, when John Conyers, then ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, the Republicans would not even allow him the curtsey of a hearing room. He had to hold hearings on these matters literally down in the basement of the Capital in a room not much larger than a broom closet.
Now that we are finally seeing these hearings out in the light of day, that’s why you are seeing some accountability finally beginning to happen. But none of these stories, frankly, I believe, would still be out there at all were it not for the blogosphere. Folks like myself and Josh Marshall, at Talking Points Memo, and John Aravosis, at America Blog and the folks over at RAW Story who have been reporting on these stories continuously over the past three, four or five years, while the rest of the mainstream had completely ignored it. And they are only now coming around and saying, oh gees I guess we missed Something.
We saw that with the US Attorney’s case recently, with the Abramoff matter, with the Plame outing, and the list goes on and on. The mainstream media has simply failed in their responsibility to be the watchdog for the American People. They have been delinquent from top to bottom and were it not for the internet and for the bloggers out there I shudder to think where we would be now.
Dori Smith: About Josh Marshall Time Magazine issued an apology to him, why don’t you explain what happened with that story about the eight judges.
Brad Friedman: In fact, Jay Carney, one of the, I think he’s a senior editor over there at Time Magazine, he had dismissed this US Attorney purge scandal, another extraordinary scandal highlighting that the Bush administration has now used the Department of Justice as little more than a bludgeon.
Josh began reporting on that some weeks ago and it was dismissed by Jay Carney over at Time Magazine as an unprovable conspiracy theory. This is something that we’ve heard time and again from Time Magazine and the New York Times and others who I also should add characterized concerns about the 2004 election as a conspiracy theory, the After Downing Street revelations showing that Bush knew that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction prior to the war, that was a conspiracy theory, all of these things were. Finally Jay Carney admitted at Time Magazine last week that he was wrong, he was sorry, and that indeed the US Attorney purge is a story and a huge one at that.
Once you get to the point where it looks like a sitting US Attorney is going to be resigning and a sitting House member may be facing some serious fire themselves well I guess they had no choice but to admit that they were wrong and that this was much more than a silly conspiracy theory. But it shouldn’t be this hard. We should have folks in the mainstream media who unlike me actually get paid for this stuff and have resources to do this stuff. They should be the ones leading the way on these stories.
Dori Smith: We’re going to take a minute away from our interview with Brad Friedman to provide an overview of what can be found on Bradblog.com
When the White House released 3,000 pages of emails and other documents on the 19th a link was provided so readers could assess the pages. By that evening another link appeared to dailybackground.com so a citizen journalist named Arlen Parsa could describe some interesting details from one of the pages he had read. Arlen had found an October 2005 letter from 19 members of Congress to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. The letter was about former US attorney Carol Lam who was fired by the White House. Arlen Parsa points out that Randy Duke Cunningham was one of those who signed what was effectively a complaint letter about Lam. Thus, while he was under investigation for corruption by Lam he and 18 members of Congress tried to get rid of her. Cunningham is now serving an eight year prison term.
Bradblog.com correspondent Margie Burns reported on what the Senate was up to and she quoted U.S. Senator Pat Leahy who said, “We don’t have a law that would make war profiteering specifically a federal crime. So Leahy introduced one, Burns reported.
There are also breaking news stories about voting and election machines and we will be taking that up with Brad Friedman at a later time. But in the time since my interview with him we’ve seen breaking news that you can bet he is working on. During the past 24 hours President Bush sought to protect White House officials from having to provide sworn testimony before Congress. Rep. John Conyers of the House Judiciary assured members of the press that he would have to insist that any conversations about the firings of US Attorney’s be dealt with in sworn testimony. Here is what he had to say on the morning of the 21st.
Rep. John Conyers (D MI) We think that this is developing into far more than we originally expected it to be. The latest round of disclosures from the Department of Justice raise new and troubling questions about the firing of the six United States attorneys that we had at the committee hearing. We have just received these documents that I held in my hand in the last hour and we are in the process of revealing them.
At a minimum we believe that these documents show a coordinated effort initiated by the White House to purge every United States attorney in the country. Until recently the Justice Department persisted in stone walling the Congress with claims that these firings were performance related. Now these documents prove this assertion was categorically false.
We know that the original plan was to fire all the United States attorneys. It’s absurd to think the performance of every U.S. Attorney in the country was sub par and that they deserved to be fired. So this is about something else, political cronyism or political pressure on public corruption investigations? We don’t know because the Justice Department and the White House continue to hide behind rationalizations and cover stories that are obviously not true, and so its time to come clean.
I’ve directed my staff to engage with the Justice Department and White House to bring in officials who may have knowledge of these issues for depositions. And if they fail to come forward voluntarily we believe that there may be other ways to compel their attendance.
Media accounts have raised the questions about the President’s and the White House role in this matter. The public deserves a full accounting.
Dori Smith: Brad just describe what comes to mind when you hear the term, Treasongate. What term are we talking about when we use that term?
Brad Friedman: It’s hard to keep all of these ‘gates’ straight at this point. Frankly I think one of the only things that’s keeping this administration afloat is that there are so many of them, we don’t have time to dig into any one before the next scandal comes along. So I think Treasongate was in reference to the outing of Plame which was quickly subsumed by the failure at Walter Reed which was quickly subsumed by the U.S. Attorneys firings scandal; I mean one has piled on top of the next on top of the next to the point that it is very difficult to keep up with any of them and to get full accountability for all of them. That is what is really required here and we need to see a lot of heads rolling and frankly at this point we’ve seen so much malfeasance and misfeasance from the White House and the administration. I see no reason why articles of impeachment are not being brought up against Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. Had this been any other administration any one of these 20 or 30 scandals, I can’t imagine they would have not led to impeachment. If these aren’t impeachable offenses I don’t know what is. And yet the accountability is still not there. You still have Democrats sort of staring like a deer in the headlights in many cases afraid to follow their Constitutional duty of holding folks accountable for high crimes and misdemeanors.
Dori Smith: You can continue this conversation with Brad Friedman online at Bradblog.com There you can learn more about Karl Rove, I. Scooter Libby, Valerie Plame Wilson and her husband Joseph Wilson, the state of the nation’s voting machines, and much more.
For Talk Nation Radio I’m Dori Smith. Talk Nation Radio is produced in the studios of WHUS, at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Connecticut. WHUS.org to listen live Wed. at 5 PM. Talknationradio.org and talknation.org for transcripts and discussions. And special thanks to C-Span for granting us permission to use their audio.
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