CHENEY – A Question of Motive
When Bush-Cheney took power, the CIA unit where Valerie Plame worked presented the principal institutional roadblock in the way to military attacks on the three "Axis of Evil" countries – Iraq, Iran and North Korea. In order to pursue them, the Administration had to work systematically to deconstruct the Division's highly successful CIA counter-proliferation program started by Bush 41 that had, under the Clinton Administration, effectively neutralized the atomic bomb programs of Iraq, Iran and North Korea.
The program of deconstructing CIA counter-proliferation made considerable progress. By late 2002, as the invasion of Iraq neared, nobody at CIA could say with certainty that the Chinese-made aluminum tubes interdicted on their way to Iraq would be used for. The agents and network that had once dealt with Khan were gone. Nonetheless, Plame flew to Jordan, where she interviewed Iraqi scientists and other sources. She concluded the tubes had other uses, but could not definitively counter other voices -- including external contractors, such as those working for Wade Cunningham's MZM -- who were falsely claiming the aluminum stock was proof that Saddam was building Khan P-1 design centrifuges to "reconstitute" his nuclear program. The resulting CIA report was a toss-up, and the invasion advocates won the debate...http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/2/7/112015/2282--------------
I have always thought that Plame's counter-proliferation work was Cheney's primary target, and that Wilson's disagreement on the war was incidental. There are plenty of ways to punish a dissenter (and ignore a NYT op-ed) short of the extraordinary perils of outing a top CIA agent and an entire CIA network. The story that it was political and that Rove did it was a cover story--a ruse, a distraction.
I was also struck by the rather compelling coincidence of dates between the Plame and David Kelly events. Plame was outed by Novak on 7/14/03. Kelly (a top British counter-proliferation expert, who had leaked his dissent on Iraq to the BBC) was found dead, under highly suspicious circumstances four days later, on 7/18/03, and furthermore had a close connection to Judith Miller (to whom he had written his last email, on the day he died, expressing concern about the "many dark actors playing games"). Kelly's office and computers were searched, and, four days after his death, on 7/22/07, Novak additionally outed Plame's Brewster-Jennings front company (putting all of its agents/contacts around the world in great danger). I still think there is a connection--Cheney outing Plame/B-J on this side of the pond, and England's key counter-proliferation scientist getting offed the same week. But I don't know what it is. Kelly wasn't likely murdered for his leak. He merely said something that almost everybody knew, at that point--that the Brits' had "sexed up" the evidence against Iraq. It was really no more explosive--and certainly as handle-able--as Wilson's op-ed. So why was he killed? (--and I--and a lot of other people--are 99.9% sure that he was).
Kelly's death is especially interesting because he supported the Iraq War until circa May 2003, when he talked anonymously to a BBC reporter about the "sexed up"
pre-war dossier. Why would he do that--try to undermine a war-in-progress that he had supported? My thesis was that he had to have stumbled upon something new--beyond what he was already aware of (that they had "sexed up" the evidence), and I thought a good candidate--at that point, early in the war--was a Rumsfeld-Cheney plot to
plant WMD evidence in Iraq. (Remember the big, high-profile "hunt" for the WMDs that everybody knew weren't there--a "hunt" that Miller was fronting?) Kelly was a fairly honorable man, from all reports. Something like that could well have turned him around. It was not likely, oh, the sheer horror of the bombing of Baghdad or other horrors like widespread torture of prisoners. It had to have been something that made him a real danger to somebody--not just a dissenter. (He was interrogated at a "safe house" the week before he was killed, and threatened with the "Official Secrets Act.")
Also, this connection of Armitage's outing of the A.Q. Khan nuclear network a year before (and consequent disabling of the CIA counter-proliferation eyes and ears in that network way before the Plame outing) makes me wonder why they so deliberately, publicly outed Plame and B-J in July '03, in the same week that Kelly was killed. If the CIA project was already disabled, what danger did Plame pose? The war was in progress. Their goal of extending it to Iran was a feasible thing to manufacture, from the launching pad of Iraq-in-chaos. A find of WMDs in Iraq, trackable to Iran, would have been a plausible trigger. (And there is a strange story in some congressman's book about Ladeen arms compadre Ghorbanifar trying to sell a story to the CIA that Iraq's nukes were being transported to Iran.)
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The facts and details of how WHIG had distorted the facts to steer the country into an illegal war threatened to emerge. It was in this context that Dick Cheney ordered his underlings to again go on the offensive. Destroy the complaining voices coming out of what remained of CIA Counter-Proliferation Division. That may have seemed at the time to Cheney, Libby and their confederates at WHIG to be a mere mopping-up exercise.http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/2/7/112015/2282--
They risked the dangerous ire of the CIA for "a mere mopping-up exercise"? Could have been hubris, maybe. But it was one of the most dangerous things they did, as to their own safety and impunity. And when you set the dates of it against the Kelly dates--it all happening simultaneously--it sure seems to me that more was at stake than mere exposure of their pre-war lies. If they were trying to plant WMDs in Iraq, they may still have been trying to accomplish it, in July 2003. Perhaps they were trying to protect that plot--a very high stakes plot to extend the war to Iran, then and there.
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