Novak names names in Plame leak case

fundingfather · July 19, 2006, 4:44pm

kluge,

I’m very disappointed in you. In a post in which you question my credibility you, yourself take liberties with the source material in an effort to smear me. Go back and look at the “quote” that you included. You make it look like one contiguous section from the report, but low and behold it is not. Here is the way it should be (with your segments in bold):

<a href=“A”>b</a>In late January, the Director of WINPAC discussed, over the phone, the portion of the State of the Union draft pertaining to uranium with his NSC counterpart,the Special Assistant to the President for Nonproliferation. Neither individual can recall who initiated the phone call. Both the WTNPAC Director and NSC Special Assistant told Committee staff that the WINPAC Directors concerns about using the uranium information pertained only to revealing sources and
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methods and not to any concerns about the credibility of the uranium reporting. The WINPAC Director said because the Niger information was specifically and directly tied to a foreign government service, his concern was about releasing classified information in an unclassified speech. He told Committee staff that this had been the CIA’s longstanding position and was the reason the CIA wanted the reference removed from the British white paper. Both the WINPAC Director and NSC Special Assistant agreed that the discussion was brief, cordial, and that they mutually agreed that citing the British information, which was already unclassified, was preferable to citing U.S. classified intelligence.
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<a href=“B”>b</a> The WINPAC Director and the NSC Special Assistant disagreed, however, about the content of their conversation in some important respects. First, when the WINPAC Director first spoke to Committee staff and testified at a Committee hearing, he said that he had told the NSC Special Assistant to remove the words Niger and 500 tons from the speech because of concerns about sources and methods. The NSC Special Assistant told Committee staff that there never was a discussion about removing Niger and 500 tons from the State of the Union and said that the drafts of the speech show that neither Niger nor 500 tons were ever in any of the drafts at all. He believed that the WINPAC Director had confused the State of the Union conversation with a conversation they had previously had in preparation for the Negroponte speech in which they did discuss removing Niger from the speech because of the WINPAC Directors concerns about revealing sources and methods.
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<a href=“C”>b</a>** A few days after his testimony before the committee, the WINPAC Director found the draft text of the State of the Union in WINPACs files and noticed that it did not say 500 tons of uranium from Niger. In a follow up interview with Committee staff, he said that he still recalls the conversation the way he described it to the Committee originally, however, he believes that he may have confused the two conversations because the documentation he found does not support his version of events. The draft text of the State of the Union he found said, we know that he [Saddam Hussein] has recently sought to buy uranium in Africa. The White House also told the Committee that the text they sent to the CIA in January said, we also know that he has recently sought to buy uranium in Africa.
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<a href=“D”>b</a>** Second, the WINPAC Director also told the Committee that the NSC Special Assistant came up with the idea to source the uranium information to the British during their conversation when he was attempting to come up with an unclassified way to use the uranium reporting. The NSC Special Assistant told Committee staff that the reference to the British came from the White House speech writers who were working to come up with publicly usable sources for all of the intelligence information in the speech. Because the speech writers obtained
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information regarding Iraqs attempts to acquire uranium from Africa from both the intelligence underlying the NIE and the British white paper, the speech writers sought to attribute the State of the Union reference to one of those sources. The NSC Special Assistant told Committee staff the discussion with the WINPAC Director was focused on which of the two sources would be better to use and that the WINPAC Director preferred sourcing the information to the British paper because it was unclassified. Both the WINPAC Director and NSC Special Assistant told Committee staff that there was never a discussion about the credibility of the information.
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<a href=“E”>b</a> Finally, the two disagreed about the WTNPAC Directors account that he had told the NSC Special Assistant that the CIA had urged the British to remove the uranium reference from their white paper**, also because of concerns about sources and methods. The NSC Special Assistant told Committee staff that the WINPAC Director did not tell him the CIA had asked the British to remove the reference from their white paper.

So, what can be gleaned from the FULL context rather than the artfully edited version that you provided:

1)In section A there was full agreement that there was no concern with the credibility of the data and that their only concern was revealing the data while protecting the sourcing and methods - hence both agreed that citing the British information which had already been made public was the best choice.

2)In B and C we see that the “disagreement” that you trump up, really was no disagreement at all. Here is what happened: when WINPAC director first testified he claimed that he had recommended changes to the SoU regarding “Niger” and “500 tons”. The NSC said that there were no discussions about that since those words were never in any draft of the SoU. NSC said that perhaps WINPAC was confused with respect to a Negroponte speech. Low and behold in Section C we see that sure enough, WINPAC checked his drafts of the SoU and saw that indeed those words were never there and that indeed he must have been confused with the Negroponte speech. So what you seemed to characterize as a disagreement is seen really as an agreement when the whole story is shown - which you conveniently left out.

3) In section E, there was a minor disagreement over whether WINPAC said something to NSC or not about recommendations that the CIA had made to the British about their disclosure of the information. This is nothing more than an issue of one party recollecting something of relative insignificance that another part doesn’t recollect. BIG DEAL - it hardly changes the conclusion that concerns about using the uranium information pertained only to revealing sources and methods and not to any concerns about the credibility of the uranium reporting.

Now on to your other scurrilous allegations. Perhaps in your zeal to smear, you forgot the original point of this discussion was whether the president “lied” about uranium from Africa in specific or Iraq’s intent to restart its nuclear weapons program in general. Therefore the conclusions which you mention about how the NIE “should” have been worded or what the DCI “should” have said are relevant only in that they reinforce what the level of intelligence reporting and oversight provided to the president and Congress by the intelligence community actually was. This is a post mortem view of what went wrong - it does not change the fact that the information that was available at the time supported what Bush said. In some perverse way you are trying to blame Bush for how the NIE “should” have been worded or what Tenet “should” have done. That’s balderdash and you know it. But, for someone to doctor the report for his own agenda of smear, what’s a little more balderdash other than a fine seasoning. Quite frankly, I expected better from you.

Novak names names in Plame leak case

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