Pelosi, Holder, Obama Seek to Handcuff CIA

From a former CIA operative:

Pelosi, the third in line to the office of president has, in lock step with the Obama administration and the Attorney General’s Office, continued the onslaught against the CIA.

Read what this witch-hunt is really about and the dire consequences of it at Human Events.

Vanderboegh--the CIA Factor and the Obama Administration

If we survive the Obama administration without a civil war, it will be because insiders within the permanent government -- people who remember their oaths or just men and women who are frightened at what might happen to the prospect of their pensions -- used leaks and calculated PR weapons of selective destruction to bring down the players, one by one.

For this reason we should celebrate the Obama Administration's decision to attack the CIA.

Read the whole thing here.

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN, NAN?

It seems that Nan has been in hiding since Friday, preferring to withdraw from the public eye after her gargantuan debacle of a news conference in which she accused the CIA of lying to her.

Over the weekend Nan was nowhere to be found. Reports are that she has been holed up with her attorneys attempting to figure out what to do now.

Today she will in all likelihood creep back into the public eye (she has House business to tend), but what will she say?

Notably, the White House has declined a response to Pelosi's allegations.

Pelosi Should Step Down

With her integrity increasingly in doubt, it is time for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to relinquish her role as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

This is the subject of my latest op-ed at Columbia Conservative Examiner.

What can we say about someone who would prosecute government officials for waterboarding, when she admits she knew it had been used as far back as 2003, yet said and did nothing?

Valerie Plame Back in the News

Valerie Plame, the CIA operative who claims she was 'outed' by Bush Administration officials in retaliation against her husband, Joe Wilson, is back in the news. This time she claims her 'covert' work involved gathering information on Iran's nuclear program.

Immediately both the mainstream media and the Left are placed in a precarious situation by the claim.

Supposedly Iran had no such program. Conventional wisdom, as relayed by the mouthpieces of the mainstream media, always cast doubt on the suggestion that Iran was working on a nuclear weapons program.

One can safely assume that the reason for such well-placed doubt was the suspicion that Bush Administration officials were using such claims as justification for attacking Iran. Thus, any slight hint that Iran either had nukes or was intending to develop such weapons had to be dismissed.

For example, as recently as June, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed that Iran was absolutely no threat to the U.S. or the world, and that there was no credible evidence that Al Qaeda or any other terrorist group in Iran was sending insurgents into Iraq.

And this leads us to the following question. Where did the materials for Iran's nuclear program come from?

We know that loosely connected terrorist organizations and rogue nations have a vested interest in Iranian nukes.

The bottom line is that if what Plame is saying is true, then the preconceived notions concerning Iran on the part of the mainstream media and the Left have been totally wrong.

The other alternative is the possibility that Plame is making the whole thing up. While this alternative is highly unlikely, such a possibility raises the stakes in the charges made against Scooter Libby. If Plame is no more trustworthy a witness than to fabricate or exaggerate her work with the CIA, then how can she be believed when giving testimony concerning her supposed 'outing' by the Bush Administration?

Her credibility at that point goes out the window.

Yet we already know there is at least some credibility to Plame's claims. We know that Iran has been developing nuclear weapons, and we have a good idea who is helping them do it. But we knew this anyway, without any information provided by Plame.

The problem is we cannot know for sure if Plame is being totally candid concerning the role she played, if any, in the Iranian nuke intelligence gathering process. But we do know enough to totally debunk the Left's contention that Iran is no serious threat.

Valerie Plame's Sour Grapes

Charlotte, NC (TLS). In a melodramatic display suitable for a daytime Oscar, Congressional Democrats staged quite a show on Friday as they provided Valerie Plame with a platform from which to exhibit a bad case of sour grapes. Plame essentially accused everyone in the Bush Administration of deliberately blowing her 'cover,' accusing officials of 'outing' her in retaliation for her husband's opposition to the Iraq War.

The obvious problem with Plame's performance today, apart from the obvious overkill and melodramatic exaggeration, is that she is pointing the finger at the wrong persons.

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's sham of a case against Scooter Libby revealed the real source of the leak--one Richard Armitage, who so far has not only escaped any blame for the 'outing' of Plame but who is never mentioned as one who may have broken federal law (this is because Fitzgerald knows Armitage broke no law in naming Plame as a CIA agent).

This begs the question, then, if the original source of the leak broke no law, then why was Scooter Libby prosecuted? Why are Democrats claiming the Bush Administration broke the law? Why are they after Cheney's head?

Plame's accusations are incredible given that everyone in Washington knew who she was and what she did, meaning of course that there was nothing inherently 'covert' about her work, although she has a penchant for touting it as such. But if one is looking for an original smoking gun--the first one to 'leak' information that everyone knew anyway--then that smoking gun is Richard Armitage.

It is curious that Armitage's name was never mentioned in Plame's lengthy soliloquy and subsequent questioning by the Congressional panel on Friday.

What is NOT surprising is that Plame was forced to admit, under heavy questioning, that she had absolutely no evidence to support her charge that Administration officials were aware that her work in the CIA was considered 'classified' information.

That Administration officials would NOT know that Plame's work was considered classified is certainly credible, given that Armitage knew all about it, along with Scooter Libby, and members of the mainstream media, such as Tim Russert, and columnist Robert Novak.

So, the question becomes, if it was common knowledge all over Washington that Plame worked for the CIA, then how could anyone be guilty of 'outing' her in retaliation? Officials within the Administration were merely repeating what they had heard others talk about openly, and thus assumed that the nature of Plame's work was NOT classified.

Let me put it this way. If Plame's work for the CIA was considered top secret and classified, then it was the most poorly-kept secret in the history of covert operations.

Merely repeating what everyone else in the Beltway already knew is not 'outing' someone.

Thus, as far as we can tell, Plame is merely verbalizing her sour grapes and cannot be considered a credible witness. And Congressional Democrats are playing this up for all it's worth in hopes of scoring some political points at the President's expense.