Whatever happened to the official CIA damage assessment from the Plame leak?
This from a Post article from October 29, 2005:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
"The CIA has not conducted a formal damage assessment, as is routinely done in cases of espionage and after any legal proceedings have been exhausted."
Of course, two days earlier, Bob Woodward claimed just the opposite on Larry King Live saying:
"They did a damage assessment within the CIA, looking at what this did that [former ambassador] Joe Wilson's wife [Plame] was outed. And turned out it was quite minimal damage. They did not have to pull anyone out undercover abroad. They didn't have to resettle anyone. There was no physical danger to anyone, and there was just some embarrassment."
http://mediamatters.org/...
Then there was this from Raw Story:
"According to current and former intelligence officials, Plame Wilson, who worked on the clandestine side of the CIA in the Directorate of Operations as a non-official cover (NOC) officer, was part of an operation tracking distribution and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction technology to and from Iran.
...
While Director of Central Intelligence Porter Goss has not submitted a formal damage assessment to Congressional oversight committees, the CIA's Directorate of Operations did conduct a serious and aggressive investigation, sources say.
Intelligence sources familiar with the damage assessment say that what is called a "counter intelligence assessment to agency operations" was conducted on the orders of the CIA's then-Deputy Director of the Directorate of Operations, James Pavitt.
Former CIA counterintelligence officer Larry Johnson believes that such an assessment would have had to be done for the CIA to have referred the case to the Justice Department.
"An exposure like that required an immediate operational and counter intelligence damage assessment," Johnson said. "That was done. The results were written up but not in a form for submission to anyone outside of CIA."
One former counterintelligence official described the CIA's reasons for not seeking Congressional assistance on the matter as follows: "[The CIA Leadership] made a conscious decision not to do a formal inquiry because they knew it might become public," the source said. "They referred it [to the Justice Department] instead because they believed a criminal investigation was needed."
The source described the findings of the assessment as showing "significant damage to operational equities."
http://rawstory.com/...
This piece goes on to detail a probable focus of Plame's work, the AQ Kahn nuclear network out of Pakistan, which reportedly fed the Iranians as well as Saudi Arabia according to a recent German report. Obviously, any compromise of this work would be substantial, since Kahn seems to be the greatest proliferation threat of the past decade, outside of the treaty busting US administration(s), of course.
So what is the true story? And why aren't democrats raising hell about it? It would seem a straightforward talking point for Meet the Press to raise some awareness on the issue, beat up on Bush, and gain national security credentials at the same time. Sounds like a job for Hillary, huh? She's trying to project military testosterone with the big boys in an apparent effort to "move to the middle". Get her on the case. Maybe we can generate some buzz on this like we did for Downing Street and the Plame case in general. How would that one look leaked to page one of the Times? With the CIA rank and file at war with the White House and the Pentagon clearly terrified of the maniacs in charge (see Sy Hersch et al) it would seem a likely possibility that with some public pressure, the real story may out.