Many of you have read the
statement posted recently at TPMCafe by Larry Johnson and other former CIA agents, which starts:
We trained and worked at the CIA with Valerie Plame. We presented the following statement at a hearing on Capitol Hill in October 2003. In light of the latest White House sanctioned assault on Valerie Plame and her character, our testimony remains relevant and accurate.
Who is this man, Larry Johnson, who speaks so powerfully in defense of his former CIA classmate, Valerie Plame?
Larry Johnson has two other powerful diaries at TPMCafe:
The Big Lie About Valerie Plame and
Mr. Bush, Have You No Shame? If you haven't read them, you should.
But who is Larry Johnson? We know he's a hero for speaking out in support of an outed CIA operative, knowing full well he is going up against an administration that specializes in petty revenge.
Some people seem to think he just showed up out of the blue the other day and started defending Plame, though. With all the recent talk concerning Rove, some of us tend to forget this scandal first flared up during 2003 and there is some history to it. The truth is that Johnson has been outspoken on this issue and the fixing of intelligence regarding Iraq for quite some time.
Going back to 2003, Johnson was a fierce public critic of Plame's outing, as shown by his September 30, 2003 appearance on NewsHour:
JOHNSON: Let's be very clear about what happened. This is not an alleged abuse. This is a confirmed abuse. I worked with this woman. She started training with me. She has been undercover for three decades, she is not as Bob Novak suggested a CIA analyst. But given that, I was a CIA analyst for four years. I was undercover. I could not divulge to my family outside of my wife that I worked for the Central Intelligence Agency until I left the agency on Sept. 30, 1989. At that point I could admit it.
So the fact that she's been undercover for three decades and that has been divulged is outrageous because she was put undercover for certain reasons. One, she works in an area where people she meets with overseas could be compromised. When you start tracing back who she met with, even people who innocently met with her, who are not involved in CIA operations, could be compromised. For these journalists to argue that this is no big deal and if I hear another Republican operative suggesting that well, this was just an analyst fine, let them go undercover. Let's put them overseas and let's out them and then see how they like it. They won't be able to stand the heat.
According to the occasionally dubious Justin Raimondo, in October 2003, Johnson was apparently among the first to suggest that Scooter Libby was one source of the leak:
Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst who worked with Valerie Plame, the reported agent, all but identified "Scooter" Libby as the government official who outed her - and at least one other in the Vice President's office.
Not having seen the TV program where he "all but identified" Libby, I can only speculate, with the benefit of hindsight, as to whether Johnson's hints might have been interpreted the wrong way:
Pressed by Pat Buchanan to name the leaker, Johnson refused to deny it was Libby; he furthermore stated that the perpetrator was no stranger to "scandal."
As Marc Rich's longtime lawyer, and a key figure in procuring the fugitive billionaire a presidential pardon, Lewis ""Scooter" Libby surely fits the bill.
Who else in the administration is "no stranger to scandal," and appears to have something to do with the Plame leak? Hmmm...
Johnson did not limit his comments to the Plame issue. For example, he authored an article entitled "Decoding the PDB" in April 2004, debunking the administration's attempt to minimize the famous August 6, 2001 PDB (you know, the one that Condi seemed to recall was entitled something about Bin Laden and attacking inside the U.S., you know, that one).
Republican partisans and even some members of the media are busy bolstering the spin that this was 'an historical memo.' Absolute nonsense!
I wrote about 40 PDB's during my four-year tenure at the CIA. This particular PDB article was written in response to a presidential request. I am told that Bush's request was a reaction to the intelligence warnings he was hearing during the daily CIA morning briefings. Something caught his attention and awakened his curiosity. He reportedly asked the CIA to come back with its assessment of Bin Laden's intentions. The CIA answered the question: Bin Laden was targeting the United States.
The PDB article released Saturday is a classic CIA response to such a request. It lays out the historical and evidentiary antecedents that undergird the analyst's belief about the nature of the threat and provides current intelligence indicators that reinforce the basic conclusion of the piece: i.e., Bin Laden was determined to attack the United States. It is true that the piece did not contain specific details about the plot that was launched subsequently on 9/11. However, the details that are included in the piece are so alarming that anyone familiar with the nature of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda should have asked, 'What are they planning and what can we do to stop it?'
Remember the furious attacks against Richard Clarke during the past month? Now that we have seen the content of the PDB we know he was telling the truth when he said that President Bush and Condoleezza Rice did not make fighting Al Qaeda a priority prior to 9/11. At a minimum, the details in the 6 August PDB should have motivated Rice to convene a principals' meeting. Such a meeting would have ensured that all members of the president's national security team were aware of the information that had been shared with the president. George Bush should have directed the different department heads to report back within one week on any information relevant to the Al Qaeda threat. Had he done this there is a high probability that the FBI field agents concerns about Arabs taking flight training would have rung some bells. There is also a high probability that the operations folks at CIA would have shared the information they had in hand about the presence of Al Qaeda operators in the United States. While Condoleezza Rice is correct that there was no 'silver bullet' in that PDB, she conveniently ignores the huge pieces of the puzzle that were in the hands of various members of the U.S. government.
This article also features a brief biography of Johnson:
Larry C. Johnson is a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. He served with the CIA from 1985 through 1989 and worked in the State Department's office of Counter Terrorism from 1989 through 1993. He also is a registered Republican who contributed financially to the Bush Campaign in 2000.
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity is a name that should ring a bell to some of you. Ray McGovern, who testified so vividly at John Conyers' DSM hearing, is one of the founders of that group.
Since this group speaks the truth, we can naturally expect that they will be smeared at some point by the Bush Administration. We've heard it all before - if you criticize the administration, you're engaging in "partisan attacks" and no one should listen to you. And I think we all know the administration would freely launch this attack even though Larry Johnson is actually a registered Republican.
The truth, of course, is much simpler. What caused Joe Wilson, who was Ambassador to Iraq under Bush's father, to become such a critic of the administration? What caused a registered Republican and CIA veteran to start going on talk shows criticizing a Republican administration?
These veterans of government service simply became disgusted with the rise of the neocons under Bush and the fixing of intelligence in order to support the war. One by one, professionals like Richard Clarke who served honorably under multiple administrations have come to understand the agenda of the Bush Administration, and they couldn't get out fast enough. I don't know one way or the other, but I doubt registered Republican Larry Johnson is some kind of committed pacifist. It's far more likely that he simply feels THIS war was a complete and total fraud on the American people.
And so we see how it all ties together, Rove, Plame, the DSM, the war in Iraq. The administration was on a mission to fix the intelligence, and Joe Wilson was one of the brave souls who spoke out against it. They needed to punish him, and cow others into silence, by any means available. Hopefully, brave men like Wilson and Johnson will ultimately succeed in showing the public what a false bill of goods we were sold by this administration.