As most of the blog world now knows, in her
NYT piece Judy Miller told us that one of her notebooks containing her notes from a meeting with Scooter Libby contained, apparently on a separate page, the words "Valerie Flame." Miller says she assumed that the words were a reference to Valerie Plame, but her crack reporter brain can't recall either the source for the name or why it might have been mispelled.
Several theories about why the name was mispelled have emerged: She got the name in an oral communication and either misheard/mistranscribed it, or was confused by a foreign accent. She read the name from a poor copy of a document, in which part of the "P" had eroded. She deliberately mispelled it to help hide her source. She got it from some piece of intentional disinformation planted to facilitate the tracing of leaks. Any of these could be possible, but none is overwhelmingly convincing.
Two threads of information came together for me today that provide another possible explanation. The first is an article posted by Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com today. Justin has been tracking Plamegate quite closely and is one of the few people who has stayed on top of the John Hannah component of the leaks and the connections between the Plame investigation and other investigations such as the Larry Franklin/AIPAC leak case. (Earlier this week he provided the fascinating information that Fitzgerald convinced Italian authorities to provide him the unredacted version of the Italian parliamentary oversight report about the Niger yellowcake forgeries.)
Today's piece delves futher into connections between the two leaks and highlights this gem from the Franklin indictment:
"On or about June 3, 2003, Franklin met with FO-3 [Naor Gilon] at the POAC [Pentagon Officers Athletic Club], and the discussion centered on a specific person, not in the United Status government, and her thoughts concerning the nuclear program of the Middle Eastern country and, separately, certain charity, efforts in Foreign Nation A."
If Franklin and his Israeli handler - a nuclear weapons specialist - were talking about a woman whose "thoughts concerning the nuclear program" of a certain "Middle Eastern country" had some significance, then surely Judith Miller is a likely candidate. When we add in the business about "certain charity efforts in Foreign Nation A," the identification becomes even more credible: "Foreign Nation A" is Israel, the "charity efforts" consist of work on behalf of the Iraqi Jewish Archive, a joint project undertaken by Miller, Harold Rhode (Franklin's associate - and fellow suspect - in Feith's policy shop), and Ahmed Chalabi.
Justin goes on to note that this meeting, as well as other conversations between Franklin and his handlers, just happened to have been taped by the FBI. Obviously, those FBI tapes have been available to Fitzgerald. So it becomes quite intertesting that the prosecutors in the Franklin case have been unwilling to turn those tapes over to the defense lawyers demanding them there. Could that be to protect information of importance to the ongoing Plame investigation?
But how, you ask, does this bit of information relate to the "Flame/Plame" question? Well, several commentors in the various blog discussions of the issue have pointed out that the Aramaic/Hebrew characters for "f" and "p" are almost identical, as can be seen here. Might it be that someone connected with AIPAC or the Israeli embassy translating the word "Plame" from Hebrew read it as "Flame" instead? Might that mistaken spelling of the name then have found its way from AIPAC, via Franklin, to the "specific person" who was the subject of Franklin's chat at the POAC on June 3, 2003?
Could it be that Fitzgerald didn't need to press Miller about her source for "Flame," because he already knew, either from tapes of Franklin's meetings or from Franklin's disclosures as part of his plea bargain, where the misspelled name came from? Ponder the meaning of this line from the WaPo article about Franlin's guilty plea:
As part of the plea agreement, Franklin has agreed to cooperate in the larger federal investigation.
What "larger" investigation? Plame, maybe?
Admittedly, while this makes for an intriguing theory that ties the Franklin case and the Plame leak together, there's a potential downside for Fitzgerald if this kind of scenario actually took place. If the Israelis knew Plame's name, did they know of her just in connection with her being Wilson's wife, or did they know that she was a NOC operative with the CIA? If it's the later, would that existing outside knowledge about Plame's identity provide a defense in an IIPA prosecution? Perhaps.
Of course those facts would then give rise to the question of how the Israelis learned about Plame's status. Perhaps as part of a different tentacle of the NeoCon Beast. Maybe Wurmser or Bolton, or some other member of the NeoCon cabal with close ties AIPAC or some other pro-Israeli group, used AIPAC as a laundry drop. Wurmser's Israeli-born wife, an outspoken proponent of U.S. intervention, armed if necessary, to bring stability to the Middle East, is Director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Hudson Institute. Bolton's nomination to the UN received strong support from AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League, B'nai B'rith International, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.
Speculation could go on and on. However, if the scenario does turn out to be true, it provides one more window into the ugly picture of the workings of the NeoCon cabal that's finally being revealed. It also provides additional evidence of the need for a comprehensive investigation of the breadth and depth of the NeoCon conspiracy and the damage it has wrought.
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