dr. elsewhere here
Further down the rabbit hole we go.
Wayne Madsen has a remarkably (for him, anyway) lucid and disturbingly believable piece up from yesterday that asserts Valerie Plame’s cover was blown in 2001, not by Rove or Scooter, but by Marc Grossman, then Under-Secretary of State for Public Affairs. And not for political revenge against Joe Wilson, but to protect a tangled espionage web that included arms and drug dealing with Eastern European and Turkish governments, as well as AIPAC and the American Turkish Council (ATC), criminal activities that Plame’s cover company was monitoring and investigating.
Marc Grossman, you will recall, was the author of the early June memo that dispatched the skinny on Wilson’s Niger trip and Plame’s covert status, the memo Armitage received prior to his meeting with Novak.
Those of you who have followed these things will recognize the constellation of certain aspects of this story as playing important an important role in the whistle blown by Sibel Edmonds. She emphasized that Marc Grossman played a key role, and Madsen claims he placed two calls to the Turkish government and a Turkish energy company shopping for nuclear expertise warning them to stay away from Brewster Jennings because it was a government front.
(To read the rest, click "Permalink" below)
According to Madsen, the exposure was executed in two phone calls intercepted by the FBI, one to the ATC and one to an agent of the Pakistani intelligence service, and destroyed the company and its potential to monitor the clandestine and illicit transfers of nuclear information. Plame was thus forced into a desk position at Langley where she was assigned to the Joint Task Force on Iraq, which presumably fielded Iraq intelligence and attempted to square it with Cheney’s preconceptions for Iraq’s WMDs.
Unofficial word has it that Plame made the decision to stay stateside at Langley while her children were young, build seniority, and then resume her covert status at a later date. But then, Plame is not in a position to reveal any details, true or otherwise, about any aspect of her CIA status or activities. Then again, the jurists monitoring Fitz’s Grand Jury investigation have emphasized the gravity of this crime, so it’s not clear if Madsen’s claim that Brewster Jennings was actually defunct in 2003 from Grossman’s exposure can be considered accurate.
Then again, and admittedly this is a long shot, Fitz may well have access to the FBI investigation into Edmonds’ case (Edmonds and the Plame leak case share Reggie Walton as their judge), though that investigation itself is flawed by strong evidence the FBI is itself complicit in the crimes and their cover-up. Fitz after all allegedly shared information he has uncovered in his Plame investigation with Paul McNulty, who is investigating the AIPAC-Larry Franklin spy scandal. Fitz may thus have some insight into the greater role of Grossman in the very first leaking of Plame’s identity way back in 2001. Knowing the role of Armitage would then be even more the red herring than it has been established to be currently, despite the efforts of Novak and his minions to pin everything on him and dismiss everything else.
However, Madsen also reports that now shamed Congressman Ney of Ohio was once a NOC agent like Plame, and was working backchannels with Iran, angering the non-negotiable neocons who demand we should invade that country, too. According to Madsen, Ney and Plame’s company were finding links between the Russian-Israeli mob and important players in the Bush administration (remember Bush waxing aflutter about seeing into Putin’s soul?), and had to be neutralized.
Of course, Madsen has earlier this week woven all this into the larger scheme that makes even Fitz complicit in covering up the role of US intelligence in the ’93 WTC bombings (a claim he has asserted previously). His interpretation of the infamous Sealed v. Sealedindictment against Rove is that Gonzalez intervened on behalf of Rove by threatening to expose Fitz's past bad behaviors. This scenario is where Madsen gets a bit convoluted for my puny little mind, but hey, stranger – and certainly more evil things have happened in this diabolical tale of intrigue that is these Untied Skates of Amerika.
9 comments:
dr e, from my interview with the director of Sibel's new film: "Most observers presume he was on Sibel’s wiretaps, possibly tipping Turkish friends about let’s say the risk posed by Brewster Jennings‘s activities"
Sibel translated stuff from 1997 to early 2002 - so Madsen appears to be correct on at least that element.
Madsen is a prankster. All he does is take stories from other sites, add bogus "details", and then claims he got the story from one of his innumerable "sources" which he presumably acquired during his one-year stint at the NSA. What a joke.
Though I admit, his site is often very entertaining to read.
911c: I tend to think as you do about Madsen. At least, that's the way I think about 40% of the time. But I'm not convinced that such is the case.
Usually, Madsen's "sources" tell him things that are never proven or disproven. Sometimes, he picks up things that are later verified through other sources. Also, Madsen used to publish in "respectable" journals with decent co-writers.
Finally, I just cannot comprehend why anyone would devote so many hours to mere pranksterism. Madsen seems to pursue his writing and research as a full-time job. There has to be something more substantial in it for him.
Now keep in mind, I still think the guy is maddening, and I certainly understand why so many shy away from his work. I always mentione it with caveats. He seems to be on target only about half the time. And I'm never really sure which half is which!
what gives? this dr. elsewher always has a high degree of snark factor when dealing with other blogs. I give The Madsen Report just as much credence as Cannonfire, after all didn't this blog post the victor ashe/george bush lurid liason lovefest.
Don't refer to them if you can't respect them.
yeah, my caveat was not likely strong enough in my post, but lukery gets closest to the reason this particular madsen piece caught my eye. specifically, if you scrutinize the plame data we have at our disposal, we find marc grossman right in the middle of it. he wrote that memo to armitage that prompted, mm no, preceded (?) the call to novak. what all the plame leak stories have continued to miss is precisely the person in the WH who knew plames id. what madsen exposes, mm, suggests here is that grossman was the person who knew because he had already outed her.
and consider the noise that was made three years ago and since that 'everyone knew' plame was cia. well, no doubt a lot of folks on the inside possibly did know her id, but they likely would not have known had she not been forced (allegedly by grossman) to shift her work schedule.
but here is something that just occurred to me and it may undermine madsen's case. if plame was outed in the really serious sense in 2001, to the point that her company had to be disbanded and she had to be 'desked', why didn't the cia request an investigation from the doj then?
seems to me a very good question, but it might also be answered this way: how do we know it wasn't? how do we know there was not already a request submitted, an investigation under way (however limp), and when the same exposure then makes it out into the public, tenet was either forced to follow through, or he saw it as an opportunity to force the investigation into high gear.
anyway, the upshot of my comment here is simply that i agree that madsen's assertions required more than a box of salt, but what grabbed my attention here was grossman's role, especially with respect to sibel edmonds' references to him.
anon831, my comment got posted before i saw yours, so wanted to defend myself.
excuse me, but i rarely if ever snark about other blogs, especially when i link to them. this was not intended as a snark, frankly, but i suppose it came off as such. the only blogs i can imagine openly snarking about would be coulter or malkin or o'reilly blogs, which i just don't have the stomach for those.
quite the contrary, i try to note the respect i have for the many blogs i link to. i would challenge you to prove otherwise.
you may or may not be a frequent visitor here, but you should know that joe and i share a jaundiced eye for madsen's work. joe has articulated his concerns eloquently in these comments, and i have to say i share them. the only thing i'd add is that, although connecting the dots is of crucial importance in these matters of the state of our state, it is sometimes just as important to dismiss some of the dots as irrelevant, noise. that might be my biggest complaint about madsen; he seems to accept all datapoints with equal weight, and offers little if any skepticism.
if you'll recall, joe referenced the bush/ashe liaison dripping with caveats, not just about the sources, but about the topic itself.
i visit madsen's site once a week or so, just to see if anything of interest comes up, and sometimes it does, and sometimes it's just over the top, a bit too sensational. but this piece really caught my eye, so i decided to share it. still, it seemed important to remind readers to consider the source.
in short, i referred to madsen's site with the respect i have for his work, which is qualified. i feel i have a responsibility to readers to do that.
Usually, Madsen's "sources" tell him things that are never proven or disproven. Sometimes, he picks up things that are later verified through other sources.
Can you think of any examples offhand where he scooped the MSM or other independent media outlets?
Finally, I just cannot comprehend why anyone would devote so many hours to mere pranksterism. Madsen seems to pursue his writing and research as a full-time job. There has to be something more substantial in it for him.
But the alternative is even harder to believe - that he has all this original info to contribute and yet he chooses to mix total BS in with it (because certainly a lot of what he writes is totally indefensible). I checked his site daily for a few months when I first found it - when I noticed that even the most idiotic theories floating around in "conspiracy" circles wound up on his site as having been reported by his sources, I realized what he was up to.
Possible that he was a legitimate researcher at one point who realized that it was easier to make a buck peddling nonsense (keep in mind that he does have a book for sale).
Flunky here. Wasn't Grossman the recipient of the June 10, 2003 memo from INR that mentioned Plames role? (According to Madsen.) And INR had been the dissenting opinion on Iraqi threat in the NIE's all along. (According to National Journal.) Still, that's how the information got closer to Cheney.
Miss P.
Re 911-curious: "All he does is take stories from other sites..."
Madsen appears to have picked up some of the story about the Dickersons from this post and this post of mine from earlier in the week. I'm not sure if he verified it elsewhere with one of his 'sources' - and perhaps picked up a couple of other new pieces in the process.
Separately, emptywheel noted here that there is a problem with at least one part of Madsen's comment about BJ being in the memo.
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