I'm sorry, but I'm not buying the "I made a terrible mistake" twice story, from Armitage or anyone else connected with the Plame affair. Two factoids that seem to have fallen through the memory hole in this recently constructed Armitage worked for State under Powell and Powell didn't even like Bush and neither did Armitage bullshit scenario, is the rather unpleasant fact, first that in spite of not liking Bush, Powell went before the UN and lied his ass off for nearly 2 hours for Bush, and second that Armitage wasn’t Powell’s maverick buddy as he is now being portrayed. Oh, and also the rather amazing confluence of apologies, Powell is so sorry now, too, isn't he. Isn't his UN fiasco his biggest personal professional regret blah, blah, blah. Of course it is--now. But another factoid seems to have been sucked through the memory hole as well. Early on it was revealed that in late May or early June in the days just before Plame's name was shopped around to at least 6 members of the lap dog Washington press corps, Powell and others took a trip to Africa, and on that trip to Africa they took a file on Plame. This was widely reported in the press at the time it was learned. The file was at one point even known to have been carried by or to have been in then Bush press secretary, Ari Fliesher's hands. He resigned shortly after that incident, although this timing may have been coincidence as it was widely reported that he was considering his resignation for some time before this flurry of accidental name spreading occurred.
Now some want to make this whole affair a big mistake. Armitage made a mistake twice, by absent mindedly spilling Plame’s name to two high powered conservative members of the Washington press corps—my-oh-my, it was all a big mistake, so sorry… Unfortunately, it isn't as easy as saying Armitage released (I'm still not buying the "I made a terrible mistake twice" story) Plame's name to the press first so there was no crime, there was no cover up. There was no harm, no foul. Here's why.
Let's look at what we do know. We know now that Plame was working not just on any old WMD, but that she was head of the WMD in Iraq desk/project at the CIA. Like all real (versus the Bush and Cheney authorized fictional/creative department/sources in the Pentagon for instance) sources for WMD in Iraq such as the UN weapons inspectors for one, she was finding no WMD in Iraq. Now whether or not there were some spent shell casing in some junkyard somewhere that had once held some kind of chemical compound from the late eighties as Dixie, the man who evidently is proud to have his head wrapped in a confederate flag, has been propagandizng here, or whether there was 500 as Santorum was spouting on FOXNEWS or the 700 that our flag-wrapped buddy now says there was is irrelevant, the important fact is that Saddam had no viable WMD, and there is ample evidence that the Bush administration's push for war with Iraq was based on the fact that Saddam not only had WMD, but he had the bomb, or was working on the bomb, or was going to get the bomb, and we had to stop this dangerous and evil dictator before he got the bomb. But in fact, he was a washed up dictator, evil or not, who had apparently even lost interest in being dictator, but like many evil dictator's he lacked an exit strategy and was apparently, in the years between GWI and GWII, transistioning from evil dictator to novelist and was hoping like many Iraqi novelists of this interwar period, to write the great Iraqi novel. History intervened. His dream was deferred.
The important point here is, Plame and her husband, Joe Wilson, evidently knew that Saddam had no WMDs, no Air Force, no drones, no mobile chemical labs (I still can't write this without laughing my ass off), no mobile missile's concealed behind Palm trees, or was it disguised as Palm trees, no matter now. In fact, Iraq had none, zero, zilch, well maybe one actual weapon of the 55 different types that Powell said Iraq had in that famous speech before the UN, where the aging and grainy film of the jet, destroyed in a bombing raid in 1991, spraying what we were told was chemical weapons all over the place, was used to such grand effect. And which Powell now claims was a big mistake and he is sorry for ever making and after all he never liked Bush and Bush rewarded him by sacking him, so we all forgive him his transgression, and some still wish he would run for President. But he was working in the Bush State Department at the time, in fact he was Secretary of State, and Richard Lee Armitage was his second in command over there, and in the current lapdog press corp rewriting of history we are supposed to believe that these two were thick as thieves, they were the mavericks, the straight shooters, the one's who didn't like Bush and who weren't loyal to Bush, maybe even conspiring against Bush. It was classic political intrigue alright, except for this one little speech at the UN and now this mistaken and innocent release of Plame's name to the press, by the number two at this radical outpost of anti-Bushism, the Bush State Department.
Now let's look at Mr. Armitage, that maverick, that guy just out there accidentally putting out Plame’s name, making mistakes, unknowing and innocent, we are now told. Because maybe Mr. Armitage
was that maverick guy at state who with Powell was so anti-Bush, so anti-neo-con, so anti-war, who really didn’t agree with Bush at all and was so against Bush that if he leaked Plame’s name it was a fluke, a mistake, an error, a lapse in judgement, an innocent slip of the tongue by a incompetent official who, in fact, he didn’t know who she was or even that she worked at CIA or what she did there, or really anything at all about her. So who is this maverick, this anti-Bushie, this incompetent loose-lipped but innocent for all that oaf, Richard Lee Armitage.
For those here who never heard of the Iraq-Contra affair, the name Richard Lee Armitage, may seem like a name from nowhere, but for those who lived through those glorious years of "my heart still tells me I did nothing wrong even though the evidence suggests otherwise," "mistakes were made" and the administration of the now canonized Ronald Reagan, that name rings a bell. Yes, Richard Lee Armitage, was so involved in the Iran-Contra affair that his first attempt at the job of Assistant Secretary of State in the George H.W. Bush administration was denied him in 1989 when he couldn’t get Senate confirmation because of his Iran-Contra ties (ever wonder how a guy who hates his father and wants to do everything different than Bush I wound up with so many of Dad’s former employees, compatriots and friends in his administration?). So this maverick was involved in that shady affair at a high level as Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, whatever that signifies. But rather than go through the history of Iran-Contra, and who did what, let’s just let Armitage’s failure to be confirmed be the telling fact on his level of involvement.
More recently we find that Armitage was a signatory to the letter from the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), titled "Rebuilding America's Defenses," which this group delivered to President William Jefferson Clinton on January 26, 1998. This letter, for those who still don’t know, specifically called for an invasion of Iraq and the removal of Saddam based on the argument that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, had drones capable of reaching America, etc. Indeed, many of the same claims made by Powell in his speech to the United Nations were coincidentally first given voice in this letter to Clinton of 1998. But that’s not the only coincidence. In fact, the PNAC, as it is so fondly referred to by it’s founders, which include, in addition to that maverick Armitage, such other maverick’s as Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Jed Bush, and surprise, Lewis Libby, was peopled by a who’s who of neo-cons in the Bush administration. And I bet you though that Armitage didn’t even know Libby or Cheney, and according to the stories now circulating who can blame you. Indeed, when Armitage was first appointed to work with Powell, it was widely rumored that he was appointed to be Powell’s Undersecretary because Cheney didn’t trust Powell so he sent Armitage over there to "keep an eye on Powell." Of course all this gets washed out in the new image of Armitage as maverick partner to maverick Powell. Some maverick, HUH.
But that’s not all this maverick has been up to. He is also a former board member for CAC International. CACI asit is commonly referred to, is the private military contractor, who employed the four interrogators who are widely believed to be responsible for the death of at least one detainee at Abu Ghraib prison. Of course, once this grisly episode was singled out by General Taguba in his report on abuses of Iraqi detainees at the prison, Armitage had to distance himself, so he resigned. So he not only suggested and helped plan the war, but later profited from it. Yes, quite a maverick this Armitage. And we are to believe that he didn’t even know who Valerie Plame was, or what he was doing when he first told Woodward about her, or when he later made the same mistake again and let her name slip to Robert Novak. Mistakes will happen even in the most awkward and improbable of circumstances.
So even though such radicals here as Dixie, he of the confederate flag head-wrap, and Damocles, the clear thinking and logical, want us now to believe that no law was broken, mistakes were made, but no harm was ever meant, I’m not buying it. You have three people in three different departments of the Bush administration releasing Plame’s name to several different members of the press, from Chris Mathews to Mathew Cooper, to Judy Miller, and others. All of this activity, this accidental name spreading occurred either before or immediately after her husband’s anti-Bush article appeared in The New York Times. We have Rove, at the White House, Libby in the Vice President’s office, and now this maverick Armitage, at State, releasing/leaking Plame’s name to at least six members of the Washington press corps within about a two-week period of time.
Now I don’t know shit about logic, or about constructing an argument or even about how government works. Hell I don’t even have a high school education, I’m, even seen by Dixie, he of the confederate flag head-wrap, as a "Fucking Idiot," and who can doubt his veracity on this particular topic, but I think I do know that if you hold an apple before your face and suddenly let go of it, it will probably fall. The reason I know this is not because I have any knowledge of physics, I don’t know shit about physics or Newton, or anything he said about apples, if he did…but because I have dropped apples and in every instance, they fell to the floor and bruised and didn’t taste very well afterwards…
The point here is that, as with the apple falling, we have to look at probabilities, and ask ourselves how likely is it that we could have these three people, Rove, Libby and Armitage, the maverick, suddenly and accidentally speaking to no less than 6 different press functionaries (two press contacts a piece, mind you) about a specific CIA agent in charge of the Iraq WMD desk/project at the CIA, during this small period of time. If you can actually look at all this, and say that no harm was meant and that this was nothing more than a group of well-meaning people just making "mistakes," good for you. I just can’t see it that way, but maybe some still can. For those who want to see most of the lies contained in Woodward’s editorial in the Washington Post debunked go here. For Plame’s job at CIA go here. For Armitage’s various biographies go here.
