Author: jpol

Three new major polls out this week spell serious trouble for President Bush, and are very compelling in their consistency. All three show the president’s approval ratings falling below 40% and all three show him at an...

Colorado voters went to the polls yesterday (November 1st) and voted in a 5-year suspension of their “Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights” (TABOR), the strictest government spending limitation in the country, thus...

The Morning Call, a daily newspaper serving Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, ran a devastating two-part series (plus sidebars) this weekend that should have been picked up by every U.S. newspaper and featured as the lead...

There is a little-known report known as the National Security Index, put out periodically by the Senate Democratic Policy Committee. It contains some truly grim statistics that are rarely reported by the mainstream media even...

Yesterday longtime UPI intelligence reporter Richard Sale, posting via Patrick Lang’s account, took issue with an October 25th New York Times article identifying Vice President Dick Cheney as I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s original source for the identity of Valerie Plame Wilson. The Times indicated that Libby’s notes suggested that Cheney had learned about Plame from former CIA Chief George Tenet and had passed the information on to Libby on June 12, 2003, nearly a month before Joseph Wilson went public about his March 2002 mission to Niger for the CIA (during which he had concluded that reports of efforts by Iraq to buy yellowcake from Niger were false).

According to Sale’s sources, “former senior and serving current intelligence officials,” “Libby’s notes on this are misleading and inaccurate or both.” Sale insists that he has four sources who allege that “it was a telephone call from the Department of State that first gave Libby the name of Plame,” and that while no one is certain who placed the call, it “definitely came from the State Department office of John Bolton, then the arms control chief of the department.” Sale implicates two Bolton employees in the leak, David Wurmser, “a virulent pro-war hawk,” and Frederick Fleitz, “a CIA officer detailed to Bolton’s office from the agency.” Sale reports that Wurmser learned about Valerie Plame from Fleitz.

Back on September 20, 2005 Arianna Huffington also implicated Bolton and Fleitz in the outing of Valerie Wilson.

Time will tell if Sale’s sources are correct, but there is a wealth of circumstantial evidence to suggest that, at the very least, John Bolton was intimately involved in the Bush administration’s efforts to disseminate the Niger Yellowcake rumors, and that he might well have been in a position to learn of Valerie Plame’s identity long before Robert Novak leaked it on July 14, 2003.

Fred Fleitz apparently had worked with John Bolton in the past, and when Bolton went to work at the State Department he requested of the CIA that Fleitz be assigned to him there. The person at CIA who ”facilitated” that request was Alan Foley, then director of the CIA office of Weapons, Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control (Winpac). Foley was Bolton’s main contact at CIA in the area of WMD, and he spoke regularly with both Fleitz and Bolton “at least once a week or three times a month,” according to his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff during Bolton’s confirmation hearings for his United Nations appointment. What is so interesting about this is that Alan Foley, as the head of Winpac, would have almost certainly known and worked closely with one Valerie Plame Wilson who worked in Non-Proliferation Division of the CIA, the operational side that worked hand-in-hand with Alan Foley’s Winpac in the area of WMD.