Lets review some interesting

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Let’s review some interesting connections.

Today’s article about the Plame case in the New York Times focused on this classified State Department memo. This is the memo which stated that Valerie Plame (identified as ‘Valerie Wilson’ in the memo) had recommended or arranged for Joe Wilson to make the fact-finding trip to Niger. And Fitzgerald’s office appears to believe that that memo was the ultimate source of the information that eventually made its way into print in Robert Novak’s column.

But remember, the CIA believes that that memo contains not just incorrect but fraudulent information. TPM Reader DK very helpfully reminded me of this passage from an article in the Post from December 2003 …

But sources said the CIA believes that people in the administration continue to release classified information to damage the figures at the center of the controversy, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV and his wife, Valerie Plame, who was exposed as a CIA officer by unidentified senior administration officials for a July 14 column by Robert D. Novak.

Wilson, a prominent critic of the administration over Iraq, has said that was done to retaliate against him for continuing to publicize his conclusion, after a 2002 mission for the CIA, that there was little evidence Iraq had sought uranium in Africa to develop nuclear weapons.

Sources said the CIA is angry about the circulation of a still-classified document to conservative news outlets suggesting Plame had a role in arranging her husband’s trip to Africa for the CIA. The document, written by a State Department official who works for its Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), describes a meeting at the CIA where the Niger trip by Wilson was discussed, said a senior administration official who has seen it.

CIA officials have challenged the accuracy of the INR document, the official said, because the agency officer identified as talking about Plame’s alleged role in arranging Wilson’s trip could not have attended the meeting.

“It has been circulated around,” one official said. CIA and State Department officials have refused to discuss the document.

On Oct. 28, Talon News, a news company tied to a group called GOP USA, posted on the Internet an interview with Wilson in which the Talon News questioner asks: “An internal government memo prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel details a meeting in early 2002 where your wife, a member of the agency for clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested that you could be sent to investigate the reports. Do you dispute that?”

The questioner, of course, was Jeff Gannon.

So a few <$NoAd$> questions.

Who requested that the memo be written? Who actually wrote it? Why does it contain the inaccuracies the CIA claims it does? Who were the administration officials who continued to circulate the classified document to conservative news outlets even after Plame’s identity was initially revealed? And how did it get into the hands of Jeff Gannon?

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