Dale, arguing Valerie Plame really was covert, because the CIA was just making it obvious she was a spy to disguise the fact she really was a spy:

The CIA would never use a red herring to attract a spy agencies attention in one area while operating in another.

B Moe, evaluating this double-oh double-bluff:

Of course! What better cover for a spy than posing as a CIA agent? No one would suspect someone openly working for the CIA of actually being a real, live, double-naught spy!

Dale you are a fucking genius!

Posted by: Ace at 08:16 AM | Comments (17)
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One good thing about a media firestorm is that it brings to light things people didn't know, forgot they knew, or liked to pretend they didn't know:

Justice Department lawyers warned eight months ago that a nefarious element had infiltrated important East Coast ports, but they weren't talking about terrorists or Arab shipping companies.

They were talking about the mafia.

In a civil suit filed in July, prosecutors accused the International Longshoremen's Association, the 65,000-member union that supplies labor to ports from Florida to Maine, of being a "vehicle for organized crime" on the waterfront.

Packed with tales of corruption, embezzling and extortion, the complaint accused union executives of being associates of the Genovese and Gambino crime families.

The U.S. attorney's office asked a judge to seize control of the union, remove its officers and "put an end to the conspiracy among union officials, organized crime figures and others that has plagued some of the nation's most important ports for decades."

The allegations, assailed by the union as unjust and untrue, are inching toward trial amid heightened concern over port security.

...

But some port security experts say America already has a fifth column, of sorts, at work on its docks: gangsters who have made the piers friendly territory for drug smugglers and cargo thieves.

...

"It is an invitation to smuggling of all kinds, whether it is heroin, or weapons, or human trafficking," King said. "Instead of bringing in 50 kilograms of heroin, what would stop them from bringing in five kilograms of plutonium?"

ILA spokesman James McNamara said any suggestion that the union poses a security risk is "ludicrous."

"Nobody in America cares more about port security than the longshoremen," he said.

I feel so warm and safe.

Posted by: Ace at 08:09 AM | Comments (17)
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The beginning of this article ennumerates all the various ways that Valerie Plame's paper-thin cover could be exposed by simple Internet and public-database searches.

And of course all hostile foreign intelligence services could do all that, and did.

Good reading, but let's cut to the chase:

When the Chicago Tribune searched for Plame on an Internet service that sells public information about private individuals to its subscribers, it got a report of more than 7,600 words. Included was the fact that in the early 1990s her address was "AMERICAN EMBASSY ATHENS ST, APO NEW YORK NY 09255."

I am not in intelligence and what I know of it is gleaned from books. I admit that. But what I have gleaned is this:

EMBASSY "COVER" IS NOT COVER AND NEVER HAS BEEN.

All intelligence services know that 1/3 to 1/2 of everyone who works in an embassy is actually a spy. So they watch them all. Anyone who works in an embassy is a suspsected spy.

In fact, CIA traitor Phillip Agee -- for whom the covert agent proectection act was SPECIFICALLY written -- revealed how you could determine all CIA "diplomants" from true diplomats in an embassy just by looking at their accreditation. I forget the details, and I wouldn't be comfortable repeating them if I did, but apparently the true diplomats jealously protect their acceditation, and won't allow the CIA plants to fake the same accreditation. So you can (or could, when the traitor's article came out) look down the embassy roster searching for who was a DSO or DFO (I forget what the acronym was) and immediately determine all the CIA operatives.

All intelligence services put spies in the embassies because they have diplomatic immunity. They can't be arrested. BUT, this also means they're automatically watched and surveilled and followed. So CIA agents in an embassy already have their covers blown from the moment they first report for duty.

YOU CANNOT BE A NOC AND HAVE SERVED IN AN EMBASSY.

Non-official cover -- "NOC" cover -- means no one has any particular reason to suspect you, and you can meet with spies you've recruited in a foreign country.

On the other hand, you do not have diplomatic immunity, so you can be hanged or jailed as a saboteur or spy if caught.

There is no back-and-forth between the two. Once you have official "cover," you can't be a NOC. You can't have non-official cover once the US government has posted you in an embassy with a big sign over your head reading "HERE IS AN AMERICAN SPY."

True cover is like your virginity. You can only lose it once. And if you've been posted in an embassy, you've lost it, big time, with a second-string cornerback named "Mitch" who didn't even last that long.

And also, to the Soviets, who were taking pictures the whole time.

That's my rant. But just wait, intelligence experts agree with me.

...

According to CIA veterans, U.S. intelligence officers working in American embassies under "diplomatic cover" are almost invariably known to friendly and opposition intelligence services alike.

"If you were in an embassy," said a former CIA officer who posed as a U.S. diplomat in several countries, "you could count 100 percent on the Soviets knowing."

Plame's true function likely would have been known to friendly intelligence agencies as well. The former senior diplomat recalled, for example, that she served as one of the "control officers" coordinating the visit of President George H.W. Bush to Greece and Turkey in July 1991.

... Plame made a $1,000 contribution to Vice President Al Gore, she listed her employer as Brewster-Jennings & Associates, a Boston company apparently set up by the CIA to provide "commercial cover" for some of its operatives.

Brewster-Jennings was not a terribly convincing cover. According to Dun & Bradstreet, the company, created in 1994, is a "legal services office" grossing $60,000 a year and headed by a chief executive named Victor Brewster. Commercial databases accessible by the Tribune contain no indication that such a person exists.

Skipping a bit. Some idiot posted his resume on-line, listing both his employment for Brewster & Jennings and the CIA, but that's just the boneheaded tradecraft of one idiot. That's the sort of mistake that any intelligence operative could make, so long as he was an employee of the CIA.

Moving on:

After Plame left her diplomatic post and joined Brewster-Jennings, she became what is known in CIA parlance as an "NOC," shorthand for an intelligence officer working under "non-official cover." But several CIA veterans questioned how someone with an embassy background could have successfully passed herself off as a private-sector consultant with no government connections.

Genuine NOCs, a CIA veteran said, "never use an official address. If she had (a diplomatic) address, her whole cover's completely phony. I used to run NOCs. I was in an embassy. I'd go out and meet them, clandestine meetings. I'd pay them cash to run assets or take trips. I'd give them a big bundle of cash. But they could never use an embassy address, ever."

Another CIA veteran with 20 years of service agreed that "the key is the (embassy) address. That is completely unacceptable for an NOC. She wasn't an NOC, period."

After Plame was transferred back to CIA headquarters in the mid-1990s, she continued to pass herself off as a private energy consultant. But the first CIA veteran noted: "You never let a true NOC go into an official facility. You don't drive into headquarters with your car, ever."

A senior U.S. intelligence official, who like the others quoted in this article spoke on condition of anonymity, noted that Plame "may not be alone in that category, so I don't want to suggest she was the only one. But it would be a fair assumption that a true-blue NOC is not someone who has a headquarters job at any point or an embassy job at any point."

Well, duh. NOC's are real undercover agents, who may be jailed or even killed (LAWFULLY!) by the country they operate in if discovered.

It's that serious. You really are breaking the law if you spy for another country, even if you're not a citizen of the country you're spying on. If you don't have diplomatic immunity, you can go to jail for life for espionage, even if you were only guilty of patriotism towards your home country.

It's the law on the books in every country. NOCs aren't often jailed for life or hanged, because usually arrangements are made for an exchange of spies (both countries what their patriotic and daring spies back, even if it means giving up the other guy's), but the possibility is there.

If you get caught, without diplomatic immunity, practicing espionage, you can be killed or jailed for life.

Now, as those are the risks. Given that...

Would any NOC drive to CIA headquarters every day? Or take an embassy job known to exist primarily to A) frustrate US citizens or B) provide the thinnest possible cover for a CIA operative?

And then venture forth to foreign countries to do espionage? With that previous record? Knowing that every foreign intelligence service knows he's a spy, and could be arrested (LAWFULLY!, not on some pretext bullshit fake charge) at any time?

No, a real NOC wouldn't.

Valerie Plame was not a NOC, and not just at the end of her career. She was a normal CIA case officer with the thinnest sort of diplomatic cover, surveilled by foreign intelligence services in every country she worked in, and then she later retired to a desk job at Langley, CIA headquarters. At no time in her entire career was she a legitimate covert operative.

End of fucking story.

NOC versus True Covert: I suppose as Valerie Plame had non-official cover at the barely-disguised CIA front Brewster & Jennings at the end of her career, she did have "NOC" cover. But no one would have sent her on actual espionage missions with that bullshit cover, and that glaringly obvious background.

Real NOCs -- the ones who are non-official from the moment they leave training, and even are separated from other CIA trainees so as to keep their identities secret -- never have official cover, and never have any obvious contact with the CIA. There's a difference between non-official-cover -- which just means any cover except diplomatic cover -- and NOCs. NOCs spend their active espionage careers without the safety of diplomatic cover, taking the most risks.

The press is confusing people by confusing "run of the mill desk agent with paper-thin non-official-cover who wouldn't try to enter Maryland on the strenght of their cover" and "bona fide covert agents who are true NOCs," partly out of intent but mostly, probably, out of ignorance.

Posted by: Ace at 12:20 AM | Comments (58)
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Because I stupidly posted the Plame thing twice, and now there are comments attached.

Posted by: Ace at 12:19 AM | Comments (19)
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Wonkette, under new management (and therefore not necessarily entirely without charm or talent), has been quoting a lot from a Washingtonian editor named Kim Eisler, a liberal Democrat who happens to also be a friend of Jack Abramoff's. And a man who stubbornly insists on sticking by his friend despite Howie Kurtz' belief he should abandon him.

Interesting stuff; I haven't seen anyone defend Abramoff much. Eisler makes the good point that if Abramoff is supposedly guilty of defrauding his Indian clients by not doing any actual work for them, how the hell can he also be charged with bribing Congressmen and Senators on their behalf? That would seem like serious work, and the kind of work that could land you in prison.

Can someone defraud you by not working for you while simultaneously working so hard for you he risks time in jail? Apparently so.

Anyway, Eisler wrote a letter to Time Magazine seeking a minor correction, over whether or not Abramoff ate nonkosher food while dining with Indian clients. In fairness, Eisler really had no first-hand knowledge of whether Abramoff did or didn't, but merely reported that his friend was strictly kosher and said he didn't eat nonkosher at the time in question.

And despite the fact that they edited out Eisler's actual point (leaving aside the validity of that point, which we're not touching), we do think it was nice of Time to print a letter refuting a fact in one of their pieces. What we're saying is, we're glad Time printed it. Because it led to another hilarious, fantastic media moment: hate mail from Chris Matthews.

Handwritten and sent to Kim Eisler's home. Best line: “I think Time just published that letter so my friends could laugh at you.”

“My friends.”

This town is middle school. We love it.

He's got a point. I haven't heard "All my friends think you're x" since middle school.

Chris Matthews. He's an adult man. Supposedly he has his own TV show, I hear.

Posted by: Ace at 06:52 PM | Comments (32)
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And how some of his miscalculations caused us to miscalculate. Very interesting article in the NYT:

As American warplanes streaked overhead two weeks after the invasion began, Lt. Gen. Raad Majid al-Hamdani drove to Baghdad for a crucial meeting with Iraqi leaders. He pleaded for reinforcements to stiffen the capital's defenses and permission to blow up the Euphrates River bridge south of the city to block the American advance.

But Saddam Hussein and his small circle of aides had their own ideas of how to fight the war. Convinced that the main danger to his government came from within, Mr. Hussein had sought to keep Iraq's bridges intact so he could rush troops south if the Shiites got out of line.

General Hamdani got little in the way of additional soldiers, and the grudging permission to blow up the bridge came too late. The Iraqis damaged only one of the two spans, and American soldiers soon began to stream across.

The episode was just one of many incidents, described in a classified United States military report, other documents and in interviews, that demonstrate how Mr. Hussein was so preoccupied about the threat from within his country that he crippled his military in fighting the threat from without.

Only one of his defenses — the Saddam Fedayeen — proved potent against the invaders. They later joined the insurgency still roiling Iraq, but that was largely by default, not design.

Also:

The Iraqi dictator was so secretive and kept information so compartmentalized that his top military leaders were stunned when he told them three months before the war that he had no weapons of mass destruction, and they were demoralized because they had counted on hidden stocks of poison gas or germ weapons for the nation's defense.

The end of the "Bush Lied" nonsense:

In December 2002, he told his top commanders that Iraq did not possess unconventional arms, like nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, according to the Iraq Survey Group, a task force established by the C.I.A. to investigate what happened to Iraq's weapons programs. Mr. Hussein wanted his officers to know they could not rely on poison gas or germ weapons if war broke out. The disclosure that the cupboard was bare, Mr. Aziz said, sent morale plummeting.

To ensure that Iraq would pass scrutiny by United Nations arms inspectors, Mr. Hussein ordered that they be given the access that they wanted. And he ordered a crash effort to scrub the country so the inspectors would not discover any vestiges of old unconventional weapons, no small concern in a nation that had once amassed an arsenal of chemical weapons, biological agents and Scud missiles, the Iraq survey group report said.

Mr. Hussein's compliance was not complete, though. Iraq's declarations to the United Nations covering what stocks of illicit weapons it had possessed and how it had disposed of them were old and had gaps. And Mr. Hussein would not allow his weapons scientists to leave the country, where United Nations officials could interview them outside the government's control.

Seeking to deter Iran and even enemies at home, the Iraqi dictator's goal was to cooperate with the inspectors while preserving some ambiguity about its unconventional weapons — a strategy General Hamdani, the Republican Guard commander, later dubbed in a television interview "deterrence by doubt."

That strategy led to mutual misperception. When Secretary of State Colin L. Powell addressed the Security Council in February 2003, he offered evidence from photographs and intercepted communications that the Iraqis were rushing to sanitize suspected weapons sites. Mr. Hussein's efforts to remove any residue from old unconventional weapons programs were viewed by the Americans as efforts to hide the weapons. The very steps the Iraqi government was taking to reduce the prospect of war were used against it, increasing the odds of a military confrontation.

Even some Iraqi officials were impressed by Mr. Powell's presentation. Abd al-Tawab Mullah Huwaish, who oversaw Iraq's military industry, thought he knew all the government's secrets. But Bush administration officials were so insistent that he began to question whether Iraq might have prohibited weapons after all. "I knew a lot, but wondered why Bush believed we had these weapons," he told interrogators after the war, according to the Iraq Survey Group report.

Saddam may have been lying (he may have cleaned up his country before the attack, relying on promises from, uhhh, interested countries to protect him so long as he wasn't caught with their WMD tech), but if Saddam's top generals assumed he had WMD's, how can it be said Bush lied?

Can a foreign President really be expected to have better intelligence than a country's top military leaders?

Thanks to dawnsblood.

Posted by: Ace at 06:35 PM | Comments (32)
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Listen up, maggots. You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else.

Oh, and Bart? Please keep playing that sad violin about how everybody hates you. It really endears you to people, your sad story.**

Really, I really mean it. Really. Feel bad for you, man. Hang in there.

**I have a massive fucking hump growing on my back.

Posted by: LauraW. at 04:59 PM | Comments (177)
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Racial code words are back, baby! How I'd missed them.

Of course, now racial code-words include calling someone "fancy." Fancy, you see, means "uppity."

Posted by: Ace at 12:51 PM | Comments (26)
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The thing I like about them is that they're so subtle.

George Clooney just optioned the rights to one cartoon featuring a Jew warming his hands by a burning Palestinian body. "Think Rosa Parks," he was quoted as saying.

Thanks to Allah.

Posted by: Ace at 12:43 PM | Comments (4)
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Interesting article about Las Vegas' techniques of data-mining to find cheats, and how the US government is now using their expertise to find terrorists:

Jonas is a leading surveillance expert, a database whiz who made his name catching casino cheats. His claim to fame is something called "nonobvious relationship awareness," which is a way of letting computers connect the dots between different data sets - like the big roulette winner who turns out to have the same home phone number as the croupier.

But once the Twin Towers fell, surveillance became a national priority. Homeland Security officials realized that Las Vegas was essentially a state-of-the-art test bed. And Jonas became the go-to guy for sorting through mountains of data, looking not for scam artists but terrorists. Last year IBM bought his company, SRD. Now he's one of about 300 "distinguished engineers" - even though he doesn't hold a college degree.

Among the other good things about liberty and capitalism is that there's always some expertise out there in just about anything you can think of.

Posted by: Ace at 12:34 PM | Comments (2)
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