The Obvious, Non-Disclosure And Wilson

I hardly ever listen to Sean Hannity on the radio, nor even watch him on TV, but I happened to this evening and was rewarded with having to give myself a dope-slap. Sean had a woman on that claimed to be original author of the legislation under which any indictments for “outing a CIA agent” would be made. As anyone who listens to more than the stock MSM understands, she reported there couldn’t be a crime here since Plame wasn’t undercover, and hadn’t been for a very long time. Reasonable people already knew that, BUT she went on to mention the OBVIOUS, and I was forced to smack myself.

Anyone that works in technology in the US, and no doubt a lot of other fields is very familiar with a document called the “NDA” or “Non Disclosure Agreement”. There is a long list of things that one isn’t supposed to disclose unless explicitly allowed by lawyers … unannounced products, proprietary technology, information about customers and on and on. NDAs are common and well understood. The point was made that it is obvious that something was very odd about the Joe Wilson / CIA deal, since he NEVER SIGNED AN NDA.

If there was such a thing as “right wing reporting”, this would have to have been reported 2 years ago, and the fact that it wasn’t shows how credulous the MSM is to fables that can damage a sitting Republican President, and what utter boobs those of us on the right including our media people are. It ought to have been IMPOSSIBLE for Joe Wilson to do the piece in the New York Times that he did http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0706-02.htm without going to jail if he was under an NDA.

Nobody collects garbage at the CIA without an NDA, it is impossible that they would send someone to gather information and not require one. It is also interesting to note that the article written by Wilson mentions Cheney by name twice and the office of VP once. Was it really important WHO in the Bush administration had “asked the question”? It seems odd that an agency that is supposed to be “all about secrets” would need to divulge to a sub-contractor who in government asked for the information in the first place, since organizations like the CIA are very familiar with the idea of “need to know” … unless one wanted to point a finger later that is.

So “somehow”, the CIA manages to hire a sub-contractor that happened to have worked in the Clinton administration and has a long history of being associated with liberal clauses. In 2004 he would work on the Kerry campaign for a short time until they decided that didn’t “look good”. They further fail to put him under any restriction to report to whomever he wanted on the information that he might find as he carried out his task “for the Vice President”.

Those aspects are facts, when one gets into the “whys”, it is easy to slip into conspiracy theories. Very gross incompetence on the part of the CIA is of course possible, but it isn’t very hard to read the NYT article and understand why folks would start calling the VPs office and asking “Why did you send Joe Wilson to Niger”? When of course the VPs office did nothing of the sort. It seems pretty reasonable to believe that they may not be very happy with the CIA for selecting someone from the Clinton Administration for a task that they requested who later publishes his view of things in the NYT and points prominently to Dick Cheney. All it takes is the word dropped that “well, his wife works at CIA and suggested him”, and we are on our way to a “scandal”, at least for the MSM if there is a Republican in the WH.

Conservatives find it hard to imagine that “Bush’s own CIA” would somehow be “out to get him”, but people familiar with government understand very well. Almost everyone that works at the CIA is a career government worker and member of the AFSCME union. The AFSCME union is just as liberal as the rest of the unions, so unsurprisingly most of the CIA has about as much time for the Bush Administration as the New York Times or your average Democrat.

Does not having a subcontractor sign an NDA “prove anything”? Of course not, no more than there is any “proof” that if information about Valerie Plame really did come from Karl Rove or “Scooter” Libby that it was somehow “retaliation”, both are just stories. The difference is when the MSM takes a story and keeps repeating it over and over some folks get confused about the difference.

The biggest message that anyone on the right needs to get out of this is WE DON’T HAVE ANY REPORTERS! To speak of at least. Most of our “right wing media” has so much left wing media to respond to, they have gotten lazy. They don’t go out and find the story and make the story. They follow the lead of the NYT just like everyone else. That needs to stop and we need to “make our own stories”, they can’t be any bigger fantasies than the ones from the left.