SocraticGadfly: Valerie Plame, self-hating Jew? — does CIA lie that baldly? or is it that dumb?

September 21, 2017

Valerie Plame, self-hating Jew? — does CIA lie that baldly? or is it that dumb?

For those who haven't seen the verschnizzle on Twitter, Valerie Plame, the Bush-era CIA agent outed by Scooter Libby and others in their relentless drive for war with Iraq, totally broke her foot off in it today when she claimed:
First, this misses the fact that in the Iraq war that she and hubby Joe Wilson were fighting to stop, the charge was led by those famous goys George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, etc. It also ignores the wag-the-dog bombing, as well as the one-sided Serb-only bombing in the Balkans (vs. doing nothing to Croatia) of non-Jew Bill Clinton.

And, in todays environment, it ignores the non-Jewish heritage of Messrs. Trump, Bannon (in background), McMaster, et al vis-a-vis North Korea. This is like Counterpunch having a blogger recently claim that the Democrats were the "war party" of all major 20th-century wars.

There's several problems additional problems here, though, related to the provenance of the link — the Unz Review. If you're not familiar with the website, or Ron Unz, click the link. Maybe names like Pat Buchanan and the even more loathsome Steve Sailer will give you an idea of stuff you can find there.  Unfortunately, lefty economist Michael Hudson (who has been on my blogroll for some time) writes or rewrites there, as does outside-most-political-lines Paul Craig Roberts.

Also in that same vein, Consortium News, also on my blogroll and which has done a lot of good pushback on the "Putin Did It" narrative, does much of this work in conjunction with Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, of which Giraldi, like Plame an ex-spook, is a member.

So, I did a four-tweet thread, starting with:
Followed by:
Then taking the other fork of the dilemma with:
And finishing with:

More on that thread below.

Anyway, Plame now claims:
Um, sure!

See my second and third tweets in that thread. Or this Twitter thread. (David Klion rightly points out the problem of left-of-center people, like Patrick Cockburn working for left-of-center mags/websites, like Counterpunch, by noting that piece author Philip Giraldi has done stuff for the likes of The Nation before. Sadly, "Ask a Mexican" alt-weekly columnist Gustavo Arellano is also listed on Unz Review.)

So, if you are telling the truth, are you really that ignorant, and if so, what does that say about CIA operatives' political insights and knowledge in general?

Or, if you're not telling the truth, is this a(nother) non-shocking case of the CIA teaching operatives to lie that baldly?

Then comes this:
Well, I tackled that on Twitter, too:
What else is there to say at that point?

Erm, Sarah Kendzior! That's what to say!

The self-inflated foreign policy non-expert weighs in:
Finally, no, it's not a defense to claim that she really meant Zionists, and not "Jews."

As a Jew herself, she should know to make that distinction, so, at best, that's further illustration of sloppiness, while still not an excuse for what the hell she's doing at Ron Unz's site.

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