Here’s an interesting look at this whole mess:

I have no personal knowledge of the situation, but there is another possibility – she may have been a Collections Management Officer (“CMO” or a “reports officer” in the old parlance). This would be an “in between” position that would explain the various classifications as an analyst and a clandestine service officer. The CIA describes the position thusly:

“The Central Intelligence Agency’s Clandestine Service Collection Management Officers are the connection between the Operations Officer in the field and the U.S. foreign policy community, both in the United States and abroad. As a Collection Management Officer you will guide the collection of intelligence and direct the dissemination of that intelligence. Managing the collection effort requires contact with U.S. policy makers to determine what they need to know and then communicating those requirements to the Operations Officers in the field for collection.”
The Operations Officer, mentioned above, is the person of who we think of when we say spy. It is his (they are predominantly male) job to recruit and maintain contact with intelligence agents (agents are foreign nationals who agree to spy for us in return, typically, for money). The Operations Officer is the one who does the leg work.

The CMO collect the information from the Ops Officers and pass them along to the right users. They do not run agents nor have any agents publicly associated with them. The CMO (predominately women) usually work from Langley (approx. 2/3 of their careers) and, when abroad, are usually in no more danger than a typical foreign service officer. Unlike analysts, however, CMO report to the Directorate of Operations (like the Operations Officers) and assume a cover when working.

The cover assumed by both Ops Officers and CMOs when abroad is typically that of State Department employees. This allows them to maintain diplomatic immunity. The CIA runs very few “illegals” (officers without official cover) and they are never CMOs.

This would answer my earlier question about why no one ever seemed to know exactly what she did or what her “cover” story (if she had one) was. It would also explain why she is connected with the Directorate of Operations (the spy guys) and could still not necessarily be a spook herself. She could still be heavy into the whole black ops world, but not personally connected to agents other than the “spies” she gathers info from. I’m not sure how that whole power structure operates, and I’m sure most people outside the CIA aren’t either.

Just some more food for thought.

Kevin Drum has answered one of my questions regarding the Plame scandal, namely “Was Valerie Plame a covert agent?” The link provides a huge roundup of articles indicating that yes, she was covert. And those reports seem credible to me.

More than ever now, I’m convinced that whoever is responsible for this disclosure should do some jail time. Now, the question is: who was it that’s responsible? I hope that the President treats this matter as seriously as it deserves to be treated.

Utah legislators felt first-hand the impact of some of their own restrictive laws lately. In attempting to provide alcohol for the upcoming National Conference of State Legislatures, they discovered that most of their ideas would violate Utah law.

Legislators planning a national conference of state lawmakers from around the nation next year in Salt Lake City want to buck the reputation that it’s impossible to get a drink in Utah.

But Monday, in contemplating the details of welcoming attendees with free wine and beer at social events, lawmakers discovered just how restrictive and confusing the very liquor laws they penned can be.

The head scratching began when Sen. Carlene Walker, R-Cottonwood Heights, asked about serving mixed drinks at the 2004 annual meeting of the National Conference of State Legislatures.

“We’ve had people say can’t you get a drink in Utah. We want them to have a good time. We should be sensitive to the fact they might expect liquor,” said the Cottonwood Heights Republican.

Trouble is, the opening social will be held at the Utah Capitol, noted legislative attorneys who aren’t sure whether wine, beer or hard liquor are allowed in state-owned buildings.

“We need to research that,” said General Counsel John Fellows.

Read the whole thing, preferably with a drink in hand and be grateful you’re not living in Utah. And if you do live in Utah, well, good luck with finding a drink.

Can free will exist in an entirely material universe? Discuss.

The new Return of the King trailer is now online! Go check it out now!

Pretty common knowledge at this point, but currently Bob Novak is denying that anyone in the Administration told him that Valerie Plame was an undercover agent.

Daniel Drezner has an excellent rundown of new information to date. Particularly interesting is this claim by Clifford May that Valerie Plame’s status wasn’t exactly a state secret:

On July 14, Robert Novak wrote a column in the Post and other newspapers naming Mr. Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA operative.

That wasn’t news to me. I had been told that — but not by anyone working in the White House. Rather, I learned it from someone who formerly worked in the government and he mentioned it in an offhand manner, leading me to infer it was something that insiders were well aware of.

I think that this is probably the most important issue. Was Valerie Plame’s status that of an undercover CIA agent? I don’t know at this point.

But here’s my other big question: if the purpose of leaking Valerie Plame’s name was, as some have suggested, an attempt to intimidate Wilson from saying that there was no uranium in Niger, why would you pick Bob Novak as the guy to leak to? Bob Novak was rather famously against going to war in Iraq, as indicated by this Crossfire segment. It just doesn’t make sense that, out of all the conservative journalists out there, you’d pick a guy who’s anti-war to discredit an anti-war argument.

More as this thing develops…

“11:15, restate my assumptions: 1. Mathematics is the language of nature. 2. Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers. 3. If you graph these numbers, patterns emerge. Therefore: There are patterns everywhere in nature.”
– Max Cohen (Sean Gullette) in Pi

A quick thought on the whole new hot topic of the minute, the “high official in the administration” that leaked the CIA agent’s identity.

The leak has been thought to be a GS-14 or GS-15, basically a high ranking civilian. Does anyone know how many GS-15s have got to be in the White House/CIA? In any government organization you are going to have at least two or three and they will be several layers removed from anyone working in the White House. There are GS-15s running around in DC like rabbits have been breeding nonstop for 25 years. Many have taken this to mean that it has to be Bush’s right hand man, or that it’s some super-important official. Just by saying that the leak is of that rank/level does not:

1) Point to a “top official” that has contact with Bush every day, and
2) Narrows it down to nobody since everyone and their mother who works in DC has three security clearances and is high in the food chain if they are connected to the White House and that particular leaked information.

So until the justice system does its job, why even speculate? I realize it’s fun to play the blame lottery to see if you “win” when the mystery is solved. However, it doesn’t really help the matter and only makes it harder for you to deny what you said in the past if it turns out you were wrong (who would do that???).

I had to take the GREs earlier this month, which I really did not want to do. It’s not that they are hard, I just can’t stand jumping through the hoops of standardized testing, and paying for it no less! Fortunately, they got rid of that silly analytical section and replaced it with 2 “essay” questions where you write an opinion on one piece and pick apart an argument in the other (gee, sound like anything I do every day?). Needless to say, I did fine on that.
The verbal part also had a reading comprehension section, where you read some stock boring passage and answer questions about it.

I started thinking about this section again when I was surfing the blogworld the other day. It seems like half of the arguments people make are made on
1) Statements taken out of context
2) Statements taken in context but completely and intentionally misread.

I’m not talking about simple mistakes in a complicated passage. I’m talking about people attempting to pass off one set of words to mean something completely different than what was intended. Opinions of the author and reader aside, there’s some people that try to force something so much that it’s laughable. They’ll omit parts of sentences, ignore certain qualifying words like “probably”, or “preliminary”. They will invert sentences to fit their opinions. I knew that you could do this with numbers and usually get away with it (who wants to check all those numbers, anyways) but words were sacred, at least for a time. I mean, a high school English teacher would fail them in a second for trying crap like that. And then when someone calls them on it, they just launch into some partisan tripe and it doesn’t even matter anymore.

If the blogworld was taking a standardized test, it would most definitely not be accepted into graduate school. And it would probably get its undergraduate degree taken away in disgust, too. Hell, I’d probably rip up the degree, spit on it, burn it, and excommunicate them from society, but that’s just me.

It’s one thing if you want to resort to spinning, or mysterious numbers to prove your points. But it just proves how sad you are when you try to butcher language to a point where there’s no use in even trying.

A few months ago, I remember talking about Edwards’ plan to allow more students to go to college. He had decided that there weren’t enough ways for kids to fund their college careers, and I disagreed, saying that there were plenty of different ways to go to college, you just had to be willing to work for them.

Today on CNN there is a story about a disadvantaged minority student who had everything working against him. Yet he still managed to go to college with the help of a couple of caring teachers, his mother, and his own drive to succeed. That’s all it takes. The old saying, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way” really does hold true. It’s a shame that stories like this are so out of the ordinary that they deserve national new coverage.

When will doing well in school, going to college, and succeeding in life be viewed as a good thing to do, and not a strictly the “white man’s” path in life? This was brought to my attention again last week when I was watching the show “Made” on MTV. The show followed a black girl who wanted to be student body President at her high school, but wasn’t the most popular girl (since that’s all high school elections, and hell, national elections are). When her advisor asked her if she thought the black students would vote for her, she said they wouldn’t because she didn’t talk like them, did well in school, and had white friends. Therefore, she was a traitor to her race. They interviewed a few students and confirmed exactly that. At any rate, here’s a snippit from the article:

“My name is Victor Nivar,” he said in a strong, confident voice. “My major is psychology, I’m excited to get it done and I want to get started.”

Victor, 18, has been doing what needed to be done for a long time. It’s how he has overcome obstacles unimaginably more daunting than an awkward silence to become the first person in his family to enter college.

This is a young man who saw his father slain, whose family has struggled on the edge of poverty, and yet who still earned grades that were good enough to win him an acceptance letter.

Nonetheless, he couldn’t have made it this far — from the Bronx to Bethlehem to the expansive Kutztown campus in southeastern Pennsylvania — without three people: his mother, a teacher and an admissions counselor. It’s also their dream that Victor is fulfilling, perhaps even more than his own.