Plame speculations by Juan Cole (and me)

To get some satisfaction from blogging, you have to find sometimes a little echo from your daily (and nightly) efforts. Today, University of Michigan History professor Juan Cole in his authorative Blog Informed Comment, announces:

Plame Wilson Had worked on Iran Anti-Proliferation

Valerie Plame Wilson and her team at the CIA were working on Iran counter-prolifetation efforts, according to Larisa Alexandrovna of Raw Story. It has been known for some time that she was involved in anti-proliferation activities, but that her main concern was Iran is new.

Plame Wilson was outed to the US press by Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney, his staffer Irving Lewis Libby, and George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove.

There has for some time been speculation among bloggers that Cheney et al. wanted to shoot down :-) Plame Wilson for reasons other than that she is the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, who blew the whistle on intelligence failures concerning alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Well, didn't I say so? (See Previous Post The Plame Enigma here.)

Of course, all this remains speculation.

Here is another one.

Turkey, the country where Plame was posted by the CIA in an Istanbul frontstore, could be much closer than Iran to the actual production of nuclear armament. The existing Turkey-Israel military cooperation could well have a mutually profitable nuclear component. The Turkish refusal to go along, in 2003, with the US invasion of Iraq, may have been inspired by the Israelis, who would have preferred an attack on Iran and who must have preferred a weakened Saddam Hussein to the foreseeable chaos that his toppling caused in Iraq.
If it is true, that Cheney and his team started their efforts to undermine the CIA-monitoring from Istanbul by Valerie Plame and her colleagues, already in April/May 2003, it may have been a last-ditch effort to get Turkish cooperation for the invasion of Iraq. Killing the embarrassing CIA operation in Istanbul, may have been a way, to get the politically very influential Turkish military on the US side.
And I do not think, that the Israeli military establishment has shed many tears over the disappearance of an independent US observation post so near to their sphere of influence.

And all this may have happened in our EU backyard. It is time to say: 'NIMBY!'