About the author:
Descended from old English money, Vidicon was raised by spiny echidnas in the mountainous rainforests of the North American Southeast. Lured back to society by time-traveling gray/reptiloid alien hybrids posing as renegade Jesuits, he has managed to maintain his outsider's perspective and an appetite for crunchy insects. Today, Vidicon is a world-class synchronicity surfer and an unlicensed quantum mechanic. He has a fourth-degree black belt in weird.
About his bi-weekly column:
Tales from the Third Lobe are the unfocused meanderings of the World's Smartest Moron. Topics range widely over the sciences, religion, philosophy, technology, modern culture, mysticism, Vidicon's personal history and viewpoints, and whatever pissed him off in the media last week.
View all articles by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. "Vidicon" Xalieri, 2HC Columnist...
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Who the hell is Valerie Plame and why should I care? (a slide presentation in one act)[click]
As you can probably guess, this is not Valerie Plame. This man's name is Rocco Martino. He used to work for Italy's Defense Intelligence Service, also known as SID. Currently, and at the time of our story, he considered himself to be a "freelance" intelligence agent. Which is to say, he uncovered secrets and sold them to other people, and that's how he made a living.
Sorry the picture is a little blurry, but that's okay. This man has since grown a beard and mustache in order to avoid being recognized too easily.
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This slide is completely black, but if it were not, it would depict a pair of French intelligence agents meeting with Martino at a hotel lobby in Brussels. It is 1999, and he is handing them a document explaining that Saddam Hussein is interested in expanding trade with Niger. The French agents are interested in the possibility—in quite a negative and worried fashion, as you plainly can't see on their faces here—because one of the principal moneymaking exports of Niger is uranium, and they don't want Hussein to have any. They are especially interested because the companies that mine and refine uranium for export in Niger are both French, and they know that the Western World will hold France up against the wall and start the kicking if they are the ones to nukify Hussein's Iraq.
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Zooming further into the blackness here. One of the French agents is handing Martino a metric fuckload of money in an envelope for this information—and for his promise to obtain more information on the topic—which Martino explains that he can obtain, should any such evidence exist. The contact he has in Niger's Embassy in Rome, the one who gave him this pretty piece of confirmable (and later confirmed) data, is on excellent terms with him. Possibly because Martino is paying him a share of the money.
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The year is 2000 now, and the world has not exploded in crashed-computer chaos. This is another blacked-out picture of Martino in Brussels meeting his French Intelligence contacts. As you can't see here, Martino is handing over a thick folder containing, among other things, notification of a request for a price quote on a worryingly large order for yellowcake ore. From Iraq. In the corner of this shot, you can make out a half-smoked cigarette, previously in the agent on the far right's mouth, burning a hole in the hotel lobby carpet.
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Here you see the documents, rife with date errors (stamped with a 1999 date, yet the text on the page claims it's referring to a Y2K date), a seal for an agency that looks nothing like the usual seal, and an ersatz signature from a man who left his post in 1989. Typical Nigerian scam crapola, good enough to get the cash into your hand, but poor enough to make people angry as soon as they get home to give it a good look. Martino is no expert on Niger and France's uranium connection. They seem good enough to him, and the stuff he brought back previously from Niger's embassy in Rome was good, right?
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This is Elisabetta Burba, a political reporter for Italy's news magazine Panorama. For some unknown reason, Martino handed her the same packet in October of 2001, not long after the bombing of the World Trade Center has been blamed on Al Qaeda. Perhaps his Nigerian contact in Rome was wondering why France was sitting on the story of Hussein trying to buy 500 metric tons of yellowcake? Maybe he was worried that France was trying to sell Hussein uranium on the sly and didn't want the world to know about it? Perhaps someone is disappointed that Iraq does not seem in any way associated with the bombings and has decided to stir up a little trouble by putting a bug up Martino's butt? In any case, Martino decides to go to the press, and this is the press he goes to.
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This is a vacation picture of Elisabetta Burba in Niger, having spent the ten minutes there necessary to show that Martino's "evidence" is crap. She is exercising her dope slappin' muscles by lifting glasses of the local beer and waving at the camera.
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This is Burba dope slapping Martino, back in Rome.
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This is Burba at the US Embassy in Rome, handing over copies of the forged documents and telling them not to worry their little heads about it.
Why is she there? Did someone there ask for copies? Is she just being friendly?
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This is Valerie Plame, a CIA agent at her desk in Langley. She worked the field undercover in Africa for at least a decade, maybe more. She is no longer in field ops, having settled down to have some children, but her cover is still active. She is an expert in what it takes for a third-world country to put together a nuke program, and seems slightly worried that 500 tons of uranium hexoxide seems like one of the principal ingredients. She notes the names and dates and such and knows that the docs are completely bogus, but she's an old hand and sends...
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...her husband, Joseph Wilson IV, a former ambassador to some country or other in Africa to go have a poke around. Ambassadors are generally aware of any covert ops going on in the countries to which they have been assigned, so it's no real trouble for him to insert himself into her old network long enough to ask a few questions, and, no, no one in Niger has any inclination to hand 500 tons of yellowcake over to fuckin' Saddam Hussein.
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Here is the interior of the Oval Office in the White House, stuffed with six juvenile chimps and Colin Powell. One of the chimps has asked the CIA for a briefing on Iraq's capacity for weapons of mass destruction, because they've pretty much wrecked the Taliban in Afghanistan and it's too expensive to ship the tanks home if they still have unexploded rockets in them. Colin, in this picture, is pointing out that the only thing that ever said that Hussein was looking for nuclear capability was completely full of crap. Also, the CIA security briefing notes that all of the nerve gas we shipped him for use on the Soviets in Afghanistan and his Iranian neighbors were wasted decades ago on the Kurds and any of the biological material we sent him over those same decades he let die, let out, or blew up trying to get it to Israel in those punk-ass Scuds we shot down in the early nineties.
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This is a picture of one of the chimps hitting the speed-dial for a chimp in Britain. This is the dialog:
"Our guys have turned up nothing. Whaddayougot?"
"Well, we have some old documents we got from an Italian spy that says Hussein tried to buy yellowcake ore, but—"
"Yellowcake? What's yellowcake? Hussein doesn't like chocolate?"
"Yellowcake is uranium ore that can be processed into weapons-grade nuclear fuel. But—" *click*
"You hear that? You hear that? That was on speakerphone. The chimp in Britain says Hussein's building nukes! Let's run with that!"
Hits the speed-dial again.
"Thanks, chimp! We're running with that."
"Sounds thin, but whatever you say." *click*
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This is Colin Powell dope slapping a chimp and tendering his resignation.
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This is a shot of a chimp saying, "You quit now, I'm giving your job to the nice lady chimp under my desk."
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This is a picture of Colin Powell storming out of the Oval Office to go address the United Nations and tell the world that we're going after Hussein because he has nukes, or so our good friends in Britain tell us.
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This is a shot of Wilson's op-ed piece in the New York Times debunking the yellowcake documents yet again, along with the likelihood that Hussein might have been trying to obtain uranium from anywhere else.
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This is a shot of the interior of the Oval Office, with everyone in it going apeshit.
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This is a shot of two chimps, Scooter and Turd Blossom, calling reporters, one after another, and telling them not to re-report Wilson's exposé to the four winds, because it will soon come out, they claim, that Wilson wasn't sent over to Africa by George Tenet, Director of the CIA, but by his wife, who is merely an undercover agent. No, they don't have her name available right off the top of their heads, but, hell, you know, why not look it up on the web or some shit. [Please note: this web page was available as is prior to June 6, 2003, when Wilson's op-ed piece appeared.]
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This is a shot of Robert Novak, a pet reporter for the Republican Party, reporting exactly what he is told to say. Including Valerie's name, which he claims he had someone look up on the web for him.
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These are shots of various chimps trying to tell a Federal Grand Jury, led by ...
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...Patrick Fitzgerald, that they had nothing to do with blowing Valerie Plame's cover, which is a felony if done deliberately, in the attempt to delude the people of the world that the illegal invasion of Iraq had the merit of ridding Saddam Hussein of a program to build and threaten the world with nuclear missiles, which, by various international treaties, he should not have had.
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End of the show. Any questions?
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Vidicon was the Buddha but the pay was lousy. |
