Valerie Plame and Sibel Edmonds

Marcy Wheeler, author of Anatomy of Deceit, the most comprehensive book on the intentional outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame by Vice President Cheney, and the roll-up of Plame's network of anti-nuclear proliferation agents in the Middle East and elsewhere, doesn't mention Sibel Edmonds in the endnotes. There is no index, but I don't remember Edmonds coming up in the book's narrative.

And that isn't surprising. Much information has come out on this case only after publication of Wheeler's book in January, 2007, just before the beginning of the trial of Irving Libby. And Wheeler's book only deals with Richard Armitage, surely to be one of the future's key players in how the demise of Brewster-Jennings played out, in passing, near the end of her narrative and timeline.

When Armitage's name first surfaced in 2006 as having been named back on November 14, 2005 in a deposition given by Bob Woodward as a "leaker," Wheeler fell for the meme that Armitage is known as a notorious gossip around the Beltway. I wrote to her then that Armitage has been known by people who don't write stuff down, for a long time, as a major player in illegal arms dealing and drug smuggling. I told her then that I had first been apprised in early 1984 of Armitage's shady "import-export" past by my friend James Bondsteel, a Congressional Medal of Honor recipient who had had the misfortune of working with Armitage in Southeast Asia during the final spasms of our Vietnam experience.

Now, Armitage has surfaced in the second and third installments of the Times of London's articles in which Edmonds tells what she has been barred from saying in our country.

We need to know more about what Edmonds read and heard. I owe it to James Buddha Bondsteel to help get the truth out.

Update - Monday 1:15 p.m: Luke Ryland at Democratic Underground interviewed Sibel Edmonds yesterday.