PROOF Libby Not Guilty in CIA Leak--"Brewster-Jennings" Was Not Undercover (Sorr : Indymedia Colombia

Plame's employer, Brewster-Jennings, apparently has never tried very hard to hide its activities. Former employees like Jean C. Edwards and Robert Lawrence Ellman even advertise their association with the company on the Internet! They were doing so before Brewster-Jennings and Valerie Plame came to light and they still are.

There was little inconvenience done to the US intelligence community by Dick Cheney's top aide Lewis Libby's outing of Valerie Plame and the subsequent outing of the Brewster-Jennings company, which is widely believed to be a CIA front company. Valerie Plame-Wilson had listed it as her employer on an campaign-contribution form. Sorry to disappoint you who are after Republican blood in the CIA leak matter, but hear me out.

Libby may be guilty, in some sense, of perjury, false statements, and obstruction of justice (as charged). But the investigation he allegedly lied and obstructed about was directed against leaking classified information, and there was little basis for the investigation in the first place. In a sense, this was an entrapment. Libby was set up to deceive in a phony investigation.

NEVER UNDERCOVER

Plame's employer, Brewster-Jennings, apparently has never tried very hard to hide its activities. Former employees like Jean C. Edwards and Robert Lawrence Ellman even advertise their association with the company on the Internet! They were doing so before Brewster-Jennings and Valerie Plame came to light and they still are.

Edwards, in her resume on the website of the Washington, D.C., law firm Akerman Senterfitt, says she worked for "Brewster-Jenning [sic] and Associates" in Boston as a consultant from 1985 to 1989.

One thing this means is that Brewster-Jennings is not a creature of the war on terror, which began after 9/11/2001.

Edwards says her work was as an engineering consultant. This work period was six years before she became an attorney. Her prior experience was with a Miami company involved in "electrophysiology," including pulse monitoring of cardiac patients. Her job at about the same time as the work for Brewster-Jennings of Boston was with another Miami company that manufactures electronics for behavior control -- of dogs. The company makes devices that give a dog pleasing audio tones for positive reinforcement of desired behavior and negative tones otherwise. It is reasonable that Edwards could be doing this in Miami because her resume says she was only consulting for Brewster-Jennings in Boston.

One could envision some kind of animal-control or electrophysiology technology (a type of electronic fence? a lie detector?) being used to detect pilferage in uranium mines in a place like Niger, where pilferage has been suspected. One could envision pulse-counting technology being used with a Geiger counter to assess the number of warheads on a passing train. Or one could envision Edwards' work as being prosaic and unrelated to any kind of security.

Then there is Robert Lawrence Ellmann, an attorney from Detroit who works in the Czech Republic for the law firm Jindrichovsky & Partners. His resume, also currently on the Internet, says he worked for "Brewster-Jennings & Associates, Boston, USA" in the period 1992-1996. Ellmann claimed he did "contract administration" for Brewster-Jennings. His resume says he speaks Czech and Italian. It is even more eclectic than Edwards', looking more like the bibliography of a mystery-novel series than a resume.

Surely if Brewster-Jennings was a US state secret, these highly intelligent people would not be outing it and themselves on the Internet, especially after all of the publicity it has received.

BREWSTER-JENNINGS: ORIGINALLY A PUBLIC COMPANY

So Brewster-Jennings once was a public company in Boston whose members made and still make no effort to conceal their association with it. It used at least two professions, engineering and law. Also, it started long before the war on terror.

The work performed there, at least when Edwards and Ellman worked there, must not have been CIA work since those two made no effort to hide it. Similarly, it is questionable whether Valerie Plame-Wilson was under cover either, which will complicate efforts to prove that Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, or anyone else deliberately exposed Plame as a covered agent of the CIA or damaged national security by causing the name "Brewster Jennings" to be made public. There is no leak crime if there is no leak. And there should have been no investigation to entrap Libby if there was no leak.

BREWSTER-JENNINGS AND VALERIE PLAME

Brewster-Jennings took the international spotlight in practically every newspaper and news broadcast in the world when the news came out that columnist Robert Novak allegedly outed a CIA agent, Valerie Plame, and her CIA cover company, Brewster-Jennings, in July 2003.

According to Jean Edwards' eclectic resume (including a degree in physics, and a degree in French with honors), Brewster-Jennings had been in Boston 20 years ago. Yet no one has ever heard of it. This means the (a) either it was not in the same building all this time, the widely publicized address at 101 Arch Street, or (b) it was, or is, at that address under another name.

Although this has been erased from almost all databases, Brewster-Jennings once did share an address and phone number with the accounting firm Burke Dennehy in the same building. (The phone number is not the long-out-of-service number the media have given for Brewster-Jennings, 617-951-2529.) Burke Dennehy may have perfomed some kind of activity for Brewster-Jennings, maybe something innocuous like forwarding its mail and answering its phone. Maybe Brewster-Jennings was just a small, unimportant company that wanted a prestigious address.

The Burke Dennehy company once went by a longer name: Swampscott Burke Dennehy. "Swampscott," like "Brewster" in "Brewster-Jennings," is the name of a town in Massachusetts. There is no person to be found by that name. It is likely that "Brewster-Jennings" stands for the name of a person AND a town, Brewster, MA.

It is also known that Burke Dennehy did business with a Mr. Jennings at a well known Anglo-Irish bank with offices in Boston. One of the things his department does is set up trusts for expatriates. Burke Dennehy employed the accounting expertise of expatriates from Nepal, among other places, around 2001 and was named by a group protesting jobs going to foreigners.

None of this is to say that Brewster-Jennings or Burke Dennehy ever was involved with national security.

I doubt the media reports that have claimed the company was named after Brewster Jennings, a long-ago president of Socony-Vacuum, the predecessor to Mobil, which of course is an oil company.

(Does anyone out there know anything about the CIA's nomenclature practices? I sure don't. All I know of sleuthing comes from the Nancy Drew books. I also doubt that Brewster-Jennings was a CIA company.)

AN EXCLUSIVE ADDRESS

It's no wonder that Brewster-Jennings claimed to be based in the high-rise office building at 101 Arch St. in Boston. This adds a little class. The building is loaded with high-priced law firms and accountants, as well as a smattering of technology companies.

Also, it in the ZIP code 02110, and this has the most millionaires of any ZIP!

There's one thing Plame's alleged employer Brewster-Jennings does lack. No one has ever published a suite address for it. Without a suite number in this 21-story building, mail is returned to the sender as undeliverable. That is, unless the addressee is a well known tenant, and to this day no one in the building remembers Brewster-Jennings.

SUMMARY

Libby, Rove, Cheney, Novak and others did not damage US national security by what Novak and others published about Plame. There is no leak case against them because there was no leak. Brewster-Jennings, which Plame listed as her employer, was never a secret, at least not according to the two former employees cited here. Libby should not have been investigated for a nonexistent leak. If he hadn't been, he wouldn't be facing charges of perjury, false statements, and obstruction. There may be something rotten in Denmark, but what I smell in Boston is a red herring.