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host · 07-14-2005, 11:19 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by stevo

I read most of what you posted, host, not all of it, but the entirety of a few articles and all of the bold quotes. My favorite is the second one you posted.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editor...l?id=110006955

The entire article

[The same bipartisan report also pointed out that the forged documents Mr. Wilson claimed to have discredited hadn't even entered intelligence channels until eight months after his trip. And it said the CIA interpreted the information he provided in his debrief as mildly supportive of the suspicion that Iraq had been seeking uranium in Niger.

About the same time, another inquiry headed by Britain's Lord Butler delivered its own verdict on the 16 words: "We conclude also that the statement in President Bush's State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003 that 'The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa' was well-founded."

In short, Joe Wilson hadn't told the truth about what he'd discovered in Africa, how he'd discovered it, what he'd told the CIA about it, or even why he was sent on the mission. The media and the Kerry campaign promptly abandoned him, though the former never did give as much prominence to his debunking as they did to his original accusations. But if anyone can remember another public figure so entirely and thoroughly discredited, let us know.

If there's any scandal at all here, it is that this entire episode has been allowed to waste so much government time and media attention, not to mention inspire a "special counsel" probe. The Bush Administration is also guilty on this count, since it went along with the appointment of prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in an election year in order to punt the issue down the road. But now Mr. Fitzgerald has become an unguided missile, holding reporters in contempt for not disclosing their sources even as it becomes clearer all the time that no underlying crime was at issue.
As for the press corps, rather than calling for Mr. Rove to be fired, they ought to be grateful to him for telling the truth. ]

Rove did nothing wrong. Nothing illegal, nothing immoral, nothing wrong at all.

I think that you confuse the "partisan" portion of the "bi-partisan" senate report, in citing the editorial you are using to make your argument, stevo.
It is in the first quote box in the first post on this thread.

I'm going to leave it to this mediamatters.org rebuttal of Rove's "fake reporter", Gannon/Guckert's foray into this controversy, waving his "secret memo" at Wilson. The beauty of all this, is that special prosecutor Fitzgerald will report his findings, and events will then determine who is "aiding and abetting". You have to overlook or ignore a bunch, if you claim that you read "most of what I posted, and you sitll cite a classic "mis-information" piece in your disagreement. Read Wilson's letter to the Republicans on the Senate Committee, read the sections of the committee report, cited below. Consider that Cooper, only this week, lays the origin of the NEPOTISM "OP", at Rove's feet.

Does it bother you that you are defending a high government official who outed a CIA agent, how can you justify doing that, stevo?

Yeah....Wilson is a Clinton "tool".....right ?? Wrong !

Quote:

http://www.americanprogress.org/site...RJ8OVF&b=58668
The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies That Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity - A Diplomat's Memoir

Chapter 17: A Strange Encounter with Robert Novak

by Ambassador Joseph Wilson

Late on Tuesday afternoon, July 8, six days before Robert Novak's article about Valerie and me, a friend showed up at my office with a strange and disturbing tale. He had been walking down Pennsylvania Avenue toward my office near the White House when he came upon Novak, who, my friend assumed, was en route to the George Washington University auditorium for the daily taping of CNN's Crossfire. He asked Novak if he could walk a block or two with him, as they were headed in the same direction; Novak acquiesced. Striking up a conversation, my friend, without revealing that he knew me, asked Novak about the uranium controversy. It was a minor problem, Novak replied, and opined that the administration should have dealt with it weeks before. My friend then asked Novak what he thought about me, and Novak answered: "Wilson's an asshole. The CIA sent him. His wife, Valerie, works for the CIA. She's a weapons of mass destruction specialist. She sent him." At that point, my friend and Novak went their separate ways. My friend headed straight for my office a couple of blocks away.

Once he related this unsettling story to me, I asked him to immediately write down the details of the conversation and afterwards ushered him out of my office. Next, I contacted the head of the news division at CNN, Eason Jordan, Novak's titular boss, whom I had known for a number of years. It took several calls, but I finally tracked him down on his cell phone. I related to him the details of my friend's encounter with Novak and pointed out that whatever my wife might or might not be, it was the height of irresponsibility for Novak to share such information with an absolute stranger on a Washington street. I asked him to speak to Novak for me, but he demurred— he said he did not know him very well—and suggested that I speak to Novak myself. I arranged for him to have Novak call me and hung up.

Novak called the next morning, but I was out, and then so was he. We did not connect until the following day, July 10. He listened quietly as I repeated to him my friend's account of their conversation. I told him I couldn't imagine what had possessed him to blurt out to a complete stranger what he had thought he knew about my wife.

Novak apologized, and then asked if I would confirm what he had heard from a CIA source: that my wife worked at the Agency. I told him that I didn't answer questions about my wife. I told him that my story was not about my wife or even about me; it was about sixteen words in the State of the Union address.

I then read to him three sentences from a 1990 news story about the evacuation of Baghdad: "The chief American diplomat, Joe Wilson, shepherds his flock of some 800 known Americans like a village priest. At 4:30 Sunday morning, he was helping 55 wives and children of U.S. diplomats from Kuwait load themselves and their few remaining possessions on transport for the long haul on the desert to Jordan. He shows the stuff of heroism." <h3>The reporters who had written this, I pointed out, were Robert Novak and Rowland Evans. I suggested to Novak that he might want to check his files before writing about me. </h3>I also offered to send him all the articles I had written in the past year on policy toward Iraq so that he could educate himself on the positions I had taken. He would learn, if he took the time, that I was hardly antiwar, just anti–dumb war. Before I hung up, Novak apologized again for having spoken about Valerie to a complete stranger.

The following Monday, July 14, 2003, I read Novak's syndicated column in the Washington Post. The sixth paragraph of the ten-paragraph story leapt out at me: "Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report."

When I showed it to Valerie, she was stoic in her manner but I could see she was crestfallen. Twenty years of loyal service down the drain, and for what, she asked after she had read it. What was Novak trying to say? What did blowing her cover have to do with the story? It was nothing but a hatchet job. She immediately began to prepare a checklist of things she needed to do to minimize the fallout to projects she was working on...................

Quote:

http://mediamatters.org/items/200502120003
<h1>In taped CNN interview, Gannon misrepresented Senate Intel report findings on Joe Wilson</h1>

In an interview with CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, former Talon News Washington bureau chief and White House correspondent Jeff Gannon falsely claimed that the Senate Intelligence Committee "chastised" former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV "for essentially misleading everybody along" by denying that his wife, former CIA operative Valerie Plame, was responsible for the CIA's decision to send Wilson to Niger to investigate allegations that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from the west African nation.

On the February 11 edition of News from CNN, Blitzer showed a clip of his interview with Gannon from the evening before, part of which had <a href="/items/itembody/200502110002">aired</a> on the February 10 edition of Wolf Blitzer Reports. In the clip, Gannon explained why the Justice Department had interviewed him as part of its investigation into the leak of Plame's identity as a CIA undercover operative:<blockquote>

GANNON: They were interested in where -- how I knew or received a copy of a confidential CIA memo that said that uh, Valerie Plame suggested that Joe Wilson be sent on this mission -- something that they have all vigorously denied but which is, in effect, true. The Senate Intelligence Committee eight months later, when they issued their report, said that and chastised Joe Wilson for essentially misleading everybody all along, and that's the day Joe Wilson was no longer a [Senator John] Kerry [presidential] campaign adviser.</blockquote>

In fact, the Senate Intelligence Committee's <a href="http://intelligence.senate.gov/iraqreport2.pdf">report</a> (pdf) did not reach a conclusion about how the CIA made its decision, much less "chastise" Wilson, who had <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2004-07-21-uranium_x.htm">denied</a> that his wife had "anything to do" with the CIA's decision. Here's what the report stated:

<blockquote>
Some CPD [CIA's Directorate of Operations, Counterproliferation Division] officials could not recall how the office decided to contact the former ambassador, however, interviews and documents provided to the committee indicate that his wife, a former CPD employee, suggested his name for the trip. The CPD reports officer told Committee staff that the former ambassador's wife "offered up his name" and a memorandum to the Deputy Chief of CPD on February 12, 2002, from the former ambassador's wife says, "my husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity." This was just one day before CPD sent a cable [blacked out] requesting concurrence with CPD's idea to send the former ambassador to Niger and requesting any additional information from the foreign government service on their uranium reports. [p. 39; PDF p. 49]
</blockquote>

The Senate report did not mention that an unnamed CIA official told the Los Angeles Times that Wilson's denial was accurate. The Times reported on July 15, 2004: "A senior intelligence official said the CIA supports Wilson's version: 'Her bosses say she did not initiate the idea of her husband going. ... They asked her if he'd be willing to go, and she said yes,' the official said."

Contrary to Gannon's assertions that the Senate Intelligence Committee "chastised" Wilson, it was only Republicans on the committee who "chastised" Wilson. In an additional statement, which was not part of the unanimous bipartisan report, Senators Pat Roberts (R-KS), Christopher S. Bond (R-MO), and Orrin G. Hatch (R-UT) [pp. 443-45; PDF pp. 453-55] attacked Wilson's credibility.

Gannon's false claim echoes his assertion in a July 15, 2004, White House <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/07/20040715-7.html">press briefing</a>, in which he asked White House press secretary Scott McClellan:

<blockquote>
Q: Last Friday, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report that shows that Ambassador Joe Wilson lied when he said his wife didn't put him up for the mission to Niger. The British inquiry into their own prewar intelligence yesterday concluded that the President's 16 words ["The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa"] were "well-founded." Doesn't Joe Wilson owe the President and America an apology for his deception and his own intelligence failure?

</blockquote>

Posted to the web on Friday February 11, 2005 at 8:35 PM EST