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host · 09-03-2006, 09:48 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by powerclown

Very possibly.
Still, nothing can change Bob Beckel's opinion.

Unlike, foxnews shill, Bob Beckel only facts about the 'Plame Leak" case being investigated by special counsel Patrick Fitzerald, reported by news reporters with reputable track record and a proven history of reliable reporting, would influence me to change my opinion....and blame Joe Wilson instead of Bush administration officials for deliberately disclosing that Plame worked for the CIA, as "payback" for Wison's refuting Bush's "16 words" in his Jan., 2003 SOTU speech.

Bob Beckel has already changed his opiinion....once:

Quote:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,162161,00.html
FOXNEWS.COM HOME > POLITICS
White House Mum on Rove Role in CIA Leak
Monday, July 11, 2005

......Democrats have already begun to call for Rove's scalp. Some want him fired, others want him suspended and his security clearances revoked. <h3>Still others want Rove to testify in congressional hearings.

"He's not getting away with this one," Democratic strategist Bob Beckel told FOX News....</h>

Show us where these reporters, or CIA spokesman Bill Harlow have retracted any of the following:

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...nguage=printer
Bush Administration Is Focus of Inquiry
CIA Agent's Identity Was Leaked to Media

By Mike Allen and Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 28, 2003; Page A01

At CIA Director George J. Tenet's request, the Justice Department is looking into an allegation that administration officials leaked the name of an undercover CIA officer to a journalist, government sources said yesterday.

The operative's identity was published in July after her husband, former U.S. ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, publicly challenged President Bush's claim that Iraq had tried to buy "yellowcake" uranium ore from Africa for possible use in nuclear weapons. Bush later backed away from the claim.

CIA Director George J. Tenet wants to know whether officials in the White House broke federal law.

The intentional disclosure of a covert operative's identity is a violation of federal law.

The officer's name was disclosed on July 14 in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak, who said his sources were two senior administration officials.

Yesterday, a senior administration official said that before Novak's column ran, two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife. Wilson had just revealed that the CIA had sent him to Niger last year to look into the uranium claim and that he had found no evidence to back up the charge. Wilson's account touched off a political fracas over Bush's use of intelligence as he made the case for attacking Iraq.

"Clearly, it was meant purely and simply for revenge," the senior official said of the alleged leak.

Sources familiar with the conversations said the leakers were seeking to undercut Wilson's credibility. They alleged that Wilson, who was not a CIA employee, was selected for the Niger mission partly because his wife had recommended him. Wilson said in an interview yesterday that a reporter had told him that the leaker said, "The real issue is Wilson and his wife."

A source said reporters quoted a leaker as describing Wilson's wife as "fair game."

The official would not name the leakers for the record and would not name the journalists. The official said there was no indication that Bush knew about the calls.

It is rare for one Bush administration official to turn on another. Asked about the motive for describing the leaks, the senior official said the leaks were "wrong and a huge miscalculation, because they were irrelevant and did nothing to diminish Wilson's credibility."

Wilson, while refusing to confirm his wife's occupation, has suggested publicly that he believes Bush's senior adviser, Karl C. Rove, broke her cover. Wilson said Aug. 21 at a public forum in suburban Seattle that it is of keen interest to him "to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs."

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said yesterday that he knows of no leaks about Wilson's wife. "That is not the way this White House operates, and no one would be authorized to do such a thing," McClellan said. "I don't have any information beyond an anonymous source in a media report to suggest there is anything to this. If someone has information of this nature, then he or she should report it to the Department of Justice."

McClellan, who Rove had speak for him, said of Wilson's comments: "It is a ridiculous suggestion, and it is simply not true." McClellan was asked about Wilson's charge at a White House briefing Sept. 16 and said the accusation is "totally ridiculous."

Administration officials said Tenet sent a memo to the Justice Department raising a series of questions about whether a leaker had broken federal law by disclosing the identity of an undercover officer. The CIA request was reported Friday night by MSNBC.com. Administration sources familiar with the matter said the Justice Department is determining whether a formal investigation is warranted. 

An intelligence official said Tenet "doesn't like leaks."

The CIA request could reopen the rift between the White House and the intelligence community that emerged this summer when Bush and his senior aides blamed Tenet for the inclusion of the now-discredited uranium claim -- the so-called "16 words" -- in the State of the Union address in January.

Tenet issued a statement taking responsibility for the CIA's approval of the address before it was delivered, but made clear the CIA had earlier warned the White House not to use the allegations about uranium ore. After an ensuing rush of leaks over White House handling of intelligence, Bush's aides said they believed in retrospect it had been a political mistake to blame Tenet.

The Intelligence Protection Act, passed in 1982, imposes maximum penalties of 10 years in prison and $50,000 in fines for unauthorized disclosure by government employees with access to classified information.

Members of the administration, especially Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, have been harshly critical of unauthorized leakers, and White House spokesmen are often dismissive of questions about news reports based on unnamed sources. The FBI is investigating senators for possibly leaking intercept information about Osama bin Laden.

The only recipient of a leak about the identity of Wilson's wife who went public with it was Novak, the conservative columnist, who wrote in The Washington Post and other newspapers that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, "is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction." He added, "Two senior administration officials told me that Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger."

When Novak told a CIA spokesman he was going to write a column about Wilson's wife, the spokesman urged him not to print her name "for security reasons," according to one CIA official. Intelligence officials said they believed Novak understood there were reasons other than Plame's personal security not to use her name, even though the CIA has declined to confirm whether she was undercover.

Novak said in an interview last night that the request came at the end of a conversation about Wilson's trip to Niger and his wife's role in it. "They said it's doubtful she'll ever again have a foreign assignment," he said. "They said if her name was printed, it might be difficult if she was traveling abroad, and they said they would prefer I didn't use her name. It was a very weak request. If it was put on a stronger basis, I would have considered it."

After the column ran, the CIA began a damage assessment of whether any foreign contacts Plame had made over the years could be in danger. The assessment continues, sources said.

The CIA occasionally asks news organizations to withhold the names of undercover agents, and news organizations usually comply. An intelligence official told The Post yesterday that no further harm would come from repeating Plame's name.

Wilson was acting U.S. ambassador to Iraq during the run-up to the Persian Gulf War of 1991. He was in the diplomatic service from 1976 until 1998, and was the Clinton administration's senior director of African affairs on the National Security Council. He is now an international business consultant. Wilson said the mission to Niger was unpaid except for expenses.

Wilson said he believes an inquiry from Cheney's office launched his eight-day mission to Niger in February 2002 to check the uranium claim, which turned out to be based at least partly on forged documents. "The way it was briefed to me was that the office of the vice president had expressed an interest in a report covering uranium purchases by Iraq from Niger," Wilson said in a telephone interview yesterday.

He said that if Novak's account is accurate, the leak was part of "a deliberate attempt on the part of the White House to intimidate others and make them think twice about coming forward."

Sources said that some of the other journalists who received the leak did not use the information because they were uncomfortable with unmasking an undercover agent or because they did not consider the information relevant to Wilson's report about Niger....

Dana Priest co-wrote the preceding Sept.2003 news report;

Quote:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana_Priest

Dana Priest is an author and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. Priest has worked almost twenty years for the Washington Post. As one of the Washington Post's specialists on National Security she has written many articles on the United States' War on terror. In February 2006, Ms. Priest was awarded the George Polk Award for National Reporting for her November 2005 article on alleged secret CIA detention facilities in foreign countries.

The article, published by the Washington Post above the fold on November 2, 2005, asserts the existence of clandestine, extraterritorial, CIA interrogation sites.[1] This article triggered a world-wide debate on these "black sites". Priest's article states that in addition to the 750 Guantanamo Bay detainees in military custody, the CIA held approximately 30 senior members of the al Qaeda and Taliban leadership and approximately 100 foot soldiers in their own facilities around the world. She wrote that several former Soviet Bloc countries had allowed the CIA to run interrogation facilities on their territory. On April 21, 2006 The New York Times reported that a European Union investigation has not proved the existence of secret CIA prisons in Europe.

In an interview, Priest confirmed that the CIA had referred her story to the Justice Department, and that various Congressmembers have called for an inquiry, to determine whether she or her sources had broken any laws.[2]. The Washington Post reported on April 21, 2006 that a CIA employee was fired for allegedly leaking classifed information to Ms. Priest and other journalists. NBC and The New York Times reported that the CIA employee is Mary O. McCarthy, appointed as Special Assistant to the President during the Clinton Administration by his former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger. The allegation has been disputed by McCarthy.

Priest is the author of a book entitled: "The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace With America's Military".[3] She was a guest scholar at the U.S. Institute of Peace. She was a recipient of the MacArthur grant the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the National Defense in 2001, the NYPL Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism.[4]

On April 17, 2006, Priest won a Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting. The announcement cited "her persistent, painstaking reports on secret 'black site' prisons and other controversial features of the government's counterterrorism campaign."

She lives in Washington, DC and is married to William Goodfellow who is Executive Director of the Center for International Policy.

....I've waited 13 month....so far.....for a civil, coherent response to my post #45 here:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...48#post2078748

I am including it again because it still contains relevant facts in "the case'' that have never been impeached. It also demonstrates that the same game of the foks who won't discuss the facts or try to impeach them, still post only glib attacks against Plame's husband Joe Wilson, and apparently pass that off as relevant and informative addiition to a discussion that logic indicates, should be about analyzing and embracng or refuting, news reporting and statements by Patrick Fitzgerald and of the judges who have ruled on his motiions and those of Scooter Libby's attorneys......but it isn't....and it's not from a lack of trying to do just that....on my part.

Does the bashing of Joe Wilson mesh with the news reporting or the CIA request for investigation of the Plame leak, or with any Fitzgerald statement or of the court? Is it at all coherent in any examination of the facts? Show us how.....or stop doing it!

Quote:

powerclown, if you recall, we recently had the exchange, quoted below, in the <a href="http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=91795">"If Rove Is Indicted"........</a> thread. It seemed OT, continuing this on that thread, so I decided to post a followup here. I saw no point, until now, in replying to your last post, because we reached a point where.....aside from commenting on the reputations for reliability and accuracy of the sources that each of us cited to back our opposing opinions, there was no new information available to add more clarity to the issue of Joe Wilson's integrity and reputation. Now....IMO, there is more....(see the third quote box.)

http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...03&postcount=9

Quote:

Originally Posted by host

Please explain your "Did Wilson do something sleazy? Yes." What can you offer to show that Wilson was not credible and forthright, in his July 6, 2003 NY Times Op-Ed piece, or subsequently, that comes from a non-partisan source. Wilson signed no NDA with the CIA before or after his trip to Niger. The subsequent revelations of the Duelfer WMD report, and the Jan. 12, 2005 admissions to reporters by Scott MCClellan, speaking on behalf of the president, <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/01/20050112-7.html">that the weapons that we all believed were there, based on the intelligence, were not there.</a>, only serve to strengthen Wilson's already strong credentials as a "whistleblower" acting appropriately in the wake of the failure of the executive administration to back it's oft repeated claims of the nature of the threat that Iraq posed to the U.S., that justified an military invasion of that sovereign country.

powerclown, you may accept Rove's distortions that "Wilson claimed Cheney sent him to Niger", or <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8525978/site/newsweek/page/2/">that Wilson's trip had not been authorized by "DCIA"—CIA Director George Tenet—or Vice President Dick Cheney. Rather, "it was, KR said, wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip.</a>

I don't accept it because there are no sources for those distortions besides "senior administration officials" and Sen. Pat Roberts partisan "addenedum".

This is a link to an accurate, IMO, of the distortions that are used to smear Wilson, and the defects in them: http://mediamatters.org/items/200507150008

Can you make a case that Wilson is "sleazy", inferring that he deserved the onslaught of Rove's campaign to marginalize Wilson and his wife, that Rove launched no later than immediately after Wilson wrote:

I have a hard time posting that anyone is "sleazy". I have to be certain of what I know, and not what others filter for me, before I'll post that about someone. What do you know, that persuades you that Wilson is sleazy?

http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...9&postcount=10

Quote:

Originally Posted by powerclown

Funny, you don't seem to have a hard time referring to members of the Bush Administration as "fuckers"or"thugs".
I'd hate to get on your bad side, host.
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Just a few reasons why Wilson is a sleazeball:

Plame's Input Is Cited on Niger Mission
Saturday, July 10, 2004

---
source

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...602069_pf.html
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...=Google+Search
Prosecutor In CIA Leak Case Casting A Wide Net
White House Effort To Discredit Critic Examined in Detail

By Walter Pincus and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, July 27, 2005; A01

The special prosecutor in the CIA leak probe has interviewed a wider range of administration officials than was previously known, part of an effort to determine whether anyone broke laws during a White House effort two years ago to discredit allegations that President Bush used faulty intelligence to justify the Iraq war, according to several officials familiar with the case.

Prosecutors have questioned former CIA director George J. Tenet and deputy director John E. McLaughlin, former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, State Department officials, and even a stranger who approached columnist Robert D. Novak on the street.

In doing so, special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has asked not only about how CIA operative Valerie Plame's name was leaked but also how the administration went about shifting responsibility from the White House to the CIA for having included 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Africa, an assertion that was later disputed.

Most of the questioning of CIA and State Department officials took place in 2004, the sources said.

It remains unclear whether Fitzgerald uncovered any wrongdoing in this or any other portion of his nearly 18-month investigation. All that is known at this point are the names of some people he has interviewed, what questions he has asked and whom he has focused on.

Fitzgerald began his probe in December 2003 to determine whether any government official knowingly leaked Plame's identity as a CIA employee to the media. Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, has said his wife's career was ruined in retaliation for his public criticism of Bush. In a 2002 trip to Niger at the request of the CIA, Wilson found no evidence to support allegations that Iraq was seeking uranium from that African country and reported back to the agency in February 2002. But nearly a year later, Bush asserted in his State of the Union speech that Iraq had sought uranium from Africa, attributing it to British, not U.S., intelligence.

Fitzgerald has said in court that he had completed most of his investigation at a time when he was pressing for New York Times reporter Judith Miller to testify about any conversations she had with a specific administration official about Plame during the week before Plame's identity was revealed.............

....Using background conversations with at least three journalists and other means, Bush officials attacked Wilson's credibility. They said that his 2002 trip to Niger was a boondoggle arranged by his wife, but CIA officials say that is incorrect. One reason for the confusion about Plame's role is that she had arranged a trip for him to Niger three years earlier on an unrelated matter, CIA officials told The Washington Post..........

......Also murky is the role of Novak, who first publicly identified Plame in a syndicated column published July 14, 2003.

Lawyers have confirmed that Novak discussed Plame with White House senior adviser Karl Rove four or more days before the column identifying her ran. But the identity of another "administration" source cited in the column is still unknown. Rove's attorney has said Rove did not identify Plame to Novak.

In a strange twist in the investigation, the grand jury -- acting on a tip from Wilson -- has questioned a person who approached Novak on Pennsylvania Avenue on July 8, 2003, six days before his column appeared in The Post and other publications, Wilson said in an interview. The person, whom Wilson declined to identify to The Post, asked Novak about the "yellow cake" uranium matter and then about Wilson, Wilson said. He first revealed that conversation in a book he wrote last year. In the book, he said that he tried to reach Novak on July 8, and that they finally connected on July 10. In that conversation, Wilson said that he did not confirm his wife worked for the CIA but that Novak told him he had obtained the information from a "CIA source."

Novak told the person that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA as a specialist in weapons of mass destruction and had arranged her husband's trip to Niger, Wilson said. Unknown to Novak, the person was a friend of Wilson and reported the conversation to him, Wilson said.

Novak and his attorney, James Hamilton, have declined to discuss the investigation, as has Fitzgerald.

Harlow, the former CIA spokesman, said in an interview yesterday that he testified last year before a grand jury about conversations he had with Novak at least three days before the column was published. He said he warned Novak, in the strongest terms he was permitted to use without revealing classified information, that Wilson's wife had not authorized the mission and that if he did write about it, her name should not be revealed.

Harlow said that after Novak's call, he checked Plame's status and confirmed that she was an undercover operative. He said he called Novak back to repeat that the story Novak had related to him was wrong and that Plame's name should not be used. But he did not tell Novak directly that she was undercover because that was classified.

In a column published Oct. 1, 2003, Novak wrote that the CIA official he spoke to "asked me not to use her name, saying she probably never again will be given a foreign assignment but that exposure of her name might cause 'difficulties' if she travels abroad. He never suggested to me that Wilson's wife or anybody else would be endangered. If he had, I would not have used her name."

Harlow was also involved in the larger internal administration battle over who would be held responsible for Bush using the disputed charge about the Iraq-Niger connection as part of the war argument. Based on the questions they have been asked, people involved in the case believe that Fitzgerald looked into this bureaucratic fight because the effort to discredit Wilson was part of the larger campaign to distance Bush from the Niger controversy.

Wilson unleashed an attack on Bush's claim on July 6, 2003, appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press," in an interview in The Post and writing his own op-ed article in the New York Times, in which he accused the president of "twisting" intelligence.

Behind the scenes, the White House responded with twin attacks: one on Wilson and the other on the CIA, which it wanted to take the blame for allowing the 16 words to remain in Bush's speech. As part of this effort, then-deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley spoke with Tenet during the week about clearing up CIA responsibility for the 16 words, even though both knew the agency did not think Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger, according to a person familiar with the conversation. Tenet was interviewed by prosecutors, but it is not clear whether he appeared before the grand jury, a former CIA official said.

On July 9, Tenet and top aides began to draft a statement over two days that ultimately said it was "a mistake" for the CIA to have permitted the 16 words about uranium to remain in Bush's speech. He said the information "did not rise to the level of certainty which should be required for presidential speeches, and the CIA should have ensured that it was removed."

A former senior CIA official said yesterday that Tenet's statement was drafted within the agency and was shown only to Hadley on July 10 to get White House input. Only a few minor changes were accepted before it was released on July 11, this former official said. He took issue with a New York Times report last week that said Rove and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, had a role in Tenet's statement.

The prosecutors have talked to State Department officials to determine what role a classified memo including two sentences about Plame's role in Wilson's Niger trip played in the damage-control campaign.

People familiar with this part of the probe provided new details about the memo, including that it was then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage who requested it the day Wilson went public and asked that a copy be sent to then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to take with him on a trip to Africa the next day. Bush and several top aides were on that trip. Carl W. Ford Jr., who was director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the time and who supervised the original production of the memo, has appeared before the grand jury, a former State Department official said.

The preceding report of the interview of former CIA spokesperson Bill Harlow makes it quite clear that Harlow is Novak's contact at the CIA, and that Harlow told Novak that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was confirmed by the CIA spokesman to have the status of an "undercover operative", and that Plame did not "send her husband, Joe Wilson, on a fact finding trip regarding the attempts by Iraq to purchase "yellowcake" uranium.

Quote:

Fitzgerald began his probe in December 2003 to determine whether any government official knowingly leaked Plame's identity as a CIA employee to the media. Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, has said his wife's career was ruined in retaliation for his public criticism of Bush. In a 2002 trip to Niger at the request of the CIA,

Quote:

Harlow, the former CIA spokesman, said in an interview yesterday that he testified last year before a grand jury about conversations he had with Novak at least three days before the column was published. He said he warned Novak, in the strongest terms he was permitted to use without revealing classified information, that Wilson's wife had not authorized the mission and that if he did write about it, her name should not be revealed.

As I posted earlier, here................

Quote:

http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...1&postcount=15
Quote Box - 3: On Oct. 1, 2003
Even Novak
tells CNN's Blitzer that senior Bush admin. officials told him that Wilson's wife suggested that he be sent to NIGER, but his source at the CIA said, "to their knowledge, he did not -- that the mission was not suggested by Ambassador Wilson's wife."

Quote Box - 4: In Wilson's July 6, 2003 Op-Ed column in the NY Times, he writes, "The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office".

.....Novak, however, chose to ignore what CIA spokesman Bill Harlow told him,
and instead, publish Rove's Nepotism "OP" to discredit and make an example out of "whistleblower", Joe Wilson..............

Quote:

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8658626/
Transcript for July 24
Fred Thompson, Dick Durbin, David Gregory, William Safire, Stuart Taylor & Nina Totenberg

BC News
Updated: 12:05 p.m. ET July 24, 2005

PLEASE CREDIT ANY QUOTES OR EXCERPTS FROM THIS NBC TELEVISION PROGRAM TO "NBC NEWS' MEET THE PRESS........

.............MODERATOR/PANELIST: Tim Russert, NBC News
............MR. RUSSERT: Four years of Latin, Canisius High School. Thank you, Brother Bill.

Let me turn to the CIA leaked case investigation. There have been numerous newspaper reports that the investigation is now focusing on perhaps perjury as opposed to the leak because the leak is difficult to prove under the law. What we know so far is that in terms of journalists, Walter Pincus and Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post, Russert of NBC, Matt Cooper of Time magazine have all testified, either in deposition or before the grand jury. We assume Robert Novak has testified because Judy Miller of The Times who didn't testify is in jail. And there's been numerous newspaper reports that there's a difference between the testimony of some of the reporters and Scooter Libby of Vice President Cheney's office and Karl Rove of President Bush's office. Bill Safire, what do we make of all this?...............

Quote:

http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/5529639.html
Last update: July 27, 2005 at 7:06 PM
Editorial: CIA & Iraq/An effort to shift the blame
July 28, 2005 ED0728

In addition to potentially indicting one or more people in the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame in the literal sense, special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald could very well figuratively indict the Bush administration's case for going to war in Iraq, plus its cynical behavior when that case began to unravel. He could also expose just how badly columnist Robert Novak behaved in all this.

The Washington Post's Walter Pincus is the gold standard in trustworthy, hard-nosed reporting these days, and he, with Jim VandeHei, put together a powerful report for Wednesday's Post that illuminates several aspects of the Plame affair.

Pincus and VandeHei write that Fitzgerald is exploring the fight between the White House and the CIA over who was responsible for the discredited claim that Iraq sought to buy enriched uranium in Niger. He's exploring this because "the effort to discredit [Ambassador Joseph] Wilson was part of the larger campaign to distance Bush from the Niger controversy."...........

powerclown, I ask you again....how do you come to label, on this forum, a man who has served his country as a respected diplomat, lauded, in 1991 by GWH Bush as a "hero", attacked by members of the Bush administration, along with his wife, a 20 year career, "undercover operative", in the description of the CIA's own recent spokesperson? Wilson was apparently sincere and forthright in all of his public statements....even the account that he provided in his recent book about Novak telling a "stranger on a DC street that Wilson was a liar and that his wife "was CIA" has now been corroborated in Pincus's new reporting.

I've posted links to back the point that WaPo reporter Pincus is the best and most reliable reporter of the details of this "story", that he has himself. provided testimony to Fitzpatrick's grand jury, and thus can be presumed to know the content of questions that Fitzpatrick asks reporters, and that, by testifying, Pincus presumably has an easier time approaching and comparing notes with those who have also testified, including Bill Harlow.

By reading and allowing your opinion to be influenced by talking points like the ones in this "example" article (see quote box below...), powerclown, and then by defending Rove, et al, and by smearing Wilson as a "sleaze", you do yourself and your reputation here no positive service, powerclown. Please reconsider who and what you have been supporting and...... denigrating.

Quote:

http://www.etherzone.com/2005/schm062205.shtml
JOSEPH WILSON
AND HIS AMAZING, TECHNICOLOR GOP TURNCOATS

By: Doug Schmitz

"It was this flat-out lie about what Wilson learned in Niger, and what he reported to the CIA upon his return, that fueled the "sixteen words" controversy and led to the publication of Wilson’s best-selling account, titled, ironically, The Politics of Truth. One can only conclude that Joseph Wilson has perpetrated one of the most astonishing hoaxes in American history."

– John Hinderaker, July 10, 2004, Powerlineblog.com

Based on the latest slant the elite media have put on stories over the last eight months to further smear the Bush administration, they seem to have resuscitated a once-useful breed of politician – besides anti-American Democrats – they can actually quote without resorting to the "anonymous source" tack: GOP turncoats who have lost their souls, as well as their backbones, in turning against Bush, our courageous troops and the war on terrorism. They seem to be the only kind of Republican the elite media will validate.

Take Joseph Wilson: The original GOP turncoat who has turned treason into a profitable career and betrayal into an art form. An ex-U.S. ambassador to Iraq under former President George H.W. Bush, Wilson has quickly made new friends – as well as a king’s ransom – by telling vicious lies and half-truths about President George W. Bush that has threatened to jeopardize our troops as they valiantly fight the just war in Iraq............

Powerclown, after at least 13 months of only glibness and avoidance from you, how about posting an answer that impeaches the reporting of WaPo's Dana Priest and statements of ex CIA spokesman, Blll Harlow? How about proviiding evidence
that refutes news reports that Plame's nearest neighbors did not know that she was a CIA employee, or show us credible support for the claim that 'Wilson's wife sent him to Niger". Show us where Wilson claimed that Cheney sent him to Niger. Show us how Bush's 16 SOTU words in Jan 2003, were legitimate, when he delivered them, and show us what unbiased 'mainstream" news reporters are on record, claiming that they personally knew that Plame worked for CIA before June, 2003. Please provide news reportiing...not ediitorials or opinion pieces, or claims of former CIA employees who left the agency ten or more years ago. I haven't seen any of those kind of citations provided, to transform your Wiilson bashing from a Rovian "fringe psy-Op", into an argument for discussion on its merits....in a poltics forum.