Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post

host · 03-08-2007, 08:09 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3

I don't understand..........I don't get it.........

ace...you can get your "take" on what happened from the WSJ editorial page, LGF, Bozell's "newsbusters", or from news reporting....

I invite you to challenge me on these two points, or....on any other "fact" reported or filed/spoken in court in this national security leak investigation:

1.) The POTUS stated that he was committed to co-operating with the DOJ investigation into who leaked the name of a CIA "operative" (as Bob Novak described her).....to the press, and that anyone who was found in the investigation, to have leaked her name, would not continue to work in "his" (the decider's....) administration. No one working in the Bush admin. was permitted to "take the fifth"....Ari Fleischer did so, only after he resigned.....

2.) The CIA filed a complaint with the DOJ, asking for an investigation to determine who had leaked the name of one of it's employees to the press, so that a determination could be made as to how the security of the classified information regarding the CIA employee was compromised, and reached the press, and then the public. The CIA has a policy of not officially confirming or denying the covert status of it's employees. Former CIA spokesman, Bill Harlow, has testified that when he was asked by Bob Novak about the circumstances of Valerie Plame's employment with the CIA, he advised Novak not to publish references to her CIA employment.....

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...030601969.html
Cheney's Suspected Role in Security Breach Drove Fitzgerald

By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 7, 2007; A06

In a small room on the third floor of the D.C. federal courthouse in late March 2004, Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald stood before I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and asked him three separate times whether his boss, Vice President Cheney, had discussed telling reporters that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA.

The question was not insignificant for Fitzgerald, who saw his mission as revealing the full chain of events behind the security breach involving Plame's work as an undercover CIA officer. Fitzgerald was unconvinced by Libby's response that even though he "may have" had such a conversation with Cheney, it probably occurred after Plame's identity had been revealed in a newspaper column.

Fitzgerald would respond with great frustration in his summation at Libby's trial almost three years later, saying that Libby's lies had effectively prevented him from learning about all of Cheney's actions in the administration's campaign to undermine Plame's husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, a critic of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

More than he had previously, Fitzgerald made clear in those remarks that his search for the truth about Cheney was a key ambition in his probe and that his inability to get it was a key provocation for Libby's indictment. Although Cheney was the target, Fitzgerald's investigation could not reach him because of Libby's duplicity.

Fitzgerald's summation explained, in part, why he brought charges based on imperfect evidence against Libby, even though Libby was not a source for Robert D. Novak, the author of the July 14, 2003, newspaper column that outed Plame as a CIA employee.

The jury's verdict addresses Fitzgerald's first conclusion -- that Libby lied deliberately and did not misspeak from faulty memory. But the trial showed that the prosecutor finished his investigation with his mind made up that Libby's account was meant to hide his own involvement as well as to conceal the potential involvement of the vice president.

At the trial's close, Fitzgerald expressed his concern in unusually blunt terms. After Libby's lawyers complained that he was trying to put a "cloud" over Cheney without evidence to back it up, Fitzgerald told the jury on Feb. 20, "We'll talk straight."

There was, he said, "a cloud over what the vice president did" during the period before Novak's column was published, and it was created by testimony about Cheney directing Libby and others at the White House to disseminate information on Wilson and Wilson's criticisms.

"We didn't put that cloud there. That cloud remains because the defendant obstructed justice and lied about what happened," Fitzgerald added.

The notion that Libby was merely a courtroom stand-in for Cheney infuriated Libby's lawyers, who sought in their courtroom statement to defend both men. "Nobody in the office of the vice president is concerned about" Plame, Libby attorney William Jeffress Jr. said in his closing argument. "She never was part of the story they were trying to put out."

Fitzgerald disagreed. He twice used a baseball metaphor to describe what he believes went on in the vice president's office -- at his announcement of Libby's indictment on Oct. 28, 2005, and again during his trial summation. Suppose, Fitzgerald said, you were looking into whether a pitcher had purposely beaned a batter, and if so, why.

"As you sit back, you want to learn why was this information going out. Why were people taking this information about Valerie Wilson and giving it to reporters?" Fitzgerald asked at the 2005 news conference. "What we have when someone charges obstruction of justice is the umpire gets sand thrown in his eyes. He's trying to figure out what happened, and somebody blocked their view."

Randall D. Eliason, a former chief prosecutor of public corruption and fraud in the U.S. attorney's office in Washington, said Fitzgerald "would not have been doing his job" if he had not brought the charges. If "witnesses believe they can lie to the FBI and lie in the grand jury and there will be no consequences, then it becomes impossible to investigate any criminal activity, from terrorism to shoplifting."

Witnesses in the case never presented evidence of illegal actions by Cheney, nor did they ever pin direct responsibility for the leak on him. They presented what some lawyers considered an imperfect picture of Libby's duplicity in pretrial and trial testimony marked by bouts of forgetfulness and hazy recollections of events.

Former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, former CIA official Robert Grenier, NBC News Washington bureau chief Tim Russert and former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer each gave accounts of their interactions with Libby or other journalists that conflicted with their earlier statements or with the recollections of others besides Libby.

"Almost every witness would misspeak on direct [questioning] or left something out of grand jury testimony or got a date wrong," said Ty Cobb, a former assistant U.S. attorney who heads the white-collar criminal defense group at Hogan & Hartson. He expressed skepticism that the case against Libby should have been presented to a jury.

But Fitzgerald's decision to do so may have stemmed from his pique at his inability to get to the truth about Cheney, who appeared in testimony and in White House documents disclosed to the jury as the man behind the screen, pulling the switches and levers in what one of Fitzgerald's aides described as an orchestrated "political public relations" campaign to undermine Wilson.

Cheney, Fitzgerald suggested, had both motive and opportunity to run the show: He was deeply angered, even preoccupied, by Wilson's claim that Cheney deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq's nuclear research. He was the first to tell Libby about Plame's job, and he scrawled a disparaging note about Plame's alleged responsibility for a CIA-sponsored "junket" to Niger that her husband took.

And finally, Cheney was convinced that if "everything" about the Wilson trip was disclosed to reporters, Wilson's credibility would be in tatters.

Libby's grand jury testimony addressed each point. "I'm not sure I would use the word 'ticked off,' but [Cheney] was frustrated" by the public impact of Wilson's critique, a topic that Cheney raised in multiple conversations, Libby said. Cheney directed Libby to interrogate Grenier on the reasons for the Wilson trip; he repeatedly "made comments" about Wilson's wife and mused about her role in arranging a junket; he dictated a set of talking points for journalists that opened with what Fitzgerald portrayed as a proverbial leading question about "who authorized Joe Wilson's trip to Niger."

"The question of who sent Wilson is important," Fitzgerald said. "It is a number one question on the vice president's mind."

Fitzgerald's presentation also called attention to two occasions in which Libby said Cheney instructed him to deal directly with reporters and spelled out what to say -- his meeting on July 8, 2003, with Miller and his telephone conversation four days later with Time magazine correspondent Matt Cooper. In both, Libby mentioned Plame's employment at the CIA.

Fitzgerald's concerns were heightened by Libby's reply to a question about when he and Cheney first discussed Plame's CIA employment. "I think it was after the [July 6] Wilson column," which accused the White House of lying about the justification for the Iraq war, Libby told the grand jury.

But then he added: "I'm sorry, I don't mean the Wilson column, I'm sorry. I misspoke. I think, I think it was after the [July 14] Novak column," which disclosed Plame's name. He and Cheney had discussed other Wilson-related matters in the intervening period, Libby said, but not "that part about the wife."

Fitzgerald, in his summation, said he found this explanation incredible. He said Cheney referred to Plame in a note he inscribed on Wilson's column and noted that over the next two days, Libby raised the issue of her CIA employment with three others: Miller, Fleischer and Cheney aide David Addington. "If you think that's a coincidence, well, that makes no sense," Fitzgerald said.

He also called the jury's attention to the fact that Libby disclosed to Cheney his statement to the FBI that he learned about Plame's employment from Russert, which Russert later disputed. "The only person he told was the vice president. Think about that," Fitzgerald said.

Libby's false account of events, he added, was meant to serve as a "blocker . . . to cut off all those conversations with people, including the vice president." There is, Fitzgerald said, "a cloud over the White House as to what happened. Don't you think the FBI, the grand jury, the American people are entitled to a straight answer?"

Fitzgerald said at a news conference yesterday that Libby, "by lying and obstructing justice, harmed the system. And that was something serious. And that's the point we made to the jury, and obviously the jury agreed."

ace....if the CIA approached you and asked you to perform a "mission" for it that involved the risk of you being arrested in the course of carrying out the steps necessary to accomplish the goals of the mission, and the CIA informed you that if, during the mission, or at anytime, afterwards...., you were accused or otherwise held accountable by any third party, for anything having to do with your CIA assigned mission....the CIA would never confirm or deny that you were working for them.....would you, after reading the above Wapo account.....be as inclined to go on the CIA mission, as you would have been if the disclosures made in Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation, or in Libby's criminal trial, and jury verdict, hadn't happened....had never been disclosed?

You can cite opinions from the WSJ editorial page, to your heart's content, ace.....and throw in some of Victoria Toensing's opinions, too....after all, "she wrote the law".....but none of that, reliably speaks to what happened here...

In a post 9/11 world....in a time when the US is "at war".....a period of "war time" where we are told by the POTUS and his VP that the risks to our country are great enough for the POTUS to unilaterally grab and exercise unprecedented, extra constitutional powers....because, we are "a nation, at war", do you think that the testimony of Mr. Libby, or the evidence of the time and attention that Libby, and his boss, VP Cheney, put into finding out about Valerie Plame's employment status, and spreading that information to others, and to smearing her husband, Joe Wilson, now that what they did is part of an official, criminal court record....made it easier, or more difficult, for the CIA, or any US agency that conducts secret or covert operations....to reassure those who are asked to "serve their country", in a secret or unofficial capacity, to decide to do so, with the same confidence that their identity and classified information related to their employment/duties would be maintained, and protected from public disclosure, by government officials with high level security clearances....in high positions of official responsibility, before Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation and Libby's trial and verdict, as they can have now, and going forward?

I ask you to consider, ace....if you "don't understand", because you've let in so much "noise" from opinions like the ones on the WSJ and editorial page, that you've come to believe that a US attorney, Mr. Fitzgerald...an appointee of president Bush, and later, by Ashcroft's #2 at the DOJ, James Comey...to take over the CIA leak investigation, with all of the "power and independence", with regard to that investigation, as if he, himself, was the attorney general.....Fitzgerald.....a prosecutor with an impeccable record on the job, and, in his personal life, a man with a dogged and relentless approach to his job as a prosecutor, with results in his career that speak for themselves, HAS DONE ANYTHING WRONG....MADE ANY MISTAKES IN THE COURSE OF CARRYING OUT THE DUTIES that James Comey assigned to him.

<h3>If you think Fitzgerald acted improperly, ace.... please post your opinion of what he did that was wrong or improper, given what Libby did and said, in response to questions he was asked, by investigators and by the grand jury.</h3>

Consider, ace....that we are "at war", that the CIA requested an investigation to determine whether a crime was committed, after Novak described that his information that "Wilson's wife", Valerie Plame, was an employed by the CIA, as an "operative", was confirmed by two "senior administration officials".

Consider how Mr. Bush assured us:

Quote:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0030930-9.html
For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
September 30, 2003

President Discusses Job Creation With Business Leaders

........ Q Do you think that the Justice Department can conduct an impartial investigation, considering the political ramifications of the CIA leak, and why wouldn't a special counsel be better?

THE PRESIDENT: Yes. Let me just say something about leaks in Washington. There are too many leaks of classified information in Washington. There's leaks at the executive branch; there's leaks in the legislative branch. There's just too many leaks. And if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of.

And so I welcome the investigation. I -- I'm absolutely confident that the Justice Department will do a very good job. There's a special division of career Justice Department officials who are tasked with doing this kind of work; they have done this kind of work before in Washington this year. I have told our administration, people in my administration to be fully cooperative.

I want to know the truth. If anybody has got any information inside our administration or outside our administration, it would be helpful if they came forward with the information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are true and get on about the business.

Yes, let's see, Kemper -- he's from Chicago. Where are you? Are you a Cubs or White Sox fan? (Laughter.) Wait a minute. That doesn't seem fair, does it? (Laughter.)

Q Yesterday we were told that Karl Rove had no role in it --

THE PRESIDENT: Yes.

Q -- have you talked to Karl and do you have confidence in him --

THE PRESIDENT: Listen, I know of nobody -- I don't know of anybody in my administration who leaked classified information. If somebody did leak classified information, I'd like to know it, and we'll take the appropriate action. And this investigation is a good thing.

And again I repeat, you know, Washington is a town where there's all kinds of allegations. You've heard much of the allegations. And if people have got solid information, please come forward with it. And that would be people inside the information who are the so-called anonymous sources, or people outside the information -- outside the administration. And we can clarify this thing very quickly if people who have got solid evidence would come forward and speak out. And I would hope they would.

And then we'll get to the bottom of this and move on. But I want to tell you something -- leaks of classified information are a bad thing. And we've had them -- there's too much leaking in Washington. That's just the way it is. And we've had leaks out of the administrative branch, had leaks out of the legislative branch, and out of the executive branch and the legislative branch, and I've spoken out consistently against them and I want to know who the leakers are.

Thank you. ..........

......consider that both Mr. Bush and VP Cheney subsequently hired criminal defense attorneys to accompany them when they were questioned about this matter, later, after Mr. Fitzgerald was appointed special counsel to oversee the investigation of the CIA leak. Consider that Mr. Cheney did not appear as a witness to defend Libby, a trusted aid he had described recently as:

Quote:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/relea...0060622-8.html
For Immediate Release
Office of the Vice President
June 22, 2006

Interview of the Vice President by John King, CNN

THE VICE PRESIDENT: John, I am not going to comment on the case. It's -- I may be called as a witness. Scooter Libby, obviously, one of the finest men I've ever known .....