The giant merged Karl Rove thread.

[host]

<h3>UPDATE July 15....if You Would Rather "Skim Through" the material presented in the 2- Post "Starter" here, go to the "condensed" version:</h3> http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...1&postcount=15

Here's the drill....."this thread starter" is spread over two consecutive posts.
The premise is that the common denominator to the "outing" of CIA employee Valerie Plame and the investigation that it triggered, is the seed of Karl Rove's demise. We start with examples of the "NEPOTISM" accusation, first connected directly to Rove by Newsweek's article about Matt Cooper's conversation with Rove in early July, 2003. (BOLD letters, scroll down....) Every Republican whoi has tried to discredit Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, and his 2002 factfinding trip to Niger, has followed Rove's example of playing the "NEPOTISM" card, even in this week's disinformation media blitz. Part II of this thread starter, IMO, is sensational. Read on....you owe it to yourself ! Near the bottom of Part I, you will discover that Dan Froomkin of washingtonpost.com , endorses a story by independent blog reporter, Murray Waas, that Rove is now a "subject" of prosecutor Fitzpatrick's investigation. MSM still will not cover this story, even to the extent that I am, now.

http://roberts.senate.gov/07-09a-2004.htm
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - July 9. 2004
CONTACT: Sarah Ross (202) 224-4774
Iraq Pre-War Intelligence Report: Additional Views of Chairman Pat Roberts joined by Senator Christopher S. Bond, Senator Orrin G. Hatch

......Niger.........

What cannot be found, however, are <b>two conclusions upon which the Committee�s Democrats would not agree. </b>While there was no dispute with the underlying facts, my Democrat colleagues refused to allow the following conclusions to appear in the report:

<b>Conclusion: The plan to send the former ambassador to Niger was suggested by the former ambassador�s wife, a CIA employee.</b>

The former ambassador�s wife suggested her husband for the trip to Niger in February 2002. The former ambassador had traveled previously to Niger on behalf of the CIA, also at the suggestion of his wife, to look into another matter not related to Iraq. On February 12, 2002, the former ambassador�s wife sent a memorandum to a Deputy Chief of a division in the CIA�s Directorate of Operations which said, �[m]y 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 the same Directorate of Operations division sent a cable to one of its overseas stations requesting concurrence with the division�s idea to send the former ambassador to Niger.

Conclusion: Rather than speaking publicly about his actual experiences during his inquiry of the Niger issue, the former ambassador seems to have included information he learned from press accounts and from his beliefs about how the Intelligence Community would have or should have handled the information he provided.

At the time the former ambassador traveled to Niger, the Intelligence Community did not have in its possession any actual documents on the alleged Niger-Iraq uranium deal, only second hand reporting of the deal. The former ambassador�s comments to reporters that the Niger-Iraq uranium documents �may have been forged because �the dates were wrong and the names were wrong,�� could not have been based on the former ambassador�s actual experiences because the Intelligence Community did not have the documents at the time of the ambassador�s trip. In addition, nothing in the report from the former ambassador�s trip said anything about documents having been forged or the names or dates in the reports having been incorrect. The former ambassador told Committee staff that he, in fact, did not have access to any of the names and dates in the CIA�s reports and said he may have become confused about his own recollection after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported in March 2003 that the names and dates on the documents were not correct. Of note, the names and dates in the documents that the IAEA found to be incorrect were not names or dates included in the CIA reports.

Following the Vice President�s review of an intelligence report regarding a possible uranium deal, he asked his briefer for the CIA�s analysis of the issue. It was this request which generated Mr. Wilson�s trip to Niger. The former ambassador�s public comments suggesting that the Vice President had been briefed on the information gathered during his trip is not correct, however. While the CIA responded to the Vice President�s request for the Agency�s analysis, they never provided the information gathered by the former Ambassador. The former ambassador, in an NBC Meet the Press interview on July 6, 2003, said, �The office of the Vice President, I am absolutely convinced, received a very specific response to the question it asked and that response was based upon my trip out there.� The former ambassador was speaking on the basis of what he believed should have happened based on his former government experience, but he had no knowledge that this did happen.

These and other public comments from the former ambassador, such as comments that his report �debunked� the Niger-Iraq uranium story, were incorrect and have led to a distortion in the press and in the public�s understanding of the facts surrounding the Niger-Iraq uranium story. The Committee found that, for most analysts, the former ambassador�s report lent more credibility, not less, to the reported Niger-Iraq uranium deal.

During Mr. Wilson�s media blitz, he appeared on more than thirty television shows including entertainment venues. Time and again, Joe Wilson told anyone who would listen that the President had lied to the American people, that the Vice President had lied, and that he had �debunked� the claim that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa. As discussed in the Niger section of the report, not only did he NOT �debunk� the claim, he actually gave some intelligence analysts even more reason to believe that it may be true. I believed very strongly that it was important for the Committee to conclude publicly that many of the statements made by Ambassador Wilson were not only incorrect, but had no basis in fact............

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editor...l?id=110006955
Karl Rove, Whistleblower
He told the truth about Joe Wilson.

Wednesday, July 13, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

Democrats and most of the Beltway press corps are baying for Karl Rove's head over his role in exposing a case of CIA nepotism involving Joe Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame. On the contrary, we'd say the White House political guru deserves a prize--perhaps the next iteration of the "Truth-Telling" award that The Nation magazine bestowed upon Mr. Wilson before the Senate Intelligence Committee exposed him as a fraud.

For Mr. Rove is turning out to be the real "whistleblower" in this whole sorry pseudo-scandal. He's the one who warned Time's Matthew Cooper and other reporters to be wary of Mr. Wilson's credibility. He's the one who told the press the truth that Mr. Wilson had been recommended for the CIA consulting gig by his wife, not by Vice President Dick Cheney as Mr. Wilson was asserting on the airwaves. In short, Mr. Rove provided important background so Americans could understand that Mr. Wilson wasn't a whistleblower but was a partisan trying to discredit the Iraq War in an election campaign. Thank you, Mr. Rove.

Media chants aside, there's no evidence that Mr. Rove broke any laws in telling reporters that Ms. Plame may have played a role in her husband's selection for a 2002 mission to investigate reports that Iraq was seeking uranium ore in Niger..........

............."While an investigation of the leak was justified, it is far from clear--at least on the public record--that a crime took place," the Post noted the other day. Granted the media have come a bit late to this understanding, and then only to protect their own, but the logic of their argument is that Mr. Rove did nothing wrong either.

The same can't be said for Mr. Wilson, who first "outed" himself as a CIA consultant in a melodramatic New York Times op-ed in July 2003. At the time he claimed to have thoroughly debunked the Iraq-Niger yellowcake uranium connection that President Bush had mentioned in his now famous "16 words" on the subject in that year's State of the Union address.

Mr. Wilson also vehemently denied it when columnist Robert Novak first reported that his wife had played a role in selecting him for the Niger mission. He promptly signed up as adviser to the Kerry campaign and was feted almost everywhere in the media, including repeat appearances on NBC's "Meet the Press" and a photo spread (with Valerie) in Vanity Fair.

But his day in the political sun was short-lived. <b>The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report last July cited the note that Ms. Plame had sent recommending her husband for the Niger mission.</b> "Interviews and documents provided to the Committee indicate that his wife, a CPD [Counterproliferation Division] employee, suggested his name for the trip," said the report............

http://www.politicsoftruth.com/edito...Statement.html
Joe Wilson's response to the addendum of the Senate Intelligence
Committee's Report on pre-war intelligence posted by three of its
Republican members

Joseph C. Wilson, IV

July 15, 2004

The Honorable Pat Roberts
Chairman, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

The Honorable Jay Rockefeller
Vice Chairman, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence


Dear Senator Roberts and Senator Rockefeller,

I read with great surprise and consternation the Niger portion of Senators Roberts, Bond and Hatch “additional comments to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee's Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Assessment on Iraq. I am taking this opportunity to clarify some of the issues raised in these comments.

First conclusion: “The plan to send the former ambassador to Niger was suggested by the former ambassador's wife, a CIA employee.”

That is not true. The conclusion is apparently based on one anodyne quote from a memo Valerie Plame, my wife sent to her superiors that says “my husband has good relations with 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.” There is no suggestion or recommendation in that statement that I be sent on the trip. Indeed it is little more than a recitation of my contacts and bona fides. The conclusion is reinforced by comments in the body of the report that a CPD reports officer stated the “the former ambassador's wife 'offered up his name'” (page 39) and a State Department Intelligence and Research officer that the “meeting was 'apparently convened by [the former ambassador's] wife who had the idea to dispatch him to use his contacts to sort out the Iraq-Niger uranium issue.”

In fact, Valerie was not in the meeting at which the subject of my trip was raised. Neither was the CPD Reports officer. After having escorted me into the room, she departed the meeting to avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest. It was at that meeting where the question of my traveling to Niger was broached with me for the first time and came only after a thorough discussion of what the participants did and did not know about the subject. My bona fides justifying the invitation to the meeting were the trip I had previously taken to Niger to look at other uranium related questions as well as 20 years living and working in Africa, and personal contacts throughout the Niger government. Neither the CPD reports officer nor the State analyst were in the chain of command to know who, or how, the decision was made. The interpretations attributed to them are not the full story. In fact, it is my understanding that the Reports Officer has a different conclusion about Valerie's role than the one offered in the “additional comments”. I urge the committee to reinterview the officer and publicly publish his statement......

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIP.../03/le.00.html
CNN LATE EDITION WITH WOLF BLITZER

Interview With Tom Ridge; Lott, Bayh Debate 9/11 Report; Interview With Joe Lieberman

Aired August 3, 2003 - 12:00 ET

......We're joined now by the man who went to Africa to personally investigate whether Iraq attempted to purchase uranium, the former U.S. acting ambassador to Iraq, Joseph Wilson.

Mr. Ambassador, welcome back to "LATE EDITION."

I want to get to that whole issue in just a moment, but listen to what David Kay, who is now working for the CIA, the former U.N. weapons inspector, says about the search for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. DAVID KAY, FORMER U.N. WEAPONS INSPECTOR: There is solid evidence being produced. We do not intend to expose this evidence until we have full confidence that it is solid proof of what we're proposed to take -- to talk about.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: I think he's being very cautious now, given some of the missteps in the past. But do you have confidence in David Kay, that they know what they're doing?

JOSEPH WILSON, FORMER U.S. ACTING AMBASSADOR TO IRAQ: Oh, absolutely, and I've had confidence in -- that we would find weapons of mass destruction, weapons of mass destruction programs from the very beginning of the run-up to the war in Iraq.

687, the initial U.N. resolution dealing with weapons of mass destruction, demanded compliance, and it had as its objective disarmament. We had not yet achieved disarmament, so it was perfectly appropriate to continue to try and gather together the international consensus to disarm Saddam and his programs.

I think we'll find chemical weapons. I think we'll find biological precursors that may or may not have been weaponized. And I think we will find a continuing interest of -- on nuclear weapons. The question really is whether it met the threshold test of imminent threat to our own national security or even the test of grave and gathering danger.

BLITZER: And you believe, going into the war, that that threshold had not been met?

WILSON: No, not at all. I believe that we had to be aggressive in disarming and that the posture we had to take had to include the credible threat of force. And in order for that threat of force to be credible, we had to be prepared to use it.

What I disagreed with was the other agendas that were in play that led us to invade, conquer and now occupy Iraq.

BLITZER: But did they exaggerate the threat?

WILSON: Well, in my particular piece of this, the Niger piece, I think it's very clear that this rumor kept popping back up...

BLITZER: That they were seeking uranium -- enriched uranium from Africa.

WILSON: Right...

BLITZER: Which they have sought in the past. Which they have sought in the past.

WILSON: Which they had sought in the '80s, and all that was well documented. And there was, in fact, a delegation that went from Baghdad to Niamey in 1999. That visit was well documented in U.S. reporting as well.

BLITZER: I know you were sent to go on this mission long before the State of the Union Address. When Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, was on this program a few weeks ago, on July 13th, I asked her about your mission. Listen to this exchange I had with her.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. CONDOLEEZZA RICE, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: I didn't know Joe Wilson was going to Niger. And if you look in Director Tenet's statement, it says that counter-proliferation experts, on their own initiative, sent Joe Wilson. So, I don't know...

BLITZER: Who sent him?

RICE: Well, it was certainly not at a level that had anything to do with the White House.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: Is that true?

WILSON: <b>Well, look, it's absolutely true that neither the vice president nor Dr. Rice nor even George Tenet knew that I was traveling to Niger.

What they did, what the office of the vice president did, and, in fact, I believe now from Mr. Libby's statement, it was probably the vice president himself...</b>

BLITZER: Scooter Libby is the chief of staff for the vice president.

WILSON: Scooter Libby.

<b>They asked essentially that we follow up on this report -- that the agency follow up on the report. So it was a question that went to the CIA briefer from the Office of the Vice President. The CIA, at the operational level, made a determination that the best way to answer this serious question was to send somebody out there who knew something about both the uranium business and those Niger officials that were in office at the time these reported documents were executed.</b>

BLITZER: I want you to elaborate on what you said, I believe, in Time magazine, that this was a smear job against you, this entire post-mortem that's been coming up since then, including your wife, who works at the CIA exposing her, for example. What did you mean by that?

WILSON: Well, first of all, with respect to my wife, I don't answer any questions. And anything that I say with respect to that, the allegations about her are all hypothetical. I would not confirm or deny her place of employment. To do so would be, if she were, a breach of national security; and if she were not, at a minimum, what they have done is they have forced her to answer a lot of uncomfortable questions from neighbors and friends and whatnot.

But what I said to Time magazine and to others is that these attacks on me, which were really very minor -- Cliff May saying that I told the truth because I was a Democrat. I went out to Iraq because I was an American patriot and my government asked me to go out.

But the idea seemed to me, in going after me and then later making these allegations about my wife, was clearly designed to keep others from stepping forward.

If you recall, there were any number of analysts who were quoted anonymously as saying that the vice president had seemed to pressure them in his many trips out to the CIA. I don't know if that's true or not, but you can be sure that a GS-14 or 15 with a couple of kids in college, when he sees the allegations that came from senior administration officials about my family are in the public domain, you can be sure that he's going to be worried about what might happen if he were to step forward.

BLITZER: And you still want an investigation to find out if laws were broken in releasing this information, for example, about your wife?

WILSON: Well, yes, and hypothetically speaking, about my wife. If in fact she is as Mr. Novak alleged in his...

BLITZER: Bob Novak.

WILSON: ... Bob Novak, the journalist, alleged in his article, then the two senior administration officials, who leaked that information are libel or vulnerable to investigation under a 1982 law dealing with the identification of American agents.

BLITZER: How close in your estimate -- and you're an expert on this -- is the U.S. to finding Saddam Hussein? WILSON: It's a hit and miss thing. If Saddam is actually out in Mosul with the western tribes, as was asserted this morning, then he might be more exposed. If he's in a neighborhood in Baghdad, I think it's a little bit more difficult to find him, because the neighborhoods he's going to frequent are full of fervent Baathist supporters, and it's hard for U.S. troops to get in there unnoticed; it's hard to spring a surprise.

BLITZER: If they found Saddam Hussein, captured him or killed him, would be it over then? Would everything, sort of, fall into place and Ambassador Bremer could have, sort of, easy ride to get democracy, elections, a new Iraqi regime in place?

WILSON: Well, I actually think having found Qusay and Uday was better in driving the wooden stake through the heart of the idea that there would be a Hussein dynasty that would reemerge.

I think as the two senators said earlier, that Saddam is largely a spent force. Killing him will kill the tyrant, and that will be a good thing.

That said, I think that what we face here is we face the fact that we defeated the Sunni tribe, and the Sunni tribe would like to come back and reassert itself in power or at a minimum will want to defend itself against both U.S. occupation forces and what they fear is going to be a Shia attempt to assert their power over the country.

So I don't think over the medium and long term this is over by a long shot.

BLITZER: We want to have you back and talk about Liberia. You're an expert on Africa too. But we don't have time, unfortunately for that today.

Ambassador Joe Wilson, thanks for joining us.

WILSON: Good to be with you, Wolf. Thanks.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/05/06/nyt.kristof/
Nicholas Kristof: Why truth matters

By Nicholas D. Kristof
Op-Ed Columnist, New York Times
Tuesday, May 6, 2003 Posted: 6:23 AM EDT (1023 GMT)

When I raised the Mystery of the Missing W.M.D. recently, hawks fired barrages of reproachful e-mail at me. The gist was: "You *&#*! Who cares if we never find weapons of mass destruction, because we've liberated the Iraqi people from a murderous tyrant.".............

..........Consider the now-disproved claims by President Bush and Colin Powell that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger so it could build nuclear weapons. As Seymour Hersh noted in The New Yorker, the claims were based on documents that had been forged so amateurishly that they should never have been taken seriously.

I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged.

The envoy reported, for example, that a Niger minister whose signature was on one of the documents had in fact been out of office for more than a decade. In addition, the Niger mining program was structured so that the uranium diversion had been impossible. The envoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted — except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway.

"It's disingenuous for the State Department people to say they were bamboozled because they knew about this for a year," one insider said. ...........

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...&notFound=true
CIA Did Not Share Doubt on Iraq Data
Bush Used Report Of Uranium Bid

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 12, 2003; Page A01

.........The CIA's failure to share what it knew, which has not been disclosed previously, was one of a number of steps in the Bush administration that helped keep the uranium story alive until the eve of the war in Iraq, when the United Nations' chief nuclear inspector told the Security Council that the claim was based on fabricated evidence...........

...Armed with information purportedly showing that Iraqi officials had been seeking to buy uranium in Niger one or two years earlier, the CIA in early February 2002 dispatched a retired U.S. ambassador to the country to investigate the claims, according to the senior U.S. officials and the former government official, who is familiar with the event. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity and on condition that the name of the former ambassador not be disclosed.

During his trip, the CIA's envoy spoke with the president of Niger and other Niger officials mentioned as being involved in the Iraqi effort, some of whose signatures purportedly appeared on the documents.

After returning to the United States, the envoy reported to the CIA that the uranium-purchase story was false, the sources said. Among the envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong," the former U.S. government official said.

However, the CIA did not include details of the former ambassador's report and his identity as the source, which would have added to the credibility of his findings, in its intelligence reports that were shared with other government agencies. Instead, the CIA only said that Niger government officials had denied the attempted deal had taken place, a senior administration said.

"This gent made a visit to the region and chatted up his friends," a senior intelligence official said, describing the agency's view of the mission. "He relayed back to us that they said it was not true and that he believed them.".......

............. The CIA's decision to send an emissary to Niger was triggered by questions raised by an aide to Vice President Cheney during an agency briefing on intelligence circulating about the purported Iraqi efforts to acquire the uranium, according to the senior officials. Cheney's staff was not told at the time that its concerns had been the impetus for a CIA mission and did not learn it occurred or its specific results.

Cheney and his staff continued to get intelligence on the matter, but the vice president, unlike other senior administration officials, never mentioned it in a public speech. He and his staff did not learn of its role in spurring the mission until it was disclosed by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof on May 6, according to an administration official............

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/op...5ac468&ei=5070
NYTimes.com > Opinion

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
What I Didn't Find in Africa
By JOSEPH C. WILSON 4th

Published: July 6, 2003

.........In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake — a form of lightly processed ore — by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990's. 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.

After consulting with the State Department's African Affairs Bureau (and through it with Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick, the United States ambassador to Niger), I agreed to make the trip. The mission I undertook was discreet but by no means secret. While the C.I.A. paid my expenses (my time was offered pro bono), I made it abundantly clear to everyone I met that I was acting on behalf of the United States government..............

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8525978/...wsweek/page/2/
Matt Cooper's Source
What Karl Rove told Time magazine's reporter.

By Michael Isikoff
Newsweek

July 18 issue - It was 11:07 on a Friday morning, July 11, 2003, and Time magazine correspondent Matt Cooper was tapping out an e-mail to his bureau chief, Michael Duffy. "Subject: Rove/P&C," (for personal and confidential), Cooper began. "Spoke to Rove on double super secret background for about two mins before he went on vacation ..." Cooper proceeded to spell out some guidance on a story that was beginning to roil Washington. He finished, "please don't source this to rove or even WH [White House]" and suggested another reporter check with the CIA..........

.......In a brief conversation with Rove, Cooper asked what to make of the flap over Wilson's criticisms. NEWSWEEK obtained a copy of the e-mail that Cooper sent his bureau chief after speaking to Rove. (The e-mail was authenticated by a source intimately familiar with Time's editorial handling of the Wilson story, but who has asked not to be identified because of the magazine's corporate decision not to disclose its contents.) <h3>Cooper wrote that Rove offered him a "big warning" not to "get too far out on Wilson." Rove told Cooper 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."</h3> Wilson's wife is Plame, then an undercover agent working as an analyst in the CIA's Directorate of Operations counterproliferation division. (Cooper later included the essence of what Rove told him in an online story.) The e-mail characterizing the conversation continues: "not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[d] suspect but so is the report. he [Rove] implied strongly there's still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro[m] Niger ... "

http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/...vak/index.html
Thursday, October 2, 2003 Posted: 12:10 AM EDT (0410 GMT)

Novak at the center of the storm

WASHINGTON --Columnist and CNN contributor Robert Novak said Wednesday he resents the suggestion he was used as a pawn to reveal the identity of a CIA operative in order to retaliate against her husband, who criticized President Bush's evidence supporting claims that Iraq attempted to buy material for nuclear weapons.

Novak appeared on CNN's "Wolf Blitzer Reports" Wednesday.

BLITZER: He's at the center of this storm, the controversy that is raging here in Washington. The naming of the CIA operative appeared in his column back on July 14. That popular columnist syndicated across the country by The Chicago Sun-Times. And he's well-known, of course, to our CNN viewers as the co-host of "Crossfire."

Joining me now for an exclusive conversation, the veteran journalist, is my colleague, Bob Novak. Bob, thanks very much for joining us. Let's talk about this. What made you decide to go out, first of all, and write about former Ambassador Joe Wilson?

NOVAK: Former Ambassador Wilson broke the secrecy that a retired diplomat, unknown, had gone to Niger in the year 2002 to investigate whether the Iraqis tried to buy yellow cake, uranium from Niger.

BLITZER: You mean when he wrote that op-ed page article in The New York Times?

<b>NOVAK: New York Times ... That was on a Sunday morning. On Monday, I began to report on something that I thought was very curious. Why was it that Ambassador Wilson, who had no particular experience in weapons of mass destruction, and was a sharp critic of the Iraqi policy of President Bush and, also, had been a high-ranking official in the Clinton White House, who had contributed politically to Democrats -- some Republicans, but mostly Democrats -- why was he being selected?

I asked this question to a senior Bush administration official, and he said that he believed that the assignment was suggested by an employee at the CIA in the counterproliferation office who happened to be Ambassador Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame. I then called another senior official of the Bush administration, and he said, Oh, you know about that? And he confirmed that that was an accurate story. I then called the CIA.</b> They said that, to their knowledge, he did not -- that the mission was not suggested by Ambassador Wilson's wife -- but that she had been asked by her colleagues in the counterproliferation office to contact her husband. So she was involved.

BLITZER: Because he was a former ambassador in Gabon, he knew that part of Africa, and that's, presumably, why they wanted to send him on this mission.

NOVAK: I'm not going into motives. I thought it was strange because he is not an expert in counterproliferation. He had not been ambassador to Niger, he had served in Niger at one time.

BLITZER: But he was a senior on African affairs at the [National Security Council] under Clinton?

NOVAK: Under Clinton, that's correct. So that was the story I wrote, was about the details of Ambassador Wilson's mission, which created a great storm. And in the sixth paragraph of a 10-paragraph story I mentioned that two senior administration officials had said it was suggested by his wife, who worked at the CIA.

BLITZER: Now, in today's column, I think you wrote in The Chicago Sun-Times and The Washington Post, appearing as well, you wrote this: "He asked me not to use her name," referring to a CIA official, "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." How much did they press you and say, you know what, this is really a problem? Please don't use her name. She's a covert operative.

NOVAK: It was what I call a weak request. In journalism we are asked not to use things constantly. I'm sure you have been. Don't use that, Wolf. I was asked by the CIA official not to use it. He did not, at any point, say her life was in danger. He did not press it. I thought it was in the nature of a pro forma request after a conversation in which he had detailed Ambassador Wilson's mission, explained to me that the mission -- that there was never a written report. A lot of people don't even know that. There was no written report.

(CROSSTALK)

NOVAK: ... oral report. And that it was not very convincing, not a very convincing report. But it was -- and at the end of that suggested that I not -- asked me, requested that [I] not use the name.

BLITZER: But the notion, even that she would never be able to have a foreign assignment, shouldn't that alone have been enough to maybe give you pause?

NOVAK: Oh, no. Let's read what I said, Wolf, not what you said.

BLITZER: This is in today's column.

NOVAK: Yes, read what I said.

BLITZER: "He asked me not to use her name saying she probably never again will be given a foreign assignment."

NOVAK: Yes. That was not anything -- whether I wrote anything or not, he said she would never be given a foreign assignment. That was a fact that she had moved on to a different phase of her career. It was not because of anything I was writing.

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: ... this would only cause her difficulties? That's what they said to you?

NOVAK: Difficulties if she was traveling abroad, I guess, on vacation or something. But they said she would not be given a foreign assignment. I thought that was a very weak request, let me repeat. And the editor of The Washington Post, Fred Hyatt, said in an editorial as well that if the request had been made by the CIA not to put this information in for the fear of the safety of Mrs. Wilson or anybody else, I certainly would not have used her name. But that request was not made. Now, why was it not made? There's one of two reasons. One possible reason is that it was a mistake by the CIA. They screwed it up. The other reason is they didn't think her life was in danger. I don't know the answer. It's one of the two though.

BLITZER: It is the subject of an investigation right now. The other issue that's coming out is the use of your word "operative" to suggest that you knew she was a covert, clandestine operative as opposed to an analyst. There's been some debate. She's currently an analyst, but according to all the sources we have, she used to be an operative.

NOVAK: Well, I have sources, too. I have sources that tell me that she was never an analyst -- I mean, never an operative. She was never covert. She was never covert. Put it that way. She was never covert. She was always what they call "light covert." That is, she was covered, she was working under the cover of another government agency, but she was not a covert operator. I have been told that by other sources...

(CROSSTALK)

NOVAK: But I just want to say that the word operative that I said in today's column, Wolf, was a mistake, using that word on my part. I have called hack politicians operatives if you read my column carefully over 40 years. And it's just kind of a throw-away word. I had no knowledge whether or not she was an operative.

<b>BLITZER: All right, the other issue that's come out is this article that appeared in Newsday, the newspaper on Long Island, July 22 after your July 14 column. The reporters said this. They were following up on your story. "Novak, in an interview, said his sources had come to him with the information. `I didn't dig it out. It was given to me,' he said. `They thought it was significant, they gave me the name, and I used.' "

NOVAK: Now, these reporters made a bad mistake. They said they came to me with the information. I never told them that. And that's not in quotes, is it?

BLITZER: They said that the sources said they -- your sources had come to you...

NOVAK: Yes, but that's not in quotes.</b>

BLITZER: That's not in quotes.

NOVAK: So then they made that up. I never said that. I said I didn't dig it out in the sense I went through the files of the CIA. It was given to me, as I just told you. There's no inconsistency there at all. But that is -- you have to be very careful, Wolf, with these things because they say that the idea that -- they're saying they came to me. They did not come to me.

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: ... the quote part is correct, "I didn't dig it out. It was given to me."

NOVAK: I just told you it was given to me. I didn't dig it out of the files there. Let me tell you this. There are people putting out stories that the White House was trying to find a pawn to put out this information. They went through six people...

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: ... to smear Joe Wilson.

NOVAK: Yes. And finally came to me. That's not true. As I have told you in detail this story, nobody came to me. Nobody came to me. I never said that. The story in Newsday is absolutely incorrect. It's not in my quotes. They never came to me. I went to them in reporting that story.

BLITZER: Other reporters are suggesting that they got these calls, but they didn't do anything...

NOVAK: I don't know if they did or not. But I resent -- and I resented it when you said it the other day, I really resented when you said that they went to six people and finally found Novak. That is just not the truth. Nobody came to me with this story. I was reporting on Joe Wilson...

BLITZER: This was your initiative?

NOVAK: Entirely.</b>

BLITZER: All right. Now let's -- speaking of Joe Wilson, he was on "Nightline" last night. And he said, as he has in the past, some very, very derogatory words about Karl Rove, the chief political adviser to the president. Let's listen precisely to what Joe Wilson said.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

FORMER AMBASSADOR JOE WILSON: What I do know or what I have confidence in, based upon what respectable press people in this town have told me, is that a week after the Novak article came out, Karl Rove was still calling around, talking to press people saying Wilson's wife is fair game.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: And the suggestion has been made -- and we're not going to ask you to reveal your sources because I know you would never reveal your sources -- that Karl Rove somehow is manipulating this whole thing to get even with Joe Wilson who was critical of the president.

NOVAK: Ambassador Wilson, I'm not going to call him a liar. Certainly, it seems highly improbable that after the story had appeared in print and it was not -- I would like to say that this was a hell of column that rocked Washington. It didn't. It was in the sixth paragraph of a 10-paragraph story. But after it appeared, Mr. Rove, the idea that he would be going around trying to peddle this column after it appeared in print, it doesn't make sense to me. Maybe it did happen, maybe it didn't. I have no information of that. I would like to see the names of the reporters, though, wouldn't you?

BLITZER: Definitely. A lot of people want it a lot more. And I'm sure presumably in the days and weeks to come we'll know a lot more. We're almost out of time. But a couple -- just to wrap a couple things up. Had you known that this information, releasing the name, could have endangered her or her colleagues, you would never have reported this?

NOVAK: No, no. I want to rephrase your question. Had I known. You're saying it would have endangered her and her colleagues. I still don't know that to this day. I will tell you this. If a CIA official said, "You are endangering the life of Mrs. Wilson and her colleagues," I never would have printed it.

BLITZER: But do you have any reason to believe that the source or sources that you spoke to in the administration themselves knew that by giving her name or telling you about her, that this would be causing her any kind of problem?

NOVAK: I really resent that premise that it endangers her life because you're saying if they knew that...

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: ... they may have thought she was simply an analyst, too.

NOVAK: She might have been. You don't know whether she was and I don't know whether she was. There's no way -- we do not know that fact. I have been told, not by the official sources at the CIA, but the unofficial sources, that she was not a covert operative whose life was in danger.

BLITZER: Because this is significant, as you know, because the law also states that you have to have intent, you have to know that by revealing the identity of a covert agent, you're committing this crime. They may not have known.

NOVAK: Let me say one other thing I had in today's column. The person who gave me the original story, I said it was given in an off-handed way during in this conversation and he was not a partisan gun slinger. I said that. I'm not going to go into more description, but I did feel that the idea that this was some kind of a carefully arranged plot to destroy this woman and her husband, as far as I'm concerned, was nonsense. It didn't happen that way, and this kind of scandal that has perpetrated in Washington is Washington at its worst.

BLITZER: Bob Novak speaking bluntly as he always does. Thanks very much.

NOVAK: Thank you, Wolf.

BLITZER: Thank you and good luck.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...071301138.html
or... http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&lr...nG=Search+News
Won't Defend? Then Attack!

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Wednesday, July 13, 2005; 12:54 PM
(link for next excerpt)= http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...1301138_2.html

.........Luskin has previously said that special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald had told him that Rove was not a "target" of the criminal investigation. All that would mean, however, is that Fitzgerald was at that point not ready to actually declare his intention to indict Rove.

<b>But Luskin has now told that National Review that Fitzgerald identified Rove, among others, as a "subject."</b>

In grand-jury talk a subject -- unlike an ordinary witness -- is someone who faces possible indictment.

<b>And investigative reporter Murray Waas blogs today that his sources tell him that columnist Robert Novak -- the first person to publish Plame's identity -- has in fact spoken at length to prosecutors...........</b>

http://whateveralready.blogspot.com/...ated-with.html
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
Exclusive: Novak co-operated with prosecutors
THE PUBLIC LIBRARY, Washington D.C.-- Columnist Robert Novak provided detailed accounts to federal prosecutors of his conversations with Bush administration officials who were sources for his controversial July 11, 2003 column identifying Valerie Plame as a clandestine CIA officer, according to attorneys familiar with the matter.

Novak's attorney, James Hamilton, declined to comment earlier this morning. An assistant for Novak told me: "Mr. Novak, per his lawyer's instruction, does not comment on any aspect of that case." Kim Nerheim, a spokesperson for Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor investigating the leak of Plame's name said: "We do not confirm or deny any anything regarding an ongoing investigation."

Novak had claimed to the investigators that the Bush administration officials with whom he spoke did not identify Plame as a covert operative, and that use of the word "operative" was his formulation and not theirs, according to those familiar with Novak's accounts to the investigators.

White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove and at least two other Bush administration officials have told federal investigators that they had spoken to reporters about Plame, but that they did not know at the time that she was a covert operative with the CIA, the same sources told me..........

..............Federal investigators have been skeptical of Novak's assertions that he referred to Plame as a CIA "operative" due to his own error, instead of having been explicitly told that was the case by his sources, according to attorneys familiar with the criminal probe.

That skepticism has been one of several reasons that the special prosecutor has pressed so hard for the testimony of Time magazine's Cooper and New York Times reporter Judith Miller.............

.................Also of interest to investigators have been a series of telephone contacts between Novak and Rove, and other White House officials, in the days just after press reports first disclosed the existence of a federal criminal investigation as to who leaked Plame's identity. Investigators have been concerned that Novak and his sources might have conceived or co-ordinated a cover story to disguise the nature of their conversations. That concern was a reason-- although only one of many-- that led prosecutors to press for the testimony of Cooper and Miller, sources said.

Lending credence to those suspicions was that a U.S. government official questioned by investigators said Novak specifically asked him whether Plame had some covert status with the CIA. The official told investigators that Novak appeared uncertain whether she was undercover or not. That account, on one hand, might lend credence to the claims by Rove and other Bush administration officials that they did not know Plame was a covert CIA officer. Conversely, however, the fact that Novak asked the question in the first place appeared to indicate that he might have indeed been told Plame was a covert operative, and was seeking confirmation of that fact................

posted by murray waas at 4:21 PM

<h3>Part I of II ---- The following post continues the exposure of Rove's NEPOTISM "OP"....Classic Rove.....everybody using the same talking points...
Rove to Novak, to Matt Cooper, to Guckert (Gannon), to Sen. Pat Robertson, et al, to RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman.....and even</H3>...our own powerclown:

Originally Posted by powerclown

Do we know that Novak is going to testify? When??

This thing is so f----d up. Coverups, unknown sources, inter-government rivalries, nepotism, a million people with a million different agendas.........

.......Meanwhile, the guy who revealed the agent's name to the public - Novak - remains silent (and free).
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...&postcount=121

[host]

and....if you've followed along, this far.....here is PART II.....

IMO, if you compare this Newsday, July 22, 2003 news report, to what Novak
told Wolf Blitzer in the interview displayed above in PART I, Novak looks like the lying, Rove "puppet" that I suspect he actually is. This is a window into prosecutor Fitzgerald's world, and I'm assuming that he's at least as thorough as I'm trying to be. This is going to be a bumpy year, I suspect.

http://www.informationclearinghouse....rticle4190.htm
Columnist Blows CIA Agent's Cover

By Timothy M. Phelps and Knut Royce
WASHINGTON BUREAU; Timothy Phelps is the Washington bureau chief.

July 22, 2003: (Newsday) Washington - The identity of an undercover CIA officer whose husband started the Iraq uranium intelligence controversy has been publicly revealed by a conservative Washington columnist citing "two senior administration officials.".............

.......<h3> Deputy White House Press Secretary Claire Buchan referred questions to a National Security Council spokesman who did not return phone calls last night.

"This might be seen as a smear on me and my reputation," Wilson said, "but what it really is is an attempt to keep anybody else from coming forward" to reveal similar intelligence lapses.

Novak, in an interview, said his sources had come to him with the information. "I didn't dig it out, it was given to me," he said. "They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it."

Wilson and others said such a disclosure would be a violation of the law by the officials, not the columnist.

Novak reported that his "two senior administration officials" told him that it was Plame who suggested sending her husband, Wilson, to Niger.

A senior intelligence official confirmed that Plame was a Directorate of Operations undercover officer who worked "alongside" the operations officers who asked her husband to travel to Niger.

But he said she did not recommend her husband to undertake the Niger assignment. "They [the officers who did ask Wilson to check the uranium story] were aware of who she was married to, which is not surprising," he said. "There are people elsewhere in government who are trying to make her look like she was the one who was cooking this up, for some reason," he said. "I can't figure out what it could be."

"We paid his [Wilson's] air fare. But to go to Niger is not exactly a benefit. Most people you'd have to pay big bucks to go there," the senior intelligence official said. Wilson said he was reimbursed only for expenses.</h3>

http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=50217
RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman Statement on the Partisan Attack on Karl Rove

7/12/2005 11:00:00 AM

To: National Desk............

..........WASHINGTON, July 12 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Following is a statement by Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Ken Mehlman on the partisan attack on Karl Rove:

"It's disappointing that once again, so many Democrat leaders are taking their political cues from the far-left, Moveon wing of the party. The bottom line is <b>Karl Rove was discouraging a reporter from writing a false story based on a false premise</b> and the Democrats are engaging in blatant partisan political attacks."

The following was released today by the RNC:

Cooper's Own Email Claims Rove Warned of Potential Inaccuracies In Wilson Information:

"(Time Reporter Matt)<b> Cooper Wrote That Rove Offered Him A 'Big Warning' Not To 'Get Too Far Out On Wilson.' Rove Told Cooper That Wilson's Trip Had Not Been Authorized By 'DCIA' - CIA Director George Tenet - Or Vice President Dick Cheney." </b>(Michael Isikoff, "Matt Cooper's Source," Newsweek, 7/18/05)

Wilson Falsely Claimed That It Was Vice President Cheney Who Sent Him To Niger, But The Vice President Has Said He Never Met Him And Didn't Know Who Sent Him:

Wilson Says He Traveled To Niger At CIA Request To Help Provide Response To Vice President's Office. "In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report. ... 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." (Joseph C. Wilson, Op-Ed, "What I Didn’t Find In Africa," The New York Times, 7/6/03)

-- Joe Wilson: "What They Did, What The Office Of The Vice President Did, And, In Fact, I Believe Now From Mr. Libby's Statement, It Was Probably The Vice President Himself ..." (CNN's "Late Edition," 8/3/03)

Vice President Cheney: "I Don't Know Joe Wilson. I've Never Met Joe Wilson. ... And Joe Wilson - I Don't (Know) Who Sent Joe Wilson. He Never Submitted A Report That I Ever Saw When He Came Back." (NBC's "Meet The Press," 9/14/03)

CIA Director George Tenet: "In An Effort To Inquire About Certain Reports Involving Niger, CIA's Counter-Proliferation Experts, On Their Own Initiative, Asked An Individual With Ties To The Region To Make A Visit To See What He Could Learn." (Central Intelligence Agency, "Statement By George J. Tenet, Director Of Central Intelligence," Press Release, 7/11/03)

-- Tenet: "Because This Report, In Our View, Did Not Resolve Whether Iraq Was Or Was Not Seeking Uranium From Abroad, It Was Given A Normal And Wide Distribution, But We Did Not Brief It To The President, Vice-President Or Other Senior Administration Officials." (Central Intelligence Agency, "Statement By George J. Tenet, Director Of Central Intelligence," Press Release, 7/11/03)

Wilson Denied His Wife Suggested He Travel To Niger, But Documentation Showed She Proposed His Name:

Wilson Claims His Wife Did Not Suggest He Travel To Niger To Investigate Reports Of Uranium Deal; Instead, Wilson Claims It Came Out Of Meeting With CIA To Discuss Report. CNN'S WOLF BLITZER: "Among other things, you had always said, always maintained, still maintain your wife, Valerie Plame, a CIA officer, had nothing to do with the decision to send to you Niger to inspect reports that uranium might be sold from Niger to Iraq. ... Did Valerie Plame, your wife, come up with the idea to send you to Niger?" JOE WILSON: "No. My wife served as a conduit, as I put in my book. When her supervisors asked her to contact me for the purposes of coming into the CIA to discuss all the issues surrounding this allegation of Niger selling uranium to Iraq." (CNN's "Lade Edition," 7/18/04)......................

http://gop.com/News/Read.aspx?ID=5624
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
In Case You Missed It: Newt Gingrich

Newt Gingrich: "[Joe Wilson] Lied To The Country About Who Got Him The Job. The Senate Intelligence Committee Is Scathing About That. He Lied To The Country About His Own Conclusions. The Senate Intelligence Committee Report Repudiates Him On That. ... It Turns Out In Retrospect He Had Been Talking To The Kerry Campaign For Months. He Was A Contributor To Kerry And He Was Essentially A Kerry Supporter ... His Book Title Is The Politics Of Truth And Yet The Senate Intelligence Committee Said That Wilson Specifically Was Using Falsehoods On 3 Or 4 Occasions ..." (NBC's, "Today," 7/13/05)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...&notFound=true
White House Briefing: Dan Froomkin
Inside the Real West Wing

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Wednesday, March 10, 2004; 10:15 AM

It's the most powerful place on Earth.

The West Wing of the White House is the part you don't get to see on the tours. It's where the Oval Office is located, and where a few dozen other people have offices only a few steps away.

You've heard of some of those people -- Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Scott McClellan. But some you've probably never heard of.
About White House Briefing

Today, I'm uncorking a rare thing -- unique on the Internet, as far as I can tell. It's a floor plan of the West Wing, showing precisely who sits where.

............ Which of These Is Not Like the Other?

As Tom Brune reported last week in Newsday, the federal grand jury investigating the leak of Valerie Plame's identity as a covert CIA operative has subpoenaed White House records on contacts with 25 journalists.

The list (low on the page) is full of familiar names: Columnist Robert Novak, of course, and MSNBC's Chris Matthews, Time's James Carney, The Post's Mike Allen, Newsweek's Evan Thomas.

And then there's Jeff Gannon of Talon News.

Who? Of what?

I first wrote about Gannon in my Feb. 19 column. Gannon works for a tiny, supremely conservative organization called Talon News which publishes a Web site by the same name as well as one called GOPUSA.com. With the sole exception of Gannon, who says he is compensated, all the "reporters" are volunteers.

Gannon's presence in the White House briefing room is something of an irritant to most of the press corps, which considers his questions at briefings to be preposterous softballs. [Note: This paragraph has been corrected. Gannon does not have an assigned seat in the briefing room as was previously reported here.]

And in return, Gannon sometimes writes on his own Web site about his views of the corps and how there is "perhaps no depth to which it will not sink in order to undermine a presidency."

Anyway, the reason Gannon is on the list is most likely an attempt to find out who gave him a secret memo that he mentioned in an interview he had with Plame's husband, former ambassador and administration critic Joseph Wilson.

<h3>Gannon asked Wilson: "An internal government memo prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel details a meeting in early 2002 where your wife, a member of the agency for clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested that you could be sent to investigate the reports. Do you dispute that?"</h3>

According to a December Washington Post story by Mike Allen and Dana Milbank, "Sources said the CIA is angry about the circulation of a still-classified document to conservative news outlets suggesting Plame had a role in arranging her husband's trip to Africa for the CIA. The document, written by a State Department official who works for its Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), describes a meeting at the CIA where the Niger trip by Wilson was discussed, said a senior administration official who has seen it."

On top of being secret, CIA officials said it was wrong.

Gannon won't talk about it. But he does keep lobbing those softballs. Sometimes he even brings props. And press secretary McClellan seems to appreciate it.

Yesterday, for instance, McClellan was getting hammered with questions about the 9/11 commission and the possible inappropriate juxtaposition of a visit to a 9/11 memorial with a fundraiser on Thursday.

It was getting ugly. "I'm not even going to dignify that with a response," McClellan said in response to a jibe. (See the full text of the briefing.)

Then he saw daylight:

"Go ahead, Jeff."

Gannon: "Thank you. First of all, I hope the grand jury didn't force you to turn over the wedding card I sent to you and your wife. (Laughter.) Do you see any hypocrisy in the controversy about the President's mention of 9/11 in his ads, when Democratic icon Franklin Delano Roosevelt's campaign issued this button, that says, 'Remember Pearl Harbor'? I have a visual aid for folks watching at home."

McClellan: "You're pointing out some historical facts. Obviously, Pearl Harbor was a defining moment back in the period of World War II, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt was strongly committed to winning World War II and talked about it frequently."

Gannon: "So you think it certainly is valid that the President does talk about it and --"

McClellan: "Yes, he addressed this this weekend, when he was first asked about it. September 11th was a defining moment for our nation. We all shared in that experience. And it's important that we look at how we lead in a post-September 11th world. And that's an important discussion to have with the American people, and to talk about the differences in approaches to winning the war on terrorism and preventing attacks from happening in the first place."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...nguage=printer
The When and How of Leak Being Probed
Timing of Disclosure of CIA Employee's Name a Factor in Deciding if Law Was Broken

By Susan Schmidt
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 26, 2004; Page A06

A federal prosecutor investigating whether administration officials illegally leaked the name of an undercover CIA operative has directed considerable effort at learning how widely the operative's identity was disseminated to reporters before it was published last year by columnist Robert D. Novak, according to people with knowledge of the case.

Special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald is trying to pinpoint precisely when and from whom several journalists learned that Joseph C. Wilson IV, an outspoken critic of the administration, was sent on an Iraq-related intelligence mission after a recommendation by his wife, Valerie Plame, a covert CIA employee. Plame's name first appeared in a July 14, 2003, column by Novak.

Robert D. Novak's July 14, 2003, column may have been seen by the White House before it ran. (CNN)


The timing could be a critical element in assessing whether classified information was illegally disclosed. If White House aides directed reporters to information that had already been published by Novak, they may not have disclosed classified information...........

.....Then-CIA Director George J. Tenet had issued a statement July 11, 2003, saying that Wilson's findings in Niger did not actually resolve the question of whether Hussein tried to buy uranium there. But Tenet nevertheless said the statement on Africa should not have been included in Bush's State of Union address, and he took responsibility for his agency's vetting of the speech. White House communications director Bartlett agreed, telling reporters that "there was no debate or questions with regard to that line when it was signed off on."

But an agency bureaucrat stirred a new round of confusion and White House anger the following week.

On July 16, two days after Novak's column appeared, Alan Foley, then-director of the CIA's intelligence, nonproliferation and arms control center, told Senate intelligence committee members that he had insisted the White House remove a reference to Niger and uranium from the State of the Union address. The White House maintained there was never any specific reference to Niger in drafts of the speech, nor, it said, had the CIA expressed any objection to referring to reports Iraq had attempted to buy uranium in Africa.

Foley later told the committee staff he may have been confused, according to a Senate committee report on Iraq intelligence released this year. The Senate report determined that Foley's original testimony had been incorrect and that the CIA had not raised concerns about the Iraq-Niger reporting in the speech.

<h3>It was in the ensuing days that television reporters Chris Matthews and Andrea Mitchell would tell Wilson they had heard from administration aides that the real story was not what Wilson found in Niger but his wife's role in selecting him for the trip.</h3>

http://rawstory.com/exclusives/byrne...gannon_424.htm
Secret Service records raise new questions about discredited conservative reporter

By John Byrne| RAW STORY Editor

Updated: Day discovered with two check-ins but no check outs; Other events found on some days without press briefings

READ THE DOCUMENTS: http://rawstory.rawprint.com/0405/guckert_access_a1

In what is unlikely to stem the controversy surrounding disgraced White House correspondent James Guckert, the Secret Service has furnished logs of the writer’s access to the White House after requests by two Democratic congressmembers.

The documents, obtained by Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) and Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) through a Freedom of Information Act request, reveal Guckert had remarkable access to the White House. Though he wrote under the name Jeff Gannon, the records show that he applied with his real name.

Gannon’s ready access to President Bush and his work for a news agency that frequently plagiarized content from other reporters and tailored it to serve a conservative message may raise new questions about the White House’s attempts to seed favorable news coverage. Democrats have sought to paint Guckert in the context of other efforts by the Administration to “plant” positive spin by paying for video news releases and columnists to espouse their views.

Guckert made more than 200 appearances at the White House during his two-year tenure with the fledging conservative websites GOPUSA and Talon News, attending 155 of 196 White House press briefings. He had little to no previous journalism experience, previously worked as a male escort, and was refused a congressional press pass.

Perhaps more notable than the frequency of his attendance, however, is several distinct anomalies about his visits.

Guckert made more than two dozen excursions to the White House when there were no scheduled briefings. On many of these days, the Press Office held press gaggles aboard Air Force One—which raises questions about what Guckert was doing at the White House. On other days, the president held photo opportunities.

On at least fourteen occasions, Secret Service records show either the entry or exit time missing. Generally, the existing entry or exit times correlate with press conferences; on most of these days, the records show that Guckert checked in but was never processed out.

In March, 2003, Guckert left the White House twice on days he had never checked in with the Secret Service. Over the next 22 months, Guckert failed to check out with the Service on fourteen days. On several of these visits, Guckert either entered or exited by a different entry/exit point than his usual one. On one of these days, no briefing was held; on another, he checked in twice but failed to check out.

“I’d be worried if I was the White House and I knew that a reporter with a day pass never left,” one White House reporter told RAW STORY. “I’d wonder, where is he hiding? It seems like a security risk.”

Others who have covered the White House say not checking in or out with the Secret Service is unusual, especially in the wake of Sept. 11. The Secret Service declined to comment.

“We responded to the FOIA request and can provide no further information,” Service spokesman Jonathan Cherry said.

Guckert declined to comment, directing all questions to the Service.

The records furnished by the Service are unlikely to finally answer who approved Gannon’s “temporary” day passes into the presidential residence. The Service keeps a record of who approved passes only for the last sixty days; previous records are kept by the White House.

Since December 2004, all but one of Gannon’s forty-eight temporary appointments were requested by Lois Cassano, a White House Press Office media assistant. One additional request was made by Peter Watkins, a press assistant who now works as deputy press secretary to First Lady Laura Bush.

Guckert sometimes stayed for an extended period of time before and after press conferences, particularly early in his tenure. This was especially common during his first few months, when he might be in the White House for as long as six hours.

A White House reporter dismissed this as insignificant, noting that sometimes reporters stay between events.

“You could probably find people who stayed there for nine hours,” the reporter said.

Occasionally, the former Talon News reporter visited the White House twice on the same day. This was also most common in the early months.

The Secret Service furnished the records after a Freedom of Information Act request from Reps. John Conyers (D-MI) and Louise Slaughter (D-NY)...........

http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/7/13/04720/9340
The Big Lie About Valerie Plame

By Larry Johnson

From: TPMCafe Special Guests
The misinformation being spread in the media about the Plame affair is alarming and damaging to the longterm security interests of the United States. Republicans' talking points are trying to savage Joe Wilson and, by implication, his wife, Valerie Plame as liars. That is the truly big lie.

For starters, Valerie Plame was an undercover operations officer until outed in the press by Robert Novak. Novak's column was not an isolated attack. It was in fact part of a coordinated, orchestrated smear that we now know includes at least Karl Rove.

Valerie Plame was a classmate of mine from the day she started with the CIA. I entered on duty at the CIA in September 1985. All of my classmates were undercover--in other words, we told our family and friends that we were working for other overt U.S. Government agencies. We had official cover. That means we had a black passport--i.e., a diplomatic passport. If we were caught overseas engaged in espionage activity the black passport was a get out of jail free card.


Jul 13, 2005 -- 12:47:20 AM EST

A few of my classmates, and Valerie was one of these, became a non-official cover officer. That meant she agreed to operate overseas without the protection of a diplomatic passport. If caught in that status she would have been executed.

The lies by people like Victoria Toensing, Representative Peter King, and P. J. O'Rourke insist that Valerie was nothing, just a desk jockey. Yet, until Robert Novak betrayed her she was still undercover and the company that was her front was still a secret to the world. When Novak outed Valerie he also compromised her company and every individual overseas who had been in contact with that company and with her.

The Republicans now want to hide behind the legalism that "no laws were broken". I don't know if a man made law was broken but an ethical and moral code was breached. For the first time a group of partisan political operatives publically identified a CIA NOC. They have set a precendent that the next group of political hacks may feel free to violate.

They try to hide behind the specious claim that Joe Wilson "lied". Although Joe did not lie let's follow that reasoning to the logical conclusion. Let's use the same standard for the Bush Administration. Here are the facts. Bush's lies have resulted in the deaths of almost 1800 American soldiers and the mutilation of 12,000. Joe Wilson has not killed anyone. He tried to prevent the needless death of Americans and the loss of American prestige in the world.

But don't take my word for it, read the biased Senate intelligence committee report. Even though it was slanted to try to portray Joe in the worst possible light this fact emerges on page 52 of the report: According to the US Ambassador to Niger (who was commenting on Joe's visit in February 2002), "Ambassador Wilson reached the same conclusion that the Embassy has reached that it was highly unlikely that anything between Iraq and Niger was going on." Joe's findings were consistent with those of the Deputy Commander of the European Command, Major General Fulford.

<h3>The Republicans insist on the lie that Val got her husband the job. She did not. She was not a division director, instead she was the equivalent of an Army major. Yes it is true she recommended her husband to do the job that needed to be done but the decision to send Joe Wilson on this mission was made by her bosses.</h3>

At the end of the day, Joe Wilson was right. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It was the Bush Administration that pushed that lie and because of that lie Americans are dying. Shame on those who continue to slander Joe Wilson while giving Bush and his pack of liars a pass. That's the true outrage.

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[host]

These "folks" may yet "kill off" the real story here. If they fail, it won't be from a lack of trying. IBD.com attempts to discredit Wilson and blame our traitors' smear campaign on "partisan politics. There is not mention in their editorial that Wilson was praised for his service in Iraq under Bush '41, or that the "senate committee" did not agree that Wilson "lied". Sen. Pat Robertson and two other Republican senators on the intelligence committee participated in the Rove NEPOTISM "OP", as Novak earlier did, all of them, IMO, aiding and abetting a traitorous act. The future freedom and wellbeing of you and your family may rest now in the hands of prosecutor Fitzgerald. Pray for him, and for the country.

http://www.investors.com/editorial/issues.asp?view=1
Investor's Business Daily
Issues & Insights

Thursday, July 14, 2005
The Plame Game

Security Leaks: Seems that talking to reporters is OK if you're Deep Throat or a Democratic congressman at war with the CIA. But if you're the guy who helped get George W. Bush elected twice, you're a criminal.

John Kerry, with Hillary Clinton nodding at his side, said that "Karl Rove ought to be fired" after the disclosure that Rove, in an e-mail to Time magazine's Matt Cooper in July 2003, said a trip that former Ambassador Joe Wilson took to Niger for the CIA was arranged by "Wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency." He didn't provide her name.

This was said to be retaliation for Wilson's claim in a New York Times op-ed piece after the trip that Bush lied in his State of the Union speech that British intelligence had learned Saddam operatives were trying to buy yellowcake uranium in Africa. Wilson also made three appearances on NBC's "Meet The Press."

Wilson, a Democrat who worked in the National Security Council under President Clinton, is a physician in need of healing himself when it comes to truth-telling.

On July 9, 2004, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence issued its report on the CIA's prewar intelligence on Iraq. The report concluded Wilson lied when he denied his wife got him the Niger assignment. The report also said Wilson lied when he told The Washington Post he knew the Niger intelligence had been based on forged documents. The CIA didn't obtain the document said to be a forgery until eight months after Wilson returned from Niger.

On July 14, 2003, Robert Novak wrote a column naming Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA employee. Novak did not name his source, but Wilson accused Rove, swearing that he would see Rove led out of the White House in "handcuffs."

In a column the following October, Novak said "the disclosure of Wilson's wife working at the agency . . . was not much of a secret" and that it "was well-known around Washington that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA."

Her name was certainly no secret, appearing in Wilson's "Who's Who In America" entry. Nor were her political affiliations and those of her husband. It could be argued that Mrs. Wilson blew her own cover when she made a contribution to the Al Gore for President campaign and listed her CIA cover company as her employer in the FEC filing.

Her husband Joe also made a contribution to the Gore campaign and, coincidentally enough, signed on with the Kerry presidential campaign as an unpaid foreign policy adviser and speech-writing assistant. He also campaigned for Kerry in six states.

The 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which Rove is accused of violating, was written following a scandal involving Philip Agee, a rogue former CIA agent who published the names of 700 of his CIA colleagues before fleeing to the worker's paradise of Cuba.

The law was designed to protect the CIA from subversion and treason by those who wished harm upon the agency and the U.S. It was not designed to protect the identities of agents and their spouses who freely inject themselves into one side of a national political debate. If Karl Rove is a criminal, exactly what was the crime?

The act protected only those who were "serving outside the United States or (have) within the last five years." It's not clear how Mrs. Wilson would qualify as an undercover covert operative when she was a weapons of mass destruction analyst sitting at a desk in Langley, Va., and not a spy.

Pure politics is behind the outrage of liberals such as Kerry and Clinton who suddenly feel protective of the CIA after spending decades blaming the organization and its covert operatives for all manner of mischief. Where was the outrage back in the '90s, when Democrats gave one of their own, then-Rep. Bob Torricelli, a pass when he blew the cover of a real CIA operative in Guatemala?

The usual suspects who got even with Newt Gingrich for electing a Republican Congress are now trying to settle the score with the architect of Bush's two election victories. Wilson now goes around Washington saying, "Neo-conservatives and religious conservatives have hijacked this administration, and I consider myself on a personal mission to destroy both." He's not alone, it seems.

http://www.opinioneditorials.com/guestcontributors/glandrith_20050714.html
and.... more from the Rove NEPOTSIM "OP"....will it work for them ?

Here is another example of Karl and Novak at work on Jan. 12, 2005:

http://mediamatters.org/items/200501140005
Victoria Toensing failed to disclose friendship with "No Disclosure" Novak in Wash. Post op-ed

...........Toensing and Sanford argued that Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney investigating the Plame leak, lacks legal justification to compel reporters to identify the government sources that purportedly leaked Plame's name because neither the original government sources nor Novak committed a crime by disclosing Plame's identity:

When the [1982 Intelligence Identities Protection] act was passed, Congress had no intention of prosecuting a reporter who wanted to expose wrongdoing and, in the process, once or twice published the name of a covert agent. Novak is safe from indictment.

But they failed to explain what "wrongdoing" Novak was seeking to expose in outing a CIA operative whom no one has accused of wrongdoing. Novak reported Plame's name as part of an effort to discredit her husband, Joseph C. Wilson, whom the CIA sent to Niger to investigate whether Iraq had in fact sought to purchase uranium from Niger, as Bush had claimed in his January 2003 State of the Union address as a justification for invading the country. Wilson wrote in a July 6, 2003, New York Times op-ed that he found no evidence that Iraq had made such an attempt. <h3>Does Novak's claim that Plame "suggested sending [her husband] to Niger to investigate the Italian report" constitute the kind of "wrongdoing" (if that word even applies) whose exposure Congress may have wanted to ensure, even at the cost of exposing a covert operative, as well as risking the exposure of everyone with whom she came into contact?</h3>

In discussing the law's applicability, Toensing and Sanford also argued: "If it were known on the Washington cocktail circuit, as has been alleged, that Wilson's wife is with the agency, a possessor of that gossip would have no reason to believe that information is classified -- or that 'affirmative measures' were being taken to protect her cover." But presumably only their government sources' knowledge of Plame's covert status is relevant to whether they violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Are they really suggesting that government sources who happened to hear gossip that someone might work for the CIA are free to divulge that the person is in fact a CIA operative?

The argument that the leakers may not have known of Plame's covert status was also challenged by reporter and blogger Joshua Micah Marshall of TalkingPointsMemo.com, who reported that Novak consistently referred to undercover CIA agents as "operatives," while reserving other titles for CIA employees whose names are publicly available. Marshall's findings were noted in a January 4, 2004, editorial in the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

Surely a prosecutor of his experience won't fall for the line the administration -- and most recently right-wing attorney Victoria Toensing -- has been floating, namely that perhaps Bush administration officials leaked Plame's name to the media but didn't commit a crime because they didn't know she was an undercover agent. "It could be embarrassing but not illegal," Toensing said in a Friday Washington Post story.

While theoretically possible, this is highly implausible. As journalist Joshua Micah Marshall wrote Friday in his online Talking Points Memo, the July 14 column by Robert Novak that outed Plame said she was an agency operative. "In the intelligence community, the word 'operative' is a term of art. And it means someone who is undercover. It doesn't refer to an analyst," he wrote, adding that "a review of all of Novak's columns in the Nexis database shows that he always uses the term in this way." Besides, it would be easy for senior administration officials to determine her status before making a call. Why wouldn't they?..............

July 14, 2005

More Bad Faith Political Posturing

George C. Landrith

If speculation about Supreme Court nominees isn't the biggest story in the Nation's Capitol, allegations that Karl Rove leaked the name of a covert CIA officer is. The ultra-liberal MoveOn.org argues Rove must be fired and investigated. Representative Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y) said Rove "should be thoroughly investigated and prosecuted." Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) called for the immediate cancellation of Rove's security clearances. Representative Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) said that Rove should be subjected to a full congressional inquiry. It all sounds pretty serious. That's how political gamesmanship is played - making something of nothing.

The game is played by claiming there is smoke everywhere and then pointing at your political adversary and saying, "where there's smoke, there's fire." But there's no fire and no actual smoke. Just a lot of political gamesmanship and posturing.

We now know that a reporter was about to write a story that Vice President Dick Cheney had asked former Clinton-appointed ambassador Joseph Wilson to travel to Africa in 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq had tried to buy uranium used in nuclear weapons. <h3>However, the story was untrue. It turns out that Wilson was involved in a massive case of political nepotism.</h3> Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, a CIA employee, had arranged the trip. Rove simply revealed this fact. However, Rove did not know or reveal her name or her position. He simply told the reporter that it was "Wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency [the CIA] on WMD [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip.".............

<h3>Are these just the "stragglers" of Karl's "OP", trickling in, or is this only the beginning of a massive wave of desperate, transparent, disinformation?</h3>
64 "items" in google news....and counting:
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ne...nG=Search+News

[Mephisto2]

I think this may be a bit of informational overload.



Mr Mephisto

[matthew330]

Yeah, it's been said before. Seriously, I don't think the "no links" should apply to you hose. Perhaps you could write your thoughts, and provide the links to the articles that apply/support your thoughts wherever appropriate. I find myself trying to page down to what you are actually saying, but trying to find that in a book of articles, that never seems to stop - i just give up. In all honest, i gave up a long long time ago. But i'd probably start reading if just links were provided.

[Redlemon]

Perhaps if you posted exerpts from the articles? I'd think 2-3 paragraphs would suffice to make the point.

[roachboy]

it is obviously difficult to present anything like a depth of research or complexity of argument on a messageboard.

sometimes, you simply have to applaud someone--in particular host---who tries to push at what i take to be formal limitations of this type of forum and present a detailed case for a given position.
there is alot of material above--it is organized quite well and you can use the organization to sort it. the only problem with the organization is that it centers on migration of rhetoric, of moves, on highlighting forms of repetition across a number of sources in order to emphasize the co-ordinated nature of the far right's defense of their boy karl.

i usually post here when i am drinking coffee in the morning and/or when i decide to avoid other projects that i should be doing. my worklife is such that much of it finds me sitting at home in front of my computer writing. i mention this because on the other side of the mirror, there is another limitation on debates in these forums:
the ways in whcih folk interact with the board--when they do it, whre they do it---many are wedging interaction with this space into a work day and are necessarily distracted, or have short timepsans in which they feel like they can divert attention from what they are doing in 3-d to this.

these amount to limitations on the quality of political discussion that can be had---particularly if the content of that discussion diverges from the packaged narratives you get in the press. they are not limitations that i see any use in complaining about, and i am not doing so here: they simply outline some of the conditions that shape what transpires on this board (and others like it)

from time to time it is good to run into these limits--it is good to know them, and to consider their effects on debate here. and maybe these limts explain why it seems that positions do not move. maybe they do not move because the whole space--and spaces like this--is based on recycling truncated information, rehearsing positions based on truncated information and so are less debates than exchanges of coded messages based on antagonistic sets of truncated information/sources.

on the material posted above:
it is interesting to see the extent and detail of the right's ability to co-ordinate the political line of its operatives. they work in a way that i think lenin would have approved of--what mattered for him, in a pre-revolutionary situation, was clarity of line and--in particular--drawing a clear distinction between inside and outside the vanguard. the idea was that as conditions slid into crisis, what would matter was less the content of the line (which should be internally consistent) than the clear distinction inside/outside.
it is funny to see such a comprehensive usage of lenin on the part of reactionaries--such is the danger of publishing texts in revolutionary organization--anyone can read them.

funnier still to think of the "left" in the states falling into the traps that the mensheviks did.

[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

Karl Rove, Whistleblower
He told the truth about Joe Wilson.

Wednesday, July 13, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

Democrats and most of the Beltway press corps are baying for Karl Rove's head over his role in exposing a case of CIA nepotism involving Joe Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame. On the contrary, we'd say the White House political guru deserves a prize--perhaps the next iteration of the "Truth-Telling" award that The Nation magazine bestowed upon Mr. Wilson before the Senate Intelligence Committee exposed him as a fraud.

For Mr. Rove is turning out to be the real "whistleblower" in this whole sorry pseudo-scandal. He's the one who warned Time's Matthew Cooper and other reporters to be wary of Mr. Wilson's credibility. He's the one who told the press the truth that Mr. Wilson had been recommended for the CIA consulting gig by his wife, not by Vice President Dick Cheney as Mr. Wilson was asserting on the airwaves. In short, Mr. Rove provided important background so Americans could understand that Mr. Wilson wasn't a whistleblower but was a partisan trying to discredit the Iraq War in an election campaign. Thank you, Mr. Rove.

Media chants aside, there's no evidence that Mr. Rove broke any laws in telling reporters that Ms. Plame may have played a role in her husband's selection for a 2002 mission to investigate reports that Iraq was seeking uranium ore in Niger. To be prosecuted under the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, Mr. Rove would had to have deliberately and maliciously exposed Ms. Plame knowing that she was an undercover agent and using information he'd obtained in an official capacity. But it appears Mr. Rove didn't even know Ms. Plame's name and had only heard about her work at Langley from other journalists.

On the "no underlying crime" point, moreover, no less than the New York Times and Washington Post now agree. So do the 36 major news organizations that filed a legal brief in March aimed at keeping Mr. Cooper and the New York Times's Judith Miller out of jail.

"While an investigation of the leak was justified, it is far from clear--at least on the public record--that a crime took place," the Post noted the other day. Granted the media have come a bit late to this understanding, and then only to protect their own, but the logic of their argument is that Mr. Rove did nothing wrong either.

The same can't be said for Mr. Wilson, who first "outed" himself as a CIA consultant in a melodramatic New York Times op-ed in July 2003. At the time he claimed to have thoroughly debunked the Iraq-Niger yellowcake uranium connection that President Bush had mentioned in his now famous "16 words" on the subject in that year's State of the Union address.
Mr. Wilson also vehemently denied it when columnist Robert Novak first reported that his wife had played a role in selecting him for the Niger mission. He promptly signed up as adviser to the Kerry campaign and was feted almost everywhere in the media, including repeat appearances on NBC's "Meet the Press" and a photo spread (with Valerie) in Vanity Fair.

But his day in the political sun was short-lived. The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report last July cited the note that Ms. Plame had sent recommending her husband for the Niger mission. "Interviews and documents provided to the Committee indicate that his wife, a CPD [Counterproliferation Division] employee, suggested his name for the trip," said the report.

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.

[stevo]

And more on nepotisim: Matt Cooper is married to Mandy Grunwald, and Mandy Grunwald is a high ranking Democratic Party operative, currently is on Hillary's staff.

[powerclown]

host, I have no idea what you're point is here. None. Sorry.

Any coherent argument you might have made was lost (on me, anyway) in the deluge of confusing and seemingly contradictory links.

I'm almost afraid to ask you a question, for fear of another incomprehensible filibuster.

I agree with stevo above, though. No legal basis here.

[roachboy]

powerclown, stevo:

are either of you lawyers?
do you practice?
in what field?

if not, then why exactly should anyone take your pronouncements about what is and is not an adequate legal basis for prosecuting rove seriously?

it appears that rove is the object of an investigation. but you do not even know that for sure. all you know is that there is an investigation and that this investigation threatens your boy karl rove.
there is as yet no indictment, so there is no trial, but you pretend that the trial is happening now.

eliminate political scandal by pretending the political does not exist: a pretty ominous strategy coming from this administration--pretty telling too, in that it provides a backhanded view into the underpinnings of the sense of total impunity that has animated these people from 9/11/2001 on. this administration does not feel itself politically accountable to anyone.
you dutifully repeat this logic, which is what a conservative seems to do above and beyond all else: repeat the party line...repeat the party line with particular relish when it comes wrapped in the trappings of pseduo-precision..

frankly, i see little more of interest in your defenses of rove than i find listening to sports talk radio and hearing the metaphysics of sports being debated
....and certainly nothing compelling in that i fundamentally do not believe that the terms you are using are your own.

[stevo]

Originally Posted by roachboy

....and certainly nothing compelling in that i fundamentally do not believe that the terms you are using are your own.

and what terms might those be? Where I said rove did nothing wrong? You find it hard to believe that I came up with that on my own?

There is a trial, its a trial of public opinion, and that is the only trial, because, as you see, rove did nothing wrong.

[host]

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 !

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...................

http://mediamatters.org/items/200502120003
<h1>In taped CNN interview, Gannon misrepresented <B style="color:black;background-color:#ffff66">Senate</B> Intel <B style="color:black;background-color:#ff9999">report</B> findings on Joe <B style="color:white;background-color:#00aa00">Wilson</B></h1>


<p>In an interview with CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, former Talon News Washington bureau chief and White House correspondent Jeff Gannon falsely claimed that the <B style="color:black;background-color:#ffff66">Senate </B><B style="color:black;background-color:#A0FFFF">Intelligence </B><B style="color:black;background-color:#99ff99">Committee</B> "chastised" former Ambassador Joseph C. <B style="color:white;background-color:#00aa00">Wilson</B> 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 <B style="color:white;background-color:#00aa00">Wilson</B> to Niger to investigate allegations that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from the west African nation.</p>

<p>On the February 11 edition of <i>News from CNN</i>, 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 <i>Wolf Blitzer Reports</i>. 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:</p><blockquote>

<p>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 <B style="color:white;background-color:#00aa00">Wilson</B> be sent on this mission -- something that they have all vigorously denied but which is, in effect, true. <b>The <B style="color:black;background-color:#ffff66">Senate </B><B style="color:black;background-color:#A0FFFF">Intelligence </B><B style="color:black;background-color:#99ff99">Committee</B> eight months later, when they issued their <B style="color:black;background-color:#ff9999">report</B>, said that and chastised Joe <B style="color:white;background-color:#00aa00">Wilson</B> for essentially misleading everybody all along</b>, and that's the day Joe <B style="color:white;background-color:#00aa00">Wilson</B> was no longer a [Senator John] Kerry [presidential] campaign adviser.</p></blockquote>

<p>In fact, the <B style="color:black;background-color:#ffff66">Senate </B><B style="color:black;background-color:#A0FFFF">Intelligence </B><B style="color:black;background-color:#99ff99">Committee's</B> <a href="http://intelligence.senate.gov/iraqreport2.pdf"><B style="color:black;background-color:#ff9999">report</B></a> (pdf) did not reach a conclusion about how the CIA made its decision, much less "chastise" <B style="color:white;background-color:#00aa00">Wilson</B>, 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 <B style="color:black;background-color:#ff9999">report</B> stated:</p>

<blockquote>
<p>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 <B style="color:black;background-color:#99ff99">committee</B> indicate that his wife, a former CPD employee, suggested his name for the trip. The CPD reports officer told <B style="color:black;background-color:#99ff99">Committee</B> 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]</p>
</blockquote>

<p>The <B style="color:black;background-color:#ffff66">Senate </B><B style="color:black;background-color:#ff9999">report</B> did not mention that an unnamed CIA official told the <i>Los Angeles Times</i> that <B style="color:white;background-color:#00aa00">Wilson's</B> denial was accurate. The <i>Times</i> reported on <B style="color:black;background-color:#ff66ff">July</B> 15, <B style="color:white;background-color:#880000">2004</B>: "A senior <B style="color:black;background-color:#A0FFFF">intelligence</B> official said the CIA supports <B style="color:white;background-color:#00aa00">Wilson's</B> 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."</p>

<p>Contrary to Gannon's assertions that the <B style="color:black;background-color:#ffff66">Senate </B><B style="color:black;background-color:#A0FFFF">Intelligence </B><B style="color:black;background-color:#99ff99">Committee</B> "chastised" <B style="color:white;background-color:#00aa00">Wilson</B>, it was only Republicans on the <B style="color:black;background-color:#99ff99">committee</B> who "chastised" <B style="color:white;background-color:#00aa00">Wilson</B>. In an additional statement, which was not part of the unanimous bipartisan <B style="color:black;background-color:#ff9999">report</B>, Senators Pat Roberts (R-KS), Christopher S. Bond (R-MO), and Orrin G. Hatch (R-UT) [pp. 443-45; PDF pp. 453-55] attacked <B style="color:white;background-color:#00aa00">Wilson's</B> credibility.</p>

<p>Gannon's false claim echoes his assertion in a <B style="color:black;background-color:#ff66ff">July</B> 15, <B style="color:white;background-color:#880000">2004</B>, 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:</p>

<blockquote>
<p>Q: <b>Last Friday, the <B style="color:black;background-color:#ffff66">Senate </B><B style="color:black;background-color:#A0FFFF">Intelligence </B><B style="color:black;background-color:#99ff99">Committee</B> released a <B style="color:black;background-color:#ff9999">report</B> that shows that Ambassador Joe <B style="color:white;background-color:#00aa00">Wilson</B> lied when he said his wife didn't put him up for the mission to Niger.</b> The British inquiry into their own prewar <B style="color:black;background-color:#A0FFFF">intelligence</B> 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 <B style="color:white;background-color:#00aa00">Wilson</B> owe the President and America an apology for his deception and his own <B style="color:black;background-color:#A0FFFF">intelligence</B> failure?</p>

</blockquote>

<p class="posted_on">Posted to the web on Friday February 11, 2005 at 8:35 PM EST</p>

[Locobot]

Um, mr. Stevo this thread and investigation are not about Wilson's credibility so you can stop waving that red herring like it's some kind of "get out of jail" card for Karl. I imagine if we do ever see a Rove perp. walk from the Whitehouse we'll find Stevo curled up in a dark corner of his basement, hands over ears, chanting, "Rove did nothing wrong Rove did nothing wrong Rove did nothing wrong..."

"...Faith does not offer the least support for a proof of objective truth. Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe, if you with to be a devotee of truth, then inquire..." -Nietzsche

[host]

I am responding to feedback in the first thread on this subject, by condensing the material presented and adding a short description of the points supported in quote box numbers 3 thru 8.

To better illustrate how far Karl Rove's NEPOTISM "OP", his "talking point" that was created in July 2003 in an attempt to undermine the claims by former Ambassador Joe Wilson that he was "sent to Niger" by the CIA, has morphed into a <h4>"refuge of denial"</h4>, for "the believers". Wilson must be branded a "liar" to justify Rove's "outing" of Wilson's CIA, WMD Analyst, wife,
I offer the first two quote boxes, the views of Bush admin "believer",Rep King.

Contrast what is displayed below the first two, "Rep. Peter King" quote boxes, in this post, with Rep. King's "talking point".

Quote Box - 3: On Oct. 1, 2003 <h4>Even Novak</h4> 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".
<h3>Wilson does NOT write that "Vice President Cheney sent him to Niger.</h3>

Quote Box - 5 : Wilson's July 15, 2004 letter to Sen. Pat Roberts, concerning the distortion of facts by the Republican senators that they inserted in their intelligence report, that did not agree with opinions of other senate democrats and republicans on the senate intelligence committee. It is this addendum that the "NEPOTISM" "OP" quotes as a "finding" in the senate report. It is not in the report, read Wilson's letter and decide for yourself.

Quote Box - 6: July 22, 2003 Newsday's D.C. news bureau reporters filed a report that, "A senior intelligence official confirmed that Plame was a Directorate of Operations undercover officer who worked "alongside" the operations officers who asked her husband to travel to Niger.
But he said she did not recommend her husband to undertake the Niger assignment."

Quote Box - 7: Nov. 25, 2004 WaPo runs a report that, "Chris Matthews and Andrea Mitchell would tell Wilson they had heard from administration aides that the real story was not what Wilson found in Niger but his wife's role in selecting him for the trip"

Quote Box - 8: March 10, 2004 WaPO reporter Froomkin reports that, "According to a December Washington Post story by Mike Allen and Dana Milbank, "Sources said the CIA is angry about the circulation of a still-classified document to conservative news outlets suggesting Plame had a role in arranging her husband's trip to Africa for the CIA. The document, written by a State Department official who works for its Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), describes a meeting at the CIA where the Niger trip by Wilson was discussed, said a senior administration official who has seen it."
On top of being secret, CIA officials said it was wrong."

Bottomline: In the last few days, we found that the "source" of the NEPOTISM "OP", was not "CIA or Intelligence Sources", they are consistantly reported, even by Novak, to deny that Valerie Plame was the one to "suggest or to send" her huband, Joeph Wilson to Niger to investigate uranium sales.
Only "senior admin. officials", and the three Republican senators who added a "partisan" addendum to the July 2004 Senate Intelligence report, are reported as the sources of the NEPOTISM "OP's" talking point !
<a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8525978/site/newsweek/page/2/">Cooper wrote that Rove offered him a "big warning" not to "get too far out on Wilson." Rove told Cooper 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>

IMO, it speaks of the deviousness and disregard for the truth, that the above quote of Rove, is now "spun" so that Rove is falsely and cynically portrayed as a "concerned whistleblower", and not the author of a smear aimed at Wilson and his CIA analyst wife, Valerie Plame.

This is a "radicalized" version of Rove's NEPOTISM "OP":
Quote Box - 1

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/ea..._id=1000978394
Rep. King Says Russert and Others in Media Should 'Be Shot,' Not Karl Rove

By E&P Staff

Published: July 13, 2005 2:00 PM ET

NEW YORK From the transcript of an interview on Tuesday night on MSNBC's "Scarborough Country," between host Joe Scarborough and Congressman Peter King, a Republican from New York, on the Plame case and the possible leak of the CIA agent's name by White House aide Karl Rove.

***
SCARBOROUGH: The last thing you want to do at a time of war is reveal the identity of undercover CIA agents.

KING: <h3>No. Joe Wilson, she recommended—his wife recommended him for this.</h3> He said the vice president recommended him. To me, she took it off the table. Once she allowed him to go ahead and say that, write his op-ed in “The New York Times,” to have Tim Russert give him a full hour on “Meet the Press,” saying that he was sent there as a representative of the vice president, when she knew, she knew herself that she was the one that recommended him for it, she allowed that lie to go forward involving the vice president of the United States, the president of the United States, then to me she should be the last one in the world who has any right to complain.

And Joe Wilson has no right to complain. <h3>And I think people like Tim Russert and the others, who gave this guy such a free ride and all the media, they're the ones to be shot, not Karl Rove.</h3>

Listen, maybe Karl Rove was not perfect. We live in an imperfect world. And I give him credit for having the guts.

And I really—I tell you, Republicans are running for cover. They should be out attacking Joe Wilson. We should throw this back at them with all the nonsense that has been said about George Bush and all the lies that have come out.

SCARBOROUGH: Well...

KING: Let's at least stand by the guy. He was trying to set the record straight for historical purposes and to save American lives. And if Joe Wilson's wife was that upset, she should have come out and said that her husband was a liar, when he was.
E&P Staff (letters@editorandpublisher.com)

More on Rep. Peter King.........
Quote Box - 2

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationwo...nation-big-pix
Fightin' words from King
Rep. Peter King takes gloves off in replies to angry voters

Jun 27, 2005

BY J. JIONI PALMER
WASHINGTON BUREAU

June 30, 2005

WASHINGTON -- A lifelong boxing fan who himself trains in the ring twice a week, Rep. Peter King is not one to run away when it comes to confrontation -- even when it comes in the form of a letter from a constituent.

"I understand that you recently contacted my office requesting that I vote to censure President Bush," King, a Republican from Seaford, recently wrote Bellmore resident Harry Halikias. "I disagree with you in every respect. You are morally, intellectually and politically wrong. President Bush is an outstanding leader of outstanding integrity. Like Ed Koch, I thank God every night that he is our president. You should do the same."

Halikias, 28, a computer systems analyst, was taken aback by King's missive, which he said was an unwarranted response to his initial letter.

"I was somewhere between shocked and disappointed that someone elected to represent us would use that kind of language," said Halikias, a Democrat who says he may have once voted for King. "I think he took it personally when he didn't have to. I didn't question his morality or intellect.".......

.........King, who said he reviews every letter sent out by his office, often penning them himself, said most are respectfully worded. However, he said, if someone takes a swing at him, they should expect to get punched back.

"The general rule is that almost any letter that comes in receives a polite response," said King. "The exception is when an abusive letter comes in, but even then sometimes you'll give them a bye the first time."

Claudia Borecky's Feb. 3 e-mail to King arguing that Social Security should not be privatized was bad enough, King said, but her follow-up to his response was over the top.

"Her first letter to me was very abusive, then she came back with another snotty letter, so I said what the hell," he said.

The second letter began, "I think you underestimate the knowledge of your constituents on Social Security" and asks "do you have the courage to hold a Town Meeting so that we may hear your opinion on plan?"

King responded: "I am in receipt of your March 5th e-mail and regret that you don't know as much about social security as you pretend." It concludes, "Frankly it is truly unfortunate that you chose to resort to adolescent-like name-calling against the president rather than attempt to discuss the issue intelligently."

Borecky, of Merrick, said the tone of King's letter was unwarranted and upsetting.............

...............King said he reserves the combative language for partisan matters. He's not at all apologetic.

"I think they should be honored they have a congressman who actually listens to them -- even if they are not making sense," King said. "I respond to them and they run crying to the newspapers. It's just like the kid who's a wise punk, then when someone takes a shot at them they go running to the teacher."

Quote Box - 3

http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/...vak/index.html
...........BLITZER: You mean when he wrote that op-ed page article in The New York Times?

NOVAK: New York Times ... That was on a Sunday morning. On Monday, I began to report on something that I thought was very curious. Why was it that Ambassador Wilson, who had no particular experience in weapons of mass destruction, and was a sharp critic of the Iraqi policy of President Bush and, also, had been a high-ranking official in the Clinton White House, who had contributed politically to Democrats -- some Republicans, but mostly Democrats -- why was he being selected?

I asked this question to a senior Bush administration official, and he said that he believed that the assignment was suggested by an employee at the CIA in the counterproliferation office who happened to be Ambassador Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame. I then called another senior official of the Bush administration, and he said, Oh, you know about that? And he confirmed that that was an accurate story. I then called the CIA. They said that, to their knowledge, he did not -- that the mission was not suggested by Ambassador Wilson's wife -- but that she had been asked by her colleagues in the counterproliferation office to contact her husband. So she was involved...............

Quote Box - 4

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/op...5ac468&ei=5070
NYTimes.com > Opinion

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
What I Didn't Find in Africa
By JOSEPH C. WILSON 4th

Published: July 6, 2003

.........In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake — a form of lightly processed ore — by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990's. 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.....

Quote Box -5

http://www.politicsoftruth.com/edito...Statement.html
Joe Wilson's response to the addendum of the Senate Intelligence
Committee's Report on pre-war intelligence posted by three of its
Republican members

Joseph C. Wilson, IV

July 15, 2004

The Honorable Pat Roberts
Chairman, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

The Honorable Jay Rockefeller
Vice Chairman, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence


Dear Senator Roberts and Senator Rockefeller,

I read with great surprise and consternation the Niger portion of Senators Roberts, Bond and Hatch “additional comments to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee's Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Assessment on Iraq. I am taking this opportunity to clarify some of the issues raised in these comments.

................First conclusion: “The plan to send the former ambassador to Niger was suggested by the former ambassador's wife, a CIA employee.”

That is not true. The conclusion is apparently based on one anodyne quote from a memo Valerie Plame, my wife sent to her superiors that says “my husband has good relations with 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.” There is no suggestion or recommendation in that statement that I be sent on the trip. Indeed it is little more than a recitation of my contacts and bona fides. The conclusion is reinforced by comments in the body of the report that a CPD reports officer stated the “the former ambassador's wife 'offered up his name'” (page 39) and a State Department Intelligence and Research officer that the “meeting was 'apparently convened by [the former ambassador's] wife who had the idea to dispatch him to use his contacts to sort out the Iraq-Niger uranium issue.”

In fact, Valerie was not in the meeting at which the subject of my trip was raised. Neither was the CPD Reports officer. After having escorted me into the room, she departed the meeting to avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest. It was at that meeting where the question of my traveling to Niger was broached with me for the first time and came only after a thorough discussion of what the participants did and did not know about the subject. My bona fides justifying the invitation to the meeting were the trip I had previously taken to Niger to look at other uranium related questions as well as 20 years living and working in Africa, and personal contacts throughout the Niger government. Neither the CPD reports officer nor the State analyst were in the chain of command to know who, or how, the decision was made. The interpretations attributed to them are not the full story. In fact, it is my understanding that the Reports Officer has a different conclusion about Valerie's role than the one offered in the “additional comments”. I urge the committee to reinterview the officer and publicly publish his statement.


It is unfortunate that the report failed to include the CIA's position on this matter. If the staff had done so it would undoubtedly have been given the same evidence as provided to Newsday reporters Tim Phelps and Knut Royce in July, 2003. They reported on July 22 that:................

The following is the July 22, 2003 report from Newsday that Wilson refers to.
Quote Box - 6

http://www.informationclearinghouse....rticle4190.htm
Columnist Blows CIA Agent's Cover

By Timothy M. Phelps and Knut Royce
WASHINGTON BUREAU; Timothy Phelps is the Washington bureau chief.

July 22, 2003: (Newsday) Washington - The identity of an undercover CIA officer whose husband started the Iraq uranium intelligence controversy has been publicly revealed by a conservative Washington columnist citing "two senior administration officials."

Intelligence officials confirmed to Newsday yesterday that Valerie Plame, wife of retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson, works at the agency on weapons of mass destruction issues in an undercover capacity - at least she was undercover until last week when she was named by columnist Robert Novak.
............. Novak reported that his "two senior administration officials" told him that it was Plame who suggested sending her husband, Wilson, to Niger.

A senior intelligence official confirmed that Plame was a Directorate of Operations undercover officer who worked "alongside" the operations officers who asked her husband to travel to Niger.

But he said she did not recommend her husband to undertake the Niger assignment. "They [the officers who did ask Wilson to check the uranium story] were aware of who she was married to, which is not surprising," he said. "There are people elsewhere in government who are trying to make her look like she was the one who was cooking this up, for some reason," he said. "I can't figure out what it could be."

"We paid his [Wilson's] air fare. But to go to Niger is not exactly a benefit. Most people you'd have to pay big bucks to go there," the senior intelligence official said. Wilson said he was reimbursed only for expenses..............

Quote Box - 7

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...nguage=printer

........It was in the ensuing days that television reporters Chris Matthews and Andrea Mitchell would tell Wilson they had heard from administration aides that the real story was not what Wilson found in Niger but his wife's role in selecting him for the trip...........

Quote Box - 8

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...&notFound=true
Inside the Real West Wing

By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Wednesday, March 10, 2004; 10:15 AM

It's the most powerful place on Earth.

.........Gannon asked Wilson: "An internal government memo prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel details a meeting in early 2002 where your wife, a member of the agency for clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested that you could be sent to investigate the reports. Do you dispute that?"

According to a December Washington Post story by Mike Allen and Dana Milbank, "Sources said the CIA is angry about the circulation of a still-classified document to conservative news outlets suggesting Plame had a role in arranging her husband's trip to Africa for the CIA. The document, written by a State Department official who works for its Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), describes a meeting at the CIA where the Niger trip by Wilson was discussed, said a senior administration official who has seen it."

On top of being secret, CIA officials said it was wrong.

Gannon won't talk about it. But he does keep lobbing those softballs. Sometimes he even brings props. And press secretary McClellan seems to appreciate it.............

[Lebell]

This is the condensed version?

Truth is, I've been blissfully without news for over 2 weeks and don't even know what the current issue is.

But I can see that we are duplicating threads.

Merged.

[Locobot]

don't drink and post kiddies!

[host]

Originally Posted by Lebell

This is the condensed version?

Truth is, I've been blissfully without news for over 2 weeks and don't even know what the current issue is.

But I can see that we are duplicating threads.

Merged.

Welcome back, Lebell....I see your point in merging. I'll just post more examples of Rove's NEPOTISM "OP", to compensate for the loss of the main point formerly displayed in the title of the primary thread.

There is still not enough effort by the press to spotlight or discuss the ongoing Rove NEPOTISM "OP". The situation is still quite contrary to that happening, as some posters on these threads still seem to believe that it is true that Wilson's wife, Valerie Wilson, aka Valerie Plame was the original "sponsor", or "sent" Joseph Wilson on a factfinding mission to Niger for the CIA.

It "matters" because, <h4>if Rove can "plant" the points</h4> that Wilson claimed VP Cheney sent him to Niger, but that it was actually Wilson's wife who sent him, that Wilson is a liar, his wife Valerie is "fair game", and Rove is a well meaning "whistleblower", only concerned in his conversation in early July, 2003 with Time reporter Matt Cooper, with aiding Cooper in avoiding the filing of an inaccurate news story, since you will then assume that Wilson was not credible or truthful about who sent him to Niger, or about what his findings about uranium sales to Iraq were.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3158220/
Criminal or Just Plain Stupid?
‘Leakgate’ may be little more than a bumbling effort to slam a critic. Plus, waging holy war from Norway
Newsweek

Oct. 8, 2003 -

......The next day, July 21, Wilson got a call from MSNBC’s “Hardball” host Chris Matthews, who told him that “I just got off the phone with Karl Rove, who said your wife was fair game.” (A source familiar with Rove’s conversation acknowledged the call <h3>but insisted that Rove put it differently: that it was “reasonable to discuss who sent Wilson to Niger.”)</h3> The efforts by Rove and perhaps others to fan the flames after the Novak column has been seized on by critics as evidence enough that the White House was directly involved in a trash-and-burn attempt to slime a critic. Rep. John Conyers, senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, yesterday wrote Rove a letter asking for his resignation, saying that Rove’s comments as reported by NEWSWEEK were “morally indefensible” and an indication that he was part of “an orchestrated campaign to smear and intimidate truth-telling critics.”.....

Now, Matt Cooper has testified, for 2-1/2 hours, to prosecutor Fitzgerald's grand jury....and...he is free to write about what he was asked by the prosecutor, and what he told the grand jury. Since he testified under oath, it is difficult for me to see the relevance about what has been posted about his wife, father-in-law, or other personal relationships, when viewed in the context of what he will report on this matter. Those who choose to attempt to marginalize his credibility here, seem to overlook that he refrained from using any information about Rove that he had for two years, in any way that impeded Rove.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/ea..._id=1000978837

Transcript of Remarks by Matt Cooper and Attorney After Testifying Today

By E&P Staff

Published: July 13, 2005 6:00 PM ET

NEW YORK After more than two hours of testimony before a grand jury today on the Plame case, Matt Cooper of Time magazine addressed reporters outside the courtroom. "It is my hope to get back to being a normal journalist on the other side of the microphones," Cooper said. "I hope to go back to Time magazine and write up an account of what took place here today and my story."

..........So I asked Mr. Luskin if he would agree to the following language, which he did, that: "Consistent with his written waiver of confidentiality he previously executed, Mr. Rove affirms his waiver of any claim of confidentiality he may have concerning any conversation he may have had with Matthew Cooper of Time magazine during the month of July 2003."

Matt and I discussed that once we got this letter. We felt that this was sufficiently personal to Matt. It was sufficient, in Matt's estimation, to cover precisely the conversation that he and Mr. Rove had concerning the article that he published.

And we subsequently came into court. Matt made his statement. In the reliance of this express and personal waiver from Mr. Rove through his attorney, Matt went and testified in the grand jury today.

We're happy to try to answer any questions. Just to clarify, we're not going to answer any questions about the substance of Matt's testimony today, but we're happy to try to answer any other questions that people have.

Q: Does the waiver limit it only to testimony before the grand jury?

COOPER: Yes, absolutely. I am free to talk about what happened in the grand jury room today. And it is my hope to get back to being a normal journalist on the other side of the microphones. I hope to go back to Time magazine and write up an account of what took place here today and my story. But that's something (inaudible) to try to do in the coming hours and days. But I'm not going to do it here, right now.

Just to clarify, for those of you who are not familiar with grand jury rules...all that goes on in the grand jury room is secret, but the witness, him or herself, is free to talk about it. I'm free to talk about it. And I fully plan to. I'm going to talk about it in the pages of Time magazine where I still work..............

<h3>And now....a new NEPOTISM "OP"...a planted story with misinformation, reported Thursday night by two NY Times reporters, quoting an unnamed source, "someone who has been officially briefed on the matter said."</h3>

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/15/politics/15rove.html
Rove Reportedly Held Phone Talk on C.I.A. Officer
By DAVID JOHNSTON
and RICHARD W. STEVENSON
Published: July 15, 2005

WASHINGTON, July 14 - Karl Rove, the White House senior adviser, spoke with the columnist Robert D. Novak as he was preparing an article in July 2003 that identified a C.I.A. officer who was undercover, someone who has been officially briefed on the matter said..........

............Mr. Rove has told investigators that he learned from the columnist the name of the C.I.A. officer, who was referred to by her maiden name, Valerie Plame, and the circumstances in which her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, traveled to Africa to investigate possible uranium sales to Iraq, the person said.

After hearing Mr. Novak's account, the person who has been briefed on the matter said, Mr. Rove told the columnist: "I heard that, too."

The previously undisclosed telephone conversation, which took place on July 8, 2003, was initiated by Mr. Novak, the person who has been briefed on the matter said.

Six days later, Mr. Novak's syndicated column reported that two senior administration officials had told him that Mr. Wilson's "wife had suggested sending him" to Africa. That column was the first instance in which Ms. Wilson was publicly identified as a C.I.A. operative. ...........

<h3>........The person who provided the information about Mr. Rove's conversation with Mr. Novak declined to be identified, citing requests by Mr. Fitzgerald that no one discuss the case. The person discussed the matter in the belief that Mr. Rove was truthful in saying that he had not disclosed Ms. Wilson's identity</h3>

On Oct. 1, 2003, Mr. Novak wrote another column in which he described calling two officials who were his sources for the earlier column. The first source, whose identity has not been revealed, provided the outlines of the story and was described by Mr. Novak as "no partisan gunslinger." Mr. Novak wrote that when he called a second official for confirmation, the source said, "Oh, you know about it."

That second source was Mr. Rove, the person briefed on the matter said. Mr. Rove's account to investigators about what he told Mr. Novak was similar in its message although the White House adviser's recollection of the exact words was slightly different. Asked by investigators how he knew enough to leave Mr. Novak with the impression that his information was accurate, Mr. Rove said he had heard parts of the story from other journalists but had not heard Ms. Wilson's name..........

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/15/po...l?pagewanted=2

.............Mr. Novak then turned to the subject of Ms. Wilson, identifying her by name, the person said. In an Op-Ed article for The New York Times on July 6, 2003, Mr. Wilson suggested that he had been sent to Niger because of Mr. Cheney's interest in the matter. <h3>But Mr. Novak told Mr. Rove he knew that Mr. Wilson had been sent at the urging of Ms. Wilson, the person who had been briefed on the matter said.</h3>

Mr. Rove's allies have said that he did not call reporters with information about the case, rebutting the theory that the White House was actively seeking to intimidate or punish Mr. Wilson by harming his wife's career. They have also emphasized that Mr. Rove appeared not to know anything about Ms. Wilson other than that she worked at the C.I.A. and was married to Mr. Wilson.

This is not the first time Mr. Rove has been linked to a leak reported by Mr. Novak. In 1992, Mr. Rove was fired from the Texas campaign to re-elect the first President Bush because of suspicions that he had leaked information to Mr. Novak about shortfalls in the Texas organization's fund-raising. Both Mr. Rove and Mr. Novak have denied that Mr. Rove had been the source.

Mr. Novak's July 14, 2003, column was published against a backdrop in which White House officials were clearly agitated by Mr. Wilson's assertion, in his Op-Ed article, that the administration had "twisted" intelligence about the threat from Iraq...............

<h3>......... But the White House was also deeply concerned about Mr. Wilson's suggestion that he had gone to Africa to carry out a mission that originated with Mr. Cheney.</h3> At the time, Mr. Cheney's earlier statements about Iraq's banned weapons were coming under fire as it became clearer that the United States would find no stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons and that Mr. Hussein's nuclear program was not far advanced.

Mr. Novak wrote that the decision to send Mr. Wilson "was made at a routinely low level" and was based on what later turned out to be fake documents that had come to the United States through Italy..........

My observations about this timely, "planted" story in the NY TIMES:

1.)The NEPOTISM "OP" is still Rove's, "worn out", but central "smear" of Wilson
2.)In the 1st Quote Box below, Novak told Blitzer that his only source for the info that Wilson was sent to Niger "by his wife", was "senior admin. officials. All news reports that quote CIA or "intelligence" officials, report the opposite,
including Novak himself, lower in the same quote! Note how Novak's source in the new, NY Times "plant", is not mentioned, <b>"But Mr. Novak told Mr. Rove he knew that Mr. Wilson had been sent at the urging of Ms. Wilson, the person who had been briefed on the matter said."</b>

3.)Rove displays his desperation by leaking this "news" from <b>"The person discussed the matter in the belief that Mr. Rove was truthful in saying that he had not disclosed Ms. Wilson's identity"</b>, while using the excuse all this week that no one in the administration can comment on the investigation.
<b>Unless the comments are a leak from an unnamed administration source, "in the belief that Mr. Rove was truthful"</b>

4.)In the middle quote box below, Novak's "outing" column of July 14, 2003, he backs what Wilson wrote in his July 6, 2003 op-ed, "The White House, State Department and Pentagon, and not just Vice President Dick Cheney, asked the CIA to look into it." He also answers his own questions of three months later, as he details Wilson's resume, bi-partisan credentials, and African expertise........

5.)In the bottom quote box, below, Novak is asking questions that he told Blitzer he was asking before he wrote the July 14, 2003 column. <b>"Why was it that Ambassador Wilson, who had no particular experience in weapons of mass destruction, and was a sharp critic of the Iraqi policy of President Bush and, also, had been a high-ranking official in the Clinton White House, who had contributed politically to Democrats -- some Republicans, but mostly Democrats -- why was he being selected?"</b> and <b>"I was curious why a high-ranking official in President Bill Clinton's National Security Council (NSC) was given this assignment."</b>
<h3>It is easy to see in the middle quote box, that Novak had the answers as to why Wilson was selected to go to Niger....Novak made the case himself! </h3> But....by October, he has a new line in his CNN interview with Wolf, and in his Oct. 1, 2003 column.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/...vak/index.html
Novak at the center of the storm

Thursday, October 2, 2003 Posted: 12:10 AM EDT (0410 GMT)

BLITZER: You mean when he wrote that op-ed page article in The New York Times?

NOVAK: New York Times ... That was on a Sunday morning. On Monday, I began to report on something that I thought was very curious. Why was it that Ambassador Wilson, who had no particular experience in weapons of mass destruction, and was a sharp critic of the Iraqi policy of President Bush and, also, had been a high-ranking official in the Clinton White House, who had contributed politically to Democrats -- some Republicans, but mostly Democrats -- why was he being selected?

<h3>I asked this question to a senior Bush administration official, and he said that he believed that the assignment was suggested by an employee at the CIA in the counterproliferation office who happened to be Ambassador Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame. I then called another senior official of the Bush administration, and he said, Oh, you know about that? And he confirmed that that was an accurate story. I then called the CIA. They said that, to their knowledge, he did not -- that the mission was not suggested by Ambassador Wilson's wife -- but that she had been asked by her colleagues in the counterproliferation office to contact her husband. So she was involved................</h3>


......NOVAK: Let me say one other thing I had in today's column. The person who gave me the original story, I said it was given in an off-handed way during in this conversation and he was not a partisan gun slinger. I said that. I'm not going to go into more description, but I did feel that the idea that this was some kind of a carefully arranged plot to destroy this woman and her husband, as far as I'm concerned, was nonsense. It didn't happen that way, and this kind of scandal that has perpetrated in Washington is Washington at its worst.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/r...20030714.shtml
Mission to Niger
Robert Novak

July 14, 2003

Editor's Note: Robert Novak wrote a column on Oct. 1, 2003 in response to the story that began to unfold three months after this column originally ran.

.........Wilson's mission was created after an early 2002 report by the Italian intelligence service about attempted uranium purchases from Niger, derived from forged documents prepared by what the CIA calls a "con man." This misinformation, peddled by Italian journalists, spread through the U.S. government. <h3>The White House, State Department and Pentagon, and not just Vice President Dick Cheney, asked the CIA to look into it.</h3>

That's where Joe Wilson came in. His first public notice had come in 1991 after 15 years as a Foreign Service officer when, as U.S. charge in Baghdad, he risked his life to shelter in the embassy some 800 Americans from Saddam Hussein's wrath. My partner Rowland Evans reported from the Iraqi capital in our column that Wilson showed "the stuff of heroism." President George H.W. Bush the next year named him ambassador to Gabon, and President Bill Clinton put him in charge of African affairs at the National Security Council until his retirement in 1998..........

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/r...20031001.shtml
The CIA leak
Robert Novak (archive)

October 1, 2003

........This story began July 6 when Wilson went public and identified himself as the retired diplomat who had reported negatively to the CIA in 2002 on alleged Iraq efforts to buy uranium yellowcake from Niger. <h3>I was curious why a high-ranking official in President Bill Clinton's National Security Council (NSC) was given this assignment.</h3> Wilson had become a vocal opponent of President Bush's policies in Iraq after contributing to Al Gore in the last election cycle and John Kerry in this one........

<h4>Can anyone post a linked source other than one attributed to "administration officials", or a partisan addendum to the July, 2004 Senate Intelligence Committee report, that reports verfication by a "CIA or Intelligence" source, that confirms that Wilson's wife suggested that he go to Niger, or "sent" him?</h4>

[host]

<h4>As this thug grows more desperate,can truth even survive the NEPOTISM OP?</h4>

http://mediamatters.org/items/200507140001
Media repeated false GOP talking point on authorization for Wilson trip to Niger
............In fact, both of the claims underpinning the RNC's defense of Rove are false: Wilson never claimed he was sent to Niger at Cheney's request, and it was the CIA's Directorate of Operations, Counterproliferation Division (CPD), that authorized the trip, not Plame.

The RNC talking point: Wilson said he was sent to Niger at Cheney's behest ...........

............The Senate Intelligence Commitee's accountPDF file, presented in its 2004 review of prewar weapons intelligence on Iraq, matches Wilson's. "Officials from the CIA's DO Counterproliferation Division told committee staff that in response to questions from the Vice President's Office and the Departments of State and Defense on the alleged Niger-uranium deal, CPD officials discussed ways to obtain additional information. ... CPD decided to contact a former ambassador to Gabon [Wilson] who had a posting early in his career in Niger," the report stated.

Rove's false claim to Cooper: Plame authorized Wilson's trip

............But the claim that Plame authorized -- or even suggested -- Wilson's trip is unproven, if not demonstrably false. The Senate Intelligence Committee closely examined the issue but did not reach a conclusion about how the CIA made the decision to hire Wilson, noting only some "interviews and documents" indicating that Plame "suggested his name for the trip." But even if Plame did "suggest" her husband, she could not have "authorized" it; only the heads of CPD could do that. The Senate report describes "a memorandum to the deputy chief of CPD, from the former ambassador's wife" [p. 39] touting her husband's credentials. But if Plame herself had the power to "authorize" Wilson's trip, as Rove told Cooper, such a memo would hardly have been necessary.

Further, several news reports have quoted unnamed intelligence officials who refuted the notion that Plame authorized, or even suggested, Wilson's trip. A July 22, 2003, Newsday article quoted an unidentified senior intelligence official who said: "They [the officers asking Wilson to check the uranium story] were aware of who she [Plame] was married to, which is not surprising. ... There are people elsewhere in government who are trying to make her look like she was the one who was cooking this up, for some reason." The Los Angeles Times reported on July 15, 2004, that an unnamed CIA official confirmed that Plame was not responsible for the CIA's decision to send Wilson to Niger, saying: "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."

<h3>Instances of media repeating RNC talking point, Rove assertion about Wilson's Niger trip</h3>

* The Wall Street Journal: For Mr. Rove is turning out to be the real "whistleblower" in this whole sorry pseudo-scandal. He's the one who warned Time's Matthew Cooper and other reporters to be wary of Mr. Wilson's credibility. He's the one who told the press the truth that Mr. Wilson had been recommended for the CIA consulting gig by his wife, not by Vice President Dick Cheney as Mr. Wilson was asserting on the airwaves. [Editorial, 7/13/05]

* CARL CAMERON [Fox News chief White House correspondent]: Plame is married to former ambassador Joe Wilson, who falsely claimed in 2003 that his investigation of Iraq's quest for nuclear weapons material from Africa was authorized by Vice President Dick Cheney. Rove's attorney and Cooper's notes indicate that Rove warned Cooper that it was not Cheney, but the CIA that authorized the investigation and that apparently Wilson's wife worked there [Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume, 7/13/05].

* G. GORDON LIDDY [radio host and former Nixon administration official]: Mr. Rove was in conversation with Mr. Cooper of Time magazine. Here, no good turn goes unpunished. Mr. Cooper was about to embarrass himself in his publication by putting out a story that Vice President Cheney had sent former ambassador Wilson to Niger. That was incorrect. Mr. Rove simply told him, "Look, it wasn't Cheney. It was this fellow's wife who apparently works at the agency." [Fox News' Hannity & Colmes, 7/12/05]

* CHRIS MATTHEWS [MSNBC host]: What would be wrong if the enemy, your enemy who has been criticizing your policy, got this gig to go to Africa because his wife got it for him? He didn't get it from the vice president, he didn't get it from the head of the CIA. What's wrong with saying that?

TUCKER ESKEW [Former Bush communications deputy assistant]: I'm glad you said it. Let's repeat it. And in fact, it was Joe Wilson who speculated publicly, Chris, that the vice president sent him. So, it was important to correct that record. He said in that story that the office of the vice president was responsible for his selection. So, when, in fact, you say that Karl Rove or someone at the White House might have called a reporter to straighten it out, please note, what I understand is that Matt Cooper called Karl Rove about another topic and, at the very end, asked about this. And Karl set the record straight. [MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews, 7/12/05]

* NEWT GINGRICH [Fox News analyst and former House speaker]: It is a fact that Wilson alleged that the vice president had sent him to Niger. And that's what Karl Rove was responding to. It is a fact that his response was to say to a reporter, "Don't go overboard on this story because you don't have the whole story." ... if you read the Senate intelligence committee review of this, they make it very clear that Wilson misled the country about who sent him to Africa, that in fact, his wife was the person who recommended him. [Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, 7/12/05]

* RUSH LIMBAUGH [nationally syndicated radio host]: You know, Wilson's out there lying through his teeth about so much of this and he's getting a total pass. The administration did not send Wilson over to Niger. They were not his choice. George Tenet didn't send him. It was Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, who suggested him for the mission and got it done because he was sitting around on his ass not doing anything. He was bored. He didn't have anything to do. [The Rush Limbaugh Show, 7/11/05]

Instances of news reporters failing to correct Republican talking point, Rove assertion about Wilson trip

* JOHN KING [CNN chief national correspondent]: Now, the question there is "leaked classified information." And the White House would tell you, and Karl Rove's lawyer would tell you, that if he said, you know, "Don't believe any of this stuff, don't believe that Dick Cheney sent Joe Wilson there, don't believe that George Tenet sent Joe Wilson there, because Joe Wilson was sent there by his wife, who apparently works in the WMD department of the CIA," nothing illegal about that. [CNN's Inside Politics, 7/12/05]

* The Wall Street Journal: Mr. Rove's lawyer says he was simply trying to steer the reporter away from the idea that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had encouraged Mr. Wilson's research into Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, which included a trip to Africa. ... A set of talking points sent by the Republican National Committee sought to buttress Mr. Rove's claim that he was trying to quash an incorrect story that was being circulated by Mr. Wilson -- namely, that his research was sought by Mr. Cheney. [News report, 7/13/05]

[Ustwo]

Originally Posted by Lebell

This is the condensed version?

Truth is, I've been blissfully without news for over 2 weeks and don't even know what the current issue is.

But I can see that we are duplicating threads.

Merged.

I was wondering where you went off to. Of course most guys learn how to change a diaper in less than two weeks

[roachboy]

welcome back, lebell. hope dadhood is treating you well.


enter novak:

Rove Reportedly Held Phone Talk on C.I.A. Officer
By DAVID JOHNSTON
and RICHARD W. STEVENSON

WASHINGTON, July 14 - Karl Rove, the White House senior adviser, spoke with the columnist Robert D. Novak as he was preparing an article in July 2003 that identified a C.I.A. officer who was undercover, someone who has been officially briefed on the matter said.

Mr. Rove has told investigators that he learned from the columnist the name of the C.I.A. officer, who was referred to by her maiden name, Valerie Plame, and the circumstances in which her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, traveled to Africa to investigate possible uranium sales to Iraq, the person said.

After hearing Mr. Novak's account, the person who has been briefed on the matter said, Mr. Rove told the columnist: "I heard that, too."

The previously undisclosed telephone conversation, which took place on July 8, 2003, was initiated by Mr. Novak, the person who has been briefed on the matter said.

Six days later, Mr. Novak's syndicated column reported that two senior administration officials had told him that Mr. Wilson's "wife had suggested sending him" to Africa. That column was the first instance in which Ms. Wilson was publicly identified as a C.I.A. operative.

The column provoked angry demands for an investigation into who disclosed Ms. Wilson's name to Mr. Novak. The Justice Department appointed Patrick J. Fitzgerald, a top federal prosecutor in Chicago, to lead the inquiry. Mr. Rove said in an interview with CNN last year that he did not know the C.I.A. officer's name and did not leak it.

The person who provided the information about Mr. Rove's conversation with Mr. Novak declined to be identified, citing requests by Mr. Fitzgerald that no one discuss the case. The person discussed the matter in the belief that Mr. Rove was truthful in saying that he had not disclosed Ms. Wilson's identity.

On Oct. 1, 2003, Mr. Novak wrote another column in which he described calling two officials who were his sources for the earlier column. The first source, whose identity has not been revealed, provided the outlines of the story and was described by Mr. Novak as "no partisan gunslinger." Mr. Novak wrote that when he called a second official for confirmation, the source said, "Oh, you know about it."

That second source was Mr. Rove, the person briefed on the matter said. Mr. Rove's account to investigators about what he told Mr. Novak was similar in its message although the White House adviser's recollection of the exact words was slightly different. Asked by investigators how he knew enough to leave Mr. Novak with the impression that his information was accurate, Mr. Rove said he had heard parts of the story from other journalists but had not heard Ms. Wilson's name.

Robert D. Luskin, Mr. Rove's lawyer, said Thursday, "Any pertinent information has been provided to the prosecutor." Mr. Luskin has previously said prosecutors have advised Mr. Rove that he is not a target in the case, which means he is not likely to be charged with a crime.

In a brief conversation on Thursday, Mr. Novak declined to discuss the matter. It is unclear if Mr. Novak has testified to the grand jury, and if he has whether his account is consistent with Mr. Rove's.

The conversation between Mr. Novak and Mr. Rove seemed almost certain to intensify the question about whether one of Mr. Bush's closest political advisers played a role in what appeared to be an effort to undermine Mr. Wilson's credibility after he challenged the veracity of a key point in Mr. Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech, saying Saddam Hussein had sought nuclear fuel in Africa.

The conversation with Mr. Novak took place three days before Mr. Rove spoke with Matthew Cooper, a Time magazine reporter, whose e-mail message about their brief talk reignited the issue. In the message, whose contents were reported by Newsweek this week, Mr. Cooper told his bureau chief that Mr. Rove had talked about Ms. Wilson, although not by name.

After saying in 2003 that it was "ridiculous" to suggest that Mr. Rove had any role in the disclosure of Ms. Wilson's name, Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, has refused in recent days to discuss any specifics of the case. But he has suggested that President Bush continues to support Mr. Rove. On Thursday Mr. Rove was at Mr. Bush's side on a trip to Indianapolis.

As the political debate about Mr. Rove grows more heated, Mr. Fitzgerald is in what he has said are the final stages of his investigation into whether anyone at the White House violated a criminal statute that under certain circumstances makes it a crime for a government official to disclose the names of covert operatives like Ms. Wilson.

The law requires that the official knowingly identify an officer serving in a covert position. The person who has been briefed on the matter said Mr. Rove neither knew Ms. Wilson's name nor that she was a covert officer.

Mr. Fitzgerald has questioned a number of high-level administration officials. Mr. Rove has testified three times to the grand jury. I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, has also testified. So has former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. The prosecutor also interviewed Mr. Bush, in his White House office, and Mr. Cheney, but they were not under oath.

The disclosure of Mr. Rove's conversation with Mr. Novak raises a question the White House has never addressed: whether Mr. Rove ever discussed that conversation, or his exchange with Mr. Cooper, with the president. Mr. Bush has said several times that he wants all members of the White House staff to cooperate fully with Mr. Fitzgerald's investigation.

In June 2004, at Sea Island, Ga., soon after Mr. Cheney met with investigators in the case, Mr. Bush was asked at a news conference whether "you stand by your pledge to fire anyone found" to have leaked the agent's name.

"Yes," Mr. Bush said. "And that's up to the U.S. attorney to find the facts."

Mr. Novak began his conversation with Mr. Rove by asking about the promotion of Frances Fragos Townsend, who had been a close aide to Janet Reno when she was attorney general, to a senior counterterrorism job at the White House, the person who was briefed on the matter said.

Mr. Novak then turned to the subject of Ms. Wilson, identifying her by name, the person said. In an Op-Ed article for The New York Times on July 6, 2003, Mr. Wilson suggested that he had been sent to Niger because of Mr. Cheney's interest in the matter. But Mr. Novak told Mr. Rove he knew that Mr. Wilson had been sent at the urging of Ms. Wilson, the person who had been briefed on the matter said.

Mr. Rove's allies have said that he did not call reporters with information about the case, rebutting the theory that the White House was actively seeking to intimidate or punish Mr. Wilson by harming his wife's career. They have also emphasized that Mr. Rove appeared not to know anything about Ms. Wilson other than that she worked at the C.I.A. and was married to Mr. Wilson.

This is not the first time Mr. Rove has been linked to a leak reported by Mr. Novak. In 1992, Mr. Rove was fired from the Texas campaign to re-elect the first President Bush because of suspicions that he had leaked information to Mr. Novak about shortfalls in the Texas organization's fund-raising. Both Mr. Rove and Mr. Novak have denied that Mr. Rove had been the source.

Mr. Novak's July 14, 2003, column was published against a backdrop in which White House officials were clearly agitated by Mr. Wilson's assertion, in his Op-Ed article, that the administration had "twisted" intelligence about the threat from Iraq.

But the White House was also deeply concerned about Mr. Wilson's suggestion that he had gone to Africa to carry out a mission that originated with Mr. Cheney. At the time, Mr. Cheney's earlier statements about Iraq's banned weapons were coming under fire as it became clearer that the United States would find no stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons and that Mr. Hussein's nuclear program was not far advanced.

Mr. Novak wrote that the decision to send Mr. Wilson "was made at a routinely low level" and was based on what later turned out to be fake documents that had come to the United States through Italy.

Many aspects of Mr. Fitzgerald's investigation remain shrouded in secrecy. It is unclear who Mr. Novak's other source might be or how that source learned of Ms. Wilson's role as a C.I.A. official. By itself, the disclosure that Mr. Rove had spoken to a second journalist about Ms. Wilson may not necessarily have a bearing on his exposure to any criminal charge in the case.

But it seems certain to add substantially to the political maelstrom that has engulfed the White House this week after the reports that Mr. Rove had discussed the matter with Mr. Cooper, the Time reporter.

Mr. Cooper's e-mail message to his editors, in which he described his discussion with Mr. Rove, was among documents that were turned over by Time executives recently to comply with a subpoena from Mr. Fitzgerald. A reporter for The New York Times, Judith Miller, who never wrote about the Wilson case, refused to cooperate with the investigation and was jailed last week for contempt of court. In addition to focusing new attention on Mr. Rove and whether he can survive the political fallout, it is sure to create new partisan pressure on Mr. Bush. Already, Democrats have been pressing the president either to live up to his promises to rid his administration of anyone found to have leaked the name of a covert operative or to explain why he does not believe Mr. Rove's actions subject him to dismissal.

The Rove-Novak exchange also leaves Mr. McClellan, the White House spokesman, in an increasingly awkward situation. Two years ago he repeatedly assured reporters that neither Mr. Rove nor several other administration officials were responsible for the leak.

The case has also threatened to become a distraction as Mr. Bush struggles to keep his second-term agenda on track and as he prepares for one of the most pivotal battles of his presidency, over the confirmation of a Supreme Court justice.

As Democrats have been demanding that Mr. Rove resign or provide a public explanation, the political machine that Mr. Rove built to bolster Mr. Bush and advance his agenda has cranked up to defend its creator. The Republican National Committee has mounted an aggressive campaign to cast Mr. Rove as blameless and to paint the matter as a partisan dispute driven not by legality, ethics or national security concerns, but by a penchant among Democrats to resort to harsh personal attacks.

But Mr. Bush said Wednesday that he would not prejudge Mr. Rove's role, and Mr. Rove was seated conspicuously just behind the president at a cabinet meeting, an image of business as usual. On Thursday, on the trip with Mr. Bush to Indiana, Mr. Rove grinned his way through a brief encounter with reporters after getting off Air Force One.

Mr. Bush's White House has been characterized by loyalty and long tenures, but no one has been at Mr. Bush's side in his journey through politics longer than Mr. Rove, who has been his strategist, enforcer, policy guru, ambassador to social and religious conservatives and friend since they met in Washington in the early 1970's. People who know Mr. Bush said it was unlikely, if not unthinkable, that he would seek Mr. Rove's departure barring a criminal indictment.

David E. Sanger contributed reporting for this article.

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/15/po...rtner=homepage

if the last lines of the article above--which is being echoed around the press this morning---is true, then the tactical choices that shape the right machine's defense of their Leader karl is kind of interesting...it looks like the line is curiously tracing a standard of proof that gives an index of the kind of information that would have to surface for bush to fire him. further evidence that beneath the right's strategy is amounts to an assumption that politics can be bypassed. maybe rove understands the extent to which the operation of the machine he has played an important role in setting up has in fact damaged political life in the states to such an extent that it cannot be understood as a space across which meaningful debate occurs because the right machine has systematically made accurate information a problem.

on this, an edito, also from the ny times, by paul krugman which does not add much new in factual terms but which does provide a nice snapshot of how the servility of those who function within the right media apparatus as a viable information source are being manoevered by that machine on this issue.

it is also a good an index of the incredulity you are finding here (and have been finding on this for some time in this space) on the part of those who observe such activity from the outside.

Karl Rove's America
By PAUL KRUGMAN

John Gibson of Fox News says that Karl Rove should be given a medal. I agree: Mr. Rove should receive a medal from the American Political Science Association for his pioneering discoveries about modern American politics. The medal can, if necessary, be delivered to his prison cell.

What Mr. Rove understood, long before the rest of us, is that we're not living in the America of the past, where even partisans sometimes changed their views when faced with the facts. Instead, we're living in a country in which there is no longer such a thing as nonpolitical truth. In particular, there are now few, if any, limits to what conservative politicians can get away with: the faithful will follow the twists and turns of the party line with a loyalty that would have pleased the Comintern.

I first realized that we were living in Karl Rove's America during the 2000 presidential campaign, when George W. Bush began saying things about Social Security privatization and tax cuts that were simply false. At first, I thought the Bush campaign was making a big mistake - that these blatant falsehoods would be condemned by prominent Republican politicians and Republican economists, especially those who had spent years building reputations as advocates of fiscal responsibility. In fact, with hardly any exceptions they lined up to praise Mr. Bush's proposals.

But the real demonstration that Mr. Rove understands American politics better than any pundit came after 9/11.

Every time I read a lament for the post-9/11 era of national unity, I wonder what people are talking about. On the issues I was watching, the Republicans' exploitation of the atrocity began while ground zero was still smoldering.

Mr. Rove has been much criticized for saying that liberals responded to the attack by wanting to offer the terrorists therapy - but what he said about conservatives, that they "saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war," is equally false. What many of them actually saw was a domestic political opportunity - and none more so than Mr. Rove.

A less insightful political strategist might have hesitated right after 9/11 before using it to cast the Democrats as weak on national security. After all, there were no facts to support that accusation.

But Mr. Rove understood that the facts were irrelevant. For one thing, he knew he could count on the administration's supporters to obediently accept a changing story line. Read the before-and-after columns by pro-administration pundits about Iraq: before the war they castigated the C.I.A. for understating the threat posed by Saddam's W.M.D.; after the war they castigated the C.I.A. for exaggerating the very same threat.

Mr. Rove also understands, better than anyone else in American politics, the power of smear tactics. Attacks on someone who contradicts the official line don't have to be true, or even plausible, to undermine that person's effectiveness. All they have to do is get a lot of media play, and they'll create the sense that there must be something wrong with the guy.

And now we know just how far he was willing to go with these smear tactics: as part of the effort to discredit Joseph Wilson IV, Mr. Rove leaked the fact that Mr. Wilson's wife worked for the C.I.A. I don't know whether Mr. Rove can be convicted of a crime, but there's no question that he damaged national security for partisan advantage. If a Democrat had done that, Republicans would call it treason.

But what we're getting, instead, is yet another impressive demonstration that these days, truth is political. One after another, prominent Republicans and conservative pundits have declared their allegiance to the party line. They haven't just gone along with the diversionary tactics, like the irrelevant questions about whether Mr. Rove used Valerie Wilson's name in identifying her (Robert Novak later identified her by her maiden name, Valerie Plame), or the false, easily refuted claim that Mr. Wilson lied about who sent him to Niger. They're now a chorus, praising Mr. Rove as a patriotic whistle-blower.

Ultimately, this isn't just about Mr. Rove. It's also about Mr. Bush, who has always known that his trusted political adviser - a disciple of the late Lee Atwater, whose smear tactics helped President Bush's father win the 1988 election - is a thug, and obviously made no attempt to find out if he was the leaker.

Most of all, it's about what has happened to America. How did our political system get to this point?

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/15/op...rugman.html?hp

i think krugman provides a nice synopsis of the opposition view of conservatives and their actions across this issue.
incredulity and no small degree of disgust constitute dominant tones.

[Lebell]

Ustwo & Roachboy,

Muchas gracias. Dadhood is indeed treating me well.

The little bugger sure does grow fast, tho...

Anyway, sorry for the threadjack.

[Marvelous Marv]

Originally Posted by Lebell

This is the condensed version?

Truth is, I've been blissfully without news for over 2 weeks and don't even know what the current issue is.

But I can see that we are duplicating threads.

Merged.

Here's the condensed version for you:

Novak and Rove were talking on the phone about a column Novak was writing. Novak said that Joseph Wilson, who did a very dubious job of investigating possible uranium sales to Iraq, was married to Valerie Plame, a CIA officer.

Rove said, "I heard that too."

Now Rove is being accused of "outing" a CIA agent.

If you're disappointed that I have not compressed nearly as many words into as few facts as has been done in other posts, there is more here:

Link

Edit: Oops--posted the same link as Roachboy.

[host]

Originally Posted by Marvelous Marv

Here's the condensed version for you:

Novak and Rove were talking on the phone about a column Novak was writing. Novak said that Joseph Wilson, who did a very dubious job of investigating possible uranium sales to Iraq, was married to Valerie Plame, a CIA officer.

Rove said, "I heard that too."

Now Rove is being accused of "outing" a CIA agent.

If you're disappointed that I have not compressed nearly as many words into as few facts as has been done in other posts, there is more here:

Link

Edit: Oops--posted the same link as Roachboy.

The story in the link that you provided is also displayed in <a href="http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpost.php?p=1839416&postcount=18">post #18</a>, just five posts back, on the only page on this thread.

Make light of it Marv, but I did not create the NEPOTISM "OP" to discredit the Wilsons, Rove did. I hope that you never have to go through an experience like the one this "thug" put Joe Wilson through, just because he exposed the lie in the 2003 SOTU address, with the authority and credibility of his past record in U.S. foreign service, and becaus of the fact finding trip that the CIA sent him to Niger for, nine months before Bush delivered the "16 words" in the SOTU address.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationwo...home-headlines
July 16, 2005
THE NATION
SHADES OF COVER
# The CIA leak case has called attention to the mosaic of lies and props the intelligence community diligently uses to protect its operatives.

By Greg Miller, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — Several months after her identity as a CIA operative was exposed in a newspaper column, Valerie Plame had dinner with five of her classmates from the agency's training academy...............

............."Cover is a mosaic, it's a puzzle," said James Marcinkowski, a former CIA case officer who attended the dinner. "Every piece is important [to protect] because you don't know which pieces the bad guys are missing." .....

.....Plame's cover — in which she posed as a private energy consultant while actually working for a CIA department tracking weapons proliferation — was somewhere in the middle of those extremes.

Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said it was unlikely Plame was in danger as a result of being identified. An internal CIA review concluded that her exposure caused minimal damage, mainly because she had been working at headquarters for years, former officials familiar with the review said.

Still, her clandestine career is over, and the outrage among many current and former case officers lingers because cover is something they go to such great lengths to protect.

<h4>"It doesn't matter whether he used her name," Marcinkowski said of the recent disclosures surrounding Rove. "It doesn't matter what her status was. He gave up a piece of the puzzle and he had no right to do it.".....</h4>

Just 5 days after Wilson wrote his NY Times Op-ed piece, critical of Bush's "16 words", CIA director George Tenet verified that Joe Wilson was right!

http://www.cia.gov/cia/public_affair...r07112003.html
From what we know now, Agency officials in the end concurred that the text in the speech was factually correct - i.e. that the British government report said that Iraq sought uranium from Africa. This should not have been the test for clearing a Presidential address. This did not rise to the level of certainty which should be required for Presidential speeches, and CIA should have ensured that it was removed.

Read the thread, Marv. Posts <a href="http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpost.php?p=1839331&postcount=15">#15</a> and <a href="http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpost.php?p=1839416&postcount=18">#18</a>, and this link: http://mediamatters.org/items/200507140001 make the core arguments and reference for the points I attempt to build a thread and hopefully, discussion around.

In post <a href="http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpost.php?p=1839416&postcount=18">#18</a>, I posted my opinion in regard to the story you linked. It also appears to me, now that Robert D. Luskin, Roves criminal defense attorney, is the probable "source" of the story. Matt Cooper claimed <a href="http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000978837">here</a> that he was free to discuss his testimony, now that he testified before prosecutor Fitzgerald's grand jury, so it follows that Rove, who has already testified, is also free to speak about his testimony, through Atty. Luskin.

The new complication is that the article you cite may be evidence that Rove broke the "Non-Disclosue Agreement" that he signed as a White House employee. Will the White House enforce the provisions of the President's executive order, covering disclosure?

<a href="http://www.yubanet.com/artman/publish/article_22864.shtml">Karl Rove's Nondisclosure Agreement</a>
.............Executive Order 12958 governs how federal employees are awarded security clearances in order to obtain access to classified information. It was last updated by President George W. Bush on March 25, 2003, although it has existed in some form since the Truman era...........

.............THE PROHIBITION AGAINST "CONFIRMING" CLASSIFIED INFORMATION
Mr. Rove, through his attorney, has raised the implication that there is a distinction between releasing classified information to someone not authorized to receive it and confirming classified information from someone not authorized to have it. In fact, there is no such distinction under the nondisclosure agreement Mr. Rove signed.

One of the most basic rules of safeguarding classified information is that an official who has signed a nondisclosure agreement cannot confirm classified information obtained by a reporter. In fact, this obligation is highlighted in the "briefing booklet" that new security clearance recipients receive when they sign their nondisclosure agreements:

Before confirming the accuracy of what appears in the public source, the signer of the SF 312 must confirm through an authorized official that the information has, in fact, been declassified. If it has not, confirmation of its accuracy is also an unauthorized disclosure.3


THE INDEPENDENT DUTY TO VERIFY THE CLASSIFIED STATUS OF INFORMATION

Mr. Rove's attorney has implied that if Mr. Rove learned Ms. Wilson's identity and occupation from a reporter, this somehow makes a difference in what he can say about the information. This is inaccurate. The executive order states: "Classified information shall not be declassified automatically as a result of any unauthorized disclosure of identical or similar information."4

Mr. Rove was not at liberty to repeat classified information he may have learned from a reporter. Instead, he had an affirmative obligation to determine whether the information had been declassified before repeating it. The briefing booklet is explicit on this point: "before disseminating the information elsewhere ... the signer of the SF 312 must confirm through an authorized official that the information has, in fact, been declassified.".............

.............THE WHITE HOUSE OBLIGATIONS UNDER EXECUTIVE ORDER 12958

Under the executive order, the White House has an affirmative obligation to investigate and take remedial action separate and apart from any ongoing criminal investigation. The executive order specifically provides that when a breach occurs, each agency must "take appropriate and prompt corrective action."8 This includes a determination of whether individual employees improperly disseminated or obtained access to classified information.

The executive order further provides that sanctions for violations are not optional. The executive order expressly provides: "Officers and employees of the United States Government ... shall be subject to appropriate sanctions if they knowingly, willfully, or negligently ... disclose to unauthorized persons information properly classified."9

There is no evidence that the White House complied with these requirements ...............

I have worked hard at researching this matter, Marv. I see it now as a very serious abuse of power and a campaign of lies and smear that reaches deep into the media and out of the mouths of national political leaders.

To his credit, but an overall sad indication of indifference and smugness on the part of those TFP members who may disagree with my analysis, only stevo has attempted to counter any of my points with a referenced and thoughtful argument. With the time I've put in on this issue, and the implications that have already undermined the credibility of the White House, and possibly the security and safety of CIA employees and the hindered the task of intelligence gathering, I think that a greater response by more members, is appropriate.

Again, I would be interested in seeing any credible reports that anyone other than "senior administration officials", and the senators who added the Republican addendum to the July 2004 Senate Intel. Committee report, have made that confirm that Joe Wilson's wife, Valerie "sent" him or suggested that he make a fact finding trip about Niger uranium sales.....anyone?

[Lebell]

While I do not share the...extreme views...of some here, I am beginning to think that Rove is proving more of a liability than an asset to Bush.

As such, he should probably tender his resignation.

[Ustwo]

Originally Posted by Lebell

While I do not share the...extreme views...of some here, I am beginning to think that Rove is proving more of a liability than an asset to Bush.

As such, he should probably tender his resignation.

And that is called being played.

After the 2002 and 2004 elections with the 2006 around the corner, there is nothing the democrats would like to see more than Rove go away.

[Zodiak]

Originally Posted by Ustwo

And that is called being played.

I think that the poster who wrote that Rove was becoming a liability is smart enough to know when he is being "played" or not. I do not understand why one would accuse another of being a dupe simply for disagreeing with the Republican side of this issue. There is some really damning evidence in this case, and so it is not intellectualy dishonest to infer that this evidence is a problem.

After the 2002 and 2004 elections with the 2006 around the corner, there is nothing the democrats would like to see more than Rove go away.

This is not a valid argument unless you put party before country. I personally do not care about who scores points over this issue as long as the interest of the United States and its people are upheld. There is no benefit for the US in outing Valerie Plame....the whole incident undermined our intelligence assets on weapons of mass destruction. If we fail to get to the bottom of this, then the Republicans can keep their political strategist, but the country loses because our intellignce community can be undermined for political purposes and we have to rebuild some of our WMD inteligence infrastructure (the human intel part, which is the part that we lack). This is in addition to the fact that Americans will know that our leaders do not care about crime if they are committed by people of their own party.

Surely one must admit that the interests of justice and national security trump partisan politics....we are Americans first, and party members second or below.

Oh, and by the way, Rove's claim that the media gave him the name of Plame fell apart over the weekend. It turns out that he is indeed the primary source for Cooper, and now Scooter Libby and possibly Cheney as well are in the hot-seat.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washing...tm?POE=NEWISVA

Originally Posted by USA Today

Rove, Libby identified CIA officer
By Susan Page and Richard Benedetto, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — White House strategist Karl Rove was the first person to tell a Time magazine reporter that the wife of an administration critic worked for the CIA, the reporter said Sunday. Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, then confirmed that fact to the reporter.

An account in the new issue of Time by Matthew Cooper is the first time a reporter involved has described the role two powerful White House aides played in breaking the story that has sparked a two-year investigation.

Cooper testified Wednesday before a grand jury investigating whether laws were broken when the identity of Valerie Plame, who had worked undercover for the CIA, was disclosed to journalists.

In Time and interviews Sunday on NBC and CNN, Cooper revealed details that could be significant in the inquiry by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald — including the first on-the-record confirmation of Libby as a source.

AP File
Lewis Libby

For two years, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Rove and Libby weren't involved.

Plame is married to former diplomat Joseph Wilson. The CIA sent Wilson to investigate whether Niger had sold Iraq "yellowcake" uranium, which can be processed for use in nuclear weapons.

Wilson later accused the administration of exaggerating intelligence about that to make the case for war, a charge the administration denies. Plame's CIA connection was then identified in a column by conservative commentator Robert Novak and a story in Time.

That is the problem with talking points...they are great for insular one-party discussions, but they are ineffective at standing up to the scrutiny of an onging investigation with new revelations coming out regularly. The truth from the begnning of this story would have served well, and that was 2 years ago.

And neither the CIA nor the Fitzgerald have any compunction about pushing this issue forward regardless of talking points. Obviously they both feel that a crime was committed here, and they have far more information than we do. We can try this case in the court of public opinion, but that will not mean diddly in the end because there is a real trial pending on this where all of the evidence comes out.

And really, even if Karl is not prosecutable under Pappy Bush's law, he still is a traitor in the eyes of a lot of Americans. He still damaged the CIA for political purposes, and he still either lied to the administration about it or had the administration lie to the American poeple about it. Americans can forgive a little indicretion from time to time, but once the trust is lost, then it is all downhill from there.

What do we hear from the administration now concerning this issue? Nothing, but two years ago they were vehement with how "ridiculous" that anyone in the administration could have been involved, assuring reporters that they have spoken with everyone and none of them were to blame. Americans remember being lied to, so they are not buying the argument that they are being "played" by Democrats now.

Besides, it is really hard for Americans to swallow the argument that Democrats are behind this issue when Joe Wilson is a Republican and the special prosecutor was put on the job by John Ashcroft.

This issue stems from the Bush administration trying their best to trump up a case for war. No true causus belli existed, so we ignored the caveats and brought forth any info at all that would back the case while concurrently omitting information that showed otherwise (cherry-picking). The trashing of Joe Wilson and the outing of his wife were political retaliation against Wilson for violating the Iraq war rationale paradigm set forth by the administration. This issue not only shows administration officials as putting their party before their country, but also shows that they are willing to lie to the American people to get us into a costly, unnecessary war and then cover it up. This is a treason that goes far beyond the treason of outing one CIA agent, and frankly, the American people are tired of it as it is becoming more obvious every day (as evidenced by Bush's decreasing poll numbers, especially on his honesty).

We can't blame Democrats for this; the administration is digging their own hole on this issue all by themselves.

[stevo]

So is this thing over now? The more I read the more obvious it is that this is a non-story. Its it over yet people? Apparantly rove named nobody and Plame was outed decades ago. So like I said before, rove committed no crime, he did nothing wrong.

Did the CIA “Out” Valerie Plame?
What the mainstream media tells the court ... but won’t tell you.



With each passing day, the manufactured "scandal" over the publication of Valerie Plame's relationship with the CIA establishes new depths of mainstream-media hypocrisy. A highly capable special prosecutor is probing the underlying facts, and it is appropriate to withhold legal judgments until he completes the investigation over which speculation runs so rampant. But it is not too early to assess the performance of the press. It's been appalling.


Is that hyperbole? You be the judge. Have you heard that the CIA is actually the source responsible for exposing Plame's covert status? Not Karl Rove, not Bob Novak, not the sinister administration cabal du jour of Fourth Estate fantasy, but the CIA itself? Had you heard that Plame's cover has actually been blown for a decade — i.e., since about seven years before Novak ever wrote a syllable about her? Had you heard not only that no crime was committed in the communication of information between Bush administration officials and Novak, but that no crime could have been committed because the governing law gives a person a complete defense if an agent's status has already been compromised by the government?

No, you say, you hadn't heard any of that. You heard that this was the crime of the century. A sort of Robert-Hanssen-meets-Watergate in which Rove is already cooked and we're all just waiting for the other shoe — or shoes — to drop on the den of corruption we know as the Bush administration. That, after all, is the inescapable impression from all the media coverage. So who is saying different?

The organized media, that's who. How come you haven't heard? Because they've decided not to tell you. Because they say one thing — one dark, transparently partisan thing — when they're talking to you in their news coverage, but they say something completely different when they think you're not listening.

You see, if you really want to know what the media think of the Plame case — if you want to discover what a comparative trifle they actually believe it to be — you need to close the paper and turn off the TV. You need, instead, to have a peek at what they write when they're talking to a court. It's a mind-bendingly different tale.


SPUN FROM THE START
My colleague Cliff May has already demonstrated the bankruptcy of the narrative the media relentlessly spouts for Bush-bashing public consumption: to wit, that Valerie Wilson, nee Plame, was identified as a covert CIA agent by the columnist Robert Novak, to whom she was compromised by an administration official. In fact, it appears Plame was first outed to the general public as a result of a consciously loaded and slyly hypothetical piece by the journalist David Corn. Corn's source appears to have been none other than Plame's own husband, former ambassador and current Democratic-party operative Joseph Wilson — that same pillar of national security rectitude whose notion of discretion, upon being dispatched by the CIA for a sensitive mission to Niger, was to write a highly public op-ed about his trip in the New York Times. This isn't news to the media; they have simply chosen not to report it.

The hypocrisy, though, only starts there. It turns out that the media believe Plame was outed long before either Novak or Corn took pen to paper. And not by an ambiguous confirmation from Rove or a nod-and-a-wink from Ambassador Hubby. No, the media think Plame was previously compromised by a disclosure from the intelligence community itself — although it may be questionable whether there was anything of her covert status left to salvage at that point, for reasons that will become clear momentarily.

This CIA disclosure, moreover, is said to have been made not to Americans at large but to Fidel Castro's anti-American regime in Cuba, whose palpable incentive would have been to "compromise[] every operation, every relationship, every network with which [Plame] had been associated in her entire career" — to borrow from the diatribe in which Wilson risibly compared his wife's straits to the national security catastrophes wrought by Aldrich Ames and Kim Philby.


THE MEDIA GOES TO COURT ... AND SINGS A DIFFERENT TUNE
Just four months ago, 36 news organizations confederated to file a friend-of-the-court brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington. At the time, Bush-bashing was (no doubt reluctantly) confined to an unusual backseat. The press had no choice — it was time to close ranks around two of its own, namely, the Times's Judith Miller and Time's Matthew Cooper, who were threatened with jail for defying grand jury subpoenas from the special prosecutor.

The media's brief, fairly short and extremely illuminating, is available here. The Times, which is currently spearheading the campaign against Rove and the Bush administration, encouraged its submission. It was joined by a "who's who" of the current Plame stokers, including ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, AP, Newsweek, Reuters America, the Washington Post, the Tribune Company (which publishes the Los Angeles Times and the Baltimore Sun, among other papers), and the White House Correspondents (the organization which represents the White House press corps in its dealings with the executive branch).

The thrust of the brief was that reporters should not be held in contempt or forced to reveal their sources in the Plame investigation. Why? Because, the media organizations confidently asserted, no crime had been committed. Now, that is stunning enough given the baleful shroud the press has consciously cast over this story. Even more remarkable, though, were the key details these self-styled guardians of the public's right to know stressed as being of the utmost importance for the court to grasp — details those same guardians have assiduously suppressed from the coverage actually presented to the public.

Though you would not know it from watching the news, you learn from reading the news agencies' brief that the 1982 law prohibiting disclosure of undercover agents' identities explicitly sets forth a complete defense to this crime. It is contained in Section 422 (of Title 50, U.S. Code), and it provides that an accused leaker is in the clear if, sometime before the leak, "the United States ha[s] publicly acknowledged or revealed" the covert agent's "intelligence relationship to the United States[.]"

As it happens, the media organizations informed the court that long before the Novak revelation (which, as noted above, did not disclose Plame's classified relationship with the CIA), Plame's cover was blown not once but twice. The media based this contention on reporting by the indefatigable Bill Gertz — an old-school, "let's find out what really happened" kind of journalist. Gertz's relevant article, published a year ago in the Washington Times, can be found here.


THE MEDIA TELLS THE COURT: PLAME'S COVER WAS BLOWN IN THE MID-1990s
As the media alleged to the judges (in Footnote 7, page 8, of their brief), Plame's identity as an undercover CIA officer was first disclosed to Russia in the mid-1990s by a spy in Moscow. Of course, the press and its attorneys were smart enough not to argue that such a disclosure would trigger the defense prescribed in Section 422 because it was evidently made by a foreign-intelligence operative, not by a U.S. agency as the statute literally requires.

But neither did they mention the incident idly. For if, as he has famously suggested, President Bush has peered into the soul of Vladimir Putin, what he has no doubt seen is the thriving spirit of the KGB, of which the Russian president was a hardcore agent. The Kremlin still spies on the United States. It remains in the business of compromising U.S. intelligence operations.

Thus, the media's purpose in highlighting this incident is blatant: If Plame was outed to the former Soviet Union a decade ago, there can have been little, if anything, left of actual intelligence value in her "every operation, every relationship, every network" by the time anyone spoke with Novak (or, of course, Corn).


THE CIA OUTS PLAME TO FIDEL CASTRO
Of greater moment to the criminal investigation is the second disclosure urged by the media organizations on the court. They don't place a precise date on this one, but inform the judges that it was "more recent" than the Russian outing but "prior to Novak's publication."

And it is priceless. The press informs the judges that the CIA itself "inadvertently" compromised Plame by not taking appropriate measures to safeguard classified documents that the Agency routed to the Swiss embassy in Havana. In the Washington Times article — you remember, the one the press hypes when it reports to the federal court but not when it reports to consumers of its news coverage — Gertz elaborates that "[t]he documents were supposed to be sealed from the Cuban government, but [unidentified U.S.] intelligence officials said the Cubans read the classified material and learned the secrets contained in them."

Thus, the same media now stampeding on Rove has told a federal court that, to the contrary, they believe the CIA itself blew Plame's cover before Rove or anyone else in the Bush administration ever spoke to Novak about her. Of course, they don't contend the CIA did it on purpose or with malice. But neither did Rove — who, unlike the CIA, appears neither to have known about nor disclosed Plame's classified status. Yet, although the Times and its cohort have a bull's eye on Rove's back, they are breathtakingly silent about an apparent CIA embarrassment — one that seems to be just the type of juicy story they routinely covet.


A COMPLETE DEFENSE?
The defense in Section 422 requires that the revelation by the United States have been done "publicly." At least one U.S. official who spoke to Gertz speculated that because the Havana snafu was not "publicized" — i.e., because the classified information about Plame was mistakenly communicated to Cuba rather than broadcast to the general public — it would not available as a defense to whomever spoke with Novak. But that seems clearly wrong.

First, the theory under which the media have gleefully pursued Rove, among other Bush officials, holds that if a disclosure offense was committed here it was complete at the moment the leak was made to Novak. Whether Novak then proceeded to report the leak to the general public is beside the point — the violation supposedly lies in identifying Plame to Novak. (Indeed, it has frequently been observed that Judy Miller of the Times is in contempt for protecting one or more sources even though she never wrote an article about Plame.)

Perhaps more significantly, the whole point of discouraging public disclosure of covert agents is to prevent America's enemies from degrading our national security. It is not, after all, the public we are worried about. Rather, it is the likes of Fidel Castro and his regime who pose a threat to Valerie Plame and her network of U.S. intelligence relationships. The government must still be said to have "publicized" the classified relationship — i.e., to have blown the cover of an intelligence agent — if it leaves out the middleman by communicating directly with an enemy government rather than indirectly through a media outlet.


LINGERING QUESTIONS
All this raises several readily apparent questions. We know that at the time of the Novak and Corn articles, Plame was not serving as an intelligence agent outside the United States. Instead, she had for years been working, for all to see, at CIA headquarters in Langley. Did her assignment to headquarters have anything to do with her effectiveness as a covert agent having already been nullified by disclosure to the Russians and the Cubans — and to whomever else the Russians and Cubans could be expected to tell if they thought it harmful to American interests or advantageous to their own?

If Plame's cover was blown, as Gertz reports, how much did Plame know about that? It's likely that she would have been fully apprised — after all, as we have been told repeatedly in recent weeks, the personal security of a covert agent and her family can be a major concern when secrecy is pierced. Assuming she knew, did her husband, Wilson, also know? At the time he was ludicrously comparing the Novak article to the Ames and Philby debacles, did he actually have reason to believe his wife had been compromised years earlier?

And could the possibility that Plame's cover has long been blown explain why the CIA was unconcerned about assigning a one-time covert agent to a job that had her walking in and out of CIA headquarters every day? Could it explain why the Wilsons were sufficiently indiscrete to pose in Vanity Fair, and, indeed, to permit Joseph Wilson to pen a highly public op-ed regarding a sensitive mission to which his wife — the covert agent — energetically advocated his assignment? Did they fail to take commonsense precautions because they knew there really was nothing left to protect?

We'd probably know the answers to these and other questions by now if the media had given a tenth of the effort spent manufacturing a scandal to reporting professionally on the underlying facts. And if they deigned to share with their readers and viewers all the news that's fit to print ... in a brief to a federal court.

http://nationalreview.com/mccarthy/m...0507180801.asp
Nice try.

[roachboy]

what a shock!
an article from the national reivew defending karl rove!
say it aint so!
well, that certainly puts any questions i had to rest.
phew.
back to sleep now.

i guess this doesn't matter, now that the national review has weighted in and settled all possible questions:

Reporter Says He First Learned of C.I.A. Operative From Rove
By LORNE MANLY and DAVID JOHNSTON

Matthew Cooper, a reporter for Time magazine, said the White House senior adviser Karl Rove was the first person to tell him that the wife of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV was a C.I.A. officer, according to a first-person account in this week's issue of the magazine.

The account also stated that Mr. Rove said Mr. Wilson's wife had played a role in sending Mr. Wilson to Africa to investigate possible uranium sales to Iraq.

The article, a description of Mr. Cooper's testimony last Wednesday to a federal grand jury trying to determine whether White House officials illegally disclosed the identity of a covert intelligence officer, offered the most detailed account yet of how a White House official purportedly did not merely confirm what a journalist knew but supplied that information.

Mr. Cooper said in his article that Mr. Rove did not mention the name of Mr. Wilson's wife, Valerie Wilson, or say that she was a covert officer. But, he wrote: "Was it through my conversation with Rove that I learned for the first time that Wilson's wife worked at the C.I.A. and may have been responsible for sending him? Yes. Did Rove say that she worked at the 'agency' on 'W.M.D.'? Yes.

"Is any of this a crime? Beats me."

The details in Mr. Cooper's article about his conversation with Mr. Rove are largely consistent with the broad outlines of Mr. Rove's grand jury testimony about the conversation as portrayed in news accounts.

But Mr. Cooper's article, a rare look inside the deliberations from a prime participant in this political and journalistic drama, is likely to add fuel to a political firestorm over whether there was a White House effort to disclose Ms. Wilson's identity as payback for her husband's criticism of the administration.

Mr. Rove's allies have said that he did not initiate any conversations with reporters and that he was merely warning them off what he said was faulty information. But White House statements over the past two years have left the impression that administration officials were not involved in identifying Ms. Wilson.

Mr. Cooper also wrote about a conversation he initiated with I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney. Although it has been known that reporters spoke to Mr. Libby, what he said was not known. His conversation with Mr. Cooper is the first indication that Mr. Libby was aware of Ms. Wilson's role in her husband's trip to Africa. When Mr. Cooper asked if Mr. Libby knew of that, Mr. Libby said he had heard that as well, the article said.

Both Mr. Libby and Mr. Rove sought to dispel speculation that Mr. Cheney had played a role in dispatching Mr. Wilson on his mission.

Mr. Cooper's article was the fulcrum for a day of partisan bickering on the television news talk programs, cable news channels and the Web. Some Democrats, saying Mr. Rove's credibility was in tatters, again called for his dismissal, while Republicans continued to defend him, saying Democrats were prejudging a continuing investigation and were trying to injure Mr. Rove's reputation with information that actually vindicated him.

"It's wrong, it's outrageous, and folks involved in this, frankly, owe Karl Rove an apology," Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, said yesterday on "Meet the Press" on NBC.

Mr. Rove's lawyer, Robert D. Luskin, declined to comment yesterday on the details in Mr. Cooper's article. He has said previously that prosecutors advised Mr. Rove that he was not a target in the case. Mr. Libby and his lawyer, Joseph A. Tate, have said in the past that they will not discuss the matter. Efforts to reach Mr. Tate yesterday were unsuccessful.

Mr. Cooper found himself in front of the grand jury on Wednesday morning, a week after a receiving "an express personal release from my source," sparing him a jail sentence for civil contempt of court. Another reporter facing the same punishment that day, Judith Miller of The New York Times, was jailed after refusing to disclose her source for an article she never wrote.

Mr. Cooper had refused to testify about what a confidential source, now known to be Mr. Rove, had told him for an article that appeared on Time magazine's Web site on July 17, 2003, about administration officials "having taken public and private whacks" at Mr. Wilson.

It can be a crime to knowingly name a covert officer for the Central Intelligence Agency. Mr. Rove's supporters have argued that he did not know of her history as a covert operative and questioned whether she remained one under the statute.

The Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into the leak in September 2003. But with pressure mounting on the administration to appoint an independent counsel, Attorney General John Ashcroft that December recused himself from the inquiry, and Patrick J. Fitzgerald, a federal prosecutor in Chicago, was chosen as special counsel.

Under federal law, prosecutors and grand jurors are sworn to secrecy. And while witnesses are free to discuss their testimony, Mr. Fitzgerald has asked that the witnesses not comment. Administration officials have heeded the request.

Mr. Cooper did not, instead providing a glimpse inside an inquiry engulfing Mr. Rove, the quintessential Bush insider who is on the cover of Time and Newsweek this week.

Mr. Cooper estimated that he spent about a third of his two and a half hours of testimony responding to jurors' questions, rather than to the prosecutor's, although Mr. Fitzgerald asked questions on their behalf.

"Virtually all the questions centered on the week of July 6, 2003," Mr. Cooper wrote. Mr. Wilson wrote an Op-Ed article that appeared in The New York Times that day challenging the veracity of 16 words in Mr. Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech, which claimed that British intelligence believed that Saddam Hussein had sought nuclear fuel in Africa.

Mr. Cooper, who had just a few weeks earlier become a White House correspondent after serving as deputy bureau chief in Washington, wrote that he called Mr. Rove the next Friday, July 11. He said he told the grand jury he was interested in "an ancillary question" to whoever had vetted the president's State of the Union address: "why government officials, publicly and privately, seemed to be disparaging Mr. Wilson" after the White House had said the claim about nuclear fuel should not have been in the speech.

But the Bush White House is not known for backing down from challenges, and Mr. Wilson had asserted that the administration had "twisted" intelligence about the threat posed by Iraq and was becoming increasingly public about his views after the Op-Ed article appeared.

Mr. Cooper said he spoke to Mr. Rove on "deep background," saying the sourcing description of "double super secret background" he used in his e-mail message to his boss was "not a journalistic term of art" but a reference to the film "Animal House," where the Delta House fraternity was placed on "double secret probation."

"The notes, and my subsequent e-mails, go on to indicate that Rove told me material was going to be declassified in the coming days that would cast doubt on Wilson's mission and his findings," Mr. Cooper wrote.

Mr. Cooper also wrote that he told the grand jury he was certain Mr. Rove never mentioned Ms. Wilson by name, and that he did not learn of her identity until several days later, when he either read it in a column by the syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak, who referred to her by her maiden name, Valerie Plame, or found it through a Google search.

"Rove did, however, clearly indicate that she worked at the 'agency' - by that, I told the grand jury, I inferred he obviously meant the C.I.A. and not, say, the Environmental Protection Agency. Rove added that that she worked on W.M.D. (the abbreviation for weapons of mass destruction) issues and that she was responsible for sending Wilson. This was the first time I had heard anything about Wilson's wife."

The Senate Intelligence Committee, in its report, said interviews and documents provided by the C.I.A.'s counterproliferation division indicate that Ms. Wilson suggested her husband for the trip. Ms. Wilson portrayed her role as minimal to the committee and said she attended a meeting involving Mr. Wilson, intelligence analysts and other C.I.A. officials only to introduce her husband.

In his article, Mr. Cooper also shared a memory that was not in his notes or e-mail messages: Mr. Rove's ending the phone call by saying, "I've already said too much."

"This could have meant he was worried about being indiscreet, or it could have meant he was late for a meeting or something else," he wrote. "I don't know, but that sign-off has been in my memory for two years."

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/18/politics/18rove.html

or this:

Bush Says He'll Fire Any Aide Who 'Committed a Crime'
By DAVID STOUT

WASHINGTON, July 18 - President Bush changed his stance today on his close adviser Karl Rove, stopping well short of promising that anyone in his administration who helped to unmask a C.I.A. officer would be fired.

"If someone committed a crime, they will no longer work in my administration," Mr. Bush said in response to a question, after declaring, "I don't know all the facts; I want to know all the facts."

For months, Mr. Bush and his spokesmen have said that anyone involved in the disclosure of the C.I.A. officer's identity would be dismissed. The president's apparent raising of the bar for dismissal today, to specific criminal conduct, comes amid mounting evidence that, at the very least, Mr. Rove provided backhanded confirmation of the C.I.A. officer's identity.

In the months after the name of the officer, Valerie Plame Wilson, was made public in July 2003, the White House said repeatedly that no one working for the administration was part of the disclosure.

Mrs. Wilson's husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, has asserted that his wife was unmasked, and her career consequently damaged, in retaliation for his criticism of the Bush administration's policy toward Iraq. He has also said he suspects that Mr. Rove, by all accounts one of the president's most trusted political advisers and an architect of his successful re-election strategy, had a role in the disclosure.

Mr. Rove's lawyer, Robert D. Luskin, has said that Mr. Rove has been told he is not a target of a federal investigation into the leak.

Matthew Cooper, a Time magazine reporter, says in a first-person account in this week's issue that Mr. Rove was the first person to tell him that Mr. Wilson's wife was an officer for the Central Intelligence Agency. Mr. Cooper writes that Mr. Rove used indirect language - not mentioning Mrs. Wilson by name, for instance - but that he supplied him information nonetheless.

The first journalist to disclose Mrs. Wilson's identity was the columnist Robert Novak, who has declined for two years to say whether he has testified to a federal grand jury investigating the leak.

Some Democrats have called for Mr. Bush to fire Mr. Rove, who is now the deputy White House chief of staff. The Democrats assert that Mr. Rove may have violated a federal law that bars the deliberate disclosure of the name of a C.I.A. agent.

Republicans have countered that Democrats are prejudging the results of the investigation - and may be eager to do so, for political reasons - and that any conversations Mr. Rove had with reporters might have been for the purpose of steering them away from unreliable rumors.

The questions about Mr. Rove and the unmasking of Mrs. Wilson have dominated the political conversation in the sweltering capital, so much so that the issue came up today as President Bush was appearing with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India at the White House.

Mr. Bush did not respond directly when he was asked whether he was "displeased" that Mr. Rove had discussed Mr. Wilson's wife with a reporter. "We have a serious ongoing investigation here, and it's being played out in the press," Mr. Bush said. He said he hopes the investigation will be over "very soon" and that people should reserve judgment until then.

The president's message was echoed by his chief spokesman, Scott McClellan, who responded to repeated questions about Mr. Rove today by urging people not to prejudge the outcome of the investigation.

Mr. McClellan rejected the suggestion that Mr. Bush had added a "qualifier" to the standards for his aides' conduct. "I think that the president was stating what is obvious when it comes to people who work in the administration: that if someone commits a crime, they're not going to be working any longer in this administration," Mr. McClellan said.

But Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said he was disappointed that Mr. Bush apparently shifted his stance. "The standard for holding a high position in the White House should not simply be that you didn't break the law," Mr. Schumer said.

The controversy over Mr. Rove comes as President Bush is preparing to nominate a candidate to fill the Supreme Court seat being vacated by the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. A reporter began a question today by alluding to rumors that the president was close to a choice.

"Really?" Mr. Bush replied, to laughter. He went on to say that he was reviewing a number of candidates, that he would be "thorough and deliberate" in choosing a name, and that he hoped a new justice could be confirmed by the Senate in time for the court term that begins in October.

"And thank you for your question, and thank you for telling me how close I am," Mr. Bush said, "or at least indicating what others think."

In the article, Mr. Cooper writes only of his dealings with Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby, but under questioning by Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" yesterday, Mr. Cooper hinted that he might have had more sources for the original article.

"Did Fitzgerald's questions give me a sense of where the investigation is heading? Perhaps," Mr. Cooper added. "He asked me several different ways if Rove indicated how he had heard that Plame worked at the C.I.A. (He did not, I told the grand jury.) Maybe Fitzgerald is interested in whether Rove knew her C.I.A. ties through a person or through a document."

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/18/po...rtner=homepage


or this:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...041100587.html


sleep well, rightwingers: the national review has figured everything out.

[The Truth]

Originally Posted by roachboy

what a shock!
an article from the national reivew defending karl rove!
say it aint so!
well, that certainly puts any questions i had to rest.
phew.
back to sleep now.

When you wake back up, if you quit trying to discount facts by ridiculing the medium that reported them, you might notice that the article is very well documented/referenced. It seems that you don't intend to let these uncontested facts influence your opinion.

Also, from your own quote:

Mr. Cooper also wrote that he told the grand jury he was certain Mr. Rove never mentioned Ms. Wilson by name, and that he did not learn of her identity until several days later, when he either read it in a column by the syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak, who referred to her by her maiden name, Valerie Plame, or found it through a Google search.

Mr. Cooper said in his article that Mr. Rove did not mention the name of Mr. Wilson's wife, Valerie Wilson, or say that she was a covert officer. But, he wrote: "Was it through my conversation with Rove that I learned for the first time that Wilson's wife worked at the C.I.A. and may have been responsible for sending him? Yes. Did Rove say that she worked at the 'agency' on 'W.M.D.'? Yes.

"Is any of this a crime? Beats me."

The details in Mr. Cooper's article about his conversation with Mr. Rove are largely consistent with the broad outlines of Mr. Rove's grand jury testimony about the conversation as portrayed in news accounts.

I don't expect this to still the cries of "Rove lied! "Rove lied!" but at least it makes it plain he didn't.

Besides, aren't these Democrats screaming for Rove's head the same ones who claimed lying under oath wasn't a big deal? Around 1998, maybe?

sleep well, rightwingers: the national review has figured everything out.

Too bad many others haven't.

[Ustwo]

roachboy what I find most amusing is while you knock the National Review, you then cite the NYT's and Washington Post. I can almost smell the irony.

Pot, meet kettle, kettle, pot.

[roachboy]

i do not have the opinion about the rove case that you might think, "the truth"---i am just watching this stuff unfold. it seems to me that the folk who assume that they already know everytyhing are the legion of rightwing talking heads who are already trotting out trial-like defenses of rove before there is really anything to defend against. the national review article offers nothing new or interesting, really, apart from a synopsis of rightwing talking points. i read the article--i found it premature. and from the review as well, which is like citing national lampoon, really.

ustwo:

i await with not inconsiderable hope and optimism an interesting and constructive post from you in politics.
equating the ny times/washington post with the national review in terms of politics aint it, however.
maybe next time.
hope springs eternal.

[Zodiak]

I figured that citing the National Review as being the obvious conservative biased source would not deter some from insisting on its iron-clad journalistic integrity, so I decided to do a little research and actually go after one fact of the article to see where the facts lead me. Here is what I found in 30 minutes of research:

The article cites a friend-of-the-court briefing filed by a lawyer on behalf of 36 news organizations. Firstly, this is a briefing written by the trial lawyer, which is a much-maligned group by the right-wing, especially when the Vice-Presidential nominee is from the other party; the first bit of hypocrisy comes from using a trail-lawyer's brief as evidence, but I digress.

Next, if one goes to the actual 40 page briefing, the citation containing this accusation (on page 7 of the briefing) only cites one article from July 23rd, 2004 article of the Washington Times as its source that Valerie Plame's name was well-known before Novak's column. I dug a little deeper and got the article, which was written by prominent conservative writer Bill Gertz. The article is two paragraphs long and says that the Russians may have known her identity prior to Novak knowing it, and cites "officials" who spoke under conditions of anonymity. That is it....no explanations or details given. What's more is that the lawyer says that Cuba was mentioned in the article, and the two paragraphs I read had nothing of Cuba in it. It is not nice to file a briefing that misquotes articles....even so this article is not "evidence".

Mind you, this is not 36 news organizations all contesting that they knew Valerie Plame's identity before Novak's column; this is a laywer citing one of the most conservative writers in Reverend Moon's Washington Times as a reason to halt proceedings and not force Cooper and Miller to reveal their sources. Of course, that briefing was filed on March 23rd, 2005 and has since been rejected, as evidenced by Judith Miller's incarceration.

So, the National Review is citing a laywer's document that cites a conservative writer from a questionably-owned newspaper who gave no details and failed to name his source, who regardless could have been easy plants by Bush administration officials looking to give some cover to Rove in the future. (this is a known Rove tactic)

Nonetheless, it is a shaky source to be making such bold determinations of guilt or innocence independent of the grand jury's findings. Only an obviously biased source would use such flimsy "evidence" to convince their followers that nothing illegal happened.

And that does not even address the fact that regardless of the publicity of her identity, the CIA determines whether it is classified or not, and the CIA is the one pressing this matter to prosecution. Is there a standard form 312 filed to declassify Plame? If so, it would be on record and would exonerate all parties involved. If the right wants to defend Rove, this document would do it, but no such filing is known to exist to this date.

Also, Judith Miller, who insisted on publishing everything Chilabi and the Bush administration said about WMDs in Iraq works for the New York Times, which tweaks the right equally as it does the left. This is in contrast to the Washington Times and the New York Post, which are both very pro-GOP on average, but even they publish some real blanced news from time to time. The National Review is no more unbiased than The Nation (which does have conservative writers, at least) and should not be used in a political debate.

[Zodiak]

One more thing. Not mentioning Plame by name is still identifying her. The law does not stipulate that she has to be specifically named, just identified. Joe Wilson only has one wife, so the identification would still be the same.

Also, when Clinton lied under oath about something not germaine to the case (his relationship with Monica), no national security was compromised, no political retribution was taking place, no abuse of power occurred, and this issue didn't concern the pretext for an expensive, bloody war. What's more is that Clinton was impeached for it. Shall we apply proportionate standards to Rove? What is Rove's potential crime compared to Clinton's? Shouldn't we take the situation that much more seriously?

Using the "yeah, but Clinton..." argument does not apply in this case because the crimes are not even comparable, nor are the positions of the accused. Clinton was the President and had to stand impeachment. Karl Rove is a minor official who would be easily replaced with minimum upheaval.

[Marvelous Marv]

Originally Posted by Zodiak

One more thing. Not mentioning Plame by name is still identifying her. The law does not stipulate that she has to be specifically named, just identified. Joe Wilson only has one wife, so the identification would still be the same.

I hope that it goes to court on the basis of your argument that Rove outed a "covert" agent.

Also, when Clinton lied under oath about something not germaine to the case (his relationship with Monica), no national security was compromised, no political retribution was taking place, no abuse of power occurred, and this issue didn't concern the pretext for an expensive, bloody war. What's more is that Clinton was impeached for it. Shall we apply proportionate standards to Rove? What is Rove's potential crime compared to Clinton's? Shouldn't we take the situation that much more seriously?

Yes, we should apply the same standards. Rove didn't lie under oath. Clinton did.

Are you saying that it's acceptable to lie under oath, as long as it doesn't involve national security?

Using the "yeah, but Clinton..." argument does not apply in this case because the crimes are not even comparable, nor are the positions of the accused. Clinton was the President and had to stand impeachment. Karl Rove is a minor official who would be easily replaced with minimum upheaval.

Which is the goal of the Democrats--to get rid of him over a non-criminal, non-event.

And they wonder why they lost the last election.

[Zodiak]

Originally Posted by Marvelous Marv

I hope that it goes to court on the basis of your argument that Rove outed a "covert" agent.

It won't be my argument, it will be the argument of the CIA, who initiated this prosecution in the first place.

Yes, we should apply the same standards. Rove didn't lie under oath. Clinton did.

Are you saying that it's acceptable to lie under oath, as long as it doesn't involve national security?

No, if you read my post carefully, I am saying the situations are not comparable. It is best to not put words into another's mouth.

Which is the goal of the Democrats--to get rid of him over a non-criminal, non-event.

And they wonder why they lost the last election.

If it was a non, criminal, non-event orchestrated by Democrats then why did Ashcroft appoint a special prosecutor? Why did Miller go to jail? Why is the CIA angry about this? Why does the media feel the story has legs? And why is Bush suddenly silent and backpedaling on this issue "from I'll fire anyone involved"to "I'll fire anyone who committed a crime"?

And the "last election" line is a non-sequitir the purpose of which I can only attribute to braggadoccio. A more effective argument would remain topical.

[AVoiceOfReason]

Originally Posted by Zodiak

Also, when Clinton lied under oath about something not germaine to the case (his relationship with Monica), no national security was compromised.

Very slight thread detour--we can't be sure about the relationship with Monica not compromising national security. In any event, it certainly put him in the position of compromising it--if the Chinese got wind of it before the FBI, for example. Let's just be glad Linda Tripp was a patriot.

Back to Rove: The best analysis I've seen on this was on (shudder) the National Review Online site where a reporter went back to the Novak column to see what it said and didn't say. He then found David Corn was writing about the same thing. Anyway, here's the link to Clifford May's article: www.nationalreview.com/may/may200507150827.asp

and if it was posted before, sorry, I've just opened this for the first time and didn't have time to read ALL of it.

[Zodiak]

Originally Posted by AVoiceOfReason

Very slight thread detour--we can't be sure about the relationship with Monica not compromising national security. In any event, it certainly put him in the position of compromising it--if the Chinese got wind of it before the FBI, for example. Let's just be glad Linda Tripp was a patriot.

Arguing "what if's" is not valid in this case. The fact was, no national security was compromised as far as we know in the public domain. Any speculation beyond that is just that...speculation.

and if it was posted before, sorry, I've just opened this for the first time and didn't have time to read ALL of it.

Then you would have read how the National Review is a biased source that misquotes and misrepresents articles, as I showed with a cursory analysis of one point in the last National Review Article. Please stick with mainstream articles if you want to engage the left in debate with honesty and good faith.

Do that and the left with refrain from Mother Jones, the Nation, etc. I have yet to see the left publish non-mainstream information here, so I think that in the spirit of respect and mutual understanding that the right should do the same.

But then again, I am a newbie, so what I think about the methods used to argue here has very little weight on the community. I just think it would be nice and certainly more equitable.

[Elphaba]

Here is a new twist. It would appear that Bush is required to take some action even if there isn't a conviction.



Waxman: Bush Statement on Rove Conflicts with Executive Order
By Rep. Henry A. Waxman
YubaNet

Monday 18 July 2005

Dear Mr. President:

In June 2004, you said that you would fire anyone found to be involved in the disclosure of Valerie Wilson's identity as a covert CIA agent. [1] Today, you significantly changed your position, stating that you would remove Karl Rove or other White House officials involved in the security breach only "if someone committed a crime." [2]

Your new standard is not consistent with your obligations to enforce Executive Order 12958, which governs the protection of national security secrets. The executive order states: "Officers and employees of the United States Government ... shall be subject to appropriate sanctions if they knowingly, willfully, or negligently ... disclose to unauthorized persons information properly classified." [3] Under the executive order, the available sanctions include "reprimand, suspension without pay, removal, termination of classification authority, loss or denial of access to classified information, or other sanctions." [4]

Under the executive order, you may not wait until criminal intent and liability are proved by a prosecutor. Instead, you have an affirmative obligation to take "appropriate and prompt corrective action." [5] And the standards of proof are much different. A criminal violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald is investigating, requires a finding that Mr. Rove "intentionally disclose[d]" the identity of a covert agent. [6] In contrast, the administrative sanctions under Executive Order 12958 can be imposed without a finding of intent. Under the express terms of the executive order, you are required to impose administrative sanctions - such as removal of office or termination of security clearance - if Mr. Rove or other officials acted "negligently" in disclosing or confirming information about Ms. Wilson's identity. [7]

I have enclosed a fact sheet on Karl Rove's Nondisclosure Agreement and its legal implications, which provides additional detail about the President's national security obligations. I urge you to act in compliance with Executive Order 12958 and your responsibility to safeguard national security secrets.

Sincerely,

Henry A. Waxman
Ranking Minority Member



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] Press Conference: President Discusses Job Creation With Business Leaders (Sept. 30, 2003).
[2] Bush: CIA Leaker Would Be Fired if Crime Committed, Reuters (July 18, 2005); Bush: Any Criminals in Leak to Be Fired, Associated Press (July 18, 2005).
[3] Executive Order 12958, sec. 5.5(b)
[4] Id. at sec. 5.5(c).
[5] Id. at sec. 5.5(e).
[6] 50 USC sec. 421(a).
[7] Executive Order 12958, sec. 5.5(b).

[AVoiceOfReason]

Originally Posted by Zodiak

Arguing "what if's" is not valid in this case. The fact was, no national security was compromised as far as we know in the public domain. Any speculation beyond that is just that...speculation.

You said "national security was not compromised," and I think engaging in such conduct IS compromising security.

Then you would have read how the National Review is a biased source that misquotes and misrepresents articles, as I showed with a cursory analysis of one point in the last National Review Article. Please stick with mainstream articles if you want to engage the left in debate with honesty and good faith.

Sorry, I'll not be lectured to about honesty and good faith by anyone. I quoted my source, which is all that is required in such discussions. If you read it and disagreed with the conclusion drawn from those facts (or if the facts themselves are wrong), so be it. But don't think for a minute that you get a better view of the news from the so-called mainstream press; that's the group that tries to hide their biases. Give me a National Review or a Nation article any day--I prefer knowing where the writer is coming from right up front.

What you're saying, in essence, is if the source doesn't fit in your definition of fair and equitible, then it's not. That's not going to fly anywhere, especially here. You may think CNN or the NYT meets that definition, but neither would by any objective standard. If it's from Fox News or National Review, then it's not fair for discussing with the left? I guess confusing them with the facts or a different view on the news isn't equitable.