What he said was that Rove is a traitor and a hero to the American people.

KT

Maybe 1% of that- you do the math...

The numbers that keep coming back to me are that Zogby poll from a couple of weeks ago.

42 percent.

42 percent of the public thought impeachment hearings should be started if Bush lied about getting us into the war. 42 percent.

At a time when the media was not reporting. Before the Rove thing really took off, almost half the people in the nation had been finding the news out themselves.
The DSM memo.

It means the average public is not as stupid as we think, even if the media was/is
doing everything it can to stop it.

Maybe, just maybe the Rove scandal will not go away. Maybe the public won't care the way Bush thinks with a Supreme distraction. Maybe the public will see what it is and maybe the dive Bush is taking will go even deeper now.

Unless the dems are in on it too, being that it appears Roberts will sail through,
this won't be a long term distraction.

The confirmation hearings will be in September, not before. That is six weeks away.
The new term starts first monday in Oct.

However, the Leak panel will not end til the end of October. The report will not be out until after that.
Judith Miller will sit in jail until then.
And every day the NY TIMES will report on how Judith Miller is still in jail while Karl Rove is creating distractions.

And if Cheney himself is at the end of the day the third part of the leak, they will discover it. And it will come out.
By that time, it will be November, one year to the 2006 races.

And if the public has decided, no minding the media, the 2006 races should be a no brainer, regardless of what happens in the world of Bush, and the day we take the congress is the day real impeachment hearings happen...unless...

the polls get so bad and every single republican knows their seat is in jeopardy, then it moves that up into play the end of this year and the start of next...who will the first republicans be that come rushing over to the other side to save their own sorry arses?

http://www.antiwar.com/mcgovern/?articleid=6706

Plameate: Dick Cheney's Role
Ray McGovern
July 20, 2005

In yesterday's essay, "Why Plame Matters," we suggested that the White House assault on the reputations of former ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife had much to do with "the particular lie that Wilson exposed," and we discussed the unusual role Vice President Dick Cheney played regarding the bogus "intelligence" about Iraq seeking to acquire uranium from Niger. Our Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) files provide contemporaneous insight into Cheney's unusual involvement and throw light on continuing attempts to disguise it.

Continuing attempts? Investigative journalist Robert Parry, writing Tuesday for ConsortiumNews.com, notes that atop the Republican National Committee's list of "Joe Wilson's Top Ten Worst Inaccuracies and Misstatements" sits "Wilson insisted that the vice president's office sent him to Niger." That's not exactly what Wilson said, but let's leave that point aside for the moment. What strikes me is the rather transparent 2-year-old campaign to dissociate Cheney from L'Affaire Iraq-Niger.

On July 14, 2003, the day of Robert Novak's opening salvo against the Wilsons, VIPs wrote a memorandum for the president with two main sections: "The Forgery Flap," and "The Vice President's Role." In that memo, we also made an important recommendation that appeared a bit extreme at the time, but it was already possible to discern what was going on:

"We recommend that you call an abrupt halt to attempts to prove Vice President Cheney 'not guilty.' His role has been so transparent that such attempts will only erode further your own credibility. Equally pernicious, from our perspective, is the likelihood that intelligence analysts will conclude that the way to success is to acquiesce in the cooking of their judgments, since those above them will not be held accountable. We strongly recommend that you ask for Cheney's immediate resignation."

Protesting (or Protecting) Too Much

We were all children once. Remember how, when you and your peers got caught in some mischief, the ringleader had to be protected? "Who decided to do this terrible thing?" was often the question. "Not Dick (or Tom or Harry)" was often the instinctive, immediate answer. Remember how, as a parent, that made you really wonder about Dick (or Tom or Harry)?

In our memo of July 14, 2003, we warned President George W. Bush that the Iraq-seeking-uranium-in-Niger forgery was "a microcosm of a mischievous nexus of overarching problems" in his White House. We cited the remarks of then-presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer earlier that week, which (as noted above) set the tone for what has followed – right up to today. When asked about the forgery Fleischer noted – as if drawing on well-memorized talking points – that the vice president was not guilty of anything. (The denial was gratuitous; the question asked did not even mention the vice president's possible role.) And the liturgy of absolution continued on July 11, 2003, when then-director of the CIA George Tenet did his awkward best to absolve the vice president of responsibility.

The "Particular Lie" and Forgery

We noted yesterday that the main motivation of the White House campaign to discredit the Wilsons had to do with "the particular lie that Joseph Wilson exposed and the essential role it played in the administration's plans." The lie was that Iraq was on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons and that, despite Iraq's inability to deliver such weapons on the U.S., this somehow posed a "grave and gathering" threat. The plans were to use that ominous specter to deceive Congress into approving war on Iraq. The problem was that not even the obsequious George Tenet could come up with evidence that could withstand close scrutiny.

This was a problem, especially since UN inspectors and U.S. intelligence knew that Iraq's nuclear program had been destroyed after the Gulf War and there was no persuasive evidence that Baghdad was moving to reconstitute it. Even the intelligence imagery analysts, whom former CIA director John Deutch gave away to the Pentagon in 1996, could not come up with the evidence needed, despite very strong incentive to please their boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

What a welcome windfall, then, when a deus ex machina appeared in early 2002, in the form of a report alleging that Iraq was seeking uranium in the African country of Niger. Since Iraq had no other use for uranium, the White House spin machine went into high gear, playing up the report as proof that Baghdad was reconstituting its nuclear weapons development program. The intelligence analysts had to hold their noses – not only because of the dubious sourcing but because the substance of the report made little sense. They knew (and Wilson confirmed) that all the uranium mined in Niger is controlled by a French-led international consortium that exercises super-strict control over exports from Niger. It just couldn't happen.

Provenance and likelihood be damned. The White House now had a "report" that could be used effectively with Congress, and Tenet could be counted on to keep his nose-holding professionals out of sight. The Iraq-seeking-uranium-from-Africa canard has assumed such prominent importance to the administration's case that it simply could not be dropped – either in Washington or in London. Accordingly, none of us in VIPs were in the least surprised to learn recently of the line taken by Karl Rove with Time reporter Matthew Cooper on July 11, 2003. In an e-mail that Cooper sent his bosses at Time, Rove insisted that Wilson's findings on Niger-Iraq were flawed. According to Cooper, Rove "implied strongly there's still plenty to implicate Iraqi interest in acquiring uranium from Niger." That was false. Neither British nor U.S. intelligence has come up with anything to throw the slightest doubt on Wilson's conclusions.

Who Did It?

Who authored the forgery remains a mystery, but one that Congress has avoided trying to solve, even though many have expressed outrage at having been snookered into voting for war. Senate intelligence committee chair Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) has demonstrated a curious lack of curiosity. Nothing that ranking minority member Jay Rockefeller could do would persuade Roberts to ask the FBI to investigate.

Those searching for answers are reduced to asking the obvious: Cui bono? Who stood to benefit from such a forgery? A no-brainer – those lusting for war on Iraq. And who might that be? Look up the "neocon" writings on the Web site of the Project for the New American Century. There you will information on people like Michael Ledeen, "Freedom Analyst" at the American Enterprise Institute and a key strategist among "neoconservative" hawks in and out of the Bush administration. Applauding the invasion of Iraq, Ledeen asserted at the very start that the war could not be contained, and that "it may turn out to be a war to remake the world."

Beyond his geopolitical punditry, Ledeen's career shows he is well-accustomed to rogue operations. A longtime Washington operative, he was fired as a "consultant" for the National Security Council under President Ronald Reagan for running fool's errands for Oliver North during the Iran-Contra subterfuge. One of Ledeen's Iran-Contra partners in crime, so to speak, was Elliot Abrams. Abrams was convicted of lying to Congress about Iran-Contra. He was pardoned before jail time, however, by George H. W. Bush and is now George W. Bush's deputy national security adviser. Ledeen continues to enjoy entree into the office of the vice president, as well as to his friend Abrams.

During a radio interview with Ian Masters on April 3, 2005, former CIA operative Vincent Cannistraro charged that the Iraq-Niger documents were forged in the United States. Drawing on earlier speculation regarding who forged the documents, Masters asked, "If I were to say the name Michael Ledeen to you, what would you say?" Cannistraro replied, "You're very close."

Ledeen has denied having anything to do with the forgery. Yet the company he keeps with other prominent Iran-Contra convicts/pardonees/intelligence contractors suggests otherwise. Another intriguing straw in the wind is Ledeen's long association with Italian intelligence, which, according to most accounts, played a role in disseminating the forged documents. If Ledeen and his associates were involved, this might also help explain the amateurishness of the forged documents. They would have sorely missed the institutional expertise formerly at their beck and call.

The Cover-Up

It is a safe bet that Joseph Wilson suspected this kind of skullduggery. He nevertheless played it straight. After hearing the bogus Iraq story repeated in the Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union speech and ascertaining that it was based on little more than the original report, Wilson began to approach administration officials suggesting that they retract the story or he would in conscience be compelled to make public what had happened. He was told, in effect, Go public; who will believe you? So he did. Astonishingly, the administration and the domesticated press have partially succeeded in making Wilson's credibility the issue – witness, for example, the frontal assault last weekend by fast-talking, no-holds-barred Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman.

Joseph Wilson had been around long enough to know what to expect. Moreover, the White House apparently made it very clear that they would make him pay if he went public. Just three weeks before The New York Times published Wilson's op-ed "What I Did Not Find in Africa," he and I shared keynoting duties at a conference on Iraq. Wilson told me then that he was about to publish, adding "They are going to come after me big-time. I don't know exactly how, but they are going to do it."

It has now become clear that Cheney's chief, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was as active as Rove in spreading the word about the Wilsons when the story broke in July 2003. Surprise, surprise.

Reprinted courtesy of TomPaine.com.

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=6711

Patrick J. 'Bulldog' Fitzgerald, an American Insurgent
Occupied Washington under siege
by Justin Raimondo

The investigation into who "outed" Valerie Plame, a CIA agent formerly engaged in deep-cover operations involving weapons of mass destruction, is now threatening to bring down some of the president's top advisers, including Karl Rove, the Machiavellian mastermind behind the White House's political machine. This has helped to create a partisan debate that obscures the potential significance of the investigation now being conducted by U.S. Attorney Patrick J. "Bulldog" Fitzgerald, and blocks any real understanding of what in blazes is going on. There's one way to get beyond this political smokescreen, however, and that's by clearing the air about the origins of this probe: what prompted it, and why is it so important?

In October 2001, the CIA received a report from a foreign intelligence agency claiming that an agreement between Iraq and the African nation of Niger had been inked sometime in early 1999, and that by late 2000 Niger's president had personally communicated to Iraq his nation's willing to begin uranium shipments pronto.

This news was met with almost universal skepticism by the American intelligence community, and our ambassador to Niger dismissed the claim as being beyond the realm of possibility. In November, the same foreign intelligence service reiterated its claim, this time with more detail. The outcome of a proposal to have the source submit to a polygraph test remains unclear. What is clear is that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) reflected the views of the Niamey embassy: the uranium mines of Niger, tightly controlled by a French consortium, were an unlikely source to fuel Saddam's alleged nuclear weapons program, particularly since the purported Iraqi order – 500 tons of yellowcake – amounted to one-sixth of that country's annual production. Surely such a large chunk torn out of Niger's yellowcake stock would attract a certain amount of notice. The whole notion just didn't make any sense.

In the Bizarro World fantasyland inhabited by the purveyors of this tall tale, however, nonsense is truth. After all, the whole idea behind the various shibboleths manufactured to lie us into war is that the War Party makes up its own reality as it goes along. Saddam's nuclear program, his alleged "links" to al-Qaeda, his stocks of chemical and biological weapons, his plan to bomb American cities using unmanned drones armed with WMD – each and every detail of this administration's war propaganda has been debunked.

Not only that, but the whole operation has been unmasked as part of a coordinated campaign carried out by a cabal of war hawks centered in the civilian upper echelons of the Pentagon and the office of the vice president. This group of neoconservative ideologues did not have many scruples about how they accomplished their grand deception. The suspicion that they may have compromised – and deliberately corrupted – the intelligence-gathering capabilities of the U.S. government in order to pull it off has solidified into a series of investigations, the most visible sign of which is Fitzgerald's probe into the outing of Plame.

The effective termination of Ms. Plame's career as a covert intelligence operative was occasioned by a campaign to discredit her husband, career diplomat Joseph C. Wilson, former ambassador to Gabon and the man assigned by the CIA to travel to Niger and investigate the alleged Iraqi attempt to procure uranium. Wilson's findings generally debunked these claims, so he was astonished to hear, in the president's 2003 State of the Union address, the now famous "16 words" – a reference to the dubious claims he assumed his mission to Niger, undertaken in late February 2002, had put to rest.

Wilson went public with his findings in a New York Times op-ed piece, but Team Bush had already prepared the ambush, and it wasn't long before they started taking potshots at him. The denouement came with the publication of a column by Robert Novak, in which Valerie Plame was identified as a CIA agent: her influence, it was said, had been used by Wilson to get the assignment and torpedo the mission for his own narrow partisan ends. Novak cited as sources "two senior administration officials." This, many believe, was the spark that set off the political firestorm now engulfing the Washington landscape – but that's only part of the story. The other part, I believe, has to do with the investigation into how and why the Niger uranium story refused to die.

On Oct. 9, 2002, Elisabeth Burba, a journalist with the Italian magazine Panorama, provided the U.S. Embassy in Rome with copies of documents purporting to be correspondence finalizing the alleged Niger-Iraqi uranium deal. These documents were supposedly never even examined by the CIA: although copies were procured, they were allegedly never distributed. The INR, which did examine them, was extremely skeptical. The Senate report on intelligence "failures" in the run-up to war with Iraq cites the INR analyst as follows:

"The INR Iraq nuclear analyst told Committee staff that the thing that stood out immediately about the documents was that a companion document – a document included with the Niger documents that did not relate to uranium – mentioned some type of military campaign against major world powers. The members of the alleged military campaign included both Iraq and Iran, and was, according to the documents, being orchestrated through the Nigerien Embassy in Rome, which all struck the analyst as 'completely implausible.' Because the stamp on this document matched the stamp on the uranium document, the analyst thought that all of the documents were likely suspect. The analyst was unaware at the time of any formatting problems with the documents or inconsistencies with the names or dates."

Here is what the "companion document" said, in full:

"CONFIDENTIAL

"REPORT ON THE MEETING REALIZE[D] WITH THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE PLAN OF ACTION 'GLOBAL SUPPORT'

"Our group, which met today June 14, 2002, at 4 PM in the residence of the Iraqi ambassador, via della Camillucia n° 355 in Rome has determined as follows:

"The group directed by the ambassadors of Niger, Sudan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Iran have [plural in original] decided that "Global Support" which is composed of specialists belonging to different military corps of the allied countries will be active immediately.

"We are convinçed [sic] that the high profession of the military belonging to "Global Support" are [subjunctive plural in original] qualified with considerable experiences and very diversified in the sectors of defence and security and without a doubt they are responsible for the tasks assigned to them.

"The Global Support (our group) is active worldwide, in all areas and extreme climates. The competences of the members of Global Support are the following:

"Our support will above all be extended to:

"governments submitted to an embargo;
"governments continually suspected, and without just cause, of producing nuclear, bacteriological, chemical weapons; governments accused, without just cause, of international terrorism;
"Islamic patriots accused of belonging to criminal organizations, to cells having non-existent ramifications."
This farrago of fantastic fiction was affixed with the "seal of the embassy in Rome of the Republic of Niger." As the INR analyst tartly observed in an e-mail message to his superiors, "You'll note that it bears a funky Emb. of Niger stamp (to make it look official, I guess)."

It may have looked official, but the information contained in this document was so obviously phony that it's no wonder the CIA didn't care to look too closely. The political pressure was on: the neoconservatives in the administration, whose command post was in Dick Cheney's office, were pushing the Niger uranium story hard. John Bolton, then in charge of anti-proliferation efforts, had a hand in it. In spite of George Tenet's efforts to stop it, this final push to put the Niger uranium hoax over the top succeeded, and a reference to it showed up in the president's State of the Union speech.

The documents were handed over to the UN's atomic energy agency, the IAEA, only after the president delivered his address, and it took their analysts only a few hours – working with Google – to expose them as the crudest of forgeries.

How did a not-very-convincing forgery wind up on the president's desk and take on the form of the infamous "16 words" – without being exposed at some point along the way as a hoax? This is the question the Senate intelligence report did not delve into, but a footnote to that report gives us a clue as to the origins of at least one aspect of the Plame probe:

"The documents from the Italian journalist are those that were later passed to the IAEA and discovered to have been forged. In March 2003, the Vice Chairman of the Committee, Senator Rockefeller, requested that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigate the source of the documents, [This sentence is redacted], the motivation of those responsible for the forgeries, and the extent to which the forgeries were part of a disinformation campaign. Because of the FBI's investigation into this matter, the Committee did not examine these issues."

In media reports of the Plame investigation, the assumption is that Fitzgerald is investigating a possible violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which makes it a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a fine of $50,000 to "out" a CIA agent. However, the conditions attached to this statute are so specific – the outer must know the agent is a covert operative, and must be motivated by a desire to obstruct or otherwise damage U.S. national security interests – that a conviction seems highly problematic. As a fallback, we are bombarded with the cliché that "the cover-up is worse than the crime," but surely charges of perjury are not, by themselves, enough to incite seismic convulsions so strong that they are shaking the foundations of the Washington power structure.

The main thrust of this investigation – as well as parallel investigations into similar breaches of U.S. national security in recent days – is aimed at the "disinformation campaign" described in that footnote to the Senate intelligence report. Who ran that campaign, and on whose behalf – what government officials were in on it, and what help, if any, did they receive from foreign intelligence agencies? These are all questions, I believe, to which Fitzgerald is seeking answers. The Plame investigation is the result of the FBI's counterintelligence efforts, which have apparently uncovered the roots of the "disinformation campaign" referred to in the Senate report. The esteemed senators on the intelligence committee were too cowardly to dig too deeply into it, but "Bulldog" Fitzgerald is kicking up a lot of dirt.

What the outing of CIA agent Plame has to do with all this is simple: whoever was out to get Wilson as a Mama's boy with a partisan agenda was also pushing the Niger uranium story. They knew its falsity, and what's more, they knew its provenance – and yet they ushered it, unexamined, through the intelligence-vetting process. The outing of Plame, which was part of the cover-up, wasn't the only blow aimed at U.S. intelligence capabilities by this group: whoever outed Plame also injected corrupted intelligence into the information stream that eventually washed up on the president's desk. Somebody burned the White House, and badly: that's why the Fitzgerald investigation has been allowed to proceed, and why it involves a lot more than violation of an obscure statute that has only been successfully prosecuted once.

Who burned the White House, and how did they pull it off? W. Patrick Lang, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency's Middle East bureau, is one of the few to see the rising importance of this question, and his answer is disturbing:

"The newsmedia have worked on this story for years now and several have well documented the result. A major TV news magazine hired me last year to help them look for those who knew the truth in this matter. They succeeded. A national wire service did the same thing without my help and has the result. The same is true of two other national news publications.

"It is very clear now that this document was forged by a couple of the shadowy ex-government characters who dwell in the environs of Washington and was planted in Italy on the basis of the personal contacts of one of them with the intention of influencing the debate over Iraq in this country. How do I know that?

"Well, I just do in the way that intelligence officers learn things. Good sources, multiple sources, first person accounts, probabilities, that is how one learns things. Could I swear to it in court? No. Intelligence conclusions are not things that can be sworn to in court.

"Nevertheless, one must ask why the newsmedia are sitting on this story. The answer seems simple. 'Carrots and sticks, carrots and sticks.' Work it out."

I'll leave it to others to translate Lang's sibylline allusions: suffice to say that this is the language of statecraft, not legalese. Who is dispensing the carrots and the sticks – and who is the recipient? The main dispenser of such items in this world is the world's sole superpower, the good old US of A, and the answer to the latter question is clearly whatever "foreign government service" or combinations of services was responsible for the initial reports of a Niger-Iraq arrangement.

The White House belatedly points to the Brits as having independently corroborated the Niger uranium story, but as Josh Marshall points out, this claim amounts to a dizzying act of circular reasoning:

"Contrary to arguments that there was lots of independent evidence of uranium sales between Iraq and Niger, US government sources have told us that almost all of the important evidence derived from the phony documents. Specifically, it came from summaries of the documents Italian intelligence was distributing to other western intelligence agencies – including those of the US, Britain and France – in late 2001 and 2002."

In an interview with Pacifica Radio, Vince Cannistraro, former head of the CIA's counterintelligence unit and intelligence director at the National Security Council under Reagan, delved into this subject of how the road to war with Iraq was paved with lies, and, in at least one case, an outright forgery:

"In many cases, the information was fabricated. Information, for example, about an alleged attempt by Saddam Hussein to acquire nuclear material, uranium, from Niger. This, we know now, was all based on fabricated documents. But it's not clear yet — either from this report, or from any other report — who fabricated the documents. The documents were fabricated by supporters of the policy in the United States. The policy being that you had to invade Iraq in order to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and you had to do it soon to avoid the catastrophe that would be produced by Saddam Hussein's use of alleged weapons of mass destruction."


Question: "Well, Ambassador Wilson publicly refuted the claims — particularly the 16 words in the President's State of the Union address that the Iraqis were trying to buy significant quantities of uranium from Niger. That document, I understand, was fabricated ... it originally came out of Italian intelligence, I think SISME, or SISDE—I'm not sure which one.

Cannistraro: "It was SISME, yeah. … [D]uring the two-thousands when we're talking about acquiring information on Iraq. It isn't that anyone had a good source on Iraq—there weren't any good sources. The Italian intelligence service, the military intelligence service, was acquiring information that was really being hand-fed to them by very dubious sources. The Niger documents, for example, which apparently were produced in the United States, yet were funneled through the Italians."

Q: "Do we know who produced those documents? Because there's some suspicion ..."

Cannistraro: "I think I do, but I'd rather not speak about it right now, because I don't think it's a proven case ..."

Q: "If I said 'Michael Ledeen'?"

Cannistraro: "You'd be very close…"

Close, but not quite there? Cannistraro, like Lang, is laconic, but the question of Ledeen's involvement in this ought to ring all sorts of alarm bells. To begin with, Ledeen's role as the go-between who facilitated the Iran-Contra "arms for hostages" deal via Israel, and his history as a founder and former director of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), implies an Israeli connection. Not only that, but an Iranian connection as well: The congressional report on Iran-Contra shows that Israel's involvement was initiated by 1985 overtures made by Iranian arms merchant Manucher Ghorbanifar. Thanks to the reporting of Joshua Marshall, Laura Rozen, and Paul Glastris, we now know we have the makings of "Iran-Contra II" in a series of Ledeen-Ghorbanifar reunions, held in Rome, starting in December, 2001, and, continuing into 2003, in Paris. Aside from Ledeen, the American contingent at the first meeting included Larry Franklin, now indicted [.pdf file] for committing espionage on behalf of Israel, and Harold Rhode, a close associate of Ledeen's, who works in the Pentagon's policy division as a top Iran specialist. According to the Washington Monthly piece,

"Also in attendance was Ghorbanifar and a number of other Iranians. One of the Iranians, according to two sources familiar with the meeting, was a former senior member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard who claimed to have information about dissident ranks within the Iranian security services. The Washington Monthly has also learned from U.S. government sources that Nicolo Pollari, the head of Italy's military intelligence agency, SISMI, attended the meetings, as did the Italian Minister of Defense Antonio Martino, who is well-known in neoconservative circles in Washington."

So, let's see what we have here: a self-proclaimed Machiavellian with a record as a go-between and advocate on behalf of Israel, who brokered the illegal Iran-Contra arms-for hostages scheme and serves as the chief ideologue of Washington's neoconservative network: an indicted spy who handed vital U.S. secrets over to Israel, and an unindicteded co-conspirator, Harold Rhode, who, according to UPI's Richard Sale, is one of the subjects of an FBI investigation into the Office of Special Plans targeting individuals who "passed highly classified U.S. military information to the government of Israel, according to federal law enforcement officials." Throw Ghorbanifar and the Italians into the mix, and we have all the ingredients for yet another off-the-books "rogue" operation – the nexus of the neocon "disinformation campaign" that lied us into war.

Outing agent Plame was only one of the more minor crimes the disinformants committed in their ruthlessly single-minded drive to war. What we are seeing, at the moment, is only a single fin of the whale that is swimming just beneath the surface of this scandal.

It's not about Rove, Bob Novak, Judith Miller, or any of the other bit players caught up in this maelstrom. It's about a small group of strategically placed players in the national security bureaucracy who functioned as a two-way transmission belt of treason: feeding the White House, Congress, and the American public a steady diet of lies in the guise of "intelligence," and, in the other direction, feeding vital U.S. secrets to its foreign sponsors and allies, including not only Israel but also Iran (the latter via Ahmed Chalabi).

What treason the neocons conceived, and carried out, and whose interests they served – these are the real issues at the heart of this investigation. Alexander Cockburn, in his latest column in The Nation – reprinted in Counterpunch – balks at my use of the T-word:

"If you want to start waving words like 'treason' around, the AIPAC spy case is surely a better target than Karl Rove. Here we have a four-year FBI probe of possible treachery by senior U.S. government officials, as well as by Israel's premier lobbying outfit in the United States, AIPAC. Yet compared with the mileage given to the Plame affair, coverage of the AIPAC spy case in the press has been sparse, and the commentary very demure, until you get to Justin Raimondo's pugnacious columns on Antiwar.com."

Demure I'm not: on that we can agree, but it gets better:

"Raimondo's been comparing the AIPAC spy case to the indictment of State Department official Alger Hiss back in the 1940s, claiming that just as the foreign policy apparatus was allegedly riddled with Communist spies in the 1940s, the same apparatus is now riddled with Israel's agents today. I'd reckon that when it comes to agents of influence the USSR back then couldn't hold a candle to Israel today…."

[Guffaw!]

Isn't it odd how conservatives who delight in telling and retelling the story of how the KGB managed to penetrate the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and still ask "Who promoted Peress?" seem remarkably incurious as to the machinations of a similar cabal in government today? Conservative columnists routinely ignore developments in the Larry Franklin case, including his recent indictment, except for periodic attempts to dismiss the whole matter as thinly disguised "anti-Semitism." Cockburn, a leftist, is of course acutely aware of the historical parallels:

"One answer in the McCarthyite era to accusations of spying was that the Soviet Union was an ally and the supposed transmission of 'secrets' was just a routine exchange of information on such matters as the schedule for the Dumbarton Oaks conference laying the groundwork for the UN (in which Hiss was involved.) Similar talk about 'allies' and 'routine exchanges' pops from the mouths of Israel's supporters here, denouncing the FBI probe as some latterday equivalent of the persecution of Dreyfuss."

Yet Cockburn still somehow manages to go all squishy on us:

"It's perfectly obvious that Israel exerts huge influence on US policy. Men and women working in Israel's interest throng Washington. But on the left, in the spy case just as in the Plame affair, we should be leery of words like traitor and 'national security'. They cut both ways."

Cockburn is worried that a "fetishization" of secrecy will lead to the criminalization of legitimate inquiries into the actions of our government, citing some obscure 1973 dispute about cost overruns at the Pentagon. That's a pretty lame excuse to look the other way while Israel steals our secrets, corrupts our intelligence-gathering capabilities, and penetrates the Pentagon – and perhaps even the White House – with a veritable army of moles.

When Patrick J. Buchanan referred to Washington, D.C., as "Israeli-occupied territory," he was widely vilified by the legions of political correctness, on the right as well as the multi-culti-goody-two-shoes left. I doubt, however, that when Pat made that remark he knew just how accurate it would turn out to be. He meant it in the metaphorical sense, but now we are beginning to understand that it is literally true. In this context, the antiwar slogan "End the occupation" acquires a whole new meaning.

What we are witnessing is an insurgency arising to take back Washington from the occupiers. It is a two-pronged legal assault, launched from within the FBI and the Department of Justice by patriotic Americans who mean to take back their country from the invader. That is the meaning of the Plame investigation and the AIPAC-Larry Franklin spy case. The battlefield is not Baghdad, it's an American courtroom: the weapon of choice is not the RPG but the subpoena. As the prosecutor-insurgents inch slowly toward the White House, occasionally scoring direct hits inside the Green Zone, the panic begins to spread: talk of "staying the course" is tempered by hints of negotiations and rumors of withdrawal. Donald Rumsfeld tells us that the Iraqi insurgency could last a decade or more, but the Washington version is likely to end much sooner – in a clear victory for the insurgents.

– Justin Raimondo

From Congressman John Conyers' blog:

http://www.conyersblog.us/archives/00000177.htm

From today's Miami Herald:

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/12173746.htm

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?sectio...articleId=10015

Follow the Documents
There's another Joe Wilson–related investigation that needs answers: Who forged the Niger memos in the first place?
By Matthew Yglesias

As intriguing as the prospect of seeing Karl Rove sent to the pokey is, I must admit that on one level I don't really care who the guilty parties in the Plame leak case are. Whoever did the deed ought to be found out and punished, because that's what you do, but it will make little difference. My opinion that Rove is a scumbag won't be altered by his possible vindication, nor appreciably strengthened by his possible conviction. The basic case for scumbaggery, grounded in the public record, is simply far too strong to be altered one way or another by anything related to this matter. At the same time, I doubt that removing the wrongdoers from office will do any good. There are a lot of scumbags out there, and as recent coverage of the College Republicans' annual conference has made clear, the right churns them out assembly-line style. President Bush will have no trouble replacing anyone he may lose with someone just as bad.

Lurking in the neighborhood of this case, however, is something I would genuinely like to know. Joseph Wilson went to Niger to investigate reports that Iraq had made significant progress toward acquiring uranium yellowcake there -- reports grounded in a memo indicating that such a deal had gone down several years previously. This memo was a forgery.

The GOP and its hack reporter friends have attempted to obscure this reality by citing the report undertaken by Lord Butler at Tony Blair's request, which found that British assertions of Iraqi efforts to acquire Nigerian uranium were well-founded. This theory ignores several inconvenient facts. First and foremost, it's now clear that whatever Iraq may or may not have tried to do in 1999, it didn't actually get anywhere near building a nuclear bomb. Second, given the actual state of Iraq's nuclear program at the time, there's no reason to think uranium yellowcake would have been useful for doing anything, as Iraq had no capacity to transform it into a usable weapon. Third, the Iraq Survey Group, appointed by the president to review Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction programs stated last year that it had "not found evidence to show that Iraq sought uranium from abroad after 1991 or renewed indigenous production of such material." Fourth, the International Atomic Energy Agency responded to the Butler report by asking the British government to provide it with the non-forgery-based evidence for the story, which the Brits have failed to do. Indeed, it seems that the only British sources were the forgery, and reports from other intelligence services that were, in turn, based on the same forgery.

All that aside, no officials anywhere, including the authors of the Butler report, deny the basic point that the Niger uranium memo was forged. What's more, the forgery was not especially hard to detect because there was not one forgery but two, the second of which was especially crude. As the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's (SSCI) report concluded:

The INR Iraq nuclear analyst told Committee staff that the thing that stood out immediately about the documents was that a companion document -- a document included with the Niger documents that did not relate to uranium -- mentioned some type of military campaign against major world powers. The members of the alleged military campaign included both Iraq and Iran, and was according to the documents, being orchestrated through the Nigerian Embassy in Rome, which all struck the analyst as being "completely implausible." Because the stamp on this document matched the stamp on the uranium document, the analyst though that all of the documents were likely suspect.
Upon further examination, those suspicions proved well-founded. The uranium document was not properly formatted as a Nigerian government document, and there were inconsistencies regarding names and dates. It's worth underscoring, moreover, exactly how absurd this second document was. It reads, in part:
Le groupement dirigé par les Ambassadeur de Niger, Soudan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libye, Iran ont décidé que le "Global Support" qui est composé de spécialistes provenant de différents corps militaires des pays alliés sera actif dans l'immédiat. Nous sommes convençus que l'haute profession des militaires appartenants au "Global Support" soient dotes d'expériences considérables et très diversifiés dans le secteur de la défense et de la sécurité et sans aucun doute ils sont résponsables des charges qui seront leur assignées.
Suggestively, this is not grammatical French. Moreover, as a rough translation shows, it's completely ridiculous:
The group directed by the ambassadors of Niger, Sudan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Iran have [plural in original] decided that "Global Support" which is composed of specialists belonging to different military corps of the allied countries will be active immediately. We are convinçed [sic] that the high profession of the military belonging to "Global Support" are [subjunctive plural in original] qualified with considerable experiences and very diversified in the sectors of defense and security and without a doubt they are responsible for the tasks assigned to them.
That something so absurd could have formed the basis for an important line in a presidential speech says a lot about the degree of unseriousness with which the Bush administration went about building its case for war. That aside, it raises a couple of pretty obvious questions: Who produced these documents, and why? I don't even have a "gotcha" speculation to offer -- I'd genuinely like to know. What we do know is that according to a footnote in the SSCI report, "in March 2003, the Vice Chairman of the Committee, Senator [Jay] Rockefeller, requested that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigate the source of the documents, [clause redacted], the motivation of those responsible for the forgeries, and the extent to which the forgeries were part of a disinformation campaign. Because of the FBI's investigation into this matter, the Committee did not examine these issues."
The FBI, so far, seems to have come up with, well, with nothing. What we do know about the documents is that they were brought to the U.S. Embassy in Rome by Elizabetta Burba, an Italian journalist. According to European press reports, she got the documents from Rocco Martino, a former Italian military-intelligence official turned businessman with some kind of ties to French intelligence services. Martino has been to the United States at least twice since being publicly identified as the source of the documents, and the FBI didn't bother to interview him.

It seems clear that some powerful elements in Washington don't want to know the truth, which should raise suspicions. This, after all, would seem to be an important matter. Somebody went to some lengths to do this. He ore she must have had some purpose in mind, and it's hard to see how that purpose could have been anything but nefarious. Republicans don't seem interested in finding out, perhaps because further scrutiny of the matter would simply reveal how willfully gullible the White House was, or perhaps for some deeper reason. Democrats' reticence to ask what happened to the FBI investigation is more puzzling, but someone ought to get on the case. That there's a partisan payoff at the end of this particular rainbow is far from clear, but unlike in the Plame case, knowing the truth might actually change how we think about a thing or two.

Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.

Copyright © 2005 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Matthew Yglesias, "Follow the Documents", The American Prospect Online, Jul 19, 2005. This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author. Direct questions about permissions to permissions@prospect.org.

From the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

URL: http://www.nwanews.com/story/adg/122602

An op-ed from a paper in Cheboygan, MI:

http://www.cheboygannews.com/articles/2005...on/opinion2.txt

Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle skewers Rove with usual style and edge:

America's Big Malignant Tumor
Libs are salivating that Karl Rove might go down. But hasn't the worst cancer already spread?

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, July 20, 2005

Read it here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?...notes072005.DTL

http://www.crisispapers.org/essays-w/horrors.htm

http://www.sanluisobispo.com/mld/sanluisob...on/12156645.htm

Summer Stonewall

By David Ignatius

A president's ability to govern effectively depends on a measure of accountability -- the public's confidence that the leader will hold subordinates accountable for lapses in performance, ethics and judgment. That is precisely the quality that is beginning to slip away from the Bush administration,...

To view the entire article, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...er=emailarticle

David Corn Tue Jul 19, 6:23 PM ET

The Nation -- I first posted the following on my blog: www.davidcorn.com. If you're obsessed with the Rove scandal, visit that site for more news, analysis, and gripes.

Now that I've been sucked into the right-wing disinformation machine, I am struck by how unrelenting it is. Cliff May posted a dumb column claiming that Joe Wilson told me on background that his wife was an undercover operative and that I was the first person to really out Valerie Wilson (nee Plame). I debunked that nonsense here. But pesky May still sent me email asking me to explain what I had already explained. By not accepting my explanation--and by claiming that what I've written previously is misleading--he is essentially calling me a liar. I take such things personally. (This fellow once asked me if I would be willing to be his partner in a right/left cable-TV face-off. I'm glad it never came to pass.) And there he was again yesterday on CNN expanding his web of fabrication. He said:

You can say what you want about Bob Novak. He has insisted since the beginning that he didn't know she was a secret agent. He just knew she worked at the

CIA. Nobody told him that. And if he had known she was secret, he wouldn't have published her name. Now who did publish her name first was David Corn of "The Nation," and he was the first one to say she was a secret agent, and he did that in a conversation with, guess who, with Joe Wilson.

How does one combat repeated silliness of this sort? Who knows what Novak would have done had he been told Valerie Wilson was an undercover officer? And maybe he was told. All we know is that Novak claims the CIA informed him it would prefer if he not name her but did not go ballistic about it. This tale may be true; it may not. (In his own account, Novak still turned down the CIA.) Moreover, Novak did publish her name first. It's right there in the column that prompted the CIA to ask the Justice Department to investigate the White House. CNN anchor Carol Costello should have stopped May and told the audience he was either lying or misspeaking. And May states as a fact that Wilson told me his wife was an undercover officer, even though he has no evidence of this and I have said precisely the opposite. What chutzpah! He doesn't even have an anonymous source to rely on. Is this the sort of journalism he learned when working at The New York Times? Or did he perfect his smear skills when he subsequently served as a spokesperson for the Republican Party? In his absurd article, he at least had the courtesy to present his bogus charge as the product of his own deductive reasoning (as defective as it was). On CNN, he stated as a fact that Wilson had spilled the beans to me about his wife--which is not true.

Having responded fully to his initial piece, I was not going to fuel this sideshow with further comment. But yesterday, I was on a public radio program--Warren Olney's To The Point--discussing the Rove scandal with Byron York, a columnist for the National Review. And as our segment was ending, he piped up and said, Well, Bob Novak didn't really out Valerie Wilson as an undercover official; it was David Corn. The show was ending, and I barely had time to exclaim, "Preposterous," and refer listeners to my website. But this is what happens: one person launches an unfounded smear and then others employ it. The point: I'm now thrown on defense, and, perhaps more importantly, a distraction has been achieved.

Disinformation, distraction--that's the plan, as trouble-causing details emerge from the investigation that threaten Karl Rove and other senior Bush aides. For GOP operatives, it's all-hands-to-the-deck time. And the strategy is to fire whatever ammunition the have, whether it is real or a dud. They want to turn this into a partisan mud-wrestle, realizing that much of the public turns off to such cat-and-dogs nastiness. They try to make the victims the culprits, calling Joe Wilson the biggest liar of all time and making claims about Valerie Wilson that are unsupported by the known facts (e.g., she was no more than a desk jockey). Change the focus to anything but what Karl Rove, Scooter Libby and other White House aides did and whether the White House and the president has covered up for them.

One could spend all day responding to the disinformation and misinformation--and that's their goal. A few days ago, The Washington Times put into circulation a quote from a former CIA officer who once supervised Valerie Wilson and who claimed she wasn't really a covert officer. The newspaper wrote:

A former CIA covert agent who supervised Mrs. Plame early in her career yesterday took issue with her identification as an "undercover agent," saying that she worked for more than five years at the agency's headquarters in Langley and that most of her neighbors and friends knew that she was a CIA employee.

"She made no bones about the fact that she was an agency employee and her husband was a diplomat," Fred Rustmann, a covert agent from 1966 to 1990, told The Washington Times.

"Her neighbors knew this, her friends knew this, his friends knew this. A lot of blame could be put on to central cover staff and the agency because they weren't minding the store here....The agency never changed her cover status."

Mr. Rustmann, who spent 20 of his 24 years in the agency under "nonofficial cover"--also known as a NOC, the same status as the wife of Mr. Wilson--also said that she worked under extremely light cover....

"She was home for such a long time, she went to work every day at Langley, she was in an analytical type job, she was married to a high-profile diplomat with two kids," Mr. Rustmann said. "Most people who knew Valerie and her husband, I think, would have thought that she was an overt CIA employee."

The newspaper didn't emphasize that Rustmann knew nothing about Valerie Wilson's CIA duties after he left the agency in 1990. Larry Johnson, a former CIA analyst who went through training with Valerie Wilson at the CIA, told me that "my understanding is that Valerie went undercover after 1990." If that's true, then quotes from Rustmann are rather irrelevant. Yet I saw his remarks scattered across the Internet, as the distracters and disinformationalists look for any stone to hurl. Even The Washington Times partially refuted Rustmann's remarks when it quoted one neighbor of the Wilsons--David Tilloston--who said he did not know she worked at the CIA and thought she was an economist.

So much to disabuse, so little time. Let's turn now to Victoria Toensing, a Republican lawyer and commentator who was involved in drafting the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. I've had pleasant dealings--professional and social--with her over the years, and many moons ago I was friendly with her daughter, a wonderful photographer. But Toensing sure is doing her duty for her side. Here's a bit from today's Washington Post:

Victoria Toensing, a lawyer and longtime Republican who helped write the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, which is at the center of this case, said Bush is now saying what he probably meant to say when the leak investigation was launched. "Of course you are going to be concerned if a law was broken," she said. "But what is it that somebody did wrong if they didn't break the law?"

Toensing has been in Washington long enough to realize that not all wrongdoing in Washington is criminal. But she's now toeing the White House line: only aides convicted of a crime will be fired. (In Washington, when the supertanker White House changes its course, all the tug boats have to follow.) Compare her observation to a portion of a New York Times article published today:

Elaine D. Kaplan, who from 1998 to 2003 was head of the Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal agency that investigates complaints of prohibited personnel practices, said: "Government employees and officials who are negligent with classified information can lose their jobs for carelessness. They don't have to be convicted of intentionally disseminating the information. Crime has never been the threshold. That's not the standard that applies to rank-and-file federal employees. They can be fired for misconduct well short of a crime."

Much of the attention has (justifiably) been on the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. But as Representative Henry Waxman (news, bio, voting record) has recently noted, when Rove shared Valerie Wilson's employment status at the CIA--which was classified information--he might have violated Executive Order 12958, which says:

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.

So the Bush/Toensing standard--leaking classified information that outs a CIA undercover officer and then not coming clean about it is not a firing offense; you're in trouble only if you break the law--is not based in law. Shouldn't she know that?

But truth is not the issue at hand. Winning is. For the right, that means firing up the fog machine and creating as many smokescreens as possible. This comes as no surprise. Still, I find it disheartening. (I can only imagine how Valerie Wilson feels.) Larry Johnson says it's a sign of how desperate the White House and its pals are. He quips, "I love the smell of fear in the morning. It smells like victory." Perhaps. A conservative journalist I know recently emailed to say he was coming to Washington and to ask if I wanted to have drinks with him (which we have occasionally done in the past). I told him I'm in no mood these days. He has yet--as far as I know--not pushed Cliff May's ridiculous Corn-did-it trash. But I need some way to vent my anger and disappointment at folks like May, York and Toensing. This episode is causing Bush's defenders to go to the most ugly extremes. Maybe Larry Johnson is right.

http://www.aljazeera.com/cgi-bin/review/ar...service_ID=9378

the Rove case - Bush says one thing does another

From Talking Points Memo, a letter about the Plame leak sent to the Dem and GOP leadership of the House and Senate, signed by 11 former intelligence officers.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/docs/intel.officers.letter.pdf

Thom Hartmann, radio host, is talking about the State Dept. memo on Air Force One. It was discussed in a news article yesterday.

He says that Bush is now implicated and to distract us, the WH leaked the women candidates and Bush announced the SCOTUS nominee yesterday.

I said the same thing yesterday - that the State Dept memo is the smoking gun.

Here is what I said yesterday:

[QUOTE]
(heritage @ Jul 19 2005, 03:56 PM)

This is where the culprits are:

"Mr. Fitzgerald has subpoenaed the phone logs from Air Force One for the week of the Africa tour, which precedes the revelation of Ms. Wilson's CIA identity in a column by Robert Novak on July 14."

They looked at the memo that Powell had that day and called back to the reporters in the states.

[unquote]

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?sectio...articleId=10013

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/colu...CB?OpenDocument

Karl Rove: He has betrayed the nation
Eric Mink
Post-Dispatch

07/20/2005

It's ironic that political genius Karl Rove - and perhaps others - could end up in prison for exposing the identity of an undercover CIA agent. Ironic, because their essential mistake in doing so was one of identity: their own.

They think they work for President George W. Bush. They don't. They work for America.

There's no reason to believe that Rove gave much thought at all to Valerie Plame Wilson, a 20-year CIA veteran working in the agency's counterproliferation division, when he mentioned her to at least two reporters in July 2003. The only reason she was in his sights was that she was married to Joseph Wilson IV. Wilson, a retired veteran U.S. diplomat, had gone public with disturbing information that the Bush administration might have twisted intelligence information to support its campaign for starting a war with Iraq.

In February 2002, the CIA sent Wilson to the African country of Niger to check out sketchy intelligence information suggesting that Iraq tried to buy Niger uranium for making nuclear weapons. Vice President Dick Cheney had been told about the report earlier and had asked for more information.

Wilson found no evidence of any recent purchases by Iraq and told the CIA so when he returned. His findings were consistent with doubts already held by the State Department's intelligence division.

Nevertheless, the administration's top officials - Cheney, Bush and then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice - continued to link Iraq with African uranium right up to the start of war in March 2003.

Wilson finally debunked the claims in a commentary published on the op-ed page of The New York Times on July 6, 2003, forcing the White House to make a rare admission of error the next day. In a statement issued July 11, then-CIA director George Tenet took full responsibility for the mistake. But on July 22, Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley admitted that Tenet had warned him (and Rice and White House speechwriter Michael Gerson) months earlier that the Iraq-Africa-uranium story was questionable.

At that point, the president's credibility on the Iraq war was in serious jeopardy, and the White House was reeling. This was the precise period of time when Rove discussed Wilson's wife's CIA job with Time magazine's Matt Cooper, syndicated columnist Robert Novak and possibly other journalists.

It was classic distraction and misdirection, time-honored tools of stage magicians and political sharpies and honed to a fine art by Rove over many years. Nothing up my sleeve; look here. Shift press attention from the administration's credibility to Wilson's credibility, even though Wilson's published account of his brief mission to Niger was beyond reasonable dispute.

Rove told Cooper on July 11, 2003, according to a detailed account in this week's edition of Time, that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA in the area of weapons of mass destruction. Rove also said that she, not Cheney, was responsible for sending Wilson to Niger.

Actually, she wasn't responsible for sending him, and Wilson's commentary never said Cheney had sent him.

Never mind. Misdirection. Cooper didn't bite immediately, but Novak did. He identified Wilson's wife using her maiden name, Valerie Plame, in a column published July 14, 2003. He also cited her CIA job and attributed the information to two unnamed senior administration officials.

The CIA requested an investigation of the leak of its agent's identity; special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald convened a grand jury to see if laws have been broken. Several might apply.

Meanwhile, distraction and misdirection continue: Consider the astute Tuesday-night timing of Bush's announcement of a nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The administration's response to the Wilson-Plame-Rove mess has been a laughable catalogue of excuses from denial to defense to rationalization - not unlike the ever-changing rationales offered for the invasion of Iraq after weapons of mass destruction were nowhere to be found. There is nothing laughable, however, about the effects of Rove's blind zeal to reinforce Bush's power and advance his agenda.

The greatest threat to America today is international terrorism, and the worst-case scenarios, as Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff reminded us last week, involve terrorists acquiring and using a weapon of mass destruction.

Valerie Wilson, 42, was an undercover agent in the counterproliferation division of the CIA's directorate of operations: Her focus was intelligence about the spread of weapons of mass destruction. As The New York Times reported earlier this month, not even the Wilsons' next-door neighbors knew she worked for the CIA until Novak blew her cover two years ago.

It's impossible to say whether or to what extent this has jeopardized her life and work and that of her contacts and sources, to say nothing of other agents associated with her fake employer, Brewster Jennings & Associates of Boston. What is certain is that Valerie Wilson no longer can work undercover and that an American intelligence asset 21 years in the making - she joined the agency in 1984 - has been irreparably damaged.

In a commentary published Sunday in the Sacramento Bee, former Republican congressman Pete McCloskey recalled a visit he paid years ago to John Ehrlichman, the late former domestic policy adviser to President Richard Nixon. Ehrlichman was in federal prison at the time, having been convicted of obstruction of justice, perjury and conspiracy for helping orchestrate the crimes of Watergate.

McCloskey said he asked Ehrlichman, an honorable World War II veteran and attorney, why he had lied for Nixon. Ehrlichman replied, "It took us three-and-a-half years to be corrupted by the power. . . ."

I don't know whether Rove, now Bush's deputy chief of staff, is a criminal, but I know he suffers from a case of mistaken self-identity. Yes, he serves at the pleasure of the president. But Rove works for the people of the United States of America. He has betrayed their trust.

E-mail: emink@post-dispatch.com

Looks like the Dems CAN walk and chew gum at the same time. Saw this at DKos:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/7/20/12412/6164

DON'T LET THIS GET BURRIED. WE NEED TO KEEP IT UP FRONT. KARL ROVE LIED TO GRAND JURY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?sectio...articleId=10016

An Unlikely Story
Karl Rove's alibi would be easier to believe if he hadn't hidden it from FBI investigators in 2003.

By Murray Waas
Web Exclusive: 07.19.05

Print Friendly | Email Article

White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove did not disclose that he had ever discussed CIA officer Valerie Plame with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper during Rove’s first interview with the FBI, according to legal sources with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

The omission by Rove created doubt for federal investigators, almost from the inception of their criminal probe into who leaked Plame's name to columnist Robert Novak, as to whether Rove was withholding crucial information from them, and perhaps even misleading or lying to them, the sources said.

Also leading to the early skepticism of Rove's accounts was the claim that although he first heard that Plame worked for the CIA from a journalist, he said could not recall the name of the journalist. Later, the sources said, Rove wavered even further, saying he was not sure at all where he first heard the information.

Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, has said that Rove never knew that Plame was a covert officer when he discussed her CIA employment with reporters, and that he only first learned of her clandestine status when he read about it in the newspaper. Luskin did not return a telephone call today seeking comment for this story.

If recently disclosed press accounts of conversations that Rove had with reporters are correct, Novak and Rove first spoke about Plame on July 8, 2003. It was three days later, on July 11, that Rove also spoke about Plame to Time magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper. Three days after that, on July 14, Novak's column appeared in which he identified Plame as an "agency operative." According to Novak's account, it was he, not Rove, who first broached the issue of Plame's employment with the CIA, and that Rove at most simply said that he, too, had heard much the same information.

Novak's column came during a period of time when senior White House officials were attempting to discredit Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was then asserting that the Bush administration had relied on faulty intelligence to bolster its case to go to war with Iraq. Wilson had only recently led a CIA-sponsored mission to Niger to investigate claims that Saddam Hussein was covertly attempting to buy enriched uranium from the African nation to build a nuclear weapon. Wilson reported back that the claims were most likely the result of a hoax. But President Bush had still cited them during a State of the Union address as evidence that Hussein had an aggressive program to develop weapons of mass destruction.

In the column, Novak called Plame an "agency operative," thus identifying her as a covert CIA agent. But Novak has since claimed that his use of the phrase "agency operative" was a formulation of his own, and that he did not know, or mean to tell his readers, that she had a covert status with the agency.

Rove, too, has told federal investigators he did not know that Plame had a covert status with the CIA when he spoke with Novak, and Cooper, about Plame.

The distinction as to whether Rove specifically knew Plame’s status has been central to the investigation of U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald; under the law, a government official can only be prosecuted if he or she knew of a person's covert status and "that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent."

But investigators were also skeptical of Novak's claim that his use of the term "operative" was a journalistic miscue because it appeared to provide legal protection for whoever his source or sources were. And although Novak's and Rove's accounts of their conversations regarding Plame were largely consistent, they appeared to be self-serving.

It has been, in large part, for all of these reasons that Fitzgerald so zealously sought the testimony of reporters Cooper and Judith Miller of The New York Times, according to sources sympathetic to Fitzgerald. Cooper testified to Fitzgerald's grand jury last week, after earlier having been found in civil contempt for refusing to do so. In contrast, Miller has refused to testify, and is currently serving a sentence in an Alexandria, Virginia, jail.

Finally, also driving Fitzgerald's investigation has been Rove's assertions that he only found out about Plame's status with the CIA from a journalist -- and one whose name he does not recall. But as The New York Times first disclosed on July 16, senior Bush administration officials first learned that Plame worked for the CIA from a classified briefing paper on July 7, 2003, exactly a week before Novak's column naming Plame appeared and at the time that senior Bush administration officials were devising a strategy to discredit Wilson.

The classified memorandum, dated June 10, 2003, was written by Marc Grossman, then the undersecretary of state for political affairs, and reportedly made claims similar to those made by Wilson: that the Bush administration had relied on faulty intelligence to exaggerate the threat posed by Hussein to make the case to go to war with Iraq. The report was circulated to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and a slew of other senior administration officials who were then traveling with President Bush to Africa.

Fitzgerald has focused on whether Rove might have learned of Plame's identity from one of the many senior White House officials who read the memo, according to the Times account and attorneys whose clients have testified before the federal grand jury.

Great, go after Rove -- but watch out for pay back.

I heard on the Connected Coast to Coast show with Ron Reagan and what's-her-name that Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) has been accused of disclosing classified information -- not in secret to a reporter, but on the senate floor (what's to investigate?).

Does anyone know more about this?

Isn't Durbin on the Judiciary Committee? This could be the RNC doing that voodoo doo doo they do so well...

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/072005C.shtml

Regarding Dick Durbin -- last week, the democrats offered an amendment to the Homeland Security funding bill that would remove the security clearance of anyone in government who releases classified info or outs a government agent. (targeting Rove).

Then Frist fired back with an unrelated "second degree" amendment that said any senator who discussed or referred to any testimony or informal comments from an FBI/CIA official, would lose his/her classified access forever. (targeting Durbin)

The dems said that all the republicans would lose their access too because all had mentioned classified or similar info in the senate before.

Both amendments failed to pass but the republican amendment failed by a larger margin.

Iran-Contra ties - was SCOTUS nominee Roberts involved while working for the Reagan administration?

[quote] During a radio interview with Ian Masters on April 3, 2005, former CIA operative Vincent Cannistraro charged that the Iraq-Niger documents were forged in the United States. Drawing on earlier speculation regarding who forged the documents, Masters asked, "If I were to say the name Michael Ledeen to you, what would you say?" Cannistraro replied, "You're very close."

Ledeen has denied having anything to do with the forgery. Yet the company he keeps with other prominent Iran-Contra convictees/pardonees/intelligence contractors suggests otherwise. Besides, Ledeen has had a longstanding association with Italian intelligence.

According to most accounts, the Italians played an important role in disseminating the forged documents. If Ledeen and his associates were involved, this might also help explain the amateurishness of the forged documents. They would have sorely missed the institutional expertise formerly at their beck and call. [unquote]

see also

http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/for...ST&f=16&t=34110

see also

http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/for...ST&f=16&t=34124

see also

http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/for...ST&f=16&t=34117

http://news.webindia123.com/news/showdetai...99213&cat=World

Wow, CNN is actually covering the letter the ex-CIA officers sent to congressional leaders today.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/07/20/cia.leak.ap/

Rove is page one tomorrow in WashintonPost

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...2002517_pf.html

Plame's Identity Marked As Secret
Memo Central to Probe Of Leak Was Written By State Dept. Analyst

By Walter Pincus and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, July 21, 2005; A01

A classified State Department memorandum central to a federal leak investigation contained information about CIA officer Valerie Plame in a paragraph marked "(S)" for secret, a clear indication that any Bush administration official who read it should have been aware the information was classified, according to current and former government officials.

Plame -- who is referred to by her married name, Valerie Wilson, in the memo -- is mentioned in the second paragraph of the three-page document, which was written on June 10, 2003, by an analyst in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), according to a source who described the memo to The Washington Post.

The paragraph identifying her as the wife of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV was clearly marked to show that it contained classified material at the "secret" level, two sources said. The CIA classifies as "secret" the names of officers whose identities are covert, according to former senior agency officials.

Anyone reading that paragraph should have been aware that it contained secret information, though that designation was not specifically attached to Plame's name and did not describe her status as covert, the sources said. It is a federal crime, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, for a federal official to knowingly disclose the identity of a covert CIA official if the person knows the government is trying to keep it secret.

Prosecutors attempting to determine whether senior government officials knowingly leaked Plame's identity as a covert CIA operative to the media are investigating whether White House officials gained access to information about her from the memo, according to two sources familiar with the investigation.

The memo may be important to answering three central questions in the Plame case: Who in the Bush administration knew about Plame's CIA role? Did they know the agency was trying to protect her identity? And, who leaked it to the media?

Almost all of the memo is devoted to describing why State Department intelligence experts did not believe claims that Saddam Hussein had in the recent past sought to purchase uranium from Niger. Only two sentences in the seven-sentence paragraph mention Wilson's wife.

The memo was delivered to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on July 7, 2003, as he headed to Africa for a trip with President Bush aboard Air Force One. Plame was unmasked in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak seven days later.

Wilson has said his wife's identity was revealed to retaliate against him for accusing the Bush administration of "twisting" intelligence to justify the Iraq war. In a July 6 opinion piece in the New York Times, he cited a secret mission he conducted in February 2002 for the CIA, when he determined there was no evidence that Iraq was seeking uranium for a nuclear weapons program in the African nation of Niger.

White House officials discussed Wilson's wife's CIA connection in telling at least two reporters that she helped arrange his trip, according to one of the reporters, Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, and a lawyer familiar with the case.

Prosecutors have shown interest in the memo, especially when they were questioning White House officials during the early days of the investigation, people familiar with the probe said.

Karl Rove, President Bush's deputy chief of staff, has testified that he learned Plame's name from Novak a few days before telling another reporter she worked at the CIA and played a role in her husband's mission, according to a lawyer familiar with Rove's account. Rove has also testified that the first time he saw the State Department memo was when "people in the special prosecutor's office" showed it to him, said Robert Luskin, his attorney.

"He had not seen it or heard about it before that time," Luskin said.

Several other administration officials were on the trip to Africa, including senior adviser Dan Bartlett, then-White House spokesman Ari Fleischer and others. Bartlett's attorney has refused to discuss the case, citing requests by the special counsel. Fleischer could not be reach for comment yesterday.

Rove and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, have been identified as people who discussed Wilson's wife with Cooper. Prosecutors are trying to determine the origin of their knowledge of Plame, including whether it was from the INR memo or from conversations with reporters.

The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that the memo made it clear that information about Wilson's wife was sensitive and should not be shared. Yesterday, sources provided greater detail on the memo to The Post.

The material in the memo was based on notes taken by an INR analyst who attended a Feb. 19, 2002, meeting at the CIA where Wilson's intelligence-gathering trip to Niger was discussed.

The memo was drafted June 10, 2003, for Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, who asked to be brought up to date on INR's opposition to the White House view that Hussein was trying to buy uranium in Africa.

The description of Wilson's wife and her role in the Feb. 19, 2002, meeting at the CIA was considered "a footnote" in a background paragraph in the memo, according to an official who was aware of the process.

It records that the INR analyst at the meeting opposed Wilson's trip to Niger because the State Department, through other inquiries, already had disproved the allegation that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger. Attached to the INR memo were the notes taken by the senior INR analyst who attended the 2002 meeting at the CIA.

On July 6, 2003, shortly after Wilson went public on NBC's "Meet the Press" and in The Post and the New York Times discussing his trip to Niger, the INR director at the time, Carl W. Ford Jr., was asked to explain Wilson's statements for Powell, according to sources familiar with the events. He went back and reprinted the June 10 memo but changed the addressee from Grossman to Powell.

Ford last year appeared before the federal grand jury investigating the leak and described the details surrounding the INR memo, the sources said. Yesterday he was on vacation in Arkansas, according to his office.

Mmmmmm... another loop in the noose.

Oh goody! I am so obsessed with this issue!

KT

It was nice to see the Washington Post doing its job again -- brings back memories of their uncovering the dirty tricks of CREEP and the Nixon administration. May the Truth win out!

It seems they are going to sacrifice Libby or Bartlett or Fleischer. probably Fleischer as he left suddenly the day the article came out.

I bet this is the scenario. Seems like Fitzgerald smells a rat though, maybe several BIG STINKING RATS, and is pursuing them.

Notice that Bartlett is the newest name to appear.
He would be a good one to take down too.

I cannot see Fleisher going silently into the night though. Have a feeling he might have quit knowing he did wrong, which would indicate he would blab
on everyone-hope indeed he is part of it too, good riddance to more rubbish.

No one said it is going to only be one though...they should take the entire stinking mess of them down and do it gradually.

The public likes it dripping out slowly, while securring the grip around their ever
claustraphobic necks tighter and tighter and tighter and watching all of them
rejects squirm deliciously in their ever expanding seats.

Watching the puddles form down the side of their pants legs...all of them...

delightful, don't you think? How Nixonian staffish to coin 2 new words.
Which one is Martha Mitchell?

The editorial board of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is not happy about BushCo covering for his best bud Karl.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/233352_karlxed.asp

PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON was on the Today show at around 720am EDT speaking basically about Africa, but Matt Lauer brought up Karl Rove.
(I don't have a link or anything yet.)

Basically, he supported JOSEPH WILSON and his wife 100 percent.

He said we should wait til the grand jury investigation is over in Oct. then when the facts are in take care of it.

He called Joe Wilson a patriot and his wife the same and said what happened to them was wrong.
I have not heard him say anything about this before.

As usual, Molly Ivins nails it.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/072005L.shtml

http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/columns/pre...t_id=1000989261

http://www.citypaper.com/columns/story.asp?id=10309

http://www.thebostonchannel.com/helenthoma...729/detail.html

http://hartfordadvocate.com/gbase/News/con...?oid=oid:119809

McCain is on Hardball tonight.

He dissed Wilson - said he lied about who sent him to Africa and about his report. He said the senate investigation proved his report was wrong.

He believes in Bush. all the way.

I'm starting to get a sick feeling when I see McCain nowadays. I never really liked him, and he's gone downhill since.

Hardball is discussing the State Dept. memo, marked "secret".

Ari Fleischer was seen reading the memo on AF1. Bolton and other State Dept people have testified for the grand jury.

Rove gave testimony that contradicted with Cooper's. They may be looking at perjury now.

Two reporters are coming up next to discuss it. Jim Vandehei - Wash Post and Tony Blankley - Wash Times