Rove Sold Out America to Hide Deceptions on Iraq

July 15, 2005

In August 2004, Karl Rove told CNN, "I didn't know her name and didn't leak her name," referring to then-covert CIA operative, Valerie Plame. The New York Times reveals this morning that Rove was not truthful on both counts: "Mr. Rove has told investigators that he learned from the columnist [Robert Novak] the name of the C.I.A. officer" and confirmed that she was employed at the CIA. Rove told Novak upon hearing of Plame's identity and occupation, "I heard that, too." Lost in all the details of “who-talked-to-whom-when” is a disturbing conclusion: a senior White House official willfully undermined U.S. security in an effort to tar a critic of the administration’s case for war in Iraq and continues to have top level oversight of national security policy today.

* Karl Rove spoke with columnist Robert Novak a week prior to publication of Novak's column outing undercover CIA agent, Valerie Plame. According to the Times, Novak called Rove shortly after former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, Plame’s husband, published an editorial in the New York Times which concluded that "some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." In that 7/8/03 conversation, Novak brought up Plame's role at the CIA, and Rove confirmed for the reporter that Plame did indeed work at the CIA. On July 14, 2003, Novak reported that "two senior administration officials" confirmed that Plame worked for the CIA as "an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction."


* This means that Rove was complicit in undermining our national security for political purposes. Despite White House claims that Rove’s involvement in this matter was “ridiculous,” Americans now know Rove was at the center of an orchestrated White House effort to out a covert CIA operative as retaliation for her husband’s criticism of the administration’s use of pre-war intelligence on Iraq. Rove continues to have full access to our national security decision making today.


* The burden is now on President Bush: he must show Americans that he will not tolerate or cover-up any threats to national security within his own administration. This is no longer just about Rove and summer political intrigue in the nation’s capital. President Bush promised Americans that he would uncover those responsible for the outing and fire anyone involved in the episode. Rove is now proven to have been directly responsible for the matter and the president should honor his word and commitment to the American people.

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Daily Talking Points is a product of the American Progress Action Fund.

Rove E-Mailed Security Official About Talk
By JOHN SOLOMON, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 1 minute ago

WASHINGTON - After mentioning a CIA operative to a reporter, Bush confidant Karl Rove alerted the president's No. 2 security adviser about the interview and said he tried to steer the journalist away from allegations the operative's husband was making about faulty Iraq intelligence.

The July 11, 2003, e-mail between Rove and then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley is the first showing an intelligence official knew Rove had talked to Matthew Cooper just days before the Time magazine reporter divulged CIA officer Valerie Plame's secret identity.

"I didn't take the bait," Rove wrote in an e-mail obtained by The Associated Press, recounting how Cooper tried to question him about whether President Bush had been hurt by the new allegations.

The White House turned the e-mail over to prosecutors, and Rove testified to a grand jury about it last year.

Earlier in the week before the e-mail, Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had written a newspaper opinion piece accusing the Bush administration of twisting prewar intelligence, including a "highly doubtful" report that Iraq bought nuclear materials from Niger.

"Matt Cooper called to give me a heads-up that he's got a welfare reform story coming," Rove wrote in the e-mail to Hadley.

"When he finished his brief heads-up he immediately launched into Niger. Isn't this damaging? Hasn't the president been hurt? I didn't take the bait, but I said if I were him I wouldn't get Time far out in front on this."

Hadley, now Bush's national security adviser, didn't immediately return a call seeking comment Friday. Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, said his client answered all the questions prosecutors asked during three grand jury appearances, never invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination or the president's executive privilege guaranteeing confidential advice from aides.

Rove, Bush's closest adviser, turned over the e-mail as soon as prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into who leaked Plame's covert work for the CIA.

He later told a grand jury the e-mail was consistent with his recollection that his intention in talking with Cooper that Friday in July 2003 wasn't to divulge Plame's identity but to caution Cooper against certain allegations Plame's husband was making, according to legal professionals familiar with Rove's testimony.

They spoke only on condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the grand jury investigation.

Rove sent the e-mail shortly before leaving the White House early for a family vacation that weekend, already aware that another journalist he had talked with, syndicated columnist Robert Novak, was planning an article about Plame and Wilson.

Rove also knew that then-CIA Director George Tenet planned later that same day to issue a dramatic statement that took responsibility for some bad Iraq intelligence but that also called into question some of Wilson's assertions, the legal sources said.

The AP reported Thursday that Rove acknowledged to the grand jury that he talked about Plame with both Cooper and Novak before they published their stories but that he originally learned about the operative's identity from the news media, not government sources.

Republicans cheered the latest revelations Friday, saying they showed Rove wasn't trying to hurt Plame but instead was trying to informally warn reporters to be cautious about some of Wilson's claims.

"What it says is, Karl Rove wasn't the leaker, he was actually the recipient of the information not the provider," Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman said on Fox News. "So there are probably a lot of folks in Washington who have prejudged this, who have rushed to judgment who are trying to smear Karl Rove."

Democrats, however, said that even if Rove wasn't the leaker, someone still divulged Plame's identity and possibly violated the law.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi and other party leaders asked Speaker    Dennis Hastert on Friday to let Congress hold hearings into the controversy regardless of the criminal probe now under way.

"In previous Republican Congresses the fact that a criminal investigation was under way did not prevent extensive hearings from being held on other, much less significant matters," Pelosi wrote.

Federal law prohibits government officials from divulging the identity of an undercover intelligence officer. But in order to bring charges, prosecutors must prove the official knew the officer was covert and nonetheless knowingly outed his or her identity.

Rove's conversations with Novak and Cooper took place just days after Wilson suggested in his opinion piece in The New York Times that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was used to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.

Summarizing a trip he made to Africa on behalf of the CIA, Wilson wrote that he'd concluded it was highly doubtful the nation of Niger had sold uranium yellowcake to Iraq. Tenet issued a lengthy statement five days later saying that he never should have allowed Bush to use the Niger information in his State of the Union address but that Wilson's report did not resolve whether Iraq was seeking uranium from abroad.

No matter what that investigation turns up or doesn't turn up, there's something that is not in question.  CIA officer Valerie Plame's career and life will never be the same.

But what about her colleagues, not to mention the assignment she was working on?  Or the agency itself?

We're joined now by former CIA special agent Jack Rice, who is now the host of his own radio show on WCCO in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Good evening to you, Jack.

JACK RICE, FORMER CIA SPECIAL AGENT:  Good evening, Alison.

STEWART:  At the time she was outed, Valerie Plame was working for a CIA front company, and obviously she didn't work there alone.  Can you explain the ripple effect of her outing?

RICE:  Well, this is potentially huge, because what happens now is, everything that she touched, every person that she touched, every asset that she may have come across, is now potentially exposed.  Every intelligence organization in the world will now go back and scour their files to see if she was ever in their country, was ever involved with anybody, and try to wrap up every operation.  The potential is huge.

STEWART:  And you're talking about in terms of five, 10 years ago, even.

RICE:  Oh, certainly.  Because if you can get a good operation going, if you have a good asset that has very good access, that person can be involved for years, decades, potentially.  And you open those people up.  I'm not just talking about physically for her directly, but for all of those assets, and sadly, for the intelligence that some of those assets may provide.

STEWART:  In your experience, is something like this, the outing of a CIA agent or operative, has it ever happened?

RICE:  Well, there's been one prosecution in the past under this statute that everybody's been talking about.  But it's a very rare circumstance.  It doesn't happen that often.  So when it does, it can be a big deal, and it should be a big deal.  This should be nonpartisan.

STEWART:  Is it likely that national security has been compromised because of this?

RICE:  I think it's very possible.  We'll never completely know.  Ideally, I hope it hasn't been.  But at the same time, what happens here is, if we ever, either side, either political party, start using politics over what's right, over patriotism, we're going to have a very serious problem in this country.

STEWART:  And in terms of that ripple effect you talked about, in terms of things being compromised and people's situations being compromised, and their assignments being compromised, how could the damage be repaired?

RICE:  I think in this case, what needs to be done is, it needs to be addressed.  It needs to be treated as seriously as it should.

Look, if we—if you look at this two ways, you can look back and see what this may have done.  You can go back and see what she may have done, and you can look at those assets.  That is one implication.

There's a second implication, at what may happen in the future, what happens for any future operations, what other CIA or other intelligence operatives may be willing to do in the future.

If there's a perception that you're going to see people in blue pinstripe suits in Washington wrapping themselves in the flag and talking about God and country while they're exposing CIA and intelligence operatives, you're going to have a real hard time convincing CIA officers to get out into the field and risk their lives for those people.

STEWART:  Jack Rice, a former CIA special agent.  Thank you so much for your time and your perspective tonight.

RICE:  Thank you, Alison.

Can Rove be impeached?
the non-binding opinion of Supreme Court Justice Story,

"All officers of the United States, therefore, who hold their appointments under the national government, whether their duties are executive or judicial, in the highest or in the lowest departments of the government, with the exception of officers in the army and navy, are properly civil officers within the meaning of the constitution, and liable to impeachment."

Questions of Who Told What to Whom, and When, May Be Crucial in Leak Case
By ADAM LIPTAK
July 16, 2005

Although enormous attention has recently been focused on the question of what information might have passed from government sources in Washington to reporters, the case involving the disclosure of a covert C.I.A. operative's identity has also pointed out that information sometimes flows the other way.

This week a person who was formally briefed on the matter said that Karl Rove, the senior adviser to President Bush, talked about a C.I.A. operative with the columnist Robert D. Novak before Mr. Novak wrote about the case on July 14, 2003.

But the person said Mr. Rove told Mr. Novak that he had already heard parts of the story from other journalists but had not heard the operative's name, Valerie Wilson.

In the investigation into the disclosure of her identity, the question of who told what to whom, and when, may have legal significance. The investigation started as an inquiry into whether the two officials who shared information with Mr. Novak for his column identifying Ms. Wilson violated the law. One of those officials is now known to be Mr. Rove.

A 1982 statute makes it a crime for people with authorized access to classified information to knowingly identify covert agents. If officials learned the information solely from reporters rather than from confidential files, they probably did not violate the law. Even if they came to know the information in both ways, the fact that it was in public circulation would suggest that it was not particularly secret.

But the 1982 law is only one source of potential legal exposure. The special prosecutor in the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, may also be expected to compare the officials' accounts of how they heard about Ms. Wilson, who was referred to in early news reports by her maiden name, Valerie Plame, with other accounts and documents.

Four reporters have testified in the investigation: Glenn Kessler and Walter Pincus of The Washington Post, Tim Russert of NBC News and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine. In their testimony, all four discussed their interactions with I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff. Mr. Pincus has also testified about a conversation with a second source, whose identity is not known. Mr. Cooper testified for a second time on Wednesday, about a conversation with Mr. Rove.

All of the reporters said they testified with their sources' permission.

Reporters often play a role in circulating information, particularly in Washington. It can be incidental, in, say, the premise of a question. It can be a way to test or confirm a piece of information. And it can be part of an effort to trade information or curry favor.

Mr. Kessler and Mr. Pincus said they did not discuss Ms. Wilson with Mr. Libby, and Mr. Cooper has not spoken publicly on the issue.

Mr. Russert's testimony last August provides intriguing clues. A statement issued by NBC at the time suggests that Mr. Libby had told Mr. Fitzgerald that he had heard about Ms. Wilson from Mr. Russert.

According to the statement, lawyers for Mr. Russert and Mr. Fitzgerald reached an agreement under which Mr. Fitzgerald questioned Mr. Russert only about Mr. Russert's end of a conversation in early July 2003 with Mr. Libby. That would be an unusual way to go about pursuing a leak inquiry, but it is consistent with an attempt to try to establish that Mr. Russert provided information to Mr. Libby.

Mr. Russert, however, according to the NBC statement, said "he did not know Ms. Plame's name or that she was a C.I.A. operative and that he did not provide that information to Mr. Libby." Indeed, the statement said, Mr. Russert first learned the information from Mr. Novak's column.

A spokeswoman for NBC declined to elaborate on the statement yesterday.

Mr. Novak has not said whether or how he cooperated in the investigation.

A sixth reporter, Judith Miller of The New York Times, is in a Virginia jail for refusing to testify in the case. Ms. Miller never wrote about the matter.

According to the federal appeals court, which rejected her appeal in February, Ms. Miller has received two subpoenas seeking testimony and documents "related to conversations between her and a specified government official" in the days before Mr. Novak's article appeared.

In court papers filed earlier this month urging that Ms. Miller be jailed, Mr. Fitzgerald said that "the source in this case has waived confidentiality in writing."

George Freeman, an assistant general counsel of The New York Times Company, said Ms. Miller would not say who that source was. "She has never received," Mr. Freeman said, "what she considers an unambiguous, unequivocal and uncoerced waiver from anyone with whom she may have spoken."

Mr. Freeman declined to say what efforts, if any, Ms. Miller and her lawyers have made to obtain a satisfactory waiver.

Asked whether Ms. Miller provided information about Ms. Wilson's identity to the source to whom Mr. Fitzgerald referred, Mr. Freeman said: "Judy learned about Valerie Plame from a confidential source or sources whose identity she continues to protect to this day. If the suggestion is that she is covering up for her source or some fictitious source, that is preposterous. Given that she is suffering in jail, it is also mean-spirited."

Reporter may face criminal charge
Miller may be pressured more to discuss source

Saturday, July 16, 2005
By Howard Kurtz and Carol D. Leonnig, The Washington Post

WASHINGTON -- Lawyers in the CIA leaks investigation are concerned that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald may seek criminal contempt charges against New York Times reporter Judith Miller, a rare move that could significantly lengthen her time in jail.

Miller, now in her 10th day in the Alexandria, Va., jail, already faces as much as four months of incarceration for civil contempt after refusing to answer questions before a grand jury about confidential conversations she had in reporting a story in the summer of 2003.

Fitzgerald and Chief U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan have both raised the possibility in open court that Miller could be charged with criminal contempt if she continues to defy Hogan's order to cooperate in the investigation of who may have unlawfully leaked the name of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame to the media.

The unusual threat in the case underscores the sensitivity of an investigation that has reached the highest levels of the White House and the prosecutor's determination to extract information from reluctant journalists even though he has yet to charge anyone with a crime.

What secrets Miller can unlock for Fitzgerald -- and the reasons he has so doggedly pursued her -- have been a subject of considerable mystery.

While media coverage in recent days has focused on conversations that White House senior adviser Karl Rove had with reporters, two sources say Miller spoke with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, during the key period in July 2003 that is the focus of Fitzgerald's investigation.

The two sources -- one who is familiar with Libby's version of events, and the other with Miller's -- said the previously undisclosed conversation occurred a few days before Plame's name appeared in Robert Novak's syndicated column on July 14, 2003. Miller and Libby discussed former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, Plame's husband, who had recently alleged that the Bush administration had twisted intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war, according to the source familiar with Libby's version.

But, according to the source, the subject of Wilson's wife did not come up.

Miller and the Times have said the reporter has chosen jail to keep promises she made to protect the identity of confidential sources. But Libby's attorney, Joseph Tate, has told the New York Times that he provided reporters with assurances that they could rely on the waivers releasing them to talk to Fitzgerald. Tate did not return phone calls placed for this story Thursday and yesterday.

Hogan has publicly chided Miller for "alleging" that she was protecting the identity of a source who the judge said had freed her to speak about their conversations.

Miller has said she was reporting on Wilson's criticism of administration claims that Iraq was seeking uranium for weapons of mass destruction, but did not write a story.

One of Miller's attorneys, veteran First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams, declined yesterday to confirm the meeting with Libby or to discuss any waivers his client may have received. "Judy's view is that any purported waiver she got from anyone was not, on the face of it, sufficiently broad, clear and uncoerced," Abrams said.

Four other reporters, including two from The Washington Post, have answered some of the prosecutors' questions after receiving specific waivers from their sources, including Libby.

Matthew Cooper, a Time magazine reporter also subpoenaed in the case, avoided Miller's fate July 6 by agreeing to testify about his conversations with Rove. But three days earlier, Cooper's attorney, Richard Sauber, said in an interview yesterday, Fitzgerald told him during negotiations over Cooper's testimony that his client could well face criminal contempt charges.

Fitzgerald was playing "hardball" and "was trying to get Matt and Judy to comply with the judge's order," Sauber said, adding that he did not consider the threat "over the top."

"Fitzgerald indicated personally to me that was one of his options," Sauber said of their July 3 conversation. He quoted Fitzgerald as telling him: "I'm going to ask the judge to remind these people they risk criminal contempt, and it is certainly an option for me."

Sauber said he is "convinced" that Fitzgerald "still might" file criminal charges against Miller.

Abrams said he remains concerned about the same possibility but hopes that it will not come to pass. "Any resort to criminal law would constitute a sad, even tragic, escalation of this controversy," he said.

Sometimes the threat of criminal contempt can be a prosecutor's strongest tool to obtain information. If Fitzgerald seeks a criminal contempt finding, the judge could order Miller held for as much as six more months and impose other penalties. Criminal contempt findings are very rare, legal experts said.

Congress of the United States
Washington, DC

For Immediate Release

Friday, July 15, 2005

REPS. CONYERS AND FRANK ASK WHETHER SENIOR WHITE HOUSE OFFICIALS CAN BE IMPEACHED BY THE HOUSE

Letter to Library of Congress seeks clarification of who in the government can be impeached by Congress

Washington, DC-House Judiciary Committee Ranking Democrat John Conyers (D-MI) and House Financial Services Ranking Democratic Member Barney Frank (D-MA) today asked the American Law Division of the Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress whether it is Constitutionally permissible to begin impeachment proceedings against high-ranking federal officials. This would include members of the President's staff such as White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove.

"We write to request your opinion as to whether high-ranking members of the President's staff are subject to the Congressional impeachment process. The Constitution in its discussion of impeachment does not spell out with any specificity which federal officials are impeachable. We believe that the rationale for impeachment clearly applies to high-ranking officials who wield presidential authority in many cases with even more impact than some cabinet officers," Frank and Conyers write in their letter.

"We share the grave concern felt by many Americans about the revelation that the President's Deputy Chief of Staff and Chief Political Advisor, Karl Rove, improperly identified a CIA undercover operative to journalists as part of a campaign to discredit her husband, who is a critic of some aspects of administration policy," said Mr. Frank.

Mr. Conyers continued: "Mr. Rove continues to occupy this high position, which means that he continues to have access to the full range of the most secret information available to the federal government, with apparently no compunctions about misusing that information for political purposes. We believe that the impeachment power of Congress is in fact intended to cover precisely this sort of situation - that is, a high-ranking official who has not only abused his power, but appears ready to continue such abuse in the future, and subject to no apparent effective check within the executive branch itself."

Historically, impeachments have been launched against presidents and other officials who have been confirmed by the Senate. However, Conyers and Frank noted the language of the constitution--Art. II, Sec. 4: The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors-does not explicitly impost such a requirement. The question Frank and Conyers are asking is what constitutes "civil officers" and does it include high-ranking officials in the White House and Executive Branch.

Given the importance of this issue, the grave abuse of power and unethical manner in which Mr. Rove has been engaged, impeachment may well be an appropriate response. This issue could be relevant in cases where there may be some uncertainty about the willingness of the Executive Branch, in which the criminal prosecution power lies, fully to use that power against someone so close to the President.

"We have asked a neutral legal authority whose function it is to advise Congress to give us the best judgment of its experts on this question, and we will speak with our colleagues about proceeding accordingly after we have received this advice," concluded Frank.

State Dept. Memo Gets Scrutiny in Leak Inquiry on C.I.A. Officer
By RICHARD STEVENSON
July 16, 2005

WASHINGTON, July 15 - Prosecutors in the C.I.A. leak case have shown intense interest in a 2003 State Department memorandum that explained how a former diplomat came to be dispatched on an intelligence-gathering mission and the role of his wife, a C.I.A. officer, in the trip, people who have been officially briefed on the case said.

Investigators in the case have been trying to learn whether officials at the White House and elsewhere in the administration learned of the C.I.A. officer's identity from the memorandum. They are seeking to determine if any officials then passed the name along to journalists and if officials were truthful in testifying about whether they had read the memo, the people who have been briefed said, asking not to be named because the special prosecutor heading the investigation had requested that no one discuss the case.

The memorandum was sent to Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state, just before or as he traveled with President Bush and other senior officials to Africa starting on July 7, 2003, when the White House was scrambling to defend itself from a blast of criticism a few days earlier from the former diplomat, Joseph C. Wilson IV, current and former government officials said.

Mr. Powell was seen walking around Air Force One during the trip with the memorandum in hand, said a person involved in the case who also requested anonymity because of the prosecutor's admonitions about talking about the investigation.

Investigators are also trying to determine whether the gist of the information in the document, including the name of the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson, Mr. Wilson's wife, had been provided to the White House even earlier, said another person who has been involved in the case. Investigators have been looking at whether the State Department provided the information to the White House before July 6, 2003, when Mr. Wilson publicly criticized the way the administration used intelligence to justify the war in Iraq, the person said.

The prosecutors have shown the memorandum to witnesses at the grand jury investigating how the C.I.A. officer's name was disclosed to journalists, blowing her cover as a covert operative and possibly violating federal law, people briefed on the case said. The prosecutors appear to be investigating how widely the document circulated within the administration, and whether it might have been the original source of information for whoever provided the identity of Ms. Wilson to Robert D. Novak, the syndicated columnist who first disclosed it in print.

On Thursday, a person who has been officially briefed on the matter said that Karl Rove, President Bush's senior adviser, had spoken about Ms. Wilson with Mr. Novak before Mr. Novak published a column on July 14, 2003, identifying the C.I.A. officer by her maiden name, Valerie Plame. Mr. Rove, the person said, told Mr. Novak he had heard much the same information, making him one of two sources Mr. Novak cited for his information.

But the person said Mr. Rove first heard from Mr. Novak the name of Mr. Wilson's wife and her precise role in the C.I.A.'s decision to send her husband to Africa to investigate a report, later discredited, that Saddam Hussein was trying to acquire nuclear material there.

It is not clear who Mr. Novak's original source was, or whether Mr. Novak has revealed the source's identity to the grand jury.

Mr. Rove also held a conversation about Mr. Wilson's mission to Africa with Matthew Cooper, a reporter for Time magazine, on July 11, 2003, two days after he discussed the case with Mr. Novak. In an e-mail message to his bureau chief provided to the grand jury by Time Inc., Mr. Cooper said Mr. Rove had alluded to Mr. Wilson's wife as a C.I.A. employee, though, in Mr. Cooper's account, Mr. Rove did not use her name or mention her status as a covert operative.

After his conversation with Mr. Cooper, The Associated Press reported Friday, Mr. Rove sent an e-mail message to Stephen J. Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser, saying he "didn't take the bait" when Mr. Cooper suggested that Mr. Wilson's criticisms had been damaging to the administration.

Mr. Rove told the grand jury in the case that the e-mail message was consistent with his assertion that he had not intended to divulge Ms. Wilson's identity but instead intended to rebut Mr. Wilson's criticisms of the administration's use of intelligence about Iraq, The A.P. reported, citing legal professionals familiar with Mr. Rove's testimony. Dozens of White House and administration officials have testified to the grand jury, and several officials have been called back for further questioning.

The special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, has sought to determine how much Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman at the time of the leak, knew about the memorandum. Lawyers involved in the case said Mr. Fitzgerald asked questions about Mr. Fleischer's role. Mr. Fleischer was with Mr. Bush and much of the senior White House staff in Africa when Mr. Powell, who was also with them, received the memorandum. A spokeswoman for Mr. Powell said he was out of the country and could not comment on the document. Mr. Fleischer said in an e-mail message this week that he would not comment on the case.

Mr. Fitzgerald has also looked into any role that I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, may have played. Lawyers in the case have said their clients have been asked about Mr. Libby's conversations in the days after Mr. Wilson's article - in part based on Mr. Libby's hand-written notes, which he turned over to the prosecutor.

In addition, several journalists have been asked about their conversations with Mr. Libby. At least one, Tim Russert of NBC News, has suggested that prosecutors wanted to know whether he had told Mr. Libby of Ms. Wilson's identity. After Mr. Russert met with Mr. Fitzgerald, NBC said that he did not provide the information to Mr. Libby.

The existence of the State Department memorandum has been previously reported by news organizations including The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek and The Daily News. But new details of how it came about and how it circulated within the administration could offer clues into who knew what and when.

The memorandum was dated June 10, 2003, nearly four weeks before Mr. Wilson wrote an Op-Ed article for The New York Times in which he recounted his mission and accused the administration of twisting intelligence to exaggerate the threat from Iraq. The memorandum was written for Marc Grossman, then the under secretary of state for political affairs, and it referred explicitly to Valerie Wilson as Mr. Wilson's wife, according to a government official who reread the document on Friday.

When Mr. Wilson's Op-Ed article appeared on July 6, 2003, a Sunday, Richard L. Armitage, then deputy secretary of state, called Carl W. Ford Jr., the assistant secretary for intelligence and research, at home, a former State Department official said. Mr. Armitage asked Mr. Ford to send a copy of the memorandum to Mr. Powell, who was preparing to leave for Africa with Mr. Bush, the former official said. Mr. Ford sent it to the White House for transmission to Mr. Powell.

It is not clear who asked for the memorandum, but in the weeks before it was written, there were several accounts in newspapers about an unnamed former diplomat's trip to Africa seeking intelligence about Iraq's nuclear program. On May 6, 2003, Nicholas D. Kristof, a columnist for The Times, wrote of a "former U.S. ambassador to Africa" who had reported to the C.I.A. and the State Department that reports of Iraq seeking to acquire uranium in Niger were "unequivocally wrong."

The memorandum was prepared at the State Department, relying on notes by an analyst who was involved in meetings in early 2002 to discuss whether to send someone to Africa to investigate allegations that Iraq was pursuing uranium purchases. The C.I.A. was asked by Mr. Cheney's office and the State and Defense Departments to look into the reports.

According to a July 9, 2004, Senate Intelligence Committee report, the notes described a Feb. 19, 2002, meeting at C.I.A. headquarters on whether Mr. Wilson should go to Niger.

The notes, which did not identify Ms. Wilson or her husband by name, said the meeting was "apparently convened by" the wife of a former ambassador "who had the idea to dispatch" him to Niger because of his contacts in the region. Mr. Wilson had been ambassador to Gabon.

The Intelligence Committee report said the former ambassador's wife had a different account of her role, saying she introduced him and left after about three minutes.

The information in the State Department memorandum generally tracked the information Mr. Novak laid out for Mr. Rove in their conversation, according to the account of their exchange provided by the person briefed on what Mr. Rove has told investigators.

But it appears to differ in at least one way, raising questions about whether it was the original source of the material that ultimately made its way to Mr. Novak. In his July 14, 2003, column, Mr. Novak referred to Ms. Wilson as Valerie Plame. The State Department memorandum referred to her as Valerie Wilson, according to the government official who reread it on Friday.

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This article was reported by Douglas Jehl, David Johnston and Richard W. Stevenson and was written by Mr. Stevenson.
David E. Sanger and Scott Shane contributed reporting for this article.

Luskin Makes Some Calls, Or the Case of the Leaking Leaker’s Leaking Leaker
Posted July 15th, 2005 by Jon

An unidentified source made calls to major news outlets last night attempting to spin the CIA agent leak scandal story to benefit Karl Rove. In course of the spin, however, the source may have inadvertently outed the fact that Rove spoke with rightwing pundit Robert Novak when Novak was writing his infamous column in which the name of secret CIA agent Valerie Plame was revealed.

The Associated Press described the leaker they spoke with as “a person briefed on the testimony.”

The New York Times described the leaker as ” someone who has been officially briefed on the matter.” And said, “[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.”

The Washington Post received a call, too, whom they described as “a lawyer involved in the case.”

Let’s see. A “lawyer involved in the case” who was “officially briefed” on Rove’s testimony. Why didn’t they just say, “and whose initials are “Robert Luskin.”

The source described testimony that Rove gave to the grand jury investigating the leak of the undercover operative. The Times regurgitated it this way:

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.”

So what is Karl Rove thinking? Surely he knew any reasonable person would know he’d sent his lawyer out to spin the spin.

And how does this benefit him? Now we know what we all suspected, Karl was busy on the phone getting the word out on his political enemy and the fact that he was risking national security in doing so simply did not matter.

There is a distinct odor of desperation emanating from all this.

CNN's "That's B*lls**t" Coverage

Lou Dobbs Tonight, (7/15/05)  as Lou was introducing a piece on the Rove story.

Lou says, "...Rove testifying that he first learned about Plame from columnist Robert Novak, a CNN contributor. Danna Bash reports." Immediately after that you can clearly hear a female voice on mic whispering "that's b*lls**t". Then Dana Bash continues with her report.

Video - WMP only (it's low quality)

so whats the spin on the big three? NBC CBS and ABC?
i haven't had a chance to watch any news this past week due to work.
so whats the spin? do we have him or not?
last i recall he (karl rove) was spinning the story in a manner that made it looke as if the media gave him the name and he just passed it on.
a hay it wasn't me who started all this approach
what are our democratic leaders doing? if any thing? i have yet to see any thing on cnn.

U.S. pays bloody price for Rove's nasty politics
Leaks by Bush aide was meant to sustain the lies that led America into Iraq war
Marie Cocco

Jul. 15, 2005. 01:00 AM

WASHINGTON—Let us remember the real reason that White House political enforcer Karl Rove was chatting with selected reporters in the summer of 2003.

It was not necessarily to blow the cover of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

It was not, entirely, to mete out vicious retribution against her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, for writing an op-ed article in The New York Times that discounted administration claims about an alleged Iraqi effort to acquire uranium from Niger.

The malevolence was more fundamental. Rove was trying to sustain the lies that led America into Iraq.

"He (Rove) implied strongly there's still plenty to implicate Iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro(m) Niger," Time magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper wrote, describing his July 11, 2003, conversation with Rove in an email to his superiors. The email was obtained by Newsweek.

On that very day, CIA director George Tenet issued a statement conceding the dubiousness of the Niger claim.

Tenet said it "was a mistake" to have included the allegation in President George Bush's State of the Union speech in January. The previous October, Tenet called the White House to demand that a reference to the alleged Niger caper be deleted from a presidential speech. At that time, it was.

By the time Rove had his conversation with reporter Cooper, insisting that there was much to indicate an Iraqi-Niger nuclear connection, the White House knew this was untrue.

Indeed, by the time Wilson penned his account and Plame was later exposed, there was plenty to indicate that Iraq had no nuclear weapons program. And no weapons of mass destruction.

Early in January 2003, U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix reported that after two months of resumed inspections in Iraq, "we haven't found any smoking guns." International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei said that aluminum tubes touted by various high-ranking administration officials as proof of a nuclear program were, in fact, intended for rocket engines.

Late in January — a day before Bush's State of the Union address would warn of Iraq's nuclear ambitions — ElBaradei reported to the Security Council that inspectors "found no evidence that Iraq has revived its nuclear weapons program since the elimination of the program in the 1990s." The very next night, Bush's speech ignored ElBaradei's new findings. The president instead touted an outdated analysis of Iraq's nuclear program as it had existed after the first Gulf War.

By early March, a few weeks before the Iraq invasion began, ElBaradei had debunked the Niger allegation, saying the documents that led to the theory were forgeries.

Blix had repeatedly reported that he'd found no weapons of mass destruction, despite searching suspect sites provided by U.S. intelligence and notwithstanding the effort of 250 inspectors from 60 countries.

Their honesty came at a price.

A cacophony of administration voices depicted Blix as an incompetent, bent on appeasement. His New York office, Blix believes, was bugged.

ElBaradei was secretly wiretapped as part of an effort by State Department official John Bolton to force his removal as head of the atomic monitoring agency. The putsch failed when no other country would go along. No matter. Bush wants to promote Bolton to U.N. ambassador.

The president condones skulduggery against the leaders of international institutions who answer to the world, not to him.

It should not now be so shocking that Rove is responsible for such treachery at home. What's a little destruction of a man's family — what, indeed, is this trifle about outing a CIA employee and breaching national security? — when the fate of such a grand project as Iraq is on the line?

The media psychodrama now turns on the trivia about the leak investigation and whether or not Rove broke a technical statute on exposing secret operatives. The familiar sounds of Washington scandal — will the president stand by his man, or won't he? — drown out the sordid, underlying theme.

The president took America to war on a false premise, one which already was unravelling before the first attack planes flew.

When experts such as Blix and ElBaradei came up with information that undermined the assumption that Iraq possessed the world's most fearsome weapons, they weren't heeded.

They, like Wilson, were assaulted by political hacks.

Rove may or may not pay some price for his malicious politics.

But make no mistake. America pays — every day in Iraq — with our blood and treasure.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Marie Cocco is a Washington Post columnist.

This email is meaningless. This is a Rove tactic. Release an email that says nothing and say it means something.  rove is trying to say, "If I had outed a CIA agent, would I ever I send an email to someone?"

Huh?

Are we that dumb? 

--------------------
Rove Says Writer Supplied Agent's Name
--------------------

---snip---

The complete article can be viewed at:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/na...-home-headlines

Hey Snuff, just thought you'd want to know that this link isn't working.

The Prosecutor Never Rests
Whether Probing a Leak or Trying Terrorists, Patrick Fitzgerald Is Relentless

By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 2, 2005; Page C01

CHICAGO

If Osama bin Laden ever stands trial, there's a prosecutor in Chicago waiting to face him down. As a driven young lawyer in the 1990s, Patrick J. Fitzgerald built the first criminal indictment against the man who would become the world's most hunted terrorist. Both men have moved on, you might say, but Fitzgerald still imagines that fantasy date before a judge.

"If you're a prosecutor, you'd be insane if you didn't want to go do that," Fitzgerald says in the well-appointed conference room of the U.S. attorney's office here. "If there was a courtroom and they said someone has to stand up and try him, would I hesitate to volunteer? No. I'm not saying I'd be the best person to try him at that point, but I'd be lying if I told you I wouldn't be interested."

A solidly built former rugby player who enjoyed getting muddy and bloody well into his twenties, Fitzgerald is nothing but confident in his own skin. Just as he does not fear bin Laden, he seems to fret little that he is now tangling simultaneously with the Bush White House and the New York Times, two of the nation's most powerful and privileged institutions.

Fitzgerald, 44, is the special prosecutor investigating the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame's name to columnist Robert Novak. The gifted son of an Irish doorman makes no bones about challenging the establishment. His office is also prosecuting former Illinois governor George Ryan and loyal associates of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley on influence-peddling and corruption charges.

He sees his task as getting to the bottom of things in ways as creative as the law allows. The law doesn't say you can't question a sitting president about his contacts or an investigative reporter about confidential sources. So Fitzgerald has done both, including quizzing Bush for more than an hour in the White House last June. His assiduous demands for answers from journalists alarms critics who believe he has created the greatest confrontation between the government and the press in a generation.

The Times editorial page has hammered Fitzgerald, saying that "in his zeal to compel reporters to disclose their sources, Mr. Fitzgerald lost sight of the bigger picture." His demand that Times reporter Judith Miller and Time magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper be forced to testify prompted the paper to call the case "a major assault" on relationships between reporters and their secret sources, the very essence of reporting on the abuse of power.

Fitzgerald is too politic to talk back, at least before he has wrapped up the case. A federal appeals panel in Washington is due to rule any day on whether the reporters must testify, and his work on the leak investigation is not done. But he appears to wonder what the fuss is all about. He says freely that he is zealous, a term he translates as passion within limits.

James B. Comey, deputy attorney general and unofficial president-for-life of the Pat Fitzgerald Booster Club, says no high-profile prosecutor ever provided less evidence that he was "doing something wacky."

"What's been interesting is seeing the media accounts and the columnists portray him as some sort of runaway prosecutor. That makes me smile," says Comey, who is largely responsible for Fitzgerald getting the Plame assignment. "Because there is no prosecutor who is less of a runaway than this guy."

The Untouchable

Fitzgerald frequently makes crime-fighting headlines in Chicago, where he took over the U.S. attorney's office just 10 days before 9/11. What's surprising is that he got the job at all. A New Yorker born and bred, Fitzgerald knew hardly a soul in Chicago, which was precisely the idea. Sen. Peter Fitzgerald (no relation) was looking for an outsider to battle the state's notoriously corrupt political apparatus.

The recently retired Illinois Republican tells a story about back in Al Capone's day, when Col. Robert McCormick, the imperious publisher of the Chicago Tribune, called FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and demanded that he send someone to Chicago who could not be bought.

Hoover sent the untouchable Eliot Ness.

Now, as then, the U.S. attorney's job has the gloss of patronage. The late Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley used to say the U.S. attorney in Chicago is one of the three most important people in the state, and Peter Fitzgerald said he wanted "someone who couldn't be influenced either to prosecute someone unfairly or protect someone from being prosecuted unjustly."

So the senator, who as the state's senior Republican had the right to recommend a candidate to the White House, went to one of Hoover's successors for advice.

"I called Louis Freeh and said, 'Who's the best assistant U.S. attorney you know of in the country?' He said, 'Patrick Fitzgerald in the Southern District of New York.' " The senator then called Mary Jo White, who ran the New York office. Same question. Same answer.

At the time, Patrick Fitzgerald was trying suspects in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. He thought the call from a senatorial aide was a practical joke by one of his buddies. But as soon as their interview was over, the senator knew he had his man.

"I thought, 'He is the original Untouchable,' " Peter Fitzgerald says. "You could just see it in his eyes that he was a straight shooter. There were no levers that anyone had over him. He had no desire to become a partner in a private law firm. He has no interest in electoral politics. He wanted to be a prosecutor."

World Class

For years, Fitzgerald has avoided receiving mail at his apartment because of the threat of a letter bomb from one murder-minded defendant or another.

The staff of the 9/11 commission called him one of the world's best terrorism prosecutors. He convicted Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and all four defendants in the embassy bombings, which had left 224 people dead. He extracted a guilty plea from Mafia capo John Gambino and became an authority on bin Laden, whom he indicted in 1998 for a global terrorist conspiracy that included the African bombings.

"His thoroughness, his relentlessness, his work ethic are legendary," says terrorism expert Daniel Benjamin, a former member of the National Security Council.

Seeing Fitzgerald in action, says Los Angeles lawyer Anthony Bouza, a college classmate, is "like watching a sophisticated machine." Colleagues speak in head-shaking tones of Fitzgerald's skills in taking a case to trial. A Phi Beta Kappa math and economics student at Amherst before earning a Harvard law degree in 1985, he has a gift for solving puzzles and simplifying complexity for a jury.

He's no slouch at stagecraft, either. At the trial of a Mafia hit man, the defense argued that a ski mask -- part of what Fitzgerald called a "hit kit" that included surgical gloves, a gun and hollow-point bullets -- was really just a hat. (The defense also said the surgical gloves were for putting ointment on the defendant's ailing dog.) During closing arguments, Fitzgerald startled the jury by rolling up one leg on his lawyerly dark suit.

"These are just shorts, ladies and gentlemen," he said, according to one account. "These are just shorts."

Into the Scrum

People who know Fitzgerald describe him as anything but a stuffed shirt. During a key moment in one New York trial, he slipped a note to his co-counsel, who interrupted questioning to read it to himself. It said, "Is there beer in the fridge?"

Fitzgerald's parents, born on opposite sides of Ireland's County Clare, met in the United States. They raised their son in Flatbush and guided him to a scholarship at a Jesuit high school. He worked as a school janitor in Brooklyn to make money for college and spent summers opening doors at an upscale co-op building on East 72nd Street in Manhattan. (His father worked at a building on East 75th, just off Madison Avenue.) It is part of Fitzgerald lore that he bit his tongue when rich apartment dwellers talked down to him as "just the doorman."

After law school, he spent three years in private practice before fleeing to the prosecution side. In the New York days, his married friends chided him about his workaholic, overachieving, hopelessly bachelor life. One time, visiting the small Brooklyn studio where Fitzgerald lived, a lawman noticed papers piled on the gas stove. Don't worry about the fire hazard, Fitzgerald told him -- "I've never turned it on."

"The advantage he had over me," Comey says, "was he was much smarter and he had no life. He could sit there and never go home. Fitz would go in there and just sit and read through files. It would almost be as if he was photographing them."

Fitzgerald did get out to exercise, and he even learned to scuba dive, an image his friends still cackle about.

"I'm certified as a scuba diver, but I can't really swim," Fitzgerald explains. "I'm very good at sinking."

Above all, Fitzgerald, who is 6 feet 2 and weighs 215 pounds, played rugby, a sport defined by toughness and camaraderie. He played at Amherst, at Harvard, and for several years in Manhattan. "You get every stress out of your system. You kick the ball, catch the ball, tackle, be tackled. At the end of the game, there's no unspent energy left. I did get bloodied a fair amount."

He adds, "That was not the goal."

'Nice Place'

Fitzgerald is careful to be apolitical in his targets and his public life alike. He registered to vote as an Independent in New York, only to discover, when he began receiving fundraising calls, that Independent was a political party. He re-registered with no affiliation, as he did later in Chicago.

He spit fire last year when reporters asked whether the racketeering indictment of Muhammad Hamid Khalil Salah, a fundraiser for the Islamic militant group Hamas, was timed to boost President Bush's reelection campaign. The case was trumpeted first by Attorney General John Ashcroft.

"I am not running for an election. I'm not part of a political party," Fitzgerald said at the time. "The election is irrelevant to this case. The reason we brought this case now is we're ready to proceed."

Nor has Fitzgerald signaled where his own ambitions lie. He insists that he has already advanced further than his imaginings, but he is clearly aware of his emerging star status. Asked about the notion of becoming FBI director after Robert Mueller, another prosecutor who quit private practice to put bad guys behind bars, he laughs. "That's probably Director Mueller when he's having a bad day, trying to unload it on somebody else."

He did not say he was uninterested, just that he is not thinking beyond his current job.

In the high-profile Chicago job, he still works killer hours and he chairs the attorney general's advisory panel on terrorism. And while he will not publicly discuss details of love, politics or religion, others say his social life has improved, along with his apartment. "It's a really nice place. My wife walked in and said, 'I know Pat's got a girlfriend,' " says Comey. "Fitz wouldn't know eggshell from burnt orange, but he's got a life."

Fitzgerald says he remembers where he came from and pinches himself when he realizes where he is.

"I'm very indebted to my parents. They were very hardworking, straight, decent people. The values we grew up with were straight-ahead. We didn't grow up in a household where people were anything but direct," Fitzgerald says. "I'm hoping that if you're a straight shooter in the world, that's not that remarkable."

'Off Course'?

Try telling that to the publisher of the New York Times.

Arthur Sulzberger Jr., defending his reporters, blasted Fitzgerald and said, "The government's investigation into the Valerie Plame case has moved dangerously off course." Not only has the liberal editorial page sliced into Fitzgerald, but conservative columnist William Safire called Fitzgerald a "runaway Chicago prosecutor" and warned that a pair of his investigations are "this generation's gravest threat to our ability to ferret out the news."

President Richard Nixon kept an enemies list and waged an epic fight over the publication of the Pentagon Papers, settling only when the Supreme Court backed the right of The Washington Post and New York Times to publish. Not a few presidents have tried, usually fruitlessly, to identify leakers and punish the reporters all too glad to publish those leaks.

But Fitzgerald has ignored the old saw about arguing with someone who buys ink by the barrel. In both the Plame case and an unrelated terrorism investigation, he is trying to force Times reporters to reveal their confidential sources, a quinella not attempted in modern memory.

"In all his cases, Pat keeps the blinders on and goes forward to where the facts lead him," says David Kelley, the acting U.S. attorney in New York and former head of the Justice Department's 9/11 Task Force. "He is not influenced by anything except by those things that ought to influence him. I wouldn't call it zeal. I would call it courage."

Many legal experts say Fitzgerald has the law on his side in the Plame investigation. The Supreme Court ruled narrowly in 1972 that reporters could be required to testify to a grand jury if the prosecutor proved a legitimate need.

Chief U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan backed Fitzgerald and ordered Miller and Cooper to testify. Fitzgerald's tactics are not "a fishing expedition or an improper exercise of prosecutorial authority," he said.

Zeal or courage? Where one side sees dangerous meddling, another sees creativity. The divergent takes are evident in the Plame investigation, a quest to find out who leaked her name and why. Faced with confidentiality pledges that reporters consider sacrosanct, Fitzgerald got one source, vice presidential Chief of Staff I. Lewis Libby, to grant journalists a limited release from their confidentiality pledge.

Reporters, including two from The Washington Post, ultimately answered a narrow list of questions regarding their conversations with Libby. One Fitzgerald backer called it "elegant thinking that I would expect from him." But some journalists worried that a secret source brave enough to expose wrongdoing could now be pressured by prosecutors to reveal his cooperation with reporters.

Even more troubling to many press analysts is Fitzgerald's effort to review the telephone records of Miller and fellow Times reporter Philip Shenon in another case. The prosecutor wants to know how the Times learned of the impending search of two Islamic charities then under investigation by Fitzgerald's office. The Times called the charities for comment, allegedly alerting them to the raid, Fitzgerald says.

In a recent court hearing, Fitzgerald told U.S. District Judge Robert W. Sweet that he is sensitive to First Amendment concerns. He said the reporters are not his targets: "We want to find out who leaked national security information."

Times attorney Floyd Abrams countered, "If we start down the road of permitting a federal prosecutor to obtain secret information without which journalists cannot function, the world will change for the worse because confidential sources will no longer be available."

The Chicago Tribune, which has cheered Fitzgerald's crime-fighting energy, published a Jan. 23 editorial titled "Mr. Fitzgerald, Back Off." It called his pursuit of the reporters "a direct affront" to the First Amendment rights of the free press.

Of the prosecutor's assertions of sensitivity, the paper scoffed, "That's rubbish."

Playing Hardball

"Do I have zeal? Yes. I don't pretend I don't," Fitzgerald says. "As a prosecutor, you have two roles: Show judgment as to what to go after and how to go after it. But also, once you do that, to be zealous. And if you're not zealous, you shouldn't have the job. Now sometimes 'zealous' becomes a code word for overzealous and I don't want to be overzealous. I hope I'm not."

Media advocacy circles are not the only places where Fitzgerald's enthusiasm has been noted with alarm. In an unusually bitter fight that surfaced in late January, Fitzgerald drew angry criticism from a Chicago federal judge who said one of Fitzgerald's attorneys improperly delivered secret grand jury material to a private attorney in a civil case.

U.S. District Judge James F. Holderman demanded an investigation of Fitzgerald and several prosecutors. Fitzgerald blazed back, charging in an unusually pointed brief that the judge had "displayed a disturbing lack of objectivity." He accused him of "petty harassment" of prosecutors and asked an appeals court to remove the judge from the case because of a conflict of interest involving his wife.

The question of zeal surfaced yet more prominently in two Chicago terrorism cases -- investigations into the Global Relief and Benevolence International foundations, which inspired a less than flattering analysis by the 9/11 commission staff.

The staff report last year said the federal government's treatment of the two charities raised "substantial civil liberty concerns" and revealed a critical difference between asserting "links" to terrorists and proving concrete support. In the case, Fitzgerald again had the backing of Ashcroft, who jetted to Chicago in October 2002 with a media contingent in tow and vowed to halt "the source of terrorist blood money."

But the trial judge and the 9/11 commission staff concluded that Fitzgerald failed to prove that Enaam Arnaout, the Benevolence executive director, had provided financial support to al Qaeda, as the indictment had alleged. A federal judge, referring to the prosecution's evidence, said the defendant appeared primarily a victim of guilt by association.

On the day the trial was to begin, Arnaout pleaded guilty to a fraud charge. Judge Suzanne Conlon made clear in ordering Arnaout to prison for 11 years that he had not been convicted of a terrorism crime.

Fitzgerald said in the interview that he is not disappointed by the plea bargain that ended the case, only by what he considers Arnaout's later failure to tell what he knows. Of Conlon, he said, "She thought we hadn't connected the dots. I thought we had."

"When you're a pitcher, you throw the ball over the plate and if you think you threw a strike and the umpire says it's a ball, it doesn't matter how much you think it's a strike. You put your case on. You don't walk into court out of fear that when you do it, either a judge will disagree with some of what you say or a defense attorney will call you overzealous."

Intelligence Officers: Can We Trust Our President?
by susanhu
Sat Jul 16th, 2005 at 10:03:47 AM EDT

Longtime intelligence colleagues have joined to ask the ultimate question: Can the intelligence community trust our president?

The longtime colleagues -- Brent Cavan, Jim Marcinkowski, Larry Johnson, and Jane Doe -- "presented the following statement at a hearing on Capitol Hill in October 2003."

Writes Larry Johnson, a former C.I.A. and U.S. State Dept. intelligence analyst -- this morning at his blog No Quarter -- "In light of the latest White House sanctioned assault on Valerie Plame and her character, our testimony remains relevant and accurate."

[My note: As I read this, I feel the deep caring and passion that these four have for each other and Valerie Wilson. I also feel the deep anger -- grief, really -- that they have experienced since this mess broke out in 2003, without abatement because the White House refuses to stand by its word, or even stand at all for anything resembling integrity and the protection of its key intelligence employes.

Look at these words. LOOK AT THEM: ""In light of the latest White House-sanctioned assault on Valerie Plame and her character ..." My god. The president's head, were he capable of shame, would hang down. He would purge the White House of all involved. Not just Karl Rove but the rest of the traitors.

While I'm glad, like the rest of you, that the president's poll numbers are going down, down, down, where in the "expletive deleted" were these people when the rest of us saw that this man is an immature, ignorant, wholly unqualified SOCIOPATH?

And while we -- and fine C.I.A. officers such as these speaking up again today -- rail against the administration, the swarmy Victoria Tensings of the world brag about their ability to write tight statutes, ignoring the plain, simply cruel acts.]

"All of us were undercover," Johnson reports. More below:

Brent Cavan and Larry Johnson worked as analysts in the Directorate of Intelligence. Jim Marcinkowski and Jane Doe were case officers and served overseas. Jane Doe's real name is not being used because she was involved in counter terrorism operations and could be at risk if her identity were divulged.
We've got each other's back. ...

The undercover group's 2003 statement continues:

We slogged through the same swamps on patrols, passed clandestine messages to each other, survived a simulated terrorist kidnapping and interrogation, kicked pallets from cargo planes, completed parachute jumps, and literally helped picked ticks off each other after weeks in the woods at a CIA training facility.
We knew each other’s secrets. We shared our fears, failures, and successes.

We came to rely on each other in a way you do not find in normal civilian life. We understood that a slip of the tongue could end in death for those close to us or for people we didn’t even know.

We were trained by the best, to be the best. We were trained by the Central Intelligence Agency.

They may not appreciate what they have created.

Our joint training experience forged a bond of trust and a sense of duty that continues some eighteen years later.

It is because of this bond of trust that the authors of this piece and two other colleagues, all former intelligence officers, appeared on ABC’s Nightline to speakout on behalf of the wife Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a sensitive undercover operative outted by columnist Robert Novak.

The Ambassador’s wife (we decline to use her name) is a friend who went through the same training with us. We acknowledge our obligation to protect each other and the intelligence community and the information we used to do our jobs.

We are speaking out because someone in the Bush Administration seemingly does not understand this, although they signed the same oaths of allegiance and confidentiality that we did.

Many of us have moved on into the private sector, where this Agency aspect of our lives means little, but we have not forgotten our initial oaths to support the Constitution, our government, and to protect the secrets we learned and to protect each other.

We still have friends who serve. We protect them literally by keeping our mouths shut unless we are speaking amongst ourselves. We understand what this bond or the lack of it means.

Clearly some in the Bush Administration do not understand the requirement to protect and shield national security assets.

Based on published information we can only conclude that partisan politics by people in the Bush Administration overrode the moral and legal obligations to protect clandestine officers and security assets.

Beyond supporting Mrs. Wilson with our moral support and prayers we want to send a clear message to the political operatives responsible for this. You are a traitor and you are our enemy.

You should lose your job and probably should go to jail for blowing the cover of a clandestine intelligence officer.

You have set a sickening precedent. You have warned all U.S. intelligence officers that you may be compromised if you are providing information the White House does not like.

A precedent, as one colleague pointed out during our brief appearances, allows you to build out a case based on previous legal actions and court decisions. It’s a slippery slope if it lowers the bar.

Ambassador Wilson’s political affiliations are irrelevant. Political differences serve as the basis for the give and take of representative government.

What is relevant is the damage caused by the exposure that Ambassador Wilson’s wife as a political act intended to undermine Wilson’s view.

It is shameful on one level that the White House uses the news media, its own leaks, and junior Congressmen from Georgia, among others, to levy attacks on Ambassador Wilson.

Moreover they discount what he has to say, his value in the Niger investigation, and suggest his wife’s cover is of little value because she was “a low-level CIA employee”.

If Wilson’s comments or analysis have no merit, why does the White House feel the need to launch such a coordinated attack? Why drag his wife into it?

Not only have the Bush Administration leakers damaged the career of our friend but they have put many other people potentially in harm’s way. If left unpunished this outing has lowered the bar for official behavior.

Further, who in their right mind would ever agree to become a spy for the United States? If we won’t protect our own officers how can we reassure foreigners that we will safeguard them?

Better human intelligence could prevent any number of terror incidents in the future, but we are unlikely to get foreign recruits to supply it if their safety cannot be somewhat assured.

If more cases like Mrs. Wilson’s occur, assurances of CIA protection will mean nothing to potential spies.

Politicians must not politicize the intelligence community. President Bush has been a decisive leader in the war on terrorism, at least initially.

What about decisiveness now? Where is the accountability he promised us in the wake of Clinton Administration scandals? We find it hard to believe the President lacks the wherewithal to get to bottom of this travesty.

It is up to the President to restore the bonds of trust with the intelligence community that have been shattered by this tawdry incident.

We joined the CIA to fight against foreign tyrants who used the threat of incarceration, torture, and murder to achieve their ends. They followed the rule of force, not the rule of law.

We now find ourselves with an administration in the United States where some of its members have chosen to act like foreign tyrants.

As loyal Americans and registered Republicans we implore President Bush to move quickly and decisively against those who, if not apprehended, will leave his Administration with the legacy of being the first to allow political operatives to out clandestine officers.

Posted by Larry Johnson at No Quarter.

Did anyone read the New York Times piece where they are trying to put the memo on the state department as Colin Powell was seen walking around with it on air force one.

Dirty Dirty Shame when you GeorgeW.Bush turn on a friend!

Hey Snuff, just thought you'd want to know that this link isn't working.