← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Sertorius
Thread ID: 20755 | Posts: 5 | Started: 2005-10-26
2005-10-26 02:08 | User Profile
[url=http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/10/24/plame/index_np.html]Go to Original[/url]
Plame Games
By Michael Scherer
Salon.com
Monday 24 October 2005
The GOP spin: Smear Wilson (again), belittle the charges. The Dems' spin: Bush and his enforcers lied us into war.
October 12, 2005, 2005.
Washington - Long ago, Washington's political attack dogs resigned themselves to the fact that they have nothing on special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. The man is so squeaky clean that just about the only dirt besmirching his public record concerns long work hours that made him ineligible to adopt a cat. Later this week, the most powerful men and women in the country will sit helplessly on the sidelines as Fitzgerald decides whether to indict White House officials in the case of Valerie Plame, a clandestine CIA agent whose identity was leaked to the press by the Bush administration.
But as soon as Fitzgerald announces his decision, in a press conference, a walk from the grand jury room to the magistrate's office in U.S. District Court, or a posting on his Web site, the political détente will end. The knives will come out. It will be an all-out rhetorical war.
Though still unfinished, the two narratives of attack, one for Democrats and the other for Republicans, have been in the works for weeks. "We have prepared and are preparing for multiple scenarios," said Republican National Committee spokesman Brian Jones, who recently put out a press release calling former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean the leader of the "Merlot Democrats." On Friday, Jones began distributing updated fact sheets on Plame's husband, Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, whose criticism of President Bush's rationale for war sparked the current investigation. "Wilson calls the United States an 'imperial power,'" reads one Republican talking point.
Wilson's character is still fair game for Republicans hoping to deflect attention from the possibility that senior White House advisors, like Karl Rove or I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, may have broken the law. The RNC fact sheet claims, among other things, that Wilson admits to having used drugs in his youth, which is true. The fact sheet also claims that the CIA identity of Wilson's wife was not a secret when it was disclosed to the press, a falsehood belied by the fact that Plame's employer, the CIA, requested the current investigation. But these attacks also reveal a striking irony: Republicans plan to defend themselves by continuing the very same smear campaign that started the Fitzgerald investigation.
On Sunday, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, debuted another spin designed to protect the White House. She downplayed the gravity of a perjury or obstruction of justice charge, two possible outcomes of the current investigation. "Look at Martha Stewart," Hutchison said on NBC's "Meet the Press," invoking the heavily derided perjury case against Stewart, who ended up serving a short stint in jail. "We are seeing grand juries and U.S. attorneys and district attorneys that go for technicalities, sort of a gotcha mentality in this country." A third approach under consideration is to attack Fitzgerald, whom even the president has praised for his "dignified" investigation, for being a detail-oriented stickler. Witness Monday's Wall Street Journal editorial: "The fact that the prosecutor has waited as long as he has - until the last days of the grand jury - suggests that he considers this a less than obvious case," the editorial board writes. "A close call deserves to be a no call."
On the Democratic side, the stakes are just as high and the rhetoric promises to be as fierce. Democrats see this as an opportunity to rub salt in the open wound of the war in Iraq, a point made succinctly Sunday by Howard Dean. "This is not so much about Scooter Libby and Karl Rove," Dean said on ABC's "This Week." "This is about the fact that the president didn't tell us the truth when we went to Iraq."
In this narrative, the leaking of Plame's covert identity and the possibility of resulting indictments are just the latest development in the misguided, if not dishonest, adventure that began in 2002 when White House officials decided they wanted to go to war against Iraq. New York Times columnist Frank Rich explained this story line over the weekend. "We don't yet know whether Lewis (Scooter) Libby or Karl Rove has committed a crime," he wrote, "but the more we learn about their desperate efforts to take down a bit player like Joseph Wilson, the more we learn about the real secret they wanted to protect: the 'why' of the war."
Last week, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, who ran for president in 2004 on a "culture of peace" platform, introduced a resolution that would require the Bush administration to turn over all the documents produced by the White House Iraq Group, a collection of senior White House aides who developed the strategy to sell the war in Iraq.
But Kucinich's proposal, not to mention other legislative strategies being considered by Democrats in the House, has no real chance of moving forward under the Republican leadership. They privately hope that Fitzgerald uncovers what they cannot. "There are a number of folks on the Hill who would like to know more, frankly, about the history of Iraqi intelligence development," said one Democratic staffer who works with the House Armed Services Committee. "I think it's a relevant question to say, Is investigator Fitzgerald the person who has all the answers to this?"
Fitzgerald's questions for Judy Miller, the New York Time reporter who received leaks of Plame's identity, suggest that the prosecutor may, in fact, shed some light on this matter. According to Miller's account, Fitzgerald asked about Dick Cheney's involvement in the leaking of Plame's name, as well as Libby's traditional handling of classified information. Fitzgerald also showed Miller documents she thought she recognized as excerpts from the National Intelligence Estimate of Iraq's weapons capability, a document that may have been classified at the time.
And a report Monday from UPI suggests that Fitzgerald may have already looked into the discredited documents gathered by Italian intelligence that purported to show an Iraqi deal for obtaining uranium.
In some ways, the Fitzgerald investigation has already shed more light on the selling of the war. In one telling exchange from 2003, recounted by Miller, Libby told her that the classified NIE on Iraq "had firmly concluded that Iraq was seeking uranium." As Newsweek's Michael Isikoff pointed out, that was a fiction. "A declassified version of the NIE was publicly released just 10 days later, and it showed precisely the opposite," Isikoff writes, with Mark Hornsball in a Web-only report. "The NIE, it turned out, contained caveats and qualifiers that had never been publicly acknowledged by the administration prior to the invasion of Iraq."
Such disclosures play right into the Democratic spin on the Fitzgerald investigation. As Dean put it this weekend, "I fundamentally don't think these are honest people running the government."
In addition to the Fitzgerald investigation, there is another ongoing inquiry that could further confirm these accounts. For more than a year, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been working on a report to determine whether government officials, including many in the White House, misled Americans about Iraqi weapons intelligence in the run-up to war. The report has been delayed, however, by partisan bickering in a committee that has historically maintained a bipartisan front. Democrats on the committee have accused Republicans of "inexcusable" delays. "We see no sign that this is being brought to a close," said an aide to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the committee's top Democrat.
At present, Democrats and Republicans are squabbling over who will be the final arbiter of exactly which specific administration statements, if any, were misleading, according to a committee staffer. Committee chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., wants the entire committee to vote on each of the more than 400 statements collected by staff, while Democrats would prefer that the committee staff make those determinations. "Our hope was to knock most of this out before we adjourned" for the winter recess, the staffer said.
The renewed focus on the actions of the White House in the marketing of the war is a narrative that many policy wonks and historians hope gains traction. For each fact known about the White House's work with intelligence - such as the fact that Vice President Cheney made repeated visits to the CIA - several unanswered questions remain. "If indictments are handed down it reopens that entire subject," says Joseph Cirincione, the director of nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Some books are hard to shut. And this one is about to pop back open."
Having followed this closely, particularly in the last few days I have a theory on how this will turn out. I believe that when "Neocongate" runs its full course that it will result in the removal of all the people who made up the "White House Iraq Group" and the "Office of Special Plans". I also think that there is a better than 50% chance that Cheney will be gone too, probably due to "ill health". Part of this is based on comments made by Bush complimenting Fitzgerald and the recent remarks made by Brent Scowcroft and Col. Lawrence Wilkerson. It appears to me that the old guard around GHW Bush has been working in the background to grease the skids of these Neocons and may have convinced Dumbya that he owes them nothing. While I don't consider Bush to be intelligent I can't help but to think that at the very least he has to be livid at the Neocons for helping him get into this mess. I can see the old guard pointing this out and explaining the best thing he can do at this point is to let Fitzgerald finish his investigation. When he is done they should be twisting in the wind nicely with the old guard ready to come in and attempt to save what is left of his presidency. I think a minimum of six Indictments will come down thursday, though, I will be optimistic and hope for 16. :biggrin:
2005-10-26 21:28 | User Profile
The Untold Story: Joseph Wilson, Judith Miller and the CIA By Cliff Kincaid | October 24, 2005
But if Miller was too cozy with the White House, why didn't she rush into print with Libby's version of events and use him as an anonymous source?
The savage left-wing attack on Judith Miller from inside and outside of the New York Times completely misses the point. She is under attack for being a lackey of the Bush Administration when she failed to do the administration and the public a big favor. She could have done a potential Pulitzer Prize-winning story that could have broken the Joseph Wilson case wide open. It is a story exposing the Wilson mission to Africa as a CIA operation designed to undermine President Bush.
For 85 days in jail, Miller protected her source, Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, but the fact remains that she never used the explosive information Libby gave her. Now we know, according to Miller's account, that Libby told her about a CIA war with the Bush Administration over Iraq intelligence and that he vociferously complained to her about CIA leaks to the press. But Miller decided that what Libby told her was not newsworthy. Why?
We were critical of Miller from the start because she went to jail rather than testify under oath and tell the truth before a grand jury. Eventually, she did testify, under questionable and mysterious circumstances. She claims she insisted that her testimony be restricted to her conversations with Libby. Clearly, Miller had a relationship with Libby as a source. On that matter, she is "guilty" as charged. But the media attacks on Miller really show her critics do not regard Libby as a source worth protecting. Libby, according to columnist Frank Rich, is a "neocon" who misled the nation to get us into the Iraq War. On the other hand, Wilson is supposed to be a hero and whistleblower. He came back from Africa, after investigating the Iraq-uranium link, and concluded that the Bush Administration was lying. His wife, CIA employee Valerie Plame, had her identity revealed by conservative columnist Robert Novak because Bush officials were upset that her husband had told the truth. At least this is their version of the facts.
But if Miller was too cozy with the White House, why didn't she rush into print with Libby's version of events and use him as an anonymous source? Miller couldn't even be counted on to do a story based on high-level information provided to her by the vice president's top aide. It was information that was not only true but explosive. Libby was letting Miller in on the real story of the Wilson affair―that the CIA was out to get the President, and that the agency was using Wilson to get Bush.
The fact that she didn't write a story has been cited many times, supposedly to prove that Miller should never have been called by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald before the grand jury. If she didn't write a story, we were told, she shouldn't have to be ordered to talk about her sources. Fitzgerald obviously believed the information she had about her sources was relevant to the case. And it was. But Miller didn't write any of this up at the time. That's mighty strange behavior for a pawn of the administration.
In my recent special report on this matter, former prosecutor Joseph diGenova called the Wilson mission a CIA "covert operation" against Bush. Like the Novak column, a Miller story about this matter could have raised questions about the purpose of the trip and who was behind it. But if Miller had done such a story for the Times, the impact could have been enormous. After all, the Times was the chosen vessel for Wilson to write his column claiming there was no Iraq uranium deal with Niger.
Miller could have revealed that Wilson was recommended for the mission by his own wife, a CIA employee. His wife's role was critically important because a truly undercover CIA operative would not recommend her husband for an overseas trip and then expect to maintain her "secret" identity as he proceeded to write an article for the New York Times and become a public spectacle because of it. Her role in the trip means that she was not undercover in any real sense of the word.
As I have noted previously, Herbert Romerstein, a former professional staff member of the House Intelligence Committee, says that Plame's involvement in sending her husband on the CIA mission to Africa meant that when Wilson went public about it, foreign intelligence services would investigate all of his family members for possible CIA connections. Those intelligence services would not simply assume that he went on the mission because he was a former diplomat. They would investigate his wife. And that would inevitably lead to unraveling the facts about Valerie Wilson, or Valerie Plame, and her involvement with the CIA. Romerstein says that Plame's role in arranging the mission for her husband is solid proof that she was not concerned about having her "cover" blown because she was not truly under cover.
By any account, she was hardly a James Bond-type. Plame's "cover," a company called "Brewster-Jennings & Associates," was so flimsy that she used it as her affiliation when she made a 1999 contribution to Al Gore for president. She identified herself as "Valerie Wilson" in this case. The same Federal Election Commission records showing her contribution to Gore also reveal a $372 contribution to America Coming Together, when the group was organizing to defeat Bush.
If Miller had done some extra digging, she would have discovered that, contrary to what Wilson said publicly in the Times, his findings were interpreted by many officials as additional evidence of an Iraqi interest in obtaining uranium. This kind of story, if it had been published in the New York Times, could have completely undermined Wilson's credibility. It would have made it ridiculous for the Times to subsequently demand the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the Bush White House. The Times went ahead and made that editorial demand, only to have it backfire on the paper when Fitzgerald demanded Miller's testimony.
The CIA obviously knew the facts of the case. Nevertheless, with Wilson and the media, led by the Times, generating a feeding frenzy over the publication of his wife's name and affiliation, the agency pushed for a Justice Department investigation, on the false premise that revealing her identity was a crime. This is what started it all. It was the perfect way to divert attention from a much-needed investigation of the CIA, the ultimate source of the questionable intelligence that the administration used to make the case for the Iraq War.
Eventually, some members of the press caught up with some parts of the truth. Susan Schmidt of the Washington Post was honest enough to admit, when the evidence came out, that Wilson had misrepresented his wife's role. Schmidt reported that the Senate Intelligence Committee report found that he was specifically recommended for the mission by his wife, "contrary to what he has said publicly." By then, however, the media feeding frenzy was well underway and the facts of the case were being buried or shunted aside. And this takes us to where we are today―wondering whether Fitzgerald will indict Bush officials for making conflicting statements about the facts of the case. If the investigation was a real desire for truth and justice, Fitzgerald would drop the case and accuse the CIA of pursuing the matter for an illegitimate political reason. It's the CIA―not the White House―that should be under investigation.
If Miller deserves criticism, it is for failing to write the story when Libby handed it to her on a silver platter. She had the perfect opportunity to set the record straight about some misinformation that had already appeared in her own paper. After all, it was Times columnist Nicholas Kristof who had asserted, in a May 6, 2003, column, that "I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger." We now know that Wilson was the source of this information, and that it was false. He whitewashed the nature of the CIA role in the trip because he wanted to protect his wife. Wilson wanted people to think that the Vice President's office was somehow behind his mission.
We also know, because of Miller's account of her testimony under oath, that it was because of this misinformation that Libby talked to Miller and wanted to get out the other side of the story. The Vice President's office, said by the liberal press to be at the center of the CIA leak "conspiracy," was justifiably outraged over Wilson going public with misleading information about his mission and blasting the administration in the process. Miller also testified that she thought Plame's CIA connection "potentially newsworthy." You bet it was. But she didn't write the story. This is where Miller failed her paper and the public.
Consider the record of the Times in this case. Editorially, the Times called for the investigation but didn't want to cooperate with it. The paper also published the misleading Wilson and Kristof columns. And yet Miller, who didn't write anything, is the Times journalist under fire in the press because she wrote stories about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs before the war and later talked to Libby about how the CIA had gotten the facts wrong! Miller has become a target even though it's her colleagues who put the misleading Wilson column into the paper, published Kristof's erroneous account, and called for the probe that resulted in Miller serving jail time.
Miller's WMD stories are said by the hard left to be evidence of her reliance on the Bush Administration for information. In fact, it shows her dependence on the same sources that told the administration that Iraq had WMD. Those sources included CIA director George Tenet, a Clinton holdover, who told Bush that finding WMD in Iraq was a "slam dunk."
We are still left with the mystery of why Miller didn't write anything based on what Libby told her. She says she proposed a story. Miller and/or her editors may have been persuaded to drop it by other sources, who may have been in the CIA. It makes perfect sense. The CIA had been behind the Wilson trip from the beginning and, as Libby told Miller, had been trying to undercut the administration's Iraq policy and divert attention from the agency's poor performance on Iraqi WMD. The CIA did not want the full extent of its role uncovered and decided that the best way to divert attention from its own shabby performance was to accuse Bush officials of violating the law against identifying covert agents. This was one covert operation by the CIA on top of another. Miller watched the whole thing play out and refused to tell her own paper and the public what was really happening.
Miller says that she only talked to the grand jury about her conversations with Libby. She said she wanted to protect other sources she used on other stories. Miller's 2001 book, Germs, on "Biological weapons and America's secret war," has several references to her other sources. Some are unnamed "analysts" at the CIA.
My own recent special report on this matter struck a chord with readers, one of whom said it is a case of "the CIA undermining and eliminating a president." But Bush is still hanging on, dismissing the stream of stories on the case as "background noise." Staying above the fray, when he has come under assault by America's premier intelligence service, Bush is letting CIA director Porter Goss do the necessary job of cleaning house at this corrupt agency.
If some of Bush's aides now go down on dubious charges of having faulty or inconsistent memories about the case, they could try to blow the whistle on the CIA in court. The CIA would most likely try to censor the proceedings on grounds of "national security" and protecting agency "operations." For the sake of maintaining our democratic form of government and reigning in rogue elements at the CIA, the truth must come out. [url]http://www.aim.org/special_report/4118_0_8_0_C/[/url] ======================
The CIA had been behind the Wilson trip from the beginning and, as Libby told Miller, had been trying to undercut the administration's Iraq policy and divert attention from the agency's poor performance on Iraqi WMD. The CIA did not want the full extent of its role uncovered and decided that the best way to divert attention from its own shabby performance was to accuse Bush officials of violating the law against identifying covert agents.
This is the main talking point they are going to build everything around. It is a trick worthy of the Clintons. Accuse someone of the same thing that you have been doing and smear the hell out of the prosecutor.
2005-10-26 23:16 | User Profile
"Rogue elements at the CIA" tend to be, from what little I know of that organization, at the political level, eg high in the structure, and not in the career force.
So, it still boils down to a political witch hunt.
No good news in any of this, just more effed up people doing effed up things and thinking they will get away with it. As to the propaganda campaign being waged, clumsily, by a variety of players in this mess, I can only say . . .
Blah. [quote=Sertorius]From reading, listening and watching the Neocons this is how they intend to blunt this. =======================
The Untold Story: Joseph Wilson, Judith Miller and the CIA By Cliff Kincaid | October 24, 2005 ====================== This is the main talking point they are going to build everything around. It is a trick worthy of the Clintons. Accuse someone of the same thing that you have been doing and smear the hell out of the prosecutor.
==================================
Uh huh.
AE
2005-10-26 23:19 | User Profile
AE,
Who is the witch?
2005-10-28 15:01 | User Profile
Department of Justice QUI PRO DOMINA JUSTITIA SEQUITUR Patrick J. Fitzgerald Chicago Office: Dirksen Federal Building Washington Office: Bond Federal Building Special Counsel 219 South Dearborn Street, Fifth Floor 1400 New York Avenue, Ninth Floor Floor Chicago, Illinois 60604 Washington, DC 20530 Please address all correspondence to the Washington Office
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEFRIDAY OCTOBER 28, 2005 [url]www.usdoj.gov/usao/iln/osc[/url] PRESS CONTACTS: DOJ Public Affairs (202) 514-2007 TDD (202) 514-1888 *MEDIA ADVISORY*
[B]SPECIAL COUNSEL PATRICK J. FITZGERALD TO HOLD PRESS CONFERENCE Washington, D.C. -- U.S. Department of Justice Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald will hold a press conference at 2:00 P.M. EDT today, Friday October 28, 2005, regarding the status of the Special Counsel's criminal investigations.[/B]
WHO: Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald FBI Special Agent-in-Charge John C. Eckenrode
WHAT: Release of public information and press conference
WHERE: Department of Justice 7th Floor Conference Center 950 Constitution Avenue, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20530 NOTE: 7th floor access to reporters at 11 A.M. EDT Cameras allowed access at noon EDT Cameras must pre-set by 1:00 P.M. EDT NO LIVE SHOTS INSIDE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT UNTIL 1:45 P.M. DUE TO SPACE LIMITATIONS NOTE: ALL MEDIA MUST PRESENT GOVERNMENT-ISSUED PHOTO ID (such as driverââ¬â¢s license) as well as VALID MEDIA CREDENTIALS. ONCE MEDIA ARE ESCORTED TO THE 7th FLOOR, THEY MUST REMAIN UNTIL THE CONCLUSION OF THE PRESS CONFERENCE. Press inquiries regarding logistics should be directed to the Department of Justice at (202) 514-2007.
:clap: :caiphas: :holiday: Merry Fitzmas!