This appeared yesteday on opinionjournal.com, an online editorial newsletter sponsored by the WSJ. it's a useful compilation of what's known and unknown at this point: -- The Plame Facts "At CIA Director George J. Tenet's request, the Justice Department is looking into an allegation that administration officials leaked the name of an undercover CIA officer to a journalist," yesterday's Washington Post reported. "The operative's identity was published in July after her husband, former U.S. ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, publicly challenged President Bush's claim that Iraq had tried to buy 'yellowcake' uranium ore from Africa for possible use in nuclear weapons." We've been keeping an eye on this story since July, when it first surfaced in the left-wing press. But we haven't commented on it, because we haven't been sure what to make of it. We're still not sure what to make of it, since we've heard only part of one side of the story; the administration has not made any substantive comments, and what we've heard from its accusers has been far from complete. But now that the story is getting attention outside the fever swamps, we thought we'd review what is and isn't known so far. At issue is the following passage in syndicated columnist Robert Novak's July 14 column: Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. "I will not answer any question about my wife," Wilson told me. Two days later, The Nation's David Corn published a column that laid out the allegation at the heart of the Post story: The sources for Novak's assertion about Wilson's wife appear to be "two senior administration officials." If so, a pair of top Bush officials told a reporter the name of a CIA operative who apparently has worked under what's known as "nonofficial cover" and who has had the dicey and difficult mission of tracking parties trying to buy or sell weapons of mass destruction or WMD material. . . . This is not only a possible breach of national security; it is a potential violation of law. Under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, it is a crime for anyone who has access to classified information to disclose intentionally information identifying a covert agent. A couple of caveats are in order here. First, it remains unconfirmed that Plame was in fact working covertly for the CIA. Novak described her as a CIA "operative," but not an undercover operative. Wilson and the CIA both imply that she was an undercover operative, but they employ various circumlocutions to avoid actually saying so. Thus Corn: Without acknowledging whether she is a deep-cover CIA employee, Wilson says, "Naming her this way would have compromised every operation, every relationship, every network with which she had been associated in her entire career. The Post, likewise, says "the CIA has declined to confirm whether she was undercover." In addition, no one in a position to know has publicly fingered the alleged leakers. Wilson himself has said he would like "to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs," and various anti-Bush conspiracy theorists have latched on to the Rove theory. But this seems to be pure speculation, and possibly wishful thinking. Bush-haters, after all, would love to be rid of Rove, a great political asset to the White House. The Post's main source narrows the field somewhat: A senior administration official said that before Novak's column ran, two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists and disclosed the identity and occupation of Wilson's wife. . . . The official would not name the leakers for the record and would not name the journalists. The official said there was no indication that Bush knew about the calls. One question that arises is how the Post's source knew that the alleged leakers were "top White House offiicials"--a category that is more specific than Novak's description of "senior administration officials." It's possible is that the Post's source is someone at the CIA who had knowledge of journalists' inquires to the agency about the leaks. Perhaps one or more of the journalists used the more specific description. But the Post account suggests that the source has even more specific knowledge. "The official would not name the leakers for the record," (emphasis ours), the paper says, implying that he did name them off the record. How would he know? Did one of the reporters betray his sources? Then there's this, also from the Post account: When Novak told a CIA spokesman he was going to write a column about Wilson's wife, the spokesman urged him not to print her name "for security reasons," according to one CIA official. . . . Novak said in an interview [Saturday] night that the request came at the end of a conversation about Wilson's trip to Niger and his wife's role in it. "They said it's doubtful she'll ever again have a foreign assignment," he said. "They said if her name was printed, it might be difficult if she was traveling abroad, and they said they would prefer I didn't use her name. It was a very weak request. If it was put on a stronger basis, I would have considered it." If the revelation of Plame's name was such a serious breach of national security, why didn't the CIA make a stronger pitch to Novak to withhold it? Indeed, as blogger Donald Luskin asks, why did the CIA answer Novak's questions at all? Instead of saying "Valerie who? We've never heard of anyone named Valerie" or simply that "We don't answer media inquiries about CIA personnel"--the CIA itself confirmed [her identity], and in so doing the CIA itself leaked it. Then there's the question of motive. Why would Novak's administration sources blow Plame's cover, assuming indeed that they did so? Wilson told Corn the revelation "is intended to intimidate others who might come forward." But this doesn't make sense. An ordinary reader of Novak's column had no way of grasping the purported significance of the revelation. Novak didn't make explicit that he was blowing Plame's cover; what he reported seemed to be more an accusation of nepotism. (Not a very convincing accusation, we might add, since Wilson was not paid for his sojourn to Niger, which is not exactly one of the world's leading vacation spots.) In order for the revelation to have the kind of deterrent value Wilson claims, it would have to be clear to an outsider that Novak had reported something truly damaging--and that couldn't happen without the leakers themselves being incriminated. And in any case, how many administration critics are married to CIA covert operatives? The Post's source's theory is that "it was meant purely and simply for revenge" against Wilson. Human nature being what it is, one can't rule out such ignoble motives. But as a political matter, taking such action would have been, as the Post's source puts it, "a huge miscalculation." What could have been in it for the administration, or for the leakers? Why risk creating the Bush White House's first-ever scandal over the yellowcake kerfuffle, an issue that no one cared about outside the Beltway and the Bush-hating left? It doesn't sound like something Karl Rove would do.
This is worth repeating, if people didn't look throught the entire post from pgabriel: CIA lawyers sent the Justice Department an informal notice of the alleged leak in July, two senior officials told NBC News on Monday. Although that letter, which was not signed by CIA Director George Tenet, was not a formal request for an investigation, the Justice Department could have opened one at that point, lawyers said. It remained unclear whether it did so. CIA lawyers followed up the notification this month by answering 11 questions from the Justice Department, affirming that the woman’s identity was classified, that whoever released it was not authorized to do so and that the news media would not have been able to guess her identity without the leak, the senior officials said. The CIA response to the questions, which is itself classified, said there were grounds for a criminal investigation, the sources said.
I'm OK with this until the end when the interpretations start to be made. The leak wasn't meant for "ordinary readers," it was meant for those in the CIA who were or might be talking to the press about the skewed interpretation the administration put on the intelligence findings. Anyone in that community would immediately grasp the importance. It had the added bonus of affecting Wilson and his wife, preventing them from possibly traveling overseas, compromising a life's work, etc. It does sound like something Rove would do, as previous stories support (and I'm sure more will come out soon) and if you believe Wilson's reasoning of intimidating future leakers, it does make sense and you can see why the WH (Rove) would do it. I'm off to the field for a few days... back late Friday.
From the white house counsel's office. PLEASE READ: Important Message From Counsel's Office We were informed last evening by the Department of Justice that it has opened an investigation into possible unauthorized disclosures concerning the identity of an undercover CIA employee. The department advised us that it will be sending a letter today instructing us to preserve all materials that might be relevant to its investigation. Its letter will provide more specific instructions on the materials in which it is interested, and we will communicate those instructions directly to you. In the meantime, you must preserve all materials that might in any way be related to the department's investigation. Any questions concerning this request should be directed to Associate Counsels Ted Ullyot or Raul Yanes in the counsel to the president's office. The president has directed full cooperation with this investigation. Well, the White House believes she's undercover. Now tell me, who fabricated this controversy again?
Here is the "infamous" Robert Novak column from 7/14/03, courtesy of townhall.com: Mission to Niger Robert Novak July 14, 2003 WASHINGTON -- The CIA's decision to send retired diplomat Joseph C. Wilson to Africa in February 2002 to investigate possible Iraqi purchases of uranium was made routinely at a low level without Director George Tenet's knowledge. Remarkably, this produced a political firestorm that has not yet subsided. Wilson's report that an Iraqi purchase of uranium yellowcake from Niger was highly unlikely was regarded by the CIA as less than definitive, and it is doubtful Tenet ever saw it. Certainly, President Bush did not, prior to his 2003 State of the Union address, when he attributed reports of attempted uranium purchases to the British government. That the British relied on forged documents made Wilson's mission, nearly a year earlier, the basis of furious Democratic accusations of burying intelligence though the report was forgotten by the time the president spoke. Reluctance at the White House to admit a mistake has led Democrats ever closer to saying the president lied the country into war. Even after a belated admission of error last Monday, finger-pointing between Bush administration agencies continued. Messages between Washington and the presidential entourage traveling in Africa hashed over the mission to Niger. Wilson's mission was created after an early 2002 report by the Italian intelligence service about attempted uranium purchases from Niger, derived from forged documents prepared by what the CIA calls a "con man." This misinformation, peddled by Italian journalists, spread through the U.S. government. The White House, State Department and Pentagon, and not just Vice President Dick Cheney, asked the CIA to look into it. That's where Joe Wilson came in. His first public notice had come in 1991 after 15 years as a Foreign Service officer when, as U.S. charge in Baghdad, he risked his life to shelter in the embassy some 800 Americans from Saddam Hussein's wrath. My partner Rowland Evans reported from the Iraqi capital in our column that Wilson showed "the stuff of heroism." President George H.W. Bush the next year named him ambassador to Gabon, and President Bill Clinton put him in charge of African affairs at the National Security Council until his retirement in 1998. Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. "I will not answer any question about my wife," Wilson told me. After eight days in the Niger capital of Niamey (where he once served), Wilson made an oral report in Langley that an Iraqi uranium purchase was "highly unlikely," though he also mentioned in passing that a 1988 Iraqi delegation tried to establish commercial contacts. CIA officials did not regard Wilson's intelligence as definitive, being based primarily on what the Niger officials told him and probably would have claimed under any circumstances. The CIA report of Wilson's briefing remains classified. All this was forgotten until reporter Walter Pincus revealed in the Washington Post June 12 that an unnamed retired diplomat had given the CIA a negative report. Not until Wilson went public on July 6, however, did his finding ignite the firestorm. During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Wilson had taken a measured public position -- viewing weapons of mass destruction as a danger but considering military action as a last resort. He has seemed much more critical of the administration since revealing his role in Niger. In the Washington Post July 6, he talked about the Bush team "misrepresenting the facts," asking: "What else are they lying about?" After the White House admitted error, Wilson declined all television and radio interviews. "The story was never me," he told me, "it was always the statement in (Bush's) speech." The story, actually, is whether the administration deliberately ignored Wilson's advice, and that requires scrutinizing the CIA summary of what their envoy reported. The Agency never before has declassified that kind of information, but the White House would like it to do just that now -- in its and in the public's interest. ©2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Well, the White House believes she's undercover. Now tell me, who fabricated this controversy again? All the smart conservatives clearly know that she wasn't undercover, so perhaps the White House is full of stupid liberals?
Wilson was on NPR yesterday. He said that the amount of people who knew about his wife was very limited. He said there were those in the CIA, and around twelve in the whitehouse. Basically this could be like one of those clever English whodunnits. We have 12 suspects. Now if we could get them all to a country estate with a nosy inspector this whole ordeal would be solved by the end of a weekend.
According to the Guardian newspaper, (isn't it nice they are thinking of having a US edition?) reporters have claimed, of the record, it was Rove, but they won't reveal their sources in order to not blow their reputation. So I guess this is where the Rove reports are coming from. It should be interesting to see if Ashcroft and Bush can tough it out. link
Media Groups Concerned by Probe of Leak By JONATHAN D. SALANT, Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON - Media organizations prepared Tuesday to oppose any efforts by the Justice Department to subpoena journalists and their notes to learn who leaked the identity of an undercover CIA agent to columnist Robert Novak. Subpoenas could be challenged on the basis of First Amendment guarantees of freedom of the press, said Bill Felber, editor of The Manhattan (Kan.) Mercury and freedom of information chairman for the Associated Press Managing Editors. But they could also be challenged, he said, if they were too broad or if the information could be obtained in other ways. "It would be fought on several grounds," Felber said. "The question really comes down to whether there are other ways to do this that do less damage to the idea of the First Amendment." robert novak must be freakin'! http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...=/ap/20030930/ap_on_go_pr_wh/cia_leak_media_1
oh hell..the rest of the story.... NBC News, whose reporter Andrea Mitchell said she had an off-the-record conversation with a Bush administration official after Novak's column was published, "doesn't disclose sources and would fight any attempt to compel us to do so," spokeswoman Barbara Levin said. Journalists have been given a limited constitutional privilege against being forced to testify or give up their notes and sources. The Supreme Court in 1972 first agreed that such a right could exist, and several U.S. Courts of Appeals have since ruled that journalists should be the last source of information rather than the first source in legal cases. "We will be mindful of the preferred position of the First Amendment and the importance of a vigorous press," the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said in 1981. First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams said the law requires the Justice Department to try to find the information without going to the reporters who wrote about it. "They certainly cannot call them first," Abrams said. "In fact, the law requires that they call them last, if at all." What worries journalists is that any attempt to ask them to give up their notes and sources could dissuade future whistle-blowers from coming forward, said APME President Ed Jones, editor of The Free Lance-Star of Fredericksburg, Va. "The record is clear that leaks certainly are messy as seen by government administrators, but the track record of those leaks producing very important public information is extensive," Jones said. "It would be unfortunate if there's a chilling effect. And I think there would be a chilling effect. Anonymity, confidentiality would be compromised." It may also hinder reporting, said Gary Hill, director of investigations for KSTP-TV in Minneapolis and chairman of the Society of Professional Journalists ethics committee. "I know it sends a chill through everything every time there's a subpoena of a journalist's phone record," Hill said. "It makes you second-guess every conversation you have with people. We count on so much of what we do to be confidential and the people who tell us things count on that." At issue are the identities of the sources who told Novak the name of a CIA operative, possibly to punish the operative's husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, for challenging Bush administration claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Novak declined to comment Tuesday. Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said the Justice Department's track record shows that it will not hesitate to question the press. For example, she said, the department subpoenaed the phone records of Associated Press reporter John Solomon to find out who leaked information about an FBI wiretap involving then-Sen. Robert Torricelli, D-N.J. "The law requires them to exhaust all alternatives before they go after the journalists," Dalglish said. "But that's not the way this Justice Department operates. I'm expecting them to try to figure out who these sources are by going after the journalists." Despite the investigation, it's unlikely that the Bush administration will ever discover the source of the leaks, Abrams said. "Leak investigations themselves invariably fail," Abrams said. "Sources rarely come forward to acknowledge that they provided information and journalists never do."
Was just thinkin'... ...maybe the Patriot Act will help the FBI and Justice department in their probe.
I'm glad that Novak is clearing this up. As I said before, it is much ado about nothing and shows how desperate the Dems are. Robert Novak The CIA leak -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: October 1, 2003 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc. WASHINGTON – I had thought I never again would write about retired diplomat Joseph Wilson's CIA-employee wife, but feel constrained to do so now that repercussions of my July 14 column have reached the front pages of major newspapers and led off network news broadcasts. My role and the role of the Bush White House have been distorted and need explanation. The leak now under Justice Department investigation is described by former Ambassador Wilson and critics of President Bush's Iraq policy as a reprehensible effort to silence them. To protect my own integrity and credibility, I would like to stress three points. First, I did not receive a planned leak. Second, the CIA never warned me that the disclosure of Wilson's wife working at the agency would endanger her or anybody else. Third, it was not much of a secret. The current Justice investigation stems from a routine, mandated probe of all CIA leaks, but follows weeks of agitation. Wilson, after telling me in July that he would say nothing about his wife, has made investigation of the leak his life's work – aided by the relentless Sen. Charles Schumer of New York. These efforts cannot be separated from the massive political assault on President Bush. This story began July 6 when Wilson went public and identified himself as the retired diplomat who had reported negatively to the CIA in 2002 on alleged Iraq efforts to buy uranium yellowcake from Niger. I was curious why a high-ranking official in President Bill Clinton's National Security Council was given this assignment. Wilson had become a vocal opponent of President Bush's policies in Iraq after contributing to Al Gore in the last election cycle and John Kerry in this one. During a long conversation with a senior administration official, I asked why Wilson was assigned the mission to Niger. He said Wilson had been sent by the CIA's counterproliferation section at the suggestion of one of its employees, his wife. It was an offhand revelation from this official, who is no partisan gunslinger. When I called another official for confirmation, he said: "Oh, you know about it." The published report that somebody in the White House failed to plant this story with six reporters and finally found me as a willing pawn is simply untrue. At the CIA, the official designated to talk to me denied that Wilson's wife had inspired his selection, but said she was delegated to request his help. He asked me not to use her name, saying she probably never again will be given a foreign assignment but that exposure of her name might cause "difficulties" if she travels abroad. He never suggested to me that Wilson's wife or anybody else would be endangered. If he had, I would not have used her name. I used it in the sixth paragraph of my column because it looked like the missing explanation of an otherwise incredible choice by the CIA for its mission. How big a secret was it? It was well known around Washington that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA. Republican activist Clifford May wrote Monday, in National Review Online, that he had been told of her identity by a non-government source before my column appeared and that it was common knowledge. Her name, Valerie Plame, was no secret either, appearing in Wilson's "Who's Who in America" entry. A big question is her duties at Langley. I regret that I referred to her in my column as an "operative," a word I have lavished on hack politicians for more than 40 years. While the CIA refuses to publicly define her status, the official contact says she is "covered" – working under the guise of another agency. However, an unofficial source at the Agency says she has been an analyst, not in covert operations. The Justice Department investigation was not requested by CIA Director George Tenet. Any leak of classified information is routinely passed by the Agency to Justice, averaging one a week. This investigative request was made in July shortly after the column was published. Reported only last weekend, the request ignited anti-Bush furor. http://wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=34867
Then why were six other journalist contacted by two different “senior Whitehouse officials? Then why did they say not to use her name? Especially her working (maiden) name? Irrelevant! By federal law, you do not disclose the name of agents. Doesn't cut it Novak...
Interesting you made that jump in advance of any facts to the contrary. Novak isn't clearing ANYTHING up. Since the story broke, there have been calls for his imprisonment. Of course he's going to change his story. He's saving his a$$! But Novak's new spin is irrelevent now -- there are six other journalists with the exact same information, and they're not changing their stories. Perhaps Novak, a long-time Republican, is smarting from an inadvertant exposure of a senior Bush official.
Interesting article by David Corn, who first pushed this issue. ********** Big Trouble For Bush 09/29/2003 @ 9:37pm E-mail this Post Scott McClellan, White House press secretary, falsely accused me of rigging the truth. But before we get to that, the news of the day: the Bush administration is responding ridiculously to reports that the CIA has asked the Justice Department to investigate whether White House officials revealed the identity of an undercover CIA officer to punish or discredit an administration critic. Regular readers of this column will remember that back in July conservative columnist Bob Novak wrote a piece in which he reported that two "senior administration officials" had told him that the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson (who had publicly challenged the White House's claim that Iraq had been shopping for uranium in Niger), was employed by the CIA and worked on counter-proliferation matters. Novak printed her name. The leakers apparently were trying to suggest that Wilson--who had been sent by the CIA to check out the Niger allegations and who concluded that there was nothing to them--had not been chosen for the job on merit. Wilson said that he considered the leak--which blew his wife's cover and perhaps undermined national security--was a message from the White House to others who might speak out against it: don't cross us, or we'll come after you and your family. To brag a bit, I was the first journalist to report that the Novak leak was evidence of a possible White House crime. Under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, it is a felony for an official who possesses classified information to reveal the identity of a covert officer. The punishment is up to ten years imprisonment and/or a fine of up to $50,000. (This law was championed by George H.W. Bush, former CIA director and father of W.) This past weekend, MSNBC.com revealed that the CIA has requested that the Justice Department investigate the anti-Wilson leak. And The Washington Post, citing an unnamed senior administration official, reported that "two top White House officials" had called at least six Washington journalists in an effort to disclose the identity and secret occupation of Wilson's wife. That makes it seem as if there was a White House campaign targeting the Wilsons. (Wilson, by the way, is a winner of the new Ron Ridenhour Award, which is given in honor of the My Lai whistleblower and journalist.) This is trouble for the White House. And that was evident today at McClellan's daily briefing for reporters. He was repeatedly asked what Bush intended to do to get to the bottom of this ugly episode. In essence, McClellan's answer was, nothing. Over and over, McClellan said the Justice Department, not the White House, was the "appropriate agency" to investigate. And he said that anyone with information on this matter should contact the Justice Department--not the president. But shouldn't the president be taking steps on his own? the reporters wondered. Every time that query was placed in front of McClellan, he batted it away with a stock reply, noting that the White House had no information beyond the media reports--which were based on anonymous sources--to "suggest White House involvement" in the Wilson leak. "Are we supposed to chase down every anonymous report in the newspaper?" McClellan asked. And several times, he challenged his inquisitors, "Do you have any specific information to bring to my attention suggesting White House involvement?" This was a ruse. McClellan was claiming that the White House was not obligated to conduct an inquiry in response to allegations predicated on anonymous sources. But the CIA's request for an investigation indicated these allegations are serious and not merely the routine spin often attributed to anonymous sources in the media. After all, the anonymous quotes that appear in the papers each day rarely charge the White House with criminal behavior that possibly harmed national security. Isn't Bush--who promised to restore honesty and integrity to the White House--curious about whether his aides might have engaged in illegal and underhanded conduct? McClellan maintained that Bush takes the matter seriously. Just not seriously enough to order any action, such as questioning top White House aides. McClellan did assert that the White House had determined that Bush uber-adviser Karl Rove, was not a party to the Wilson leak. But he declined to say how that had been learned or when he had spoken to Rove about this. McClellan further defended Rove by saying, "I've known Karl for a long time, and I didn't even need to go ask Karl because I know the kind of person that he is, and he is someone that is committed to the highest standards of conduct." ("Have you read any book about him lately?" one reporter replied, and McClellan did not take the bait.) When McClellan was asked if Bush was "convinced that there was no White House involvement" in the Wilson leak, he did not answer. McClellan presented a poor case for why the Bush White House was refusing to look into the allegations, and the journalists got annoyed. Near the end of the briefing--after McClellan once more explained White House inaction by saying, "if there is specific information that you have to bring to our attention, please do so"--a frustrated reporter exclaimed, "You keep pointing the finger at us to step forward with information. I mean, you're asking us to come forward and reveal things, but you haven't asked the White House staff to." This was a weird situation. Here was McClellan telling the press corps that he and the White House had absolutely no information of their own on the Wilson leak, yet several reporters--including Novak--know exactly who called them to pass on the information on Wilson's wife. These reporters, though, can only reveal the truth by ratting out a confidential source. As of yet, none of them have done so. In fact, several White House reporters with whom I spoke--who were not contacted by the leakers--had only guesses as to which White House aides might have orchestrated the Wilson leak. That is, the identity of the leakers has not yet become out-in-the-open scuttlebutt. But there are journalists--NBC's Andrea Mitchell appears to be one--who can say definitively whether the White House was behind the leak. Shortly before McClellan hit the podium, Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer called for a special counsel to handle the investigation. He argued that Attorney General John Ashcroft and his political appointees should not be trusted to oversee a probe of the White House. Asked about a special counsel, McClellan said there was no need, and he asserted the Justice Department could handle it. "Scott," one reporter said, "the statement you gave about why there shouldn't be a special prosecutor was almost word for word what the Clinton people said in 1994 about why there shouldn't be a special prosecutor in Whitewater. Why should it stand now if it didn't stand then?" McClellan answered: "I just reject that comparison." The reporters laughed. Pity McClellan. He has a tough task--to depict the president as caring about the leak even though he is doing nothing about it. The White House could well end up being ensnared in this scandal. The early signs are that there was indeed a plot to get Wilson (and destroy the career of his wife). The news reports indicate that some administration officials--perhaps only one or two--are upset about this and are willing to talk to reporters. If they're willing to talk to reporters, they might be willing to speak to prosecutors. The CIA must be committed to pushing the issue, otherwise it would not have requested an inquiry that places the White House in the crosshairs. Before this, the CIA and the White House had engaged in tense scuffling concerning the uranium-from-Niger controversy. But Tenet's request for an investigation was the bureaucratic equivalent of going nuclear. Now the Justice Department is in the spotlight. Will it go ahead with an investigation that threatens the White House? And will its decisions in this case be regarded as credible and not influenced by politics? Schumer says that he is rounding up more Democrats to join his call for a special counsel. In the meantime, McClellan will have to keep on dancing. Speaking of which. At one point at the press conference, the subject shifted to a letter recently sent to Tenet by the House intelligence committee reporting on the committee's review of the prewar intelligence on Iraq's WMDs and ties to terrorists. The committee found that this intelligence--which Bush has said was a solid basis for going to war--was predicated on fragmentary, circumstantial and out-of-date information and contained "too many uncertainties." McClellan noted, "Let's look at what we knew. We knew, just like the United Nations Security Council and intelligence agencies across the world and previous administrations, that Saddam Hussein...had large, unaccounted for stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons....We knew all these facts. Then came September 11th." Wrong. And since I was there in the White House briefing room, I pointed out this was not the case, noting that Secretary of State Colin Powell had said in early 2001 that there were no stockpiles ("Hussein has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction"), that the Defense Intelligence Agency in September 2002 had concluded there was no "reliable information" on whether Iraq had chemical weapons stockpiles, and that the UN inspectors had not said there were WMD stockpiles. "Where are you getting your information?" I asked. Referring to the Powell statement, McClellan said, "That's not what he said....I think you're mischaracterizing Secretary Powell's comments." But it was what he said in 2001, I countered. McClellan then claimed "it was well documented by the United Nations Security Council that there were undocumented stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons." No, I said, and referred to Rolf Ekeus, the former executive chairman of the UN inspections in the 1990s. In a 2000 interview, Ekeus said, "There are no large quantities of weapons [in Iraq]. I don't think that Iraq is especially eager in the biological and chemical area to produce such weapons for storage. Iraq views those weapons as tactical assets instead of strategic assets, which would require long-term storage of those elements, which is difficult. Rather, Iraq has been aiming to keep the capability to start up production immediately should it need to." McClellan did not counter facts with facts. Instead, he tossed out rhetoric: "America is safer, the world is better, the world is safer because Saddam Hussein and his brutal regime have been removed from power." The facts are closing in on Bush and his crowd. And perhaps the law--that is, if Bush's comrades at the Justice Department are on the level. As Iraq continues to be a $170 billion headache, they have tied themselves to the mast of their prewar misrepresentations. As the Wilson leak threatens to become a primetime scandal, they are yielding no ground and hoping this inconvenience blows past. All in all, a precarious position for Bush. These are messes too severe to be straightened out by McClellan's heavy-handed, ludicrous spin. link
Well we now have the names of two of the six other journalists... ----------------------------------------------------------- Raw Data: Second Notice to White House Employees Wednesday, October 01, 2003 The following notice was sent to all White House employees on Tues., Sept 30, 2003: IMPORTANT FOLLOW-UP MESSAGE FROM COUNSEL'S OFFICE This communication is a follow-up to the directive I sent you this morning regarding the preservation of certain materials in the possession of the White House, its staff, or its employees. Pursuant to a request from the Department of Justice, I am instructing you to preserve and maintain the following: "[F]or the time period February 1, 2002 to the present, all documents, including without limitation all electronic records, telephone records of any kind (including but not limited to any records that memorialize telephone calls having been made), correspondence, computer records, storage devices, notes, memoranda, and diary and calendar entries, that relate in any way to: 1. Former U.S. Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, his trip to Niger in February 2002, and/or his wife's purported relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency; 2. Contacts with any member or representative of the news media about Joseph C. Wilson, his trip to Niger in February 2002, and/or his wife's purported relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency; and 3. Contacts with reporters <b>Knut Royce, Timothy M. Phelps</b>, or Robert D. Novak, or any individual(s) acting directly or indirectly, on behalf of these reporters." You must preserve all documents relating, in any way, directly or indirectly, to these subjects, even if there would be a question whether the document would be a presidential or federal record or even if its destruction might otherwise be permitted. If you have any questions regarding any of the foregoing, please contact Associate Counsels Ted Ullyot or Raul Yanes in the Counsel to the President's Office. Alberto R. Gonzales Counsel to the President http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,98785,00.html
