"But regardless of the source, the leak compromised the confidential identity of a longtime public servant, which was wrong, and unfair to her and those who worked with her. Whoever did it should come forward and not hide behind journalistic ethics for his or her self-protection." ____________ Wow.
She's a very loyal, longtime aide and friend of the President. He should listen to her. Certainly in this case. Keep D&D Civil!!
It may be, but I'm sick of the exagerations here that the key to our operation was somehow exposed rather than just another bureaucrat in the CIA-- undercover or not. Woo-hoo, she is working on WMDs on the one hand. One the other hand there is great celebrations that we did not and are not finding any WMDs... A little too opportunistic I'd say.
The truth is finally starting to sink in huh giddy! You were duped! You're right! This isn't just about a second hand desk jockey at Langley. Follow the Uranium By FRANK RICH "I am saying that if anyone was involved in that type of activity which I referred to, they would not be working here." - Ron Ziegler, press secretary to Richard Nixon, defending the presidential aide Dwight Chapin on Oct. 18, 1972. Chapin was convicted in April 1974 of perjury in connection with his relationship to the political saboteur Donald Segretti. "Any individual who works here at the White House has the confidence of the president. They wouldn't be working here at the White House if they didn't have the president's confidence." - Scott McClellan, press secretary to George W. Bush, defending Karl Rove on Tuesday. WELL, of course, Karl Rove did it. He may not have violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982, with its high threshold of criminality for outing a covert agent, but there's no doubt he trashed Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame. We know this not only because of Matt Cooper's e-mail, but also because of Mr. Rove's own history. Trashing is in his nature, and bad things happen, usually through under-the-radar whispers, to decent people (and their wives) who get in his way. In the 2000 South Carolina primary, John McCain's wife, Cindy, was rumored to be a drug addict (and Senator McCain was rumored to be mentally unstable). In the 1994 Texas governor's race, Ann Richards found herself rumored to be a lesbian. The implication that Mr. Wilson was a John Kerry-ish girlie man beholden to his wife for his meal ticket is of a thematic piece with previous mud splattered on Rove political adversaries. The difference is that this time Mr. Rove got caught. Even so, we shouldn't get hung up on him - or on most of the other supposed leading figures in this scandal thus far. Not Matt Cooper or Judy Miller or the Wilsons or the bad guy everyone loves to hate, the former CNN star Robert Novak. This scandal is not about them in the end, any more than Watergate was about Dwight Chapin and Donald Segretti or Woodward and Bernstein. It is about the president of the United States. It is about a plot that was hatched at the top of the administration and in which everyone else, Mr. Rove included, are at most secondary players. To see the main plot, you must sweep away the subplots, starting with the Cooper e-mail. It has been brandished as a smoking gun by Bush bashers and as exculpatory evidence by Bush backers (Mr. Rove, you see, was just trying to ensure that Time had its facts straight). But no one knows what this e-mail means unless it's set against the avalanche of other evidence, most of it secret, including what Mr. Rove said in three appearances before the grand jury. Therein lies the rub, or at least whatever case might be made for perjury. Another bogus subplot, long popular on the left, has it that Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, gave Mr. Novak a free pass out of ideological comradeship. But Mr. Fitzgerald, both young (44) and ambitious, has no record of Starr- or Ashcroft-style partisanship (his contempt for the press notwithstanding) or known proclivity for committing career suicide. What's most likely is that Mr. Novak, more of a common coward than the prince of darkness he fashions himself to be, found a way to spill some beans and avoid Judy Miller's fate. That the investigation has dragged on so long anyway is another indication of the expanded reach of the prosecutorial web. Apparently this is finally beginning to dawn on Mr. Bush's fiercest defenders and on Mr. Bush himself. Hence, last week's erection of the stonewall manned by the almost poignantly clownish Mr. McClellan, who abruptly rendered inoperative his previous statements that any suspicions about Mr. Rove are "totally ridiculous." The morning after Mr. McClellan went mano a mano with his tormentors in the White House press room - "We've secretly replaced the White House press corps with actual reporters," observed Jon Stewart - the ardently pro-Bush New York Post ran only five paragraphs of a wire-service story on Page 12. That conspicuous burial of what was front-page news beyond Murdochland speaks loudly about the rising anxiety on the right. Since then, White House surrogates have been desperately babbling talking points attacking Joseph Wilson as a partisan and a liar. These attacks, too, are red herrings. Let me reiterate: This case is not about Joseph Wilson. He is, in Alfred Hitchcock's parlance, a MacGuffin, which, to quote the Oxford English Dictionary, is "a particular event, object, factor, etc., initially presented as being of great significance to the story, but often having little actual importance for the plot as it develops." Mr. Wilson, his mission to Niger to check out Saddam's supposed attempts to secure uranium that might be used in nuclear weapons and even his wife's outing have as much to do with the real story here as Janet Leigh's theft of office cash has to do with the mayhem that ensues at the Bates Motel in "Psycho." This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit - the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes - is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. That's why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative who posed for Vanity Fair. So put aside Mr. Wilson's February 2002 trip to Africa. The plot that matters starts a month later, in March, and its omniscient author is Dick Cheney. It was Mr. Cheney (on CNN) who planted the idea that Saddam was "actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time." The vice president went on to repeat this charge in May on "Meet the Press," in three speeches in August and on "Meet the Press" yet again in September. Along the way the frightening word "uranium" was thrown into the mix. By September the president was bandying about the u-word too at the United Nations and elsewhere, speaking of how Saddam needed only a softball-size helping of uranium to wreak Armageddon on America. But hardly had Mr. Bush done so than, offstage, out of view of us civilian spectators, the whole premise of this propaganda campaign was being challenged by forces with more official weight than Joseph Wilson. In October, the National Intelligence Estimate, distributed to Congress as it deliberated authorizing war, included the State Department's caveat that "claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa," made public in a British dossier, were "highly dubious." A C.I.A. assessment, sent to the White House that month, determined that "the evidence is weak" and "the Africa story is overblown." AS if this weren't enough, a State Department intelligence analyst questioned the legitimacy of some mysterious documents that had surfaced in Italy that fall and were supposed proof of the Iraq-Niger uranium transaction. In fact, they were blatant forgeries. When Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said as much publicly in the days just before "shock and awe," his announcement made none of the three evening newscasts. The administration's apocalyptic uranium rhetoric, sprinkled with mushroom clouds, had been hammered incessantly for more than five months by then - not merely in the State of the Union address - and could not be dislodged. As scenarios go, this one was about as subtle as "Independence Day" and just as unstoppable a crowd-pleaser. Once we were locked into the war, and no W.M.D.'s could be found, the original plot line was dropped with an alacrity that recalled the "Never mind!" with which Gilda Radner's Emily Litella used to end her misinformed Weekend Update commentaries on "Saturday Night Live." The administration began its dog-ate-my-homework cover-up, asserting that the various warning signs about the uranium claims were lost "in the bowels" of the bureaucracy or that it was all the C.I.A.'s fault or that it didn't matter anyway, because there were new, retroactive rationales to justify the war. But the administration knows how guilty it is. That's why it has so quickly trashed any insider who contradicts its story line about how we got to Iraq, starting with the former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill and the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke. Next to White House courtiers of their rank, Mr. Wilson is at most a Rosencrantz or Guildenstern. The brief against the administration's drumbeat for war would be just as damning if he'd never gone to Africa. But by overreacting in panic to his single Op-Ed piece of two years ago, the White House has opened a Pandora's box it can't slam shut. Seasoned audiences of presidential scandal know that there's only one certainty ahead: the timing of a Karl Rove resignation. As always in this genre, the knight takes the fall at exactly that moment when it's essential to protect the king. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/opinion/17rich.html?
Giddyup, did you read the link I provided about Brewster Jennings, and Associates? Did you read what kind of duties Valerie Plame was assigned to? Plame, and the front company were in fact responsible for COVERTLY INVESTIGATING SAUDI ARABIA, and elsewhere in the MIDDLE EAST. Plame was a CIA cover operative who's expertise was WMD. Do you think that because there were no WMD's in Iraq that WMD's are no a longer a threat? Do you honestly believe that a covert operative who's specialty is WMD's, and is part of a top secret front company that has contacts in Saudi Arabia(where most of the AQ hijackers on 9/11 are from) and elsewhere in the middle east is just another bureaucrat? What do you think the nature of our war on terror is? You realize that not just Plame but every single agent and contact that had anything to do with Brewster Jennings and Associates has now been exposed, and we can no longer use that as a front for surveliance in the hotbed of Islamic terrorism. Why are you trivializing that?
i've pretty much bailed on this thread and subject until there's something substantive in the investigation, but posting week-old frank rich articles, the great theater critic and bush basher for the nycrimes, is a new low for you mc josh. frankly, as it were, i expected better...
You don't find the Wall Street Journal articles which show that the part in the official memo discussing Valerie Plame was not only labeled Top Secret but also labeled "Secret, not to share even with foreign service of friendly nations?" importatnt? That doesn't add to the mountain of evidence showing that Plame was definitely undercover at the time all of this happened? In case you missed it here is what John Harwood from the liberal rag the Wall Street Journal had to say about it.
[basso, this is pretty fresh. A new high, perhaps?] Ex-CIA Officers Rip Bush Over Rove Leak http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2005/07/22/national/w122228D72.DTL By DONNA DE LA CRUZ, Associated Press Writer Saturday, July 23, 2005 (07-23) 00:27 PDT WASHINGTON, (AP) -- President Bush is jeopardizing national security by not disciplining Karl Rove for his role in leaking the name of a CIA officer, and has hampered efforts to recruit informants in the war on terror, former U.S. intelligence officers say. Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson used the Democratic Party's weekly radio address Saturday to reiterate comments he made Friday to a panel of House and Senate Democrats. At that event, Johnson and others expressed great frustration that CIA operative Valerie Plame's name was made public. Plame is married to former ambassador Joseph Wilson, a critic of Bush's Iraq policy. "Instead of a president concerned first and foremost with protecting this country and the intelligence officers who serve it, we are confronted with a president who is willing to sit by while political operatives savage the reputations of good Americans like Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson," Johnson said in the radio address. Johnson, who said he was a registered Republican, said Bush has gone back on his promise to fire anyone at the White House implicated in a leak. Federal law forbids government officials from revealing the identity of an undercover intelligence officer. Rove, Bush's deputy chief of staff, told Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper in a 2003 phone call that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA on weapons of mass destruction issues, according to an account by Cooper in the magazine. Rove has not disputed that he told Cooper that Wilson's wife worked for the agency, but has said through his lawyer that he did not mention her by name. In July 2003, Robert Novak, citing unnamed administration officials, identified Plame by name in his syndicated column and wrote that she worked for the CIA. The column has led to a federal criminal investigation into who leaked Plame's undercover identity. New York Times reporter Judith Miller — who never wrote a story about Plame — has been jailed for refusing to testify. Bush said last week, "I think it's best that people wait until the investigation is complete before you jump to conclusions. And I will do so, as well." Dana Perino, a White House spokesman, said Friday that the administration would have no comment on the investigation while it was continuing. Johnson said he wished a Republican lawmaker would have the courage to stand up and "call the ugly dog the ugly dog." "Where are these men and women with any integrity to speak out against this?" he asked. "I expect better behavior out of Republicans."
I don't give a rat's ass about Rove; you can have him. While victorious, he is unsavory. I do object, though, to the assault on Bush based on some casual remarks that he made. It is not back-tracking for him to add that somebody ought to be guilty of a crime before it costs them their job.
So if Rove is not found guilty of a crime, but is shown to have blown the cover of the CIA Agent and ruined the Brewster Jennings connection then all should be fine with him staying on the job and having access to classified information? I would want to work for you. I could do just about anything and never get fired with those standards.
Hey, let's just execute OJ while we're at it? Don't you believe in the rule of law or do you just want your way? If Bush wants to dump him that is his right, but he is under no obligation to do so to please you. Since Rove didn't actually publish the info on Plame, why are these reporters and publishers involved not in your cross-hairs as well? Not political enough?
The press aren't the ones that leaked the information. I'm all for the rule of law. If Rove didn't break a law then he shouldn't go to jail. But blowing the cover of top secret CIA agents who's information is so classified that it shouldn't even be discussed with friendly nation's intel services, is bad enough to be fired, and have your security clearence revoked. If you think it is ok to go around leaking classified information to the press as long as it isn't a crime then that is fine. Like I said, I would love to work for you, it must really hard to lose your job.
Is the reading public not part of the world? If Rove is the culprit he told someone who then chose to publish the information in a widely-read newspaper.... and that decision is not culpable? Maybe the lead started with Rove, but it could have stopped there... if this is indeed such a devastating revelation. "Go(ing) around leaking classified information" -- LOL -- you make it sound like a habit. How many times has it "happened?" Bush can do what he wants to but he generally doesn't respond to the wants of his critics.
The press aren't the ones that have access to the classified information unless it is leaked to them. They may or may not even know when they receive it that it is classified. Bush certainly can do what he wants. That isn't the same thing as doing what he should. It isn't about critics in this case. It is about national security. How many times should it have to happen? This is a serious matter. It isn't like they just forgot to dot an i or cross a t on a document. It has happened at least twice. There is the Plame instance, as well as the time the administration blew an isnider contact with Al-Qaeda by leaking his name to the press.
