Was Karl Rove the source of the Plame leak. . .

Weak.

Thin line between forgetting (once he got called on it) and mental incapacity and flat making stuff up.

 

much like joe wilson's article in the NYTimes that started this whole kerfluffle.

 

Poll: Libby Indictment Hits Major Nerve
By WILL LESTER, Associated Press Writer

Tue Nov 8, 6:52 PM ET

The recent indictment of Vice President Cheney's top aide has struck a nerve with the American public. Four in five, 79 percent, said the indictment of former Cheney aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby on perjury and other charges is important to the nation, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Pew noted that in September 1998, 65 percent said President Clinton's lies under oath were important. Clinton was impeached over his handling of an affair with Monica Lewinsky, but was acquitted by the Senate on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.

Libby was charged with lying to investigators and a grand jury during an investigation of his role in revealing the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame, wife of an outspoken critic of the war against Iraq.

Most Americans, six in 10, say they do not think the news about Libby's indictment has gotten too much coverage.

The concerns about Libby's case come at a time that a growing number of people, 43 percent, now say U.S. and British leaders were mostly lying when they claimed before the Iraq war that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, while an equal number said they were misinformed by bad intelligence.

That's up from 31 percent who felt in February 2004 that the leaders were lying, while 49 percent said they got bad intelligence.

Two-thirds of Democrats say U.S. and British political leaders were lying about weapons of mass destruction and half of independents feel that way. Only one in 10 Republicans said that was the case.

The telephone poll of 1,201 adults was taken Nov. 3-6 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

___

On the Net:

Pew Research Center — http://www.people-press.org

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051108...E8k8tJh24cA;_ylu=X3oDMTA4NGRzMjRtBHNlYwMxNjk5

 

Judy Miller is out at the Times

Times executive editor Bill Keller's memo

To the Staff:

Judy Miller has retired from The New York Times effective today.

In her 28 years at The Times, Judy participated in some great, prize-winning journalism. She displayed fierce determination and personal courage both in pursuit of the news and in resisting assaults on the freedom of news organizations to report. We wish her well in the next phase of her career.

Bill

P.S. Judy asked that I share with you a letter I sent regarding my recent
memo to the staff. It follows, and speaks for itself.

Dear Judy,

I know you've been distressed by the memo I sent to the staff about things I wish I'd done differently in the course of this ordeal. Let me be clear on two points you've raised.

First, you are upset with me that I used the words "entanglement" and "engagement" in reference to your relationship with Scooter Libby. Those words were not intended to suggest an improper relationship. I was referring only to the series of interviews through which you -- and the paper -- became caught up in an epic legal controversy.

Second, you dispute my assertion that "Judy seems to have misled" Phil Taubman when he asked whether you were one of the reporters to whom the White House reached out with the Wilson story. I continue to be troubled by that episode. But you are right that Phil himself does not contend that you misled him; and, of course, I was not a participant in the conversation between you and Phil.

I wish you all the best for the future.

Regards, Bill

http://poynter.org/forum/view_post.asp?id=10616

 

This will be incredibly important when cheney runs for president in 2008.

 

You do know that Cheney's approval rating is in the teens, right?

 

What started it was when somebody leaked Plame's identity. Wilson's article was certainly informative, but in way is evidence about the leaking of his wife's identity.

 

not only are liberals humor challenged, but irony challenegd as well. perhaps ii should use more smilies.

 

When one speech just would do the trick, it is time for a full blown PR campaign. A successful PR campaign to convey that Bush is "honesty and trustworthiness" may alleviate the need for Bush to actually start behaving "honesty and trustworthiness" . You go, George.


White House to 'hit back' at Democrats
Aides plan aggressive response to claims intelligence misused

From Dana Bash
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, November 8, 2005; Posted: 11:55 p.m. EST (04:55 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Top White House officials say they're developing a "campaign-style" strategy in response to increasing Democratic allegations that the Bush administration twisted intelligence to make its case for war.

White House aides, who agreed to speak to CNN only on the condition of anonymity, said they hoped to increase what they called their "hit back" in coming days.

The officials say they plan to repeatedly make the point -- as they did during the 2004 campaign -- that pre-war intelligence was faulty, it was not manipulated and everyone was working off the same intelligence.

They hope to arm GOP officials with more quotes by Democrats making the same pre-war claims as Republicans did about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

Democrats have pointed at declassified information they say shows the White House was "deceptive" in pre-war statements.

Telegraphing the beginning of a communications effort is a tactic the Bush team has used in the past, especially when it comes to Iraq.

The examination into the intelligence used to justify invading Iraq has intensified on the heels of the October 28 indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, who resigned the day he was indicted. (Full story)

Libby has been charged with obstruction of justice, perjury and making false statements to federal agents investigating who revealed the identity of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame. The agent's name was leaked to reporters after her husband publicly challenged a key element of the administration's case for war. (Wolf Blitzer interviews Plame's husband)

White House officials are determined to reverse President Bush's poor poll showings on the topics of Iraq and "honesty and trustworthiness."

The White House has been on the defensive about whether Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove, was involved in publicly identifying Plame. (Poll: Few doubt wrongdoing in CIA leak case)

The White House is trying to coordinate a response from administration officials to congressional Republicans.

Republicans on Capitol Hill who have criticized the White House for failing to coordinate responses to a host of issues say Bush aides are working noticeably harder to set up meetings and conference calls to arrange a widespread response.

Aside from regular White House briefings, it is unclear which administration officials will participate in this "aggressive" response, which senior officials indicate will be unveiled in interviews and other public events.

It also is uncertain how much the president will be involved in the information campaign aside from "responding appropriately when asked," a third senior official said.

One senior official said Cheney would not participate in the White House response, despite that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, has accused the vice president of being a key offender in manipulating intelligence. (Read about Democrats closing the Senate to push the war probe)

 

This column contains good advice for Mr. Bush...


Mulshine: My advice, Mr. President? Fire the leakers

Paul Mulshine, THE STAR LEDGE (NEWARK, N.J.)
Thursday, November 10, 2005

It's been a while since George W. called me to chat, but in case he's reading this column I freely offer the following advice:

Look out the window of the White House, Mr. President. Do you see a bus going by? If so, throw under it any member of your administration who had anything to do with unveiling the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame.

Why? Because it's the right thing to do. Anyone who would give away national secrets to score political points is a traitorous weasel and should be fired immediately.

Oops, I forgot. You're a politician. Forget I mentioned morality. I don't know what got into me. But let's look at the practical aspects of this scandal.

As I have noted before, I was the sole right-wing columnist in America to pay attention to this issue back when it was a Democrat (New Jersey's Bob Torricelli) who was outing CIA operatives. I was an expert in this area back when those clowns at Fox News didn't even know how to spell "CIA."

And my expertise leads me to the following conclusion: You're hosed. I've heard Karl Rove is a brilliant chess player, but in this game he's up against an opponent who's captured his queen and both his rooks. If Patrick Fitzgerald wakes up in a bad mood one morning, by the next evening he could easily get indictments against any of a number of members of your administration, including the vice president.

And if he chose to, he could get those indictments under the law most often cited as central to the case, the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act. The spin doctors are trying to sell the line that Plame did not fit the definition of a "covert agent" under the terms of that act because she had not served outside the country during the five years prior to that July day in 2003 when your boys outed her in a leak to columnist Bob Novak.

However, former CIA agent Larry Johnson told me on the phone the other day that Plame traveled overseas in 2001, 2002 and 2003. "The lawyers at the CIA looked at that and checked into her activities and realized she had served overseas," Johnson said. "She was working as an energy consultant. Consultants travel. Consultants meet with people."

Now that your boys have outed her, Plame could be arrested if she were ever to return to those countries. "She filled out and lied on immigration forms," Johnson said. That in itself could be cause for arrest overseas, never mind the much more serious charge of spying.

Johnson may be wrong here. I don't know. But I do know that he and the other former CIA men who have been most outspoken in Plame's defense are anything but flaming liberals. They were just as mad when Torricelli was giving away CIA secrets.

And speaking of Torricelli, he has been pulling dirty tricks since he tried to fix an election for class president at Rutgers back in 1971, but at least when he outed a CIA operative he had the guts to do so openly. In that 1995 case, then-Congressman Torricelli named the CIA man right on the front page of the New York Times.

Your boys, meanwhile, began a whisper campaign not against the man they were trying to attack, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, but against his wife. When Wilson began questioning your assertions about Saddam Hussein's attempts to buy uranium in Africa, Vice President Dick Cheney requested classified material about Wilson's wife for what seems to have been the sole purpose of orchestrating a political campaign against Wilson. That in itself looks like a violation of the Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement guidelines.

The subsequent campaign by indicted Cheney aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and "Official A" to get this into the newspapers led to the infamous Novak column. Forget the notorious "16 words" in that speech about WMDs. It's Novak's 53 words that will go down in history. They were of negligible value to your side, yet when the folks at the CIA read them, they went nuts over the outing of one of their agents. This led to the naming of a special prosecutor, which led to the current fiasco.

Your defense, Mr. President, which I hereby offer to you unsolicited, is that you had nothing to do with this boondoggle. Your father was CIA director before he was president. If there's one thing Dad impressed on you it was the importance of not blabbing about classified information. You would have pointed this out immediately if Cheney had discussed it with you.

But he didn't, right? If not, the sound of that big diesel motor revving up on H Street should be music to your ears.

http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/stories/11/10mulshine_edit.html



Mr. Bush should pay attention.


Keep D&D Civil.

 

It looks like Bush's friends receive special treatment

 

Woodward Was Told of Plame More Than Two Years Ago

By Jim VandeHei and Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, November 16, 2005; A01



Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward testified under oath Monday in the CIA leak case that a senior administration official told him about CIA operative Valerie Plame and her position at the agency nearly a month before her identity was disclosed.

In a more than two-hour deposition, Woodward told Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald that the official casually told him in mid-June 2003 that Plame worked as a CIA analyst on weapons of mass destruction, and that he did not believe the information to be classified or sensitive, according to a statement Woodward released yesterday.

Fitzgerald interviewed Woodward about the previously undisclosed conversation after the official alerted the prosecutor to it on Nov. 3 -- one week after Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was indicted in the investigation.

Citing a confidentiality agreement in which the source freed Woodward to testify but would not allow him to discuss their conversations publicly, Woodward and Post editors refused to disclose the official's name or provide crucial details about the testimony. Woodward did not share the information with Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. until last month, and the only Post reporter whom Woodward said he remembers telling in the summer of 2003 does not recall the conversation taking place.

Woodward said he also testified that he met with Libby on June 27, 2003, and discussed Iraq policy as part of his research for a book on President Bush's march to war. He said he does not believe Libby said anything about Plame.

He also told Fitzgerald that it is possible he asked Libby about Plame or her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. He based that testimony on an 18-page list of questions he planned to ask Libby in an interview that included the phrases "yellowcake" and "Joe Wilson's wife." Woodward said in his statement, however, that "I had no recollection" of mentioning the pair to Libby. He also said that his original government source did not mention Plame by name, referring to her only as "Wilson's wife."

Woodward's testimony appears to change key elements in the chronology Fitzgerald laid out in his investigation and announced when indicting Libby three weeks ago. It would make the unnamed official -- not Libby -- the first government employee to disclose Plame's CIA employment to a reporter. It would also make Woodward, who has been publicly critical of the investigation, the first reporter known to have learned about Plame from a government source.

The testimony, however, does not appear to shed new light on whether Libby is guilty of lying and obstructing justice in the nearly two-year-old probe or provide new insight into the role of senior Bush adviser Karl Rove, who remains under investigation.

Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Rove, said that Rove is not the unnamed official who told Woodward about Plame and that he did not discuss Plame with Woodward.

William Jeffress Jr., one of Libby's lawyers, said yesterday that Woodward's testimony undermines Fitzgerald's public claims about his client and raises questions about what else the prosecutor may not know. Libby has said he learned Plame's identity from NBC's Tim Russert.

"If what Woodward says is so, will Mr. Fitzgerald now say he was wrong to say on TV that Scooter Libby was the first official to give this information to a reporter?" Jeffress said last night. "The second question I would have is: Why did Mr. Fitzgerald indict Mr. Libby before fully investigating what other reporters knew about Wilson's wife?"

Fitzgerald has spent nearly two years investigating whether senior Bush administration officials illegally leaked classified information -- Plame's identity as a CIA operative -- to reporters to discredit allegations made by Wilson. Plame's name was revealed in a July 14, 2003, column by Robert D. Novak, eight days after Wilson publicly accused the administration of twisting intelligence to justify the Iraq war. Fitzgerald's spokesman, Randall Samborn, declined to comment yesterday.

Woodward is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and author best known for exposing the Watergate scandal and keeping secret for 30 years the identity of his government source "Deep Throat."

"It was the first time in 35 years as a reporter that I have been asked to provide information to a grand jury," he said in the statement.

Downie said The Post waited until late yesterday to disclose Woodward's deposition in the case in hopes of persuading his sources to allow him to speak publicly. Woodward declined to elaborate on the statement he released to The Post late yesterday afternoon and publicly last night. He would not answer any questions, including those not governed by his confidentiality agreement with sources.

According to his statement, Woodward also testified about a third unnamed source. He told Fitzgerald that he does not recall discussing Plame with this person when they spoke on June 20, 2003.

It is unclear what prompted Woodward's original unnamed source to alert Fitzgerald to the mid-June 2003 mention of Plame to Woodward. Once he did, Fitzgerald sought Woodward's testimony, and three officials released him to testify about conversations he had with them. Downie, Woodward and a Post lawyer declined to discuss why the official may have stepped forward this month.

Downie defended the newspaper's decision not to release certain details about what triggered Woodward's deposition because "we can't do anything in any way to unravel the confidentiality agreements our reporters make."

Woodward never mentioned this contact -- which was at the center of a criminal investigation and a high-stakes First Amendment legal battle between the prosecutor and two news organizations -- to his supervisors until last month. Downie said in an interview yesterday that Woodward told him about the contact to alert him to a possible story. He declined to say whether he was upset that Woodward withheld the information from him.

Downie said he could not explain why Woodward said he provided a tip about Wilson's wife to Walter Pincus, a Post reporter writing about the subject, but did not pursue the matter when the CIA leak investigation began. He said Woodward has often worked under ground rules while doing research for his books that prevent him from naming sources or even using the information they provide until much later.

Woodward's statement said he testified: "I told Walter Pincus, a reporter at The Post, without naming my source, that I understood Wilson's wife worked at the CIA as a WMD analyst."

Pincus said he does not recall Woodward telling him that. In an interview, Pincus said he cannot imagine he would have forgotten such a conversation around the same time he was writing about Wilson.

"Are you kidding?" Pincus said. "I certainly would have remembered that."

Pincus said Woodward may be confused about the timing and the exact nature of the conversation. He said he remembers Woodward making a vague mention to him in October 2003. That month, Pincus had written a story explaining how an administration source had contacted him about Wilson. He recalled Woodward telling him that Pincus was not the only person who had been contacted.

Pincus and fellow Post reporter Glenn Kessler have been questioned in the investigation.

Woodward, who is preparing a third book on the Bush administration, has called Fitzgerald "a junkyard-dog prosecutor" who turns over every rock looking for evidence. The night before Fitzgerald announced Libby's indictment, Woodward said he did not see evidence of criminal intent or of a major crime behind the leak.

"When the story comes out, I'm quite confident we're going to find out that it started kind of as gossip, as chatter," he told CNN's Larry King.

Woodward also said in interviews this summer and fall that the damage done by Plame's name being revealed in the media was "quite minimal."

"When I think all of the facts come out in this case, it's going to be laughable because the consequences are not that great," he told National Public Radio this summer.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/15/AR2005111501857_pf.html

 

Hadley was Woodward's source.

--------------------------------

National Security Adviser was Woodward's source, attorneys say
Larisa Alexandrovna and Jason Leopold

National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley was the senior administration official who told Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward that Valerie Plame Wilson was a covert CIA officer, attorneys close to the investigation and intelligence officials tell RAW STORY.

Testifying under oath Monday to Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, Woodward recounted a casual conversation he had with Hadley, these sources say. Hadley did not return a call seeking comment.

http://rawstory.com/news/2005/National_Security_Adviser_was_Woodwards_source_1116.html

So now let's see, you have Libby telling Miller, Rove telling Cooper and Hadley telling Woodward. You have a rep of the VP, a rep of the Pres and a rep of the President's National Security office leaking the SAME information.

Can you say CONSPIRACY, or at the very least, a concerted effort to disclose classified information important to national security simply for political gain?

I think you can...

 

this seems about right:

Sources: Plame Learned Covert Status from Woodward
by Scott Ott

(2005-11-16) — Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who secured grand jury indictments against a top Bush administration official last month, today announced he may be close to discovering who told Valerie Plame that she was an undercover CIA agent.

Mr. Fitzgerald refused to release any names, but sources close to the probe said evidence indicates that the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward may have revealed Ms. Plame’s covert status to her.

The prosecutor declined to comment on Mr. Woodward’s possible connection to the case, instead he focused on Ms. Plame’s apparent ignorance of her role at the Central Intelligence Agency.

“In the months, and even years, leading up to July 2003, Valerie Plame was not behaving like someone who knew she was a covert agent,” said Mr. Fitzgerald. “The woman friends knew as Mrs. Joe Wilson seems to have learned of her undercover status at about the same time a reference to her appeared in Robert Novak’s syndicated column.”

The prosecutor said it may be a violation of federal law to reveal a CIA agent’s covert status to the agent.

“We’re looking at what’s called ‘deep deep cover’ in the intel community,” Mr. Fitzgerald said. “In other words, the CIA unwittingly may have been using Mrs. Wilson as an undercover agent without her knowledge, or the knowledge of anyone else at the Agency.”

Meanwhile, as former vice presidential chief of staff I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby awaits trial on five counts of hindering the CIA leak probe, Mr. Novak and Mr. Woodward remain at large.

http://www.scrappleface.com/?p=2072

 

Ms. Plame was so undercover that even she didn't know she was undercover.

Sounds like an undercoveroverup.

 

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck, the odds are it is, in fact, a duck. A possiblity exists that, appearances to the contrary, and as difficult as it may be to believe, the waddling, quacking creature who's a dead ringer for a duck is something else... perhaps a robotic thing made in Japan, those clever rascals. Personally, my money would be on the duck. Golly, I meant to say a conspiracy.


Keep D&D Civil.

 

What would they gain from that?

 

Payback. The White House would ensure her career was ruined.