Karl Rove headed to Prison???

[phuloi]

The Left isn't obsessed with destroying Karl Rove simply because they want to taint President Bush by taking out one of his closest confidants. When they're not focused on their fantasy that Vice President Cheney is the de facto president, they sometimes think Rove is. To destroy Rove is to neuter the Bush presidency.

As resolute, effective and visionary as President Bush has been in office, the Left obviously still doesn't consider him the man in charge. Only a superhuman Machiavellian strategist could have engineered this bumbler's unlikely ascension to the presidency.

And, anyone one capable of facilitating a lightweight's rise to the highest office in the land must be not only brilliant, but sinister. For who but a sociopath would foist on the nation such a dangerous Neanderthal hell-bent on reversing the advances of "progressivism"?

The Left's underestimation of Bush and irrational fear of Rove distort their perception and drive them into a mouth-foaming feeding frenzy to devour this mad political scientist. These misapprehensions also explain their jaded view of the baseless claims against Rove in the Valerie Plame matter.

But in considering the Left's possible motives in this manufactured scandal against Rove, let's not forget the underlying subject matter driving the story: the Left's obsessive claim that Bush lied in maintaining that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling or trying to acquire WMD.

If there were such a thing as the personification and eventual death of an ideology, American liberalism would doubtlessly derive some degree of deathbed comfort from repeatedly chanting until it's final breath the "Bush lied" mantra. What began as a monstrous deception would finally ripen into a full-blown delusion where the engineers of the lie came to believe it themselves into eternity.

But American liberalism is far from dead and is eager to retrofit any available snippets, no matter how intrinsically unreliable, onto its "Bush lied about Iraqi WMD" template. One such snippet was Joe Wilson's supposed revelation that President Bush lied when stating these notorious 16 words in his 2003 SOTU address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Now, let's be clear here. President Bush's statement was true when he made it, and it remains true today. The Brits made such a claim and reiterated it emphatically (with the Butler inquiry expressly validating President Bush's SOTU claim) even after the Bush-scavenging American Left falsely accused him of inventing the story.

That Joe Wilson claims he couldn't substantiate Britain's findings on his own trip to Niger in no way alters the irrefutable fact that the Brits made and stood by their claim. But as we now also know, analysts contradict Wilson's present version of the story, saying that his findings did more to support the Brits' conclusion than discredit it.

In their zeal to dispatch Rove, the Left willfully ignores that Wilson not only lied about his findings but also about who sent him, denying his wife recommended him for the job, and sometimes alleging that Vice President Cheney, who didn't know him from Adam, sent him.

They ignore that a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee discredited Wilson in two essential particulars. First, it confirmed that Plame recommended her husband for the African junket. Second, it found that certain forged documents Wilson bragged about debunking were not even discovered until eight months after his trip.


$32,066
1:44AM
Friday


The Left also chooses to overlook Wilson's political motivation to damage President Bush -- his admitted longtime support of John Kerry and his monetary contributions to Kerry's presidential campaign.

They would have us believe the flawlessly calculating Rove is gratuitously vindictive. That he is foolish enough to risk conspicuously violating a criminal statute by outing an undercover CIA operative to a presumptively hostile member of the mainstream media all for the sake of petty revenge on the Wilson/Plame duo.

It strains credulity far less to deduce that Rove -- who readily provided information to authorities with no apparent fear of incriminating himself -- alluded to Wilson's wife's CIA status to refute his fraudulent implications against the Bush administration: that it sent Wilson to Niger.

It is uncontroverted that Rove didn't know Plame's name, much less that she was a covert operative. He was alerting Time's Matt Cooper to the incestuous, conflict of interest-laden genesis of Wilson's assignment (through his wife) in defense of his boss, not to lash out at or imperil this star-struck couple, who didn't even respect Plame's undercover status themselves.

If the Left didn't have so much invested in Wilson's fictions and obliterating Karl Rove and George Bush, they would abandon this non-starter against Rove and concede that the clear misfit in this overblown episode is the truly tainted and already thoroughly discredited Joe Wilson.
David Limbaugh

[Gimpy]

Don't think so Griz!

###START###

Wilson's Iraq Assertions Hold Up Under Fire From Rove Backers

July 14 (Wire Services) --

Two-year old assertions by former ambassador Joseph Wilson regarding Iraq and uranium, which lie at the heart of the controversy over who at the White House identified a covert U.S. operative, have held up in the face of attacks by supporters of presidential adviser Karl Rove.

Rove is a subject of a special prosecutor's investigation into how the name of the agent, who is Wilson's wife, was leaked to journalists. There has been no evidence made public that Rove identified the agent to reporters. Rove's allies are arguing that he was in fact trying to steer journalists away from taking too seriously Wilson's criticism of President George W. Bush's reasons for going to war in Iraq in 2003.

The agent, Valerie Plame, was publicly identified July 14, 2003, a week after Wilson wrote an article for the New York Times about an investigative trip he took in 2002 at the behest of the Central Intelligence Agency. Wilson wrote that the administration's claim that Saddam Hussein's regime tried to buy uranium in Africa for nuclear weapons was wrong.

The main points of Wilson's article have largely been substantiated by a Senate committee as well as U.S. and United Nations weapons inspectors. A day after Wilson's piece was published, the White House acknowledged that a claim Bush made in his January 2003 state of the union address that Iraq tried to buy ``significant quantities of uranium from Africa'' could not be verified and shouldn't have been included in the speech .


While the administration was justified at the time in being concerned that Hussein was trying to build nuclear weapons, "on the specifics of this I think Joe Wilson was right,'' said Michael O'Hanlon, a scholar of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Criticism of Wilson


Republicans are attempting to defend Rove by discrediting Wilson, saying the former ambassador misled the public about why he was sent to Niger and what he found there.

Bush supporters such as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich contend that Wilson lied in claiming that Vice President Dick Cheney dispatched him on the mission to Niger. That echoes a Republican National Committee talking-points memo sent to party officials.

Wilson never said that Cheney sent him , only that the vice president's office had questions about an intelligence report that referred to the sale of uranium yellowcake to Iraq from Niger. Wilson, in his New York Times article, said CIA officials were informed of Cheney's questions.

"The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office,'' Wilson wrote.

Senate Report

The "Wilson/Rove Research & Talking Points'' memo distributed by RNC Director of Television Carolyn Weyforth contends, "Both the Senate Committee on Intelligence and the CIA found assessments Wilson made in his report were wrong.''

No...they didn't!

The Senate panel conclusions didn't discredit Wilson . The committee concluded that the Niger intelligence information wasn't solid enough to be included in the State of the Union speech. It added that Wilson's report didn't change the minds of analysts on either side of the issue, while also concluding that an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate "overstated what the Intelligence Community knew about Iraq's possible procurement attempts.''

Wilson is vulnerable to some criticisms. The Republican talking points say Wilson has lied about the role his wife played in his trip. In his memoir, ``The Politics of Truth,'' Wilson asserted his wife was not involved in the decision to send him to Niger. ``Valerie had nothing to do with the matter,'' he wrote. ``She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip.''

The Senate Intelligence Committee report states that a CIA official told the panel that Plame ``offered up'' Wilson's name for the Niger trip and later sent a memo to a CIA official saying her husband had good relations with leaders in Niger.

Republicans also dismiss Wilson as a partisan because of his ties to the 2004 presidential campaign of Democrat John Kerry, the four-term U.S. senator from Massachusetts. He advised the Kerry campaign for several months on foreign policy and donated money to his race.

The crux of Wilson's argument in his New York Times article was that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program -- a central part of the Bush administration's justification for invading Iraq -- "was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.'' It certainly appears from all information now brought forth this is in fact the case.


Backing Away


Well before Wilson's article was published -- though after Bush's State of the Union address -- administration officials were backing off the contention that Iraq sought nuclear material from Africa.
On Feb. 4, 2003, State Department officials gave the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency information it requested about Iraq's attempts to obtain uranium from Niger. It told the agency that it could not confirm the reports and had questions about specific claims.

The next day, Secretary of State Colin Powell presented evidence, based on U.S. intelligence, about Iraq's prohibited weapons program to the UN Security Council. He didn't mention Iraqi attempts to obtain uranium from Africa.

On March 7, IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei told the UN Security Council that the documents that detailed uranium transactions between Iraq and Niger were "not authentic'' and "these specific allegations are unfounded.'' On March 9, Powell acknowledged that the documents were false.

The U.S. launched the invasion of Iraq on March 19.


A White House Concession


Finally, in July 2003, after Wilson's piece was published, the White House conceded that the uranium assertion should not have been included in the president's speech. Several administration officials have accepted responsibility for allowing it into the speech, including Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser and now secretary of state; Stephen Hadley, then Rice's deputy and now the national security adviser; and then-CIA Director George Tenet.

In October 2002, as the White House was reviewing drafts of a speech Bush would give in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, the allegation that Iraq sought ``substantial amounts of uranium oxide'' from Africa was removed after Tenet called Hadley to raise doubts about the information. On Oct. 5 and 6, the CIA sent memorandums to the White House expressing concerns about the Niger intelligence and differences on it between the U.S. and British spy agencies.

Novak's Column

Plame's identity was first revealed July 14, 2003, by syndicated columnist Robert Novak, who cited two unidentified administration officials as his sources for the information.

Knowingly disclosing the identity of a covert agent is a federal crime, and that is the subject of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation. Part of that probe is seeking information about confidential sources from reporters.

Rove's name surfaced in a July 11, 2003, e-mail from a Time magazine reporter to his editor that was disclosed this week by Newsweek magazine. The memo says Rove gave a "big warning'' about pursuing Wilson's claims and said it was "Wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on WMD issues who authorized'' Wilson's trip to Niger, according to Newsweek.

###END###



The Republican 'Smear' machine is working full bore once again.

[urbsdad6]

This article and links are at:

http://www.propagandamatrix.com/arti...bushsbrain.htm

'Bush's Brain' Besieged

Jim Lobe | July 15 2005

Battered by sagging poll numbers, new doubts in the aftermath of the London bombings about the effectiveness of its war on terrorism, and no letup in the bad news out of Iraq, the White House has found itself this week embroiled in yet another controversy, one that threatens the credibility, if not the tenure, of the man widely known as President George W. Bush's "brain."

Thanks to the disclosure of e-mail messages from a Time magazine reporter to his editor, it is now known that, contrary to categorical assurances by the White House two years ago, Karl Rove, Bush's top political adviser, leaked the identity of a covert Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer, the subject of a criminal investigation by a federal grand jury.

At the time, Bush himself had assured reporters that he would fire anyone in his administration found to be responsible for the "outing" of Valerie Plame, the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a retired diplomat who had published an article in the New York Times debunking Bush's assertions in the run-up to the Iraq war that Baghdad had tried to buy uranium yellowcake from Niger, presumably as part of a nuclear weapons program.

But now, with Rove "outed" as one of the sources of the leak, the White House is refusing to comment about the implications, insisting, in contrast to its assurances about Rove's innocence as recently as 14 months ago, that it would be wrong to say anything about the case while the grand jury investigation continues.

Bush himself stoically ignored questions about Rove's fate that were shouted at him by reporters during a very brief photo-opportunity with a visiting foreign dignitary Tuesday. At the end of a cabinet meeting in which Rove was discreetly seated in a rear row Wednesday, he announced, "This is a serious investigation."

Top Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, are now trying to extract maximum political advantage, demanding that Rove step down for breaching national security and placing the lives of Plame, her associates, and their agents in jeopardy.

While Rove is considered most unlikely to leave, at least in the near term, the stakes are high. Rove, whom Bush has referred to as "the architect" of his electoral successes and, more affectionately, as "boy genius," is widely considered the president's single most influential adviser, and not just on political matters.

Neoconservatives howled, for example, when Rove, who has guided Bush's political career from its outset, reportedly told top cabinet officials in the fall of 2003 that there was to be "no war in 2004," in order to ensure the president's reelection.

"[T]his president does not want to lose Karl Rove," David Gergen, a top political adviser to former presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, told the Los Angeles Times. "Rove is his right arm."

The controversy began almost exactly two years ago ? almost three months after the U.S. invasion of Iraq ? when Wilson published a column in the New York Times July 6, 2003, recounting his 2002 trip to Niger as a CIA consultant precisely to investigate intelligence reports that Iraq had tried to buy a large quantity of yellowcake from the country.

After a week talking to sources in the country, Wilson, who had served a good part of his diplomatic career in Francophone Africa, including Niger, concluded that the reports were untrue and reported his conclusions back to the CIA and the State Department.

Despite his findings, the allegation that "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," made its way into Bush's State of the Union Address in January 2003, less than two months before the invasion.

Noting the apparent anomaly, Wilson, who wrote that he was confident his findings had been communicated to the relevant policymakers, particularly Vice President Dick Cheney's office, which, he was told, had expressed particular interest in the Niger reports, argued that, "If ? the information was ignored because it did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq, then a legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses."

The article, which was published at the moment when it first became clear that U.S. forces in Iraq faced a serious and growing insurgency, received considerable attention, and, within days, the White House conceded that the inclusion in Bush's speech of the uranium claim was a mistake.

On July 14, 2003, however, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Robert Novak published a column in which he reported that Wilson had traveled to Niger at the suggestion of his wife, whom Novak not only identified by name, but also described as "an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction." He cited "two senior administration officials" as his sources.

Several other Washington reporters came forward shortly afterward saying that they, too, had been called by senior officials regarding Plame's identity, apparently in an effort to discredit Wilson's reporting by suggesting that nepotism played a role in his selection. None of the reporters, however, identified their sources by name.

Under a 1982 law, it is a crime to knowingly disclose the identity of U.S. citizens working undercover for the CIA. Democrats, the media, and indeed some intelligence veterans soon began clamoring for a criminal investigation of the leak, particularly amid evidence that the leak may have resulted in the agency's closure of a major international counter-proliferation operation that been running for a number of years.

The Justice Department initiated an investigation and, under growing public pressure, reluctantly appointed a special counsel, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, to handle the case. Fitzgerald promptly impaneled a grand jury and began taking testimony from administration officials, including Rove. All grand jury proceedings are secret, and remarkably little has leaked out to date.

Reporters, many of whom initially resisted testifying on the grounds that conversations with sources were confidential, were also subpoenaed to testify by Fitzgerald, who has won a series of court decisions holding that reporters do not have an absolute right to withhold the identity of their sources when a crime has been committed. It was in that context that Time magazine turned over the records of conversations held between its reporter, Matthew Cooper, and White House officials, including Rove.

According to one e-mail message obtained last week by Newsweek, Cooper informed his editor that Rove had told him four days before the Novak column was published that Wilson's wife ? whom he did not identify by name ? "apparently works" for the CIA and had a role in selecting him for the Niger mission.

Rove's lawyer has since confirmed that such a conversation had taken place but insisted that his client had not done anything illegal, both because Rove did not provide Plame's name, nor was he aware that she was a covert officer.

In addition, the attorney has also declared that Rove has specifically waived the confidentiality of his conversation with Cooper, thus permitting the Time correspondent, who had been prepared to go to jail rather than to disclose his source, to testify before the grand jury in the coming weeks.

While Rove's waiver saved Cooper from going to jail, another reporter, Judith Miller of the New York Times, has been behind bars since last Wednesday for refusing to cooperate with Fitzgerald's investigation.

While her decision has been hailed by many in the media as an act of integrity and courage, others have noted that, in the run-up to the Iraq, Miller, who is considered close to neoconservative hawks in and out of the administration, was the most consistent purveyor in the elite media of stories about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) based on the accounts of sources provided by the Iraqi National Congress (INC) and the Pentagon.

Given her close association with the war hawks, her WMD expertise, and the fact that she never wrote about Wilson or his wife, some writers, notably William Jackson, Jr. of the trade publication, Editor & Publisher, have raised the question whether she may have been a source for, as well as a witness to, disclosure of Plame's identity.

Another prominent neoconservative, Clifford May of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, boasted two years ago that he was told by two "former government officials" of Plame's identity before Novak published his column. May worked as a reporter for the Times for 10 years before becoming communications director for the Republican National Committee, a post where he knew Rove quite well.

FAIR USE NOTICE(see link at top of article)



Doc Urb

[SuperScout]

The doomsayers that are the modern Leftmedia have wanted to put President Bush in a box since his re-election, claiming that he'll be a lame duck after summer 2005, and that second-term presidencies are never as productive because they're prone to fatigue and scandal and blah blah blah. These are all assessments based on Bush's predecessor, of course, and are hardly applicable to the vast majority of two-term presidencies. But now, the lefties believe they have found the man who will bring down the Bush administration, and that man is none other than Karl Rove.

So begins the Plame game. Rove has been dragged into what can only be termed "the scandal that wasn't" -- the outing of Valerie Plame as an "undercover" operative of the CIA. Plame works at CIA headquarters at Langley, so it was no stretch to assume that she was an intelligence officer, and blowing her cover, as it were, is hardly the same as fingering undercover agents in the field. Nonetheless, when her identity was leaked to the press in July, 2003, her husband, prominent anti-Bush pundit and mediocre author Joe Wilson, claimed it was in retaliation for his stance against the Iraq war.

President Bush vowed to fire whoever the leaker was in his administration, and now that Karl Rove's name has popped up in the ongoing investigation over Plame, Democrats are calling for him to get the ax. "He's the leaker!" they squealed with delight. John Kerry, still bitter over the three-million-vote beat-down that Rove helped put on him last November, opined, "It is perfectly clear that Rove ... has to go." All indications point to the fact that Rove didn't even know Plame's name -- the sole e-mail between Rove and Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper that has become the pivot point for this investigation doesn't mention Plame by name. Never mind that Rove was actually steering Cooper away from Wilson's false allegations about Vice President Dick Cheney. For that matter, let's completely cast aside the fact that Rove was not encouraging Cooper to follow up with Wilson and his wife. Even The Washington Post and The New York Times, together with the 36 major news organizations which filed a legal brief in Cooper's defense, agree that there is no crime here. Plainly and simply, the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act doesn't come into play. The drive behind this controversy is that the Demos want Rove gone, the media want a story, and the lefties want to see the President bruised and bloodied.

It's a sad state indeed when a once-proud American political party is reduced to propping up a book-peddling Mittyesque fantasist like Joe Wilson. Sorry, boys, but if The Post won't bite, you can be pretty certain that "Plame-gate" is a no-go.

And as a parting shot, one has to wonder why this elusive Judith Miller has clammed up, and who's she protecting? Has anybody bothered to think that maybe, just maybe, she's the guilty culprit in this non-crime? How could one evaluate her mealy-mouth excuse why she doesn't think the general waiver that was granted to her is "good enough" or that she thinks it was given under duress? Oh, the joys of being a martyr must wonderfully outweigh sleeping on clean sheets in your own home..... blah, blah, blah..............

[Gimpy]

Conservative shills to the bitter end. Dutuifully regurgitating their GOP talking points.

Nice to see that so many of us can debunk them over and over and over and over?

Oh well, they are just adhering to one of the fundamental rules of their disgraced hero, Rove. Repeat a lie often enough, and it will become true.


On to more pressing things.

The wingnutosphere, in association with the associated press and Rio Linda press will be very excited about this CNN interview with Wilson.

BLITZER: But the other argument that?s been made against you is that you?ve sought to capitalize on this extravaganza, having that photo shoot with your wife, who was a clandestine officer of the CIA, and that you?ve tried to enrich yourself writing this book and all of that.

What do you make of those accusations, which are serious accusations, as you know, that have been leveled against you.

WILSON: My wife was not a clandestine officer the day that Bob Novak blew her identity.


BLITZER: But she hadn?t been a clandestine officer for some time before that?


WILSON: That?s not anything that I can talk about. And, indeed, I?ll go back to what I said earlier, the CIA believed that a possible crime had been committed, and that?s why they referred it to the Justice Department.

She was not a clandestine officer at the time that that article in Vanity Fair appeared. And I have every right to have the American public know who I am and not to have myself defined by those who would write the sorts of things that are coming out, being spewed out of the mouths of the RNC?....

AMEN!

For sentient humans, it?s clear what Wilson means - that she ceased to be a clandestine operative the day Novak?s column came out. It?s also clear from his other comments (as it was clear to Blitzer in conversation) that he has to use such language because he can?t acknowledge that she ever was a clandestine operative with direct language.


For Christ sakes. Is stupidity painful??


Just asking.


Now, on to more pertinent items.

Joe Wilson questioned initially only the basis for the ?16 words? in the Presidents SOTU speech and for that his wife was outed and the ?Big Smear? was on. Just like O?Neill and Clarke and anyone else who attempts to question the manufactured reality of this administration.

The worn out rhetoric of the Republicans is that Iraq was a mess and it?s Clinton?s fault.

The appalling consequences of US foreign policy on the rest of the world are a subject worth examining a little closer. Both Colin Powell, former US Secretary of State, and Condoleezza Rice, President Bush?s closest adviser, made clear before September 11 2001 that Saddam Hussein was no threat - to America, Europe or the Middle East.

In Cairo, on February 24 2001 , Colin Powell said: ?He (Saddam Hussein) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours.?

This is the very opposite of what Bush and Blair said in public.


Powell even boasted that it was the US policy of ?containment? (under Clinton) that had effectively disarmed the Iraqi dictator - again the very opposite of what Bush & Blair said time and again AFTER 9/11.


On May 15 2001 , Powell went further and said that Saddam Hussein had not been able to ?build his military back up or to develop weapons of mass destruction? for ?the last 10 years? . America, he said, had been successful in keeping him ?in a box?. (Hmmmmmmm???I wonder if he meant Bill Clinton again since it was during these EIGHT YEARS he was "contained"???-----)

Two months later in July 2001 , only two months prior to the horror of 9/11, Condoleezza Rice also described a weak, divided and militarily defenseless Iraq. ?Saddam does not control the northern part of the country,? she said. ?We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt."

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm?? So I guess what they said THEN........... means less than what they say NOW , huh?


Talk about hypocritical.


Support the troops, support the troops. Conservatives like to wave their yellow ribbons at you if you don?t blindly follow their claims that if you disagree with the Preznits conclusion to take us to war in the first place then you MUST be either unpatriotic and/or a traitorus scumbag!


Conservatives seem to have forgotten that the Central Intelligence Agency is as important as any branch of our military apparatus. CIA agents gather information that bears directly on the deployment and success of our troops in the field. Many of them face danger and privation in the line of duty. While they may not wear a uniform, they are certainly soldiers serving their country.


When no less than the top strategist for the whole conservative political machine, Karl Rove, exposes the identity of an undercover CIA agent for utterly callow political reasons, conservatives rush to his defense. They ignore, at our troops? peril, the deeply demoralizing effect Mr. Rove?s actions have had on the CIA, and on the military as a whole.


Conservatives can?t have it both ways . If they are truly dedicated to supporting the troops, they need to confront Mr. Rove?s indefensible disregard for the welfare of those who risk their lives for our country.

Many Republicans seems very, very anxious to defend Rove even though the potential ramifications of what he may have done are quite serious (despite their denials). I don?t believe they know or care whether he may have done anything wrong.

As long as they stay in charge, any potentially unethical behavior by a Republican is OK. The ends justify the means, right? I mean, come on, the elder Bush praised Wilson to the skies fifteen years ago. Called him a ?great American?. Haven?t heard a word from the old man lately about Wilson. Why? Because he 'can?t' say anything. That wouldn?t be allowed in the GOP playbook.


I think what really makes my blood boil is that the rightwingnuts try very hard to paint democrats as unpatriotic, which is beneath contempt in my opinion.

In the Rove controversy, like every other time the actions of a Republican are questioned, the GOP will 'always' defend the interests of their party (no matter how revolting their conduct and/or behavior) above the interests of this country. THAT is the definition of hating America.

Getting to watch the desparation, anger and shrillness of the far rightwingnuts reach fever pitch over this Karl Rove fiasco is worth the price of admission. They know it?s over. They can see the writing on the wall, but will deny it to the end.

[BLUEHAWK]

This just in from Marine brother Bones:



By: Clifford May

"Bob Novak did not reveal that Valerie Plame was an undercover agent for the CIA.

Read ? or reread ? his column from July 14, 2003. All Novak reports is that the wife of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson is ?an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction.?

Novak has said repeatedly that he was not told, and that he did not know, that Plame was ? or had ever been ? a NOC, an agent with Non-Official Cover. He has emphatically said that had he understood that she was any sort of secret agent, he would never have named her.

As for Novak?s use of the word ?operative,? he might as easily have called her an ?official,? an ?analyst, or an ?employee.? But, as a longtime newsman, he instinctively chose the sexiest term (one he routinely applies to political figures, too, i.e. ?a party operative?).

Reread Novak?s article, and you?ll also see that Novak in no way denigrates Wilson. On the contrary, he talks of Wilson?s ?heroism? in Iraq in 1991. And nowhere in his column does he say ? or even imply ? that Wilson was unqualified to conduct the Niger investigation or that Plame was responsible for getting him the assignment ? merely that she ?suggested sending him.?

Even so, it is unclear whether Novak?s sources may have committed a crime by talking to Novak about Plame. That would depend on a number of variables involving what they knew about Plame and how they came to know it. A prosecutor would have the power to compel Novak to testify regarding what was said to him and by whom.

Is this splitting hairs? Not at all. In Washington, plenty of people are acquainted with CIA operatives who are not working undercover. For example, when a CIA analyst wrote a book under the pseudonym ?Anonymous,? it was widely known that Anonymous was the Agency?s Michael Scheuer. Before long, someone revealed that in print. No crime was committed or alleged ? no classified information had been disclosed, no NOC had been exposed.

So if Novak did not reveal that Valerie Plame was a secret agent, who did? The evidence strongly suggests it was none other than Joe Wilson himself. Let me walk you through the steps that lead to this conclusion.

The first reference to Plame being a secret agent appears in The Nation, in an article by David Corn published July 16, 2003, just two days after Novak?s column appeared. It carried this lead: ?Did Bush officials blow the cover of a U.S. intelligence officer working covertly in a field of vital importance to national security ? and break the law ? in order to strike at a Bush administration critic and intimidate others??

Since Novak did not report that Plame was ?working covertly? how did Corn know that?s what she had been doing?

Corn does not tell his readers and he has responded to a query from me only by pointing out that he was asking a question, not making a ?statement of fact.? But in the article, he asserts that Novak ?outed? Plame ?as an undercover CIA officer.? Again, Novak did not do that. Rather, it is Corn who is, apparently for the first time, ?outing? Plame?s ?undercover? status.

Corn follows that assertion with a quote from Wilson saying, ?I will not answer questions about my wife.? Any reporter worth his salt would immediately wonder: Did Wilson indeed answer Corn?s questions about his wife ? after Corn agreed not to quote his answers but to use them only on background? Read the rest of Corn?s piece and it?s difficult to believe anything else. Corn names no other sources for the information he provides ? and he provides much more information than Novak revealed.

Corn also claims that Wilson ?will not confirm nor deny that his wife ?works for the CIA.? Corn adds: ?But let?s assume she does. That would seem to mean that the Bush administration has screwed one of its own top-secret operatives in order to punish Wilson ??

On what basis could Corn ?assume? that Plame was not only working covertly but was actually a ?top-secret? operative? And where did Corn get the idea that Plame had been ?outed? in order to punish Wilson? That is not suggested by anything in the Novak column which, as I noted, is sympathetic to Wilson and Plame.

The likely answer: The allegation that someone in the administration leaked to Novak as a way to punish Wilson was made by Wilson ? to Corn. But Corn, rather than quote Wilson, puts the idea forward as his own.

Keep in mind that from early on there were two possible but contradictory scenarios:

1) Members of the Bush administration intentionally exposed a covert CIA agent as a way to take revenge against her husband who had written a critical op-ed.

2) Members of the Bush administration were attempting to set the record straight by telling reporters that it was not Vice President Cheney who sent Wilson on the Africa assignment as Wilson claimed; rather Wilson?s wife, a CIA employee, helped get him the assignment. (And that is indeed the conclusion of the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee.)

Corn?s article then goes on to provide specific details about Plame?s undercover work, her ?dicey and difficult mission of tracking parties trying to buy or sell weapons of mass destruction or WMD material.? But how does Corn know about that? From what source could he have learned it?

Corn concludes that Plame?s career ?has been destroyed by the Bush administration.? And here he does, finally, quote Wilson directly. 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. This is the stuff of Kim Philby and Aldrich Ames.?

Corn has assured us several times that Wilson refused to answer questions about his wife, refused to confirm or deny that she worked for the CIA, refused to ?acknowledge whether she is a deep-cover CIA employee.? But he is willing to say on the record that ?naming her this way? was an act of treachery? That?s not talking about his wife? That?s not providing confirmation? There is only one way to interpret this: Wilson did indeed talk about his wife, her work as a secret agent, and other matters to Corn (and perhaps others?) on a confidential basis.

If Wilson did tell Corn that his wife was an undercover agent, did he commit a crime? I don?t claim to know. But the charge that someone committed a crime by naming Plame as a covert agent was also made by Corn, apparently for the first time, in this same article. No doubt, the independent prosecutor and the grand jury will sort it out.

Criminality aside, if Wilson revealed to Corn that Plame worked as a CIA ?deep-cover? operative ?tracking parties trying to buy or sell? WMDs, surely that?s news.

And it is consequential: On the basis of Novak?s story alone, it is highly unlikely that anyone would have had a clue that Plame ? presumably under a different name and while living in a foreign country ? had been a NOC. At most, her friends in Washington would have been surprised to learn that she didn?t work where she said she worked.

But once Corn published the fact that Plame had been a ?top-secret operative,? and once he quoted Wilson saying what exposing his wife would mean ? and once Plame posed for Vanity Fair photographers ? anyone who had ever known her in a different context and with a different identity would have been tipped off.

But they would not have been tipped by Novak ? nor, based on what we know so far, by Karl Rove. Rather, it appears they would have been tipped off by Joe Wilson who, the publicly available evidence strongly suggests, leaked like a sieve to The Nation?s David Corn."

? Clifford D. May, a former New York Times foreign correspondent, is president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism.

[Jerry D]

Blue good report lots of good facts included ...

[Gimpy]

fast there fellas!

########

Why the Leak Probe Matters


For all the complexities of the Valerie Plame case, this story is about how easy it was to get into Iraq, and how hard it will be to get out.


By Jonathan Alter

Newsweek


July 25 issue - Like a lot of President Bush's critics, I supported the Iraq war at first. Because of the evidence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction laid out by Colin Powell, I agreed that we needed to disarm Saddam Hussein. I even think it's possible that 25 years from now, historians will conclude that the Iraq war helped accelerate the modernizing of the Middle East, even if it doesn't fully democratize it.

But if that happens, Bush might not get as much credit as he hopes, and not just because most historians, as Richard Nixon liked to say, are liberals. Bush may look bad because his leadership on Iraq has been a fiasco.

He didn't plan for it: the early decisions that allowed the insurgency to get going were breathtakingly incompetent. He didn't pay for it: Bush is the first president in history to cut taxes during a war, this one now costing nearly $1 billion a week. And most important of all, he didn't tell the American people the truth about it: taking a nation to war is the most solemn duty of a president, and he'd better make certain there's no alternative and no doubt about the evidence.

Why do I mention this now? Because for all of the complexities of the Valerie Plame case, for all the questions raised about the future of investigative journalism and the fate of the most influential aide to an American president since Louis Howe served Franklin D. Roosevelt 70 years ago, this story is fundamentally about how easy it was to get into Iraq and how hard it will be to get out.

We got in because we "cooked" the intelligence, then hyped it. That's why the "Downing Street Memo" is not a smoking gun but a big "duh." For two years we've known that senior White House officials were determined to, in the words of the British intelligence memo, "fix" the intelligence to suit their policy decisions. When someone crossed them, they would "fix" him, too, as career ambassador Joseph Wilson found when he came back from Africa with a report that threw cold water on the story that Saddam Hussein sought yellowcake uranium from Niger.


Was Plame "fair game," as Karl Rove told Chris Matthews?

George H.W. Bush didn't think so. Even after Wilson embarrassed the president publicly, Bush Sr . wrote Wilson?whom he had appointed to various ambassadorial posts?to congratulate him for his service and sympathize with him over the outing of his wife. The old man was head of the CIA in the 1970s and knows the consequences of blowing the identities of covert operatives.


But does his son? A real leader wouldn't hide behind Clintonian legalisms like "I don't want to prejudge." Even if the disclosure was unintentional and no law was broken, Rove's confirmed conduct?talking casually to two reporters without security clearances about a CIA operative?was dangerous and wrong.

As GOP congressman turned talk-show host Joe Scarborough puts it, if someone in his old congressional office did what Rove unquestionably did, that someone would have been promptly fired, just as the president promised in this case . Scarborough, no longer obligated to toe the pathetic Republican Party line, says it's totally irrelevant if Joe Wilson is a preening partisan who misled investigators about the role his wife played in recommending his Niger trip.

The frantic efforts of the GOP attack machine to change the subject to Wilson shows how scared Republicans are that the master of their universe will be held accountable for Rove's destructive carelessness.


To get an idea of how destructive, I talked to Melissa Mahle, a former CIA covert operative turned author whose career parallels Plame's. She explained what happens when someone's cover is blown.

It isn't pretty, especially when, like Plame, you have been under "nonofficial cover" (working for a phony front company or nonprofit), which is more sensitive than "official cover" (pretending to work for another government agency). The GOP's spinners are making it seem that because Plame had a desk job in Langley at the time she was outed, she wasn't truly undercover.

As Mahle says, that reflects a total ignorance about the way the CIA works. Being outed doesn't just waste millions of taxpayer dollars; it compromises hundreds of other people in the field you may have worked with in the past.

If Bush isn't a hypocrite on national security, he needs, at a minimum, to yank Rove's security clearance. "Whether you do it [discuss the identity of CIA operatives] intentionally or unintentionally, you have not met the requirements of that security clearance," Mahle told me .


The bigger question is what this scandal does to the CIA's ability to develop essential "humint" (human intelligence). Here's where the Iraq war comes in again. The sooner we beef up our intelligence, the sooner we crack the insurgency and get to bring our troops home.

What does it say to the people doing the painstaking work of building those spy networks when the identity of one of their own becomes just another weapon in the partisan wars of Washington? For a smart guy, Karl Rove was awfully stupid .

? 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

[SuperScout]

Former Ambassador Joe Wilson repeatedly refused to say yesterday whether his CIA employee wife Valerie Plame had been stationed overseas in the five years prior to having her name revealed in the press in 2003 - one of the stipulations necessary for the Intelligence Identities Protection Act to have been violated. [Isn't this a really simple "Yes" or "NO" type question?]

Appearing on CBS's "Face the Nation," Wilson was asked by Chicago Tribune reporter Jan Crawford Greenburg: "Ambassador, I am just not clear on something. The law actually covers and protects covert agents who served abroad within the last five years. So if these conversations took place in 2003, does that law protect your wife? Did she serve abroad as an agent since 1998?"

Rather than answer Greenburg's query directly, Wilson responded: "Well, I'm not a lawyer, first of all. {And WTF does that have to do withthe question? OK, so you're not a lawyer, and it appears, not a very good investigative bureaucrat, either.] But the CIA would not have frivolously referred this to the Justice Department if they did not believe a possible crime had been committed."

Not satisfied, Greenburg pressed: "But had she served abroad in the time period from [1998 through 2003]?" [Again, a simple one-word response would have been perfect.] Wilson dodged the question again, saying: "I would just tell you that she was covered according to the CIA, and the CIA made the referral."

At that point "Face the Nation" host Bob Schieffer stepped in and changed the subject. But a few moments later, Greenburg returned to the topic, offering Wilson one more chance to clear up the mystery:

"Well, could we go back to the ambassador in this? You declined to say whether she served abroad within five years of those conversations, but did anyone know that she was working at the agency or driving to Langley? Did her friends or neighbors? Did anyone know that your wife worked for the CIA."

Wilson answered that his wife's friends had no idea about her CIA employment, but refused to offer any information about when she last stationed abroad. [If Stonewallin' Joe is so anxious to see justice carried out, why can't he just answer simple questions and thereby potentially expedite the process? Or could it be that Joe suffers from the dreaded CRS syndrome, telling one and all that it was the Vice President who wanted him to go on the trip, when in fact the Vice President doesn't know Joe from shinola?]

[Gimpy]

Manure....................

As Jonathan Alter clearly states!

"As GOP congressman turned talk-show host Joe Scarborough puts it, if someone in his old congressional office did what Rove unquestionably did, that someone would have been promptly fired, just as the president promised in this case . Scarborough, no longer obligated to toe the pathetic Republican Party line, says it's totally irrelevant even if Joe Wilson is a preening partisan who misled investigators about the role his wife played in recommending his Niger trip.


The frantic efforts of the GOP attack machine to change the subject to Wilson shows how scared Republicans are that the master of their universe will be held accountable for Rove's destructive carelessness.


To get an idea of how destructive, I talked to Melissa Mahle, a former CIA covert operative turned author whose career parallels Plame's. She explained what happens when someone's cover is blown.

It isn't pretty, especially when, like Plame, you have been under "nonofficial cover" (working for a phony front company or nonprofit), which is more sensitive than "official cover" (pretending to work for another government agency). The GOP's spinners are making it seem that because Plame had a desk job in Langley at the time she was outed, she wasn't truly undercover.

As Mahle says, that reflects a total ignorance about the way the CIA works. Being outed doesn't just waste millions of taxpayer dollars; it compromises hundreds of other people in the field you may have worked with in the past.

If Bush isn't a hypocrite on national security, he needs, at a minimum, to yank Rove's security clearance. "Whether you do it [discuss the identity of CIA operatives] intentionally or unintentionally!"---End quote.