War Without End

Alpha · Last edited by Alpha on Wed Jul 12, 2006 2:26 am; edited 80 times in total

Novak: Rove confirmed Plame's identity
Columnist reveals cooperation in probe, won't name first source

http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/07/11/cia.leak/index.html

R.Dreyfuss: Cheney's control of US govt -- The enforcers:

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/05/27/r-dreyfuss-cheney-s-control-of-us-govt-the-enforcers.php

Rove And Novak Devised Story To Stymie Feds On Plame Leak (scroll down to page 1 of 'Comments'):

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2006/05/25/rove-and-novak-devised-st_n_21616.html

Cheney Authorized Libby To Leak Classified CIA Report To Discredit Joe Wilson To The Media.... :

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2006/04/14/cheney-authorized-libby-t_n_19138.html

Special Prosecutor Places Cheney At Center Of Concerted Action To "Discredit, Punish Or Seek Revenge" On Iraq War Critic...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2006/04/08/special-prosecutor-places_n_18750.html?p=2#comments

Outcry Builds Over Bush Leaking Classified Iraq Info...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2006/04/07/outcry-builds-over-bush-l_n_18680.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/scooter-libby-inkstaine_b_18622.html

Libby: Bush Authorized Plamegate Leak
Indicted ex-Cheney aide told grand jury of White House approval

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0406061libby1.html

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Papers: Cheney Aide Says Bush OK'd Leak
By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 31 minutes ago

Vice President Dick Cheney's former top aide told prosecutors that President Bush authorized a leak of sensitive intelligence information about Iraq, according to court papers filed by prosecutors in the CIA leak case.

The filing by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald also describes Cheney involvement in I. Lewis Libby's communications with the press.

There was no indication in the filing that either Bush or Cheney authorized Libby to disclose Valerie Plame's CIA identity. But it points to Cheney as one of the originators of the idea that Plame could be used to discredit her husband, Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson.

Before his indictment, Libby testified to the grand jury investigating the CIA leak that Cheney told him to pass on prewar intelligence on Iraq and that it was Bush who authorized the disclosure, the court papers say. According to the documents, the authorization led to the July 8, 2003, conversation between Libby and New York Times reporter Judith Miller. In that meeting, Libby made reference to the fact that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA.

According to Fitzgerald's court filing, Cheney, in conversation with Libby, raised the question of whether a CIA-sponsored trip by Wilson "was legitimate or whether it was in effect a junket set up by Mr. Wilson's wife."

The disclosure in documents filed Wednesday means that the president and the vice president put Libby in play as a secret provider of information to reporters about prewar intelligence on Iraq.

Presidential spokesman Scott McClellan said Thursday the White House would have no comment on the ongoing investigation. At a congressional hearing, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said the president has the "inherent authority to decide who should have classified information."

Libby is asking for voluminous amounts of classified information from the government in order to defend himself against five counts of perjury, obstruction and lying to the FBI in the Plame affair.

He is accused of making false statements about how he learned of Plame's CIA employment and what he told reporters about it.

Bush's political foes jumped on the revelation about Libby's testimony.

"The fact that the president was willing to reveal classified information for political gain and put the interests of his political party ahead of America's security shows that he can no longer be trusted to keep America safe," Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean said.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said, "The more we hear, the more it is clear this goes way beyond Scooter Libby. At the very least, President Bush and Vice President Cheney should fully inform the American people of any role in allowing classified information to be leaked."

Libby's testimony indicates both the president and the vice president authorized leaks. Bush and Cheney both have long said they abhor that practice, so much so that the administration has put in motion criminal investigations to hunt down leakers.

The most recent instance is the administration's launching of a probe into who disclosed to The New York Times the existence of the warrantless domestic surveillance program.

The authorization involving intelligence information came as the Bush administration faced mounting criticism about its failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the main reason the president and his aides had given for going to war.

Libby's participation in a critical conversation with Miller on July 8, 2003 "occurred only after the vice president advised defendant that the president specifically had authorized defendant to disclose certain information in the National Intelligence Estimate," the papers by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald stated. The filing did not specify the "certain information."

"Defendant testified that the circumstances of his conversation with reporter Miller — getting approval from the president through the vice president to discuss material that would be classified but for that approval — were unique in his recollection," the papers added.

Plame's husband, a former U.S. ambassador, said the administration had twisted prewar intelligence to exaggerate the Iraqi threat from weapons of mass destruction.

After Wilson publicly attacked the administration on Iraq on July 6, 2003, "Vice President Cheney, defendant's immediate superior, expressed concerns to defendant regarding whether Mr. Wilson's trip was legitimate or whether it was in effect a junket set up by Mr. Wilson's wife," the papers said.

After a 2002 CIA-sponsored trip to Africa, Wilson said he had concluded that Iraq did not have an agreement to acquire uranium yellowcake from Niger.

Libby spoke to Miller on July 8, 2003, and Fitzgerald's filing identifies Cheney as being instrumental in having Libby speak again four days later to Miller as well as to Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper regarding Wilson. In all three conversations, Libby told the reporters about Wilson's wife, both Miller and Cooper have testified.

Her CIA status was publicly disclosed by conservative columnist Robert Novak eight days after her husband accused the Bush administration of twisting prewar intelligence to exaggerate the Iraqi threat from weapons of mass destruction.

Libby says he needs extensive classified files from the government to demonstrate that Plame's CIA connection was a peripheral matter that he never focused on, and that the role of Wilson's wife was a small piece in a building public controversy over the failure to find WMD in Iraq.

Fitzgerald said in the new court filing that Libby's requests for information go too far and the prosecutor cited Libby's own statements to investigators in an attempt to limit the amount of information the government must turn over to Cheney's former chief of staff for his criminal defense.

The court filing was first disclosed by The New York Sun.

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Libby: White House 'Superiors' OK'd Leaks

By TONI LOCY, Associated Press Writer
56 minutes ago

A former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney told a federal grand jury that his superiors authorized him to give secret information to reporters as part of the Bush administration's defense of intelligence used to justify invading Iraq, according to court papers.

Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said in documents filed last month that he plans to introduce evidence that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff, disclosed to reporters the contents of a classified National Intelligence Estimate in the summer of 2003.

The NIE is a report prepared by the head of the nation's intelligence operations for high-level government officials, up to and including the president. Portions of NIEs are sometimes declassified and made public. It is unclear whether that happened in this instance.

In a Jan. 23 letter to Libby's lawyers, Fitzgerald said Libby also testified before the grand jury that he caused at least one other government official to discuss an intelligence estimate with reporters in July 2003.

"We also note that it is our understanding that Mr. Libby testified that he was authorized to disclose information about the NIE to the press by his superiors," Fitzgerald wrote.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan refused to comment. "Our policy is that we are not going to discuss this when it's an ongoing legal proceeding," he said.

William Jeffress, Libby's lawyer, said, "There is no truth at all" to suggestions that Libby would try to shift blame to his superiors as a defense against the charges.

Libby, 55, was indicted late last year on charges that he lied to FBI agents and the grand jury about how he learned CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity and when he subsequently told reporters. He is not charged with leaking classified information from an intelligence estimate report.

Plame's identity was published in July 2003 by columnist Robert Novak after her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, accused the administration of twisting intelligence about Iraq's efforts to buy uranium in Niger. The year before, the CIA had sent Wilson to Niger to determine the accuracy of the uranium reports.

Wilson's revelations cast doubt on President Bush's claim in his 2003 State of the Union address that Niger had sold uranium to Iraq to develop a nuclear weapon as one of the administration's key justifications for going to war in Iraq.

On Thursday, Sen. Edward Kennedy (news, bio, voting record), D-Mass., said Cheney should take responsibility if he authorized Libby to share classified information with reporters.

"These charges, if true, represent a new low in the already sordid case of partisan interests being placed above national security," Kennedy said. "The vice president's vindictiveness in defending the misguided war in Iraq is obvious. If he used classified information to defend it, he should be prepared to take full responsibility."

In the summer of 2003, White House officials — including Libby — were frustrated that the media were incorrectly reporting that Cheney had sent Wilson to Niger and had received a report of his findings in Africa before the war in Iraq had begun.

In an effort to counter those reports, Libby and other White House officials sought information from the CIA regarding Wilson and how his trip to Niger came about, according to court records.

Fitzgerald, in his letter to Libby's lawyers, said he plans to use Libby's grand jury testimony to support evidence pertaining to the White House aide's meeting with former New York Times reporter Judith Miller.

During the meeting with Miller on July 8, Libby also discussed Plame, Fitzgerald said. "Our anticipated basis for offering such evidence is that such facts are inextricably intertwined with the narrative of the events of spring 2003, as Libby's testimony itself makes plain," the prosecutor wrote.

Miller spent 85 days in jail for refusing to discuss her source.

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Cheney Spearheaded Effort to Discredit Wilson:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/020906J.shtml

Mr. Fitz Goes to Washington:

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/02/08/mr-fitz-goes-to-washington.php

A high-risk game of nuclear chicken

http://www.sibernews.com/the-news/world-news/a-high%11risk-game-of-nuclear-chicken-200601313615/

Pentagon investigation of Iraq war hawk stalling Senate inquiry:

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/01/30/pentagon-investigation-of-iraq-war-hawk-stalling-senate-inqu.php

Cheney authorized leak:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2006/02/09/cheney-authorized-leaki_n_15361.html

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Israel and the Neocons, The Libby Affair and the Internal War:

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/12/27/israel-and-the-neocons-the-libby-affair-and-the-internal-wa.php

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2006/02/04/prosecutors-report-says-_n_15096.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2006/02/02/cia-told-cheney-libby-ni_n_15014.html

Records Sought For CIA Leak Case Missing From White House…

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11150000/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2006/02/02/records-sought-for-cia-le_n_14996.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-kleiman/graymail-and-missing-emai_b_14985.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2006/01/26/indicted-cheney-aide-scoo_n_14546.html

Who forged the Niger documents? (JINSA Israel firster operative Michael Ledeen according to following article):

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/horton.php?articleid=6888

http://www.franklingate.com/ledeen_facism.htm

There is a connection between Scooter-gate/Libby-gate and the AIPAC/Israel espionage case involving Larry Franklin at the neocon Pentagon (Karen Kwiatkowski mentions the Franklin case in the following blog entry as well):

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karen-kwiatkowski/neoconservatives-here-to-_b_14493.html

More about the AIPAC/Israel/Franklin 12 1/2 year sentence at following URL:

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/01/20/ex-pentagon-man-gets-12-years-in-aipac-case.php

JINSA Israel firster Zionist Jew Michael Ledeen wrote for Italian mag with Niger forgery

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/01/18/jinsa-zionist-ledeen-wrote-for-italian-mag-with-niger-forger.php

Lied to FBI, Committed Perjury, Obstructed Justice…

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2005/10/28/lied-to-fbi-committed-pe_n_9672.html

The War and the Israel-Zionist Hypothesis By James Petras

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/05/22/the-war-and-the-israel-zionist-hypothesis-by-james-petras.php

Look up this Libby (Israel first) neocon traitor in the index of esteemed US intelligence author James Bamford's 'A Pretext for War' book (get the recently released paperback version for page 403 to see how the Israeli generals would walk to JINSA operative Douglas Feith's office at the Pentagon like they owned the place).

http://gorillaintheroom.blogspot.com/2005/05/karen-kwiatkowski-interview.html

Thinking about Neoconservatism:

http://www.vdare.com/misc/macdonald_neoconservatism.htm

For more on JINSA (Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs) Zionist Michael Ledeen (who is an admirer of the Italian fascists and is a close friend of Karl Rove) at AEI and other Israel first traitors to America like him, scroll down to the 'Neoconservatism as a Jewish Movement' essay (by professor Kevin MacDonald of California State University, Long Beach) which is linked at the following URL (be sure to read the 'Thinking about Neoconservatism' article which is linked there as well):

Neoconservatism as a Jewish Movement:

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/04/06/neoconservatism-as-a-jewish-movement.php

Even Cindy Sheehan wrote that her son (Casey) died for a PNAC Neocon agenda to benefit Israel:

http://www.slate.com/id/2124788/sidebar/2124791/

http://representativepress.blogspot.com/2005/08/cindy-sheehan-mother-of-spc-casey.html

Rhetoric
In her anti-war speeches and writings, Sheehan is blunt and often vitriolic, a characteristic that has been noted by observers on both the left and right, and which Sheehan herself does not deny [24]. Some of her statements have caused controversy.

Of greatest controversy is an incident about which Sheehan's detractors claim she has lied. In March, 2005, James Morris sent an e-mail, written by Sheehan, to ABC's Nightline that allegedly included the statements that Casey "was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel" and that he had "joined the Army to protect America, not Israel." Sheehan denies the allegations, "I've never said that... Those aren't even words that I would say. I do believe that the Palestinian issue is a hot issue that needs to be solved, and it needs to be more fair and equitable, but I never said my son died for Israel," and claims that the email was modified by James Morris to support his own personal agenda. [25] [26] However, James Morris denies altering the email before sending it along to Nightline [27] on Sheehan's behalf (per her request for him to do so). Two other individuals, Tony Tersch and Skeeter Gallagher, received a copy of Sheehan's email directly from her; both claim that the e-mail they received is consistent with Morris's story, rather than Sheehan's. Tersch posted the email he received to the "bullyard" Google group [28]. Opponents of Sheehan assert that this essentially proves that she has repeatedly lied about the content of her original e-mail[29].

Sheehan also gave a speech on August 5, 2005, at the Veterans for Peace convention in Texas, stating, "You get America out of Iraq, you get Israel out of Palestine". [30] [31]

The above was taken from the 'Rhetoric' section of the Wikipedia reference for Cindy Sheehan..

http://representativepress.blogspot.com/2005/08/gorilla-in-room-is-us-support-for.html

http://nomorewarforisrael.blogspot.com

http://www.nowarforisrael.com

http://nogw.com/warforisrael.html

http://amconmag.com/2005/2005_11_07/feature.html

November 21, 2005 Issue

Forging the Case for War

Who was behind the Niger uranium documents?

by Philip Giraldi

Additional material can be found at the following URL:

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/08/05/rove-gate-who-leaked-to-the-leakers-this-isn-t-about-rove-page-3.php

Rove-gate: Who Leaked
to the Leakers?
This isn't about Karl Rove

http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=6677

Judith Miller: Hearsted on
Her Own Petard
General Judy's in the brig ?
and justice is served

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=6693

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A Second Take on Scooter-gate
It's all about treason
by Justin Raimondo

http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=7490

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PNAC, You have got to check this out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PNAC

Even Cindy Sheehan mentioned that her son (Casey Sheehan) died for a PNAC Neocon agenda to benefit Israel (scroll down to the 'Rhetoric' paragraph of the following URL):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cindy_Sheehan

Plame case is about Iraq

http://english.pravda.ru/mailbox/22/101/399/15831_.html

http://www.ariannaonline.com/forums/showthread.php?t=27345

http://www.ariannaonline.com/forums/showthread.php?t=27345

Niger Yellowcake and The Man Who Forged Too Much:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/7/22/7563/12283

'JINSA John' Bolton provided untruthful information

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thenewswire/archive/2005/07/it-seems-unusual-that-mr_4852.html

Do a search for JINSA at www.google.com

http://nomorewarforisrael.blogspot.com

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thenewswire/archive/2005/07/huff-pos-arianna-_4798.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/arianna-huffington/judy-miller-do-we-want-_4791.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/arianna-huffington/judy-miller-how-deep-do_4845.html

Condi Rice involved with Plame-gate...

http://www.counterpunch.com/morris07272005.html

'Democracy Now' on Rove-gate

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/27/1422240

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Patrick J. 'Bulldog' Fitzgerald, American Insurgent
Occupied Washington under siege

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=6711

Bush's Soviet State

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/072205Y.shtml

FOCUS | Did Bush Lie about Rove's Role in CIA Leak?

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/072405Y.shtml

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FOCUS | Former Agents Push Bush for Action on Rove:

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/072305Z.shtml

DOWNING STREET MEMO HEARING: US WENT TO WAR FOR ISRAEL

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/06/17/downing-street-memo-hearing-us-went-to-war-for-israel.php

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Hearing on Security Implications of Revealing Covert Agent's Identity
Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) co-chair a meeting on the national security implicatings of disclosing a covert agent's identity. Former intelligence agents participate in the meeting, co-sponsored by the Sen. Democratic Policy Committee and Democratic members of the Hse. Gov. Reform Comm.

http://www.c-span.org/search/basic.asp?ResultStart=1&ResultCount=10&BasicQueryText=covert+agent%27s&image1.x=11&image1.y=7

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Whoops, 'Plamegate' Back on Page One

http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000989261

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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=an7SakVWGrTQ&refer=us

Rove, Libby Accounts in CIA Case Differ With Those of Reporters

July 22 (Bloomberg) -- Two top White House aides have given accounts to a special prosecutor about how reporters first told them the identity of a CIA agent that are at odds with what the reporters have said, according to people familiar with the case.

Lewis ``Scooter'' Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, told special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald that he first learned from NBC News reporter Tim Russert of the identity of Central Intelligence Agency operative Valerie Plame, the wife of former ambassador and Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson, one person said. Russert has testified before a federal grand jury that he didn't tell Libby of Plame's identity, the person said.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove told Fitzgerald that he first learned the identity of the CIA agent from syndicated columnist Robert Novak, according a person familiar with the matter. Novak, who was first to report Plame's name and connection to Wilson, has given a somewhat different version to the special prosecutor, the person said.

These discrepancies may be important because Fitzgerald is investigating whether Libby, Rove or other administration officials made false statements during the course of the investigation. The Plame case has its genesis in whether any administration officials violated a 1982 law making it illegal to knowingly reveal the name of a covert intelligence agent.

`Twisted' Intelligence

The CIA requested the inquiry after Novak reported in a July 14, 2003, column that Plame recommended her husband for a 2002 mission to check into reports Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger. Wilson, in a July 6, 2003, article in the New York Times, had said President George W. Bush's administration ``twisted'' some of the intelligence on Iraq's weapons to justify the war.

Robert Luskin, Rove's attorney, said yesterday that Rove told the grand jury ``he had not heard her name before he heard it from Bob Novak.'' He declined in an interview to comment on whether Novak's account of their conversation differed from Rove's.

There also is a discrepancy between accounts given by Rove and Time magazine reporter Mat Cooper. The White House aide mentioned Wilson's wife -- though not by name -- in a July 11, 2003, conversation with Cooper, the reporter said. Rove, 55, says that Cooper called him to talk about welfare reform and the Wilson connection was mentioned later, in passing.

Cooper wrote in Time magazine last week that he told the grand jury he never discussed welfare reform with Rove in that call.

Miller in Jail

One reporter, Judith Miller of the New York Times, has been jailed on contempt of court charges for refusing to testify before the grand jury about her reporting on the Plame case.

Cooper testified only after Time Inc. said it would comply with Fitzgerald's demands for Cooper's notes and reporting on the Plame matter, particularly regarding his dealings with Rove.

Libby, 54, didn't return a phone call seeking comment.

The varying accounts of conversations between Rove, Libby and reporters come as new details emerge about a classified State Department memorandum that's also at the center of Fitzgerald's probe.

A memo by the department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research included Plame's name in a paragraph marked ``(S)'' for ``Secret,'' a designation that indicated to anyone who read it that the information was classified, the Washington Post reported yesterday.

State Department Memo

The memo, prepared July 7, 2003, for Secretary of State Colin Powell, is a focus of Fitzgerald's interest, according to individuals who have testified before the grand jury and attorneys familiar with the case.

The three-page document said that Wilson had been recommended for a CIA-sponsored trip to Africa by his wife, who worked on the CIA's counter-proliferations desk.

Bush had said in his State of the Union message in January 2003 that Iraq was trying to purchase nuclear materials in Africa. Days after Wilson's article -- in which he said there was no basis to conclude that Iraq was trying to buy nuclear material in Africa and that the administration had exaggerated the evidence -- the White House acknowledged that the Africa assertion shouldn't have been included in the speech.

The memo summarizing the Plame-Wilson connection was provided to Powell as he left with Bush on a five-day trip to Africa. Fitzgerald is exploring whether other White House officials on the trip may have gained access to the memo and shared its contents with officials back in Washington. Rove and Libby didn't accompany Bush to Africa.

One key to the inquiry is when White House aides knew of Wilson's connection to Plame and whether they learned about it through this memo or other classified information.

Some Bush allies hope that the Fitzgerald investigation, which dominated the news in Washington for the first part of July, will subside as attention shifts to Bush's nomination of Judge John Roberts to fill the first vacancy on the Supreme Court in 11 years.

Fitzgerald's term of service lasts until October, which is also the length of time remaining for the grand jury hearing evidence in the case.

To contact the reporter on this story:
Richard Keil in Washington at dkeil@bloomberg.net.

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washingtonpost.com
Plame's Identity Marked As Secret
Memo Central to Probe Of Leak Was Written By State Dept. Analyst

By Walter Pincus and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, July 21, 2005; A01

A classified State Department memorandum central to a federal leak investigation contained information about CIA officer Valerie Plame in a paragraph marked "(S)" for secret, a clear indication that any Bush administration official who read it should have been aware the information was classified, according to current and former government officials.

Plame -- who is referred to by her married name, Valerie Wilson, in the memo -- is mentioned in the second paragraph of the three-page document, which was written on June 10, 2003, by an analyst in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), according to a source who described the memo to The Washington Post.

The paragraph identifying her as the wife of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV was clearly marked to show that it contained classified material at the "secret" level, two sources said. The CIA classifies as "secret" the names of officers whose identities are covert, according to former senior agency officials.

Anyone reading that paragraph should have been aware that it contained secret information, though that designation was not specifically attached to Plame's name and did not describe her status as covert, the sources said. It is a federal crime, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, for a federal official to knowingly disclose the identity of a covert CIA official if the person knows the government is trying to keep it secret.

Prosecutors attempting to determine whether senior government officials knowingly leaked Plame's identity as a covert CIA operative to the media are investigating whether White House officials gained access to information about her from the memo, according to two sources familiar with the investigation.

The memo may be important to answering three central questions in the Plame case: Who in the Bush administration knew about Plame's CIA role? Did they know the agency was trying to protect her identity? And, who leaked it to the media?

Almost all of the memo is devoted to describing why State Department intelligence experts did not believe claims that Saddam Hussein had in the recent past sought to purchase uranium from Niger. Only two sentences in the seven-sentence paragraph mention Wilson's wife.

The memo was delivered to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on July 7, 2003, as he headed to Africa for a trip with President Bush aboard Air Force One. Plame was unmasked in a syndicated column by Robert D. Novak seven days later.

Wilson has said his wife's identity was revealed to retaliate against him for accusing the Bush administration of "twisting" intelligence to justify the Iraq war. In a July 6 opinion piece in the New York Times and in an interview with The Washington Post, he cited a secret mission he conducted in February 2002 for the CIA, when he determined there was no evidence that Iraq was seeking uranium for a nuclear weapons program in the African nation of Niger.

White House officials discussed Wilson's wife's CIA connection in telling at least two reporters that she helped arrange his trip, according to one of the reporters, Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, and a lawyer familiar with the case.

Prosecutors have shown interest in the memo, especially when they were questioning White House officials during the early days of the investigation, people familiar with the probe said.

Karl Rove, President Bush's deputy chief of staff, has testified that he learned Plame's name from Novak a few days before telling another reporter she worked at the CIA and played a role in her husband's mission, according to a lawyer familiar with Rove's account. Rove has also testified that the first time he saw the State Department memo was when "people in the special prosecutor's office" showed it to him, said Robert Luskin, his attorney.

"He had not seen it or heard about it before that time," Luskin said.

Several other administration officials were on the trip to Africa, including senior adviser Dan Bartlett, then-White House spokesman Ari Fleischer and others. Bartlett's attorney has refused to discuss the case, citing requests by the special counsel. Fleischer could not be reached for comment yesterday.

Rove and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, have been identified as people who discussed Wilson's wife with Cooper. Prosecutors are trying to determine the origin of their knowledge of Plame, including whether it was from the INR memo or from conversations with reporters.

The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that the memo made it clear that information about Wilson's wife was sensitive and should not be shared. Yesterday, sources provided greater detail on the memo to The Post.

The material in the memo about Wilson's wife was based on notes taken by an INR analyst who attended a Feb. 19, 2002, meeting at the CIA where Wilson's intelligence-gathering trip to Niger was discussed.

The memo was drafted June 10, 2003, for Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, who asked to be brought up to date on INR's opposition to the White House view that Hussein was trying to buy uranium in Africa.

The description of Wilson's wife and her role in the Feb. 19, 2002, meeting at the CIA was considered "a footnote" in a background paragraph in the memo, according to an official who was aware of the process.

It records that the INR analyst at the meeting opposed Wilson's trip to Niger because the State Department, through other inquiries, already had disproved the allegation that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger. Attached to the INR memo were the notes taken by the senior INR analyst who attended the 2002 meeting at the CIA.

On July 6, 2003, shortly after Wilson went public on NBC's "Meet the Press" and in The Post and the New York Times discussing his trip to Niger, the INR director at the time, Carl W. Ford Jr., was asked to explain Wilson's statements for Powell, according to sources familiar with the events. He went back and reprinted the June 10 memo but changed the addressee from Grossman to Powell.

Ford last year appeared before the federal grand jury investigating the leak and described the details surrounding the INR memo, the sources said. Yesterday he was on vacation in Arkansas, according to his office.

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Rove-Plame Scandal Leading to Deeper
White House Horrors?

http://www.crisispapers.org/essays-w/horrors.htm

By Bernard Weiner
Co-Editor, The Crisis Papers

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Cooper mentions that Karl Rove was source for Valerie Plame mention and that other sources are involved as well:

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.politics.bush/browse_frm/thread/a7b3e62f3d84c1d6/129cd1480ec20ad9#129cd1480ec20ad9

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Reporter Ties Cheney's staffer (Scooter Libby who is an ardent Israel first neocon all for the Iraq invasion/occupation for Israel) to leak of Valerie Plame:

http://www.boston.com/ae/media/articles/2005/07/18/reporter_ties_cheney_aide_to_cia_story/?rss_id=Boston+Globe+--+Front+Page

ROVEGATE - the Israeli Spying Connection

http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=7005

Everything you need to know about fellow JINSA Israel firster Michael
Ledeen (is he also involved with Rovegate?):

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/07/10/everything-you-need-to-know-about-michael-ledeen.php

Treason at a high level: Pentagon Zionists, AIPAC and Israel:

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2004/09/08/treason-in-high-places-pentagon-zionists-aipac-and-israel.php

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Forwarded:

Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2005 21:33:07 EDT
Subject: Judge Roberts and Cheney

We have to keep up the focus on the Fitzgerald investigation and deception that led us to war. The public does care about that and Roberts is a part of it.
Use the info. Post it. Pass it on.

In re: Richard B. Cheney, Vice President of the United States, 2003 U.S. App. LEXIS 18831 (D.C. Cir. 2003), cert. granted, 2003 U.S. LEXIS 9205 (2003): secrecy of Vice President Cheney's energy task force

Judge Roberts was one of the dissenters in the court's 5-3 denial of a petition for rehearing en banc (with one judge not participating) filed by the Bush Administration in its continuing efforts to avoid releasing records pertaining to Vice President Cheney's energy task force. This ruling came in litigation brought by Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club charging that the Vice President's task force had violated federal law by not making its records public. The court's ruling marked "the fourth time a judicial panel has rebuffed efforts to keep the information from the public." Carol D. Leonnig, "Energy Task Force Appeal Refused," Washington Post (Sept. 12, 2003). At the Administration's urging, the Supreme Court has agreed to review the case; a decision is expected by the end of June 2004.
http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=13523

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May 13, 2005
John Bolton's Yellowcake

by Ray McGovern
What role did John Bolton play in the Bush administration's efforts to manufacture the intelligence needed to justify the invasion of Iraq? As it turns out, a hidden but important role. Remember the "yellowcake from Niger"?

Briefly reported last week in Steve Clemons' The Washington Note was that a Congressional subcommittee, citing a State Department inspector general's report, found that Bolton ordered and received updates on the notorious "Fact Sheet" of Dec. 19, 2002, that claimed Iraq had been trying to procure uranium "yellowcake" from Niger. In other words, John Bolton played a key role in ordering that discredited intelligence be used to support the president's case for war, three months before the attack on Iraq.

Boltonization

But how does this kind of "fixing" play out? Insights leap out of recently declassified e-mail messages from the office of Undersecretary of State John Bolton, archdeacon of politicization.
I was particularly struck to learn from the Washington Post that Bolton's principal aide and chief enforcer, Frederick Fleitz, is actually a CIA analyst on loan to Bolton. In this light, his behavior in trying to cook intelligence to the recipe of high policy is even more inexcusable. CIA analysts, particularly those on detail to policy departments, have no business playing the enforcer of policy judgments, have no business conjuring up "intelligence around the policy."

Fleitz must have flunked Ethics and Intelligence Analysis 101. Or perhaps the CIA does not offer the course any more. This is the same Fleitz who "explained" to State Department intelligence analyst Christian Westermann that it was "a political judgment as to how to interpret this data [on Cuba's biological weapons program] and the I.C. [intelligence community] should do as we asked."

E-mails released more recently show Fleitz acting as stalking horse for Bolton to make sure the intelligence fit the policies Bolton was pushing. Fleitz is furious that State Department intelligence experts feel it their duty to demur on Bolton/Fleitz judgments regarding the efficacy of missile export controls against China. Fleitz, whose home office at CIA is the one which gave us "high confidence" judgments on the presence of WMD in Iraq, apparently ordered up analysis from CIA to suit his boss' strongly held judgment that the controls on exports to China were deficient.

Not surprisingly, Bolton liked the analysis that was served up by Fleitz' CIA colleagues and told him to pass it to Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. But State's intelligence analysts had the temerity to do their job, and attached a cover memo taking the opposite position, viewing the export controls positively. Questioned on this by Senate staffers last week, Fleitz admitted that his experience in his CIA home office gave him a personal stake in how the analysis was treated. This is doubly inappropriate.

The idea of seconding intelligence analysts to policy departments dates back almost three decades to a time when many analysts found themselves working in a vacuum, blissfully unaware of policymakers' interests and needs. The analysts' (otherwise laudable) search for relevance has now swung the pendulum too far in the other direction, with folks like Fleitz "cherry-picked" by folks like Bolton to "support" policy in wholly inappropriate ways. That top CIA officials allow the Boltons of this administration to get away with that shows CIA managers to be weak, witting, and willing accomplices in this corruption of the intelligence process.

Enter the Yellowcake

The Fleitz technique is one way to Boltonize intelligence, but there are other ways to counter attempts by intelligence analysts to "tell it like it is," when "like it is" needs to be "fixed" around a policy. Just go around the analysts.

An instructive example of this can be seen by harking back to a key juncture in the saga on Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction," in which Bolton achieved his aims by simply cutting State Department intelligence analysts out of the flow.

Painful as it is to bring up the embarrassing canard about Iraq seeking uranium in Niger, that sad chapter illustrates how Bolton operates when he knows he cannot bully intelligence community analysts to come up with the desired "analysis." Before President Bush's key speech on Oct. 7, 2002, setting the stage for Congress' vote on the war three days later, then-CIA director Tenet personally intervened to prevent the president from using spurious "intelligence" on the alleged attempts to acquire "yellowcake" (slightly enriched uranium) from Africa.

Just two months later, however, this canard reappeared in an official State Department "Fact Sheet" dated Dec. 19, debunking Baghdad's submission to the UN Security Council accounting for Iraqi weapons programs. The "Fact Sheet" directly cited the "yellowcake" deal as proof that Saddam Hussein was lying to the United States about his nuclear program (which had been "reconstituted" only in the rhetoric of Bolton's patron, Dick Cheney).

Small problem: State's intelligence analysts had long shared CIA's skepticism about that report. Indeed, in the National Intelligence Estimate of Oct. 1, 2002, they had branded it "dubious."

What accounts for new life being injected into this canard? We learned some time ago from a former senior Bush State Department official that the impetus came from Bolton's office. And now we have documentary proof, thanks to a State Department Inspector General investigation, the results of which were shared with a congressional subcommittee. In sum, when Bolton realized that the Iraq-Niger report itself left most analysts holding their noses (even before it was established that it was based on crude forgeries), his office inserted the bogus story into the official State Department "Fact Sheet" without clearing it with the department's own intelligence analysts. Easy.

This strongly suggests that it was also no accident that a month later the yellowcake fable found its way into the president's State of the Union address. Bolton's rogue operation ensured the subsequent embarrassment of one and all when the head of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohammed ElBaradei, declared the reports "not authentic," forcing both White House officials and George Tenet to apologize.

Bolton kept his head down during all this, doing all he could to disguise his involvement in the "Fact Sheet" misadventure. Indeed, the House Committee on Government Reform's Subcommittee on National Security found that "the State Department deliberately concealed unclassified information about the role of John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control, in the creation of a fact sheet that falsely claimed that Iraq sought uranium from Niger."

In a letter of Sept. 25, 2003, State told the subcommittee that "Bolton did not play a role in the creation of this document." However, subcommittee investigators subsequently obtained access to a State Department inspector general report that showed that Bolton not only ordered that the fact sheet be created, but also received updates on its development.

Later, Bolton fell back on his default modus operandi: the by-now-familiar attempts to fire for their insolence analysts, managers, senior UN officials ? it doesn't matter. Late last year, Bolton led a one-man, one-country vendetta aimed at preventing the well-respected ElBaradei from getting another term as director of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency. That quixotic campaign was unprecedented in its vindictiveness and won the U.S. no friends.

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Why "White House v. Wilson/Plame" Matters
By Ray McGovern
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Tuesday 19 July 2005

The key issue in the affair has little directly to do with former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson; or his wife, Valerie Plame; or Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby; or even President George W. Bush's alter ego, Karl Rove. White House v. Wilson/Plame is about Iraq, where our sons and daughters - and many others - are daily meeting violent death in an unwinnable war.

And it's about manipulation.

It's about how our elected representatives were deceived into voting for an unprovoked war and what happened when one man stood up and called the administration's bluff. And it's about the perfect storm now gathering, as:

more lies are exposed (whether in journalists' e-mails or in the minutes of high-level meetings at 10 Downing Street),

the guerrilla war escalates in Iraq, and

more and more Americans find themselves agreeing with Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., that administration leaders seem to be "making it up as they go along."
It wasn't envisaged this way by the naï¶¥ "neoconservative" ideologues that got us into the quagmire in Iraq. Actually they still seem to believe that all will be well if the Iraqi people can only get it into their heads that we are liberators, not occupiers.

So much smoke is being blown over White House v. Wilson/Plame that it is becoming almost impossible to see the forest for the trees. Bewildered houseguests from outside the Beltway throw up their hands: "It's all just politics...and character assassination." And that may well be precisely the impression the media wish to leave with us. Otherwise, left to our own devices, we might conclude they served us poorly with the indiscriminate, hyper-patriotic cheerleading that helped slide us into the worst foreign policy debacle in our nation's history.

Our weekend guests had a hard time trying to understand why the White House two years ago blew the cover of CIA operative Valerie Plame, wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson. Sure, Wilson had caught and exposed the Bush administration in a very serious lie. But almost immediately, top officials conceded that Ambassador Wilson was essentially correct in dismissing the flimsy report that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium in Africa.

Betrayal of Trust

So why the neuralgic reaction? Why go to such lengths to impugn Wilson's credibility; and what purpose would be served by harming his wife as well? At first blush, it does seem awfully petty. But dig a little deeper and you'll get a glimpse of what lies beneath the White House campaign against the Wilsons.

Revenge? There was certainly a strong desire to retaliate. And Karl Rove did tell NBC's Chris Matthews at the time that wives were "fair game." Angry at White House dissembling, Wilson had doffed his ambassadorial hat and thrown down the gauntlet when he told the press that the Iraq-Niger caper "begs the question about what else they are lying about." And, indeed, how many more untruths have been uncovered over the past two years?

Was the relentless White House campaign to vilify the Wilsons aimed primarily at serving notice that a similar fate awaits any whose conscience might prompt them to expose still more of the lies used to "justify" the attack on Iraq? That, too, was surely part of it. And, sad to say, it has worked - at least until now. Yes, we have learned about the misdiagnosed aluminum tubes, the "Curveball" deception on Iraqi biological warfare, and the "unpiloted aerial vehicles" (UAVs) that Congress was told could threaten our coastal cities. But it was basic physics that held administration arguments up to eventual ridicule. None of the exposé³ came from the mouths of people like Joe Wilson, who simply could not abide crass deception in matters of war and peace.

The main motivation of the White House character assassins had more to do with the particular lie that Joseph Wilson exposed and the essential role it played in the administration's plans. For a nuclear-armed Iraq was the most compelling threat that could be peddled to our elected representatives and senators to deceive them into approving a war launched for reasons unrelated to any putative Iraqi WMD program.

The Big Lie

The Bush administration needed to assert that Iraq was on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. Taking that line posed a huge challenge. On the one hand, a new threat had to be created/hyped out of thin air; and, on the other, the pundits had to be too lazy to refresh their memories on what senior U.S. officials had said about Iraq's military capability before 9/11.

"Saddam Hussein has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors." (Colin Powell, Feb. 24, 2001)

"We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt." (Condoleezza Rice, July 29, 2001)

These statements went quickly down the memory hole. Immediately after 9/11, administration officials, with Vice President Dick Cheney in the lead, began to warn that Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" were just over the horizon. On August 26, 2002, a month after senior U.S. officials had explained to their British counterparts that intelligence was being "fixed" around a policy of war, Vice President Dick Cheney was the first to use that fabricated and twisted intelligence to deceive Americans at large. In a major speech he claimed:

"We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Among other sources, we've gotten this from the firsthand testimony of defectors - including Saddam's own son-in-law."

In fact, Saddam's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, had told us just the opposite: "All weapons - biological, chemical, missile, nuclear were destroyed," he told his debriefers in 1995. Everything else he told them was true. And so was that. Kamel had been in charge of those programs; the weaponry was destroyed at his command.

But no matter. Cheney's speech, and the subsequent National Intelligence Estimate cooked to his recipe, allowed the president to raise the specter of mushroom clouds over U.S. cities, to force a yes vote in Congress for war and, not incidentally, to win back the Senate the following month.

The Iraq-Niger lie was thus both the cornerstone of the Bush agenda for war and the key to unraveling how the "fixing" worked. Rove, master of the administration's strategy yet only two years out of Texas, joined by Cheney's chief of staff I. Lewis ("Scooter") Libby spread red herrings to divert reporters off the scent and wound up triggering the eventual appointment of a special prosecutor and the convening of a grand jury.

So it was the president's and vice president's own men who brought the skunk to the picnic - Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. He shows no inclination to join in the fun and games, and still less to speak prematurely, or to speak at all. Rather, Fitzgerald appears to be a real pro, and as long has he can avoid being fired, he could potentially take all the fun out of things. "Neo-conservative" pundit William Kristol was clearly reflecting growing uneasiness when he commented recently that Fitzpatrick is "the problem for the White House; we have no idea what he knows."

Ray McGovern works at Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. He had a 27-year career as an analyst at CIA and is on the Steering Committee of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. This article appeared first on TomPaine.com.

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http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050719/cheney_and_plame.php

Cheney And Plame
Ray McGovern
July 19, 2005

Ray McGovern works at Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. He had a 27-year career as an analyst at CIA and is on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

In yesterday?s essay, Why Plame Matters , we suggested that the White House assault on the reputations of former ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife had much to do with ?the particular lie that Wilson exposed,? and we discussed the unusual role Vice President Dick Cheney played regarding the bogus ?intelligence? about Iraq seeking to acquire uranium from Niger. Our Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) files provide contemporaneous insight into Cheney?s unusual involvement and throw light on continuing attempts to disguise it.

Continuing attempts? Investigative journalist Robert Parry, writing today for consortiumnews.com, notes that atop the Republican National Committee?s list of ?Joe Wilson?s Top Ten Worst Inaccuracies and Misstatements? sits ?Wilson insisted that the Vice President?s office sent him to Niger.? That?s not exactly what Wilson said, but let?s leave that point aside for the moment. What strikes me is the rather transparent two-year-old campaign to dissociate Cheney from L?Affaire Iraq-Niger.

On July 14, 2003, the day of Robert Novak?s opening salvo against the Wilsons, VIPS wrote a Memorandum for the President with two main sections: ?The Forgery Flap,? and ?The Vice President?s Role.? In that memo, we also made an important recommendation that appeared a bit extreme at the time, but it was already possible to discern what was going on:

We recommend that you call an abrupt halt to attempts to prove Vice President Cheney ?not guilty.? His role has been so transparent that such attempts will only erode further your own credibility. Equally pernicious, from our perspective, is the likelihood that intelligence analysts will conclude that the way to success is to acquiesce in the cooking of their judgments, since those above them will not be held accountable. We strongly recommend that you ask for Cheney?s immediate resignation.

Protesting (or Protecting) Too Much

We were all children once. Remember how, when you and your peers got caught in some mischief, the ringleader had to be protected? ?Who decided to do this terrible thing?? was often the question. ?Not Dick (or Tom or Harry)? was often the instinctive, immediate answer. Remember how, as a parent, that made you really wonder about Dick (or Tom or Harry)?

In our memo of July 14, 2003, we warned President George W. Bush that the Iraq-seeking-uranium-in-Niger forgery was ?a microcosm of a mischievous nexus of overarching problems? in his White House. We cited the remarks of then-presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer earlier that week, which (as noted above) set the tone for what has followed?right up to today. When asked about the forgery Fleischer noted?as if drawing on well-memorized talking points?that the vice president was not guilty of anything. (The denial was gratuitous; the question asked did not even mention the vice president?s possible role.) And the liturgy of absolution continued on July 11, 2003, when then-director of the CIA, George Tenet, did his awkward best to absolve the vice president of responsibility.

The ?Particular Lie? and Forgery

We noted yesterday that the main motivation of the White House campaign to discredit the Wilsons had to do with ?the particular lie that Joseph Wilson exposed and the essential role it played in the administration?s plans. The lie was that Iraq was on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons and that, despite Iraq?s inability to deliver such weapons on the U.S., this somehow posed a ?grave and gathering? threat. The plans were to use that ominous specter to deceive Congress into approving war on Iraq. The problem was that not even the obsequious George Tenet could come up with evidence that could withstand close scrutiny.

This was a problem, especially since U.N. inspectors and U.S. intelligence knew that Iraq?s nuclear program had been destroyed after the Gulf War and there was no persuasive evidence that Baghdad was moving to reconstitute it. Even the intelligence imagery analysts, whom former CIA director John Deutch gave away to the Pentagon in 1996, could not come up with the evidence needed, despite very strong incentive to please their boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

What a welcome windfall, then, when a deus ex machina appeared in early 2002, in the form of a report alleging that Iraq was seeking uranium in the African country of Niger. Since Iraq had no other use for uranium, the White House spin machine went into high gear, playing up the report as proof that Baghdad was reconstituting its nuclear weapons development program. The intelligence analysts had to hold their noses?not only because of the dubious sourcing but because the substance of the report made little sense. They knew (and Wilson confirmed) that all the uranium mined in Niger is controlled by a French-led international consortium that exercises super-strict control over exports from Niger. It just couldn?t happen.

Provenance and likelihood be damned. The White House now had a ?report? that could be used effectively with Congress, and Tenet could be counted on to keep his nose-holding professionals out of sight. The Iraq-seeking-uranium-from-Africa canard assumed such prominent importance to the administration?s case that it simply could not be dropped altogether?either in Washington or in London. Accordingly, none of us in VIPS were in the least surprised to learn recently of the line taken by Karl Rove with Time reporter Matthew Cooper on July 11, 2003. In an email that Cooper sent his bosses at Time , Rove insisted that Wilson?s findings on Niger-Iraq were flawed. According to Cooper, Rove ?implied strongly there?s still plenty to implicate Iraqi interest in acquiring uranium from Niger.? That was false. Neither British nor U.S. intelligence has come up with anything to throw the slightest doubt on Wilson?s conclusions.

Who Did It?

Who authored the forgery remains a mystery, but one that Congress has avoided trying to solve, even though many have expressed outrage at having been snookered into voting for war. Senate intelligence committee chair Pat Roberts, R-Kan., has demonstrated a curious lack of curiosity. Nothing that ranking minority member Jay Rockefeller could do would persuade Roberts to ask the FBI to investigate.

Those searching for answers are reduced to asking the obvious: Cui bono? Who stood to benefit from such a forgery? A no-brainer?those lusting for war on Iraq. And who might that be? Look up the ?neocon? writings on the website of the Project for the New American Century . There you will find information on people like Michael Ledeen, ?Freedom Analyst? at the American Enterprise Institute and a key strategist among ?neoconservative? hawks in and out of the Bush administration. Applauding the invasion of Iraq, Ledeen asserted at the very start that the war could not be contained, and that ?it may turn out to be a war to remake the world.?

Beyond his geopolitical punditry, Ledeen?s career shows he is well-accustomed to rogue operations. A longtime Washington operative, he was fired as a ?consultant? for the National Security Council under President Ronald Reagan for running fool?s errands for Oliver North during the Iran-Contra subterfuge. One of Ledeen?s Iran-Contra partners in crime, so to speak, was Elliot Abrams. Abrams was convicted of lying to Congress about Iran-Contra. He was pardoned before jail time, however, by George H. W. Bush and is now George W. Bush?s deputy national security adviser. Ledeen continues to enjoy entree into the office of the vice president, as well as to his friend Abrams.

During a radio interview with Ian Masters on April 3, 2005, former CIA operative Vincent Cannistraro charged that the Iraq-Niger documents were forged in the United States. Drawing on earlier speculation regarding who forged the documents, Masters asked, ?If I were to say the name Michael Ledeen to you, what would you say?? Cannistraro replied, ?You?re very close.?

Ledeen has denied having anything to do with the forgery. Yet the company he keeps with other prominent Iran-Contra convictees/pardonees/intelligence contractors suggests otherwise. Another intriguing straw in the wind is Ledeen?s long association with Italian intelligence, which, according to most accounts, played a role in disseminating the forged documents. If Ledeen and his associates were involved, this might also help explain the amateurishness of the forged documents. They would have sorely missed the institutional expertise formerly at their beck and call.

The Cover-up

It is a safe bet that Joseph Wilson suspected this kind of skullduggery. He nevertheless played it straight. After hearing the bogus Iraq-story repeated in the January 28, 2003, State of the Union speech and ascertaining that it was based on little more than the original report, Wilson began to approach administration officials suggesting that they retract the story or he would in conscience be compelled to make public what had happened. He was told, in effect, Go public; who will believe you? So he did. Astonishingly, the administration and the domesticated press have partially succeeded in making Wilson?s credibility the issue?witness, for example, the frontal assault last weekend by fast-talking, no-holds-barred Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman.

Joseph Wilson had been around long enough to know what to expect. Moreover, the White House apparently made it very clear that they would make him pay if he went public. Just three weeks before The New York Times published Wilson?s op-ed ?What I Did Not Find in Africa,? he and I shared keynoting duties at a conference on Iraq. Wilson told me then that he was about to publish, adding ?They are going to come after me big-time. I don?t know exactly how, but they are going to do it.?

It has now become clear that Cheney?s chief of staff, I. Lewis ?Scooter? Libby, was as active as Rove in spreading the word about the Wilsons when the story broke in July 2003. Surprise, surprise.

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http://nytimes.com

July 22, 2005
For Two Aides in Leak Case, 2nd Issue Rises
By DAVID JOHNSTON

This article was reported by David Johnston, Douglas Jehl and Richard W. Stevenson and was written by Mr. Johnston.

WASHINGTON, July 21 - At the same time in July 2003 that a C.I.A. operative's identity was exposed, two key White House officials who talked to journalists about the officer were also working closely together on a related underlying issue: whether President Bush was correct in suggesting earlier that year that Iraq had been trying to acquire nuclear materia

Alpha · Last edited by Alpha on Fri Jul 29, 2005 7:48 am; edited 10 times in total

According to Wayne Madsen:

http://waynemadsenreport.com/

Senator Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) intends to interfere in Fitzgerald probe. Roberts, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, announced that his commitee will be "reviewing" the criminal probe by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald of the White House leak of the identities of covert CIA agents. If Roberts is serious and not just grandstanding, this may indicate that the White House is looking to give Fitzgerald's targets (Karl Rove, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and others) congressional general immunity from prosecution in return for their testimony before Roberts' committee. This was the method by which John Poindexter and Oliver North were able to avoid jail time for their roles in Iran-contra, their convictions being overturned by a federal appeals court because of their previously granted congressional immunity. There is also a bit of Watergate redux in Roberts' statement. Pressure by the GOP on Fitzgerald is reminiscent of the Nixon administration's decision to fire Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox. That prompted the resignations of Nixon's Attorney and Deputy Attorney General.

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For Bush, repercussions of leak case are uncertain
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
The New York Times
24 Jul 2005

WASHINGTON — His former secretary of state, most of his closest aides and a parade of other senior officials have testified to a grand jury. His political strategist has emerged as a central figure in the case, as has his vice president's chief of staff. His spokesman has taken a pounding for making statements about the matter that now appear not to be accurate.

For all that, it is still not clear what the investigation into the leak of a CIA operative's identity will mean for President Bush. So far the disclosures about the involvement of Karl Rove, among others, have not exacted any substantial political price from the administration. And nobody has suggested that the investigation directly implicates the president.

Yet Bush has yet to address some uncomfortable questions that he may not be able to evade indefinitely.

For starters, did Bush know in fall 2003, when he was telling the public that no one wanted to get to the bottom of the case more than he did, that Rove, his longtime strategist, senior adviser and alter ego, and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, had touched on the CIA officer's identity in conversations with journalists before the officer's name became public? If not, when did they tell him, and what would the delay say in particular about his relationship with Rove, whose career and Bush's have been intertwined for decades?

There also is the broader issue of whether Bush was aware of any effort by his aides to use the CIA officer's identity to undermine the standing of her husband, a former diplomat who had publicly accused the administration of twisting its prewar intelligence about Iraq's nuclear program.

For the past several weeks, Bush and his spokesman, Scott McClellan, have declined to address the leak in any substantive way, citing the continuing federal criminal investigation.

But Democrats increasingly see an opportunity to raise questions about Bush's credibility and to reopen a debate about whether the White House leveled with the nation about the urgency of going to war with Iraq. And even some Republicans said Bush cannot assume he will escape from the investigation politically unscathed.

"Until all the facts come out, no one is really going to know who the fickle finger of fate points at," said Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster.

Degrees of knowing

The case centers on how the name of a CIA operative ended up two years ago in a syndicated column by Robert Novak, who identified her by her maiden name, Valerie Plame.

The operative, who is more commonly known as Valerie Wilson, is married to Joseph Wilson, a former diplomat who had publicly accused the administration eight days before Novak's column of twisting some of the intelligence used to justify going to war with Iraq. Under some conditions, the disclosure of a covert intelligence agent's name can be a federal crime.

The special prosecutor in the case, Patrick Fitzgerald, has kept a tight curtain of secrecy around his investigation. But he spent more than an hour in the Oval Office on June 24, 2004, interviewing Bush about the case. Bush was not under oath, but he had his lawyer for the case, James Sharp, with him.

Neither the White House nor the Justice Department has said what Bush was asked, but prosecutors do not lightly seek to put questions directly to any president, suggesting there was information Fitzgerald felt he could get only from Bush.

Allan Lichtman, a presidential historian at American University in Washington, said the lesson of recent history, for example in the Iran-contra case under President Reagan, is that presidents tend to know more than it might first appear about what is going on within the White House.

"My presumption in presidential politics is that the president always knows," Lichtman said. "But there are degrees of knowing. Reagan said, keep the contras together body and soul. Did he know exactly what Oliver North was doing? No, it doesn't mean he knew what every subordinate is doing."

Rove spoke to reporters

According to accounts by various people involved in the case, Rove spoke in the days after Wilson went public with his criticism in July 2003 to both of the first two reporters to disclose that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA, Novak and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine. Cooper has said he also spoke about the case with Libby.

By September 2003, as a criminal investigation was beginning, McClellan was telling reporters that Rove had nothing to do with the leak, saying he had checked with Rove about the topic.

Around the same time, the president was saying he had no idea who might have been responsible. Asked by a reporter on Oct. 6, 2003, whether the leak was retaliation for Wilson's criticism, Bush replied: "I don't know who leaked the information, for starters. So it's hard for me to answer that question until I find out the truth."

Republicans said the relationship between Bush and Rove was so deep and complex that it was hard to imagine the president cutting ties with him barring an indictment.

McClellan and other White House officials have repeatedly declined to answer when asked if Rove or Libby had told the president by October 2003 that they had alluded to Wilson's identity months earlier in their conversations with the journalists.

Bush in a box?

But Bush's political opponents said the president is in a box. In their view, either Rove and Libby kept the president in the dark about their actions, making them appear evasive at a time Bush was demanding that his staff cooperate fully, or Rove and Libby had told the president and he was not forthcoming in his public statements about his knowledge of their roles.

"We know that Karl Rove, through Scott McClellan, did not tell Americans the truth," said Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., and a former top aide in President Clinton's White House. "What's important now is what Karl Rove told the president."

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

'A Clean Break' JINSA/PNAC Neocon Associated Espionage

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/07/14/a-clean-break-jinsa-pnac-neocons-associated-aipac-espionag.php

How Chalabi Conned the Neocons

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/01/31/how-ahmed-chalabi-conned-the-neocons.php

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Cheney, Bolton, and others linked to Valerie Plame leak?

http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/7/12/155834/147

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JOHN BOLTON PUSHED NIGER-URANIUM FIASCO AT STATE

http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/000370.html

March 14, 2005

JOHN BOLTON PUSHED NIGER-URANIUM FIASCO AT STATE -- Then Tried to Hide his Tracks and Staff Lied to Congress

I just received this March 1, 2005 letter written by House Government Reform Committee Ranking Member Henry Waxman to Representative Christopher Shays who chairs the Government Reform Committee's Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats, and International Security.

Waxman is basically blowing the whistle on the administration's extravagant use of "sensitive but unclassified" designations on official acts to block public access to and transparency of government policymaking.

On pages 5-7, Waxman reveals that John Bolton promulgated the Niger-Uranium fiction at the State Department despite rejection of this claim by State Department and CIA intelligence analysts.

Waxman then argues that not only did Bolton and his people then try and conceal Bolton's role in pushing the Niger-Uranium agenda by marking the material "sensitive but unclassified" and blocking it in case of a Freedom of Information Act request, the State Department actually LIED TO CONGRESS about John Bolton's role.

I think Senator Hagel might want to reconsider his support for the Bolton nomination now. . .

Here is the excerpt from the Waxman letter:

Concealment of a State Department Official's Role in the Niger Uranium Claim

In April 2004, the State Department used the designation "sensitive but unclassified" to conceal unclassified information about the role of John Bolton, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control, in the creation of a fact sheet distributed to the United Nations that falsely claimed Iraq had sought uranium from Niger.

On December 19, 2002, the State Department issued a fact sheet entitled "Illustrative Examples of Omissions from the Iraqi Declaration to the United Nations Security Council." (9) The fact sheet listed eight key areas in which the Bush Administration found fault with Iraq's weapons declaration to the United Nations on December 7, 2002. Under the heading "Nuclear Weapons," the fact sheet stated:

The Declaration ignores efforts to procure uranium from Niger.
Why is the Iraqi regime hiding their uranium procurement?

It was later discovered that this claim was based on fabricated documents. (10) In addition, both State Department intelligence officials and CIA officials reported that they had rejected the claim as unreliable. (11) As a result, it was unclear who within the State Department was involved in preparing the fact sheet.

On July 21, 2003, I wrote to Secretary of State Colin Powell, asking for an explanation of the role of John Bolton, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs, in creating the document. (12) On September 25, 2003, the State Department responded with a definitive denial: "Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs, John R. Bolton, did not play a role in the creation of this document." (13)

Subsequently, however, I joined six other members of the Government Reform Committee in requesting from the State Department Inspector General a copy of an unclassified "chronology" on how the fact sheet was developed. (14) This chronology described a meeting on December 18, 2002, between Secretary Powell, Mr. Bolton, and Richard Boucher, the Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Public Affairs. According to this chronology, Mr. Boucher specifically asked Mr. Bolton "for help developing a response to Iraq's Dec 7 Declaration to the United Nations Security Council that could be used with the press. According to the chronology, which is phrased in the present tense, Mr. Bolton "agrees and tasks the Bureau of Nonproliferation," a subordinate office that reports directly to Mr. Bolton, to conduct the work.

This unclassified chronology also stated that on the next day, December 19, 2003, the Bureau of Nonproliferation "sends email with the fact sheet, 'Fact Sheet Iraq Declaration.doc.'" to Mr. Bolton's office (emphasis in original). A second e-mail was sent a few minutes later, and a third e-mail was sent about an hour after that. According to the chronology, each version "still includes Niger reference." Although Mr. Bolton may not have personally drafted the document, the chronology appears to indicate that he ordered its creation and received updates on its development.

The Inspector General's chronology was marked "sensitive but unclassified." In addition, the letter transmitting the chronology stated that it "contains sensitive information, which may be protected from public release under the Freedom of Information Act" and requested that no "public release of this information" be made. (15) In fact, however, the chronology consisted of nothing more than a factual recitation of information on meetings, e-mails, and documents.

This is not a constructive reformer out to promote American interests in a dignified manner in the world's most significant multilateral institution.

There are many administration jobs that John Bolton may be completely appropriate for -- but the one that he has been nominated for is not on that list.

Senator Hagel -- don't you see that?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Devil And Judy Miller

http://www.radaronline.com/fresh-intelligence/2005/07/15/index.php

Did Robert Novak rat on New York Times reporter Judith Miller? While some have suggested Miller—who never wrote a word about CIA spook Valerie Plame—was dragged into the leak probe when her name turned up on a White House call log, several beltway insiders close to the investigation say special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald learned of Miller’s involvement from Novak himself.

Though the GOP hatchetman claims he’s never spoken to the grand jury about the column, a well-known Democratic pundit tells Radar, “Novak is the media’s Joseph Valachi,” referring to the 1960’s mafia capo who was the first mobster to testify against La Cosa Nostra. “There’s no question he rolled over.” According to our sources, Miller shared Plame’s identity with her perfidious fellow neocon after deciding not to publish it herself; Novak then called his two White House sources—one of whom was Karl Rove—for confirmation and wrote the July 14, 2003 column that blew Plame’s cover.

Soon after, Fitzgerald dispatched agents to question Novak about his sources and he promptly spilled the beans. The special prosecutor then subpoenaed Miller, who’s currently in jail on a contempt charge. Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson—whose Times’ op-ed triggered the leak in the first place—is open to the theory. “If Novak met with the special counsel and satisfied all their needs, they wouldn’t have any need to call him in front of the grand jury,” Wilson tells Radar. “As for what he told them [about Miller], why don’t you ask Novak?”

Repeated calls and e-mails to the Prince of Darkness went unanswered, and Times spokesman Toby Usnik would only say, robotically, that “Ms. Miller learned about Valerie Plame from a confidential source or sources whose identity she continues to protect to this day.” Noble, indeed. As for Novak, we hear fellow pariah Michael Jackson is looking for a ghostwriter.

Photo: NYDN

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

Rove Leak is Just Part of Larger Scandal
By Daniel Schorr
The Christian Science Monitor

Friday 15 July 2005

Washington - Let me remind you that the underlying issue in the Karl Rove controversy is not a leak, but a war and how America was misled into that war.

In 2002 President Bush, having decided to invade Iraq, was casting about for a casus belli. The weapons of mass destruction theme was not yielding very much until a dubious Italian intelligence report, based partly on forged documents (it later turned out), provided reason to speculate that Iraq might be trying to buy so-called yellowcake uranium from the African country of Niger. It did not seem to matter that the CIA advised that the Italian information was "fragmentary and lacked detail."

Prodded by Vice President Dick Cheney and in the hope of getting more conclusive information, the CIA sent Joseph Wilson, an old Africa hand, to Niger to investigate. Mr. Wilson spent eight days talking to everyone in Niger possibly involved and came back to report no sign of an Iraqi bid for uranium and, anyway, Niger's uranium was committed to other countries for many years to come.

No news is bad news for an administration gearing up for war. Ignoring Wilson's report, Cheney talked on TV about Iraq's nuclear potential. And the president himself, in his 2003 State of the Union address no less, pronounced: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Wilson declined to maintain a discreet silence. He told various people that the president was at least mistaken, at most telling an untruth. Finally Wilson directly challenged the administration with a July 6, 2003 New York Times op-ed headlined, "What I didn't find in Africa," and making clear his belief that the president deliberately manipulated intelligence in order to justify an invasion.

One can imagine the fury in the White House. We now know from the e-mail traffic of Time's correspondent Matt Cooper that five days after the op-ed appeared, he advised his bureau chief of a super-secret conversation with Karl Rove who alerted him to the fact that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA and may have recommended him for the Niger assignment. Three days later, Bob Novak's column appeared giving Wilson's wife's name, Valerie Plame, and the fact she was an undercover CIA officer. Mr. Novak has yet to say, in public, whether Mr. Rove was his source. Enough is known to surmise that the leaks of Rove, or others deputized by him, amounted to retaliation against someone who had the temerity to challenge the president of the United States when he was striving to find some plausible reason for invading Iraq.

The role of Rove and associates added up to a small incident in a very large scandal - the effort to delude America into thinking it faced a threat dire enough to justify a war.

Daniel Schorr is the senior news analyst at National Public Radio.

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

Rove Tied to Tom DeLay Lobbying Scandal
Campaign for a Cleaner Congress | Press Release

Thursday 14 July 2005

Washington - Karl Rove's involvement in leaking the name of a CIA operative for political advantage during wartime could be just the tip of the iceberg as far as unethical behavior, since his web of influence extends to the most notorious figure of the House Lobbying Scandal.

"It's widely known that Karl Rove has been pulling strings all over Washington for years, obviously not just in the case of the Plame leak," said Peter L. Kelley, manager of the Campaign for a Cleaner Congress.

"What is not widely known, however, is his close connection with Jack Abramoff, who is at the center of the lobbying scandal in which Washington is now embroiled. Rove let archconservative operatives like Grover Norquist call shots at the White House. And just this week, a Texas judge ruled that a former Rove lieutenant must face felony charges of money laundering for Tom DeLay's political operation.

"Without further ethics reforms, the public has virtually no ability to find out what is really going on in Washington these days," Kelley said. "But what we do know is starting to smell, and it offers a starting point for further investigation."

When Rove got to the White House in 2001, he hired as his personal assistant Susan Ralston, previously Abramoff's personal assistant. Ralston has since become an insider's insider.

Norquist reportedly made a deal in which Ralston would take messages for Rove at the White House, then call Norquist to tell her whether she should put the caller through.

John Colyandro wrote direct mail pieces for Rove in the 1980s. When he was hired as executive director of the Texans for a Republican Majority PAC, he was described as a "longtime pal of Rove's." This week, a judge said Colyandro must stand trial for laundering over $600,000 in corporate campaign contributions.

Alpha

Rove Reportedly Held Phone Talk on CIA Officer

By David Johnston and Richard W. Stevenson
The New York Times

Friday 15 July 2005

Washington - Karl Rove, the White House senior adviser, spoke with the columnist Robert D. Novak as he was preparing an article in July 2003 that identified a CIA officer who was undercover, someone who has been officially briefed on the matter said.

Mr. Rove has told investigators that he learned from the columnist the name of the CIA officer, who was referred to by her maiden name, Valerie Plame, and the circumstances in which her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, traveled to Africa to investigate possible uranium sales to Iraq, the person said.

After hearing Mr. Novak's account, the person who has been briefed on the matter said, Mr. Rove told the columnist: "I heard that, too."

The previously undisclosed telephone conversation, which took place on July 8, 2003, was initiated by Mr. Novak, the person who has been briefed on the matter said.

Six days later, Mr. Novak's syndicated column reported that two senior administration officials had told him that Mr. Wilson's "wife had suggested sending him" to Africa. That column was the first instance in which Ms. Wilson was publicly identified as a CIA operative.

The column provoked angry demands for an investigation into who disclosed Ms. Wilson's name to Mr. Novak. The Justice Department appointed Patrick J. Fitzgerald, a top federal prosecutor in Chicago, to lead the inquiry. Mr. Rove said in an interview with CNN last year that he did not know the CIA officer's name and did not leak it.

The person who provided the information about Mr. Rove's conversation with Mr. Novak declined to be identified, citing requests by Mr. Fitzgerald that no one discuss the case. The person discussed the matter in the belief that Mr. Rove was truthful in saying that he had not disclosed Ms. Wilson's identity.

On Oct. 1, 2003, Mr. Novak wrote another column in which he described calling two officials who were his sources for the earlier column. The first source, whose identity has not been revealed, provided the outlines of the story and was described by Mr. Novak as "no partisan gunslinger." Mr. Novak wrote that when he called a second official for confirmation, the source said, "Oh, you know about it."

That second source was Mr. Rove, the person briefed on the matter said. Mr. Rove's account to investigators about what he told Mr. Novak was similar in its message although the White House adviser's recollection of the exact words was slightly different. Asked by investigators how he knew enough to leave Mr. Novak with the impression that his information was accurate, Mr. Rove said he had heard parts of the story from other journalists but had not heard Ms. Wilson's name.

Robert D. Luskin, Mr. Rove's lawyer, said Thursday, "Any pertinent information has been provided to the prosecutor." Mr. Luskin has previously said prosecutors have advised Mr. Rove that he is not a target in the case, which means he is not likely to be charged with a crime.

In a brief conversation on Thursday, Mr. Novak declined to discuss the matter. It is unclear if Mr. Novak has testified to the grand jury, and if he has whether his account is consistent with Mr. Rove's.

The conversation between Mr. Novak and Mr. Rove seemed almost certain to intensify the question about whether one of Mr. Bush's closest political advisers played a role in what appeared to be an effort to undermine Mr. Wilson's credibility after he challenged the veracity of a key point in Mr. Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech, saying Saddam Hussein had sought nuclear fuel in Africa.

The conversation with Mr. Novak took place three days before Mr. Rove spoke with Matthew Cooper, a Time magazine reporter, whose e-mail message about their brief talk reignited the issue. In the message, whose contents were reported by Newsweek this week, Mr. Cooper told his bureau chief that Mr. Rove had talked about Ms. Wilson, although not by name.

After saying in 2003 that it was "ridiculous" to suggest that Mr. Rove had any role in the disclosure of Ms. Wilson's name, Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, has refused in recent days to discuss any specifics of the case. But he has suggested that President Bush continues to support Mr. Rove. On Thursday Mr. Rove was at Mr. Bush's side on a trip to Indianapolis.

As the political debate about Mr. Rove grows more heated, Mr. Fitzgerald is in what he has said are the final stages of his investigation into whether anyone at the White House violated a criminal statute that under certain circumstances makes it a crime for a government official to disclose the names of covert operatives like Ms. Wilson.

The law requires that the official knowingly identify an officer serving in a covert position. The person who has been briefed on the matter said Mr. Rove neither knew Ms. Wilson's name nor that she was a covert officer.

Mr. Fitzgerald has questioned a number of high-level administration officials. Mr. Rove has testified three times to the grand jury. I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, has also testified. So has former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. The prosecutor also interviewed Mr. Bush, in his White House office, and Mr. Cheney, but they were not under oath.

The disclosure of Mr. Rove's conversation with Mr. Novak raises a question the White House has never addressed: whether Mr. Rove ever discussed that conversation, or his exchange with Mr. Cooper, with the president. Mr. Bush has said several times that he wants all members of the White House staff to cooperate fully with Mr. Fitzgerald's investigation.

In June 2004, at Sea Island, Ga., soon after Mr. Cheney met with investigators in the case, Mr. Bush was asked at a news conference whether "you stand by your pledge to fire anyone found" to have leaked the agent's name.

"Yes," Mr. Bush said. "And that's up to the US attorney to find the facts."

Mr. Novak began his conversation with Mr. Rove by asking about the promotion of Frances Fragos Townsend, who had been a close aide to Janet Reno when she was attorney general, to a senior counterterrorism job at the White House, the person who was briefed on the matter said.

Mr. Novak then turned to the subject of Ms. Wilson, identifying her by name, the person said. In an Op-Ed article for The New York Times on July 6, 2003, Mr. Wilson suggested that he had been sent to Niger because of Mr. Cheney's interest in the matter. But Mr. Novak told Mr. Rove he knew that Mr. Wilson had been sent at the urging of Ms. Wilson, the person who had been briefed on the matter said.

Mr. Rove's allies have said that he did not call reporters with information about the case, rebutting the theory that the White House was actively seeking to intimidate or punish Mr. Wilson by harming his wife's career. They have also emphasized that Mr. Rove appeared not to know anything about Ms. Wilson other than that she worked at the CIA and was married to Mr. Wilson.

This is not the first time Mr. Rove has been linked to a leak reported by Mr. Novak. In 1992, Mr. Rove was fired from the Texas campaign to re-elect the first President Bush because of suspicions that he had leaked information to Mr. Novak about shortfalls in the Texas organization's fund-raising. Both Mr. Rove and Mr. Novak have denied that Mr. Rove had been the source.

Mr. Novak's July 14, 2003, column was published against a backdrop in which White House officials were clearly agitated by Mr. Wilson's assertion, in his Op-Ed article, that the administration had "twisted" intelligence about the threat from Iraq.

But the White House was also deeply concerned about Mr. Wilson's suggestion that he had gone to Africa to carry out a mission that originated with Mr. Cheney. At the time, Mr. Cheney's earlier statements about Iraq's banned weapons were coming under fire as it became clearer that the United States would find no stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons and that Mr. Hussein's nuclear program was not far advanced.

Mr. Novak wrote that the decision to send Mr. Wilson "was made at a routinely low level" and was based on what later turned out to be fake documents that had come to the United States through Italy.

Many aspects of Mr. Fitzgerald's investigation remain shrouded in secrecy. It is unclear who Mr. Novak's other source might be or how that source learned of Ms. Wilson's role as a CIA official. By itself, the disclosure that Mr. Rove had spoken to a second journalist about Ms. Wilson may not necessarily have a bearing on his exposure to any criminal charge in the case.

But it seems certain to add substantially to the political maelstrom that has engulfed the White House this week after the reports that Mr. Rove had discussed the matter with Mr. Cooper, the Time reporter.

Mr. Cooper's e-mail message to his editors, in which he described his discussion with Mr. Rove, was among documents that were turned over by Time executives recently to comply with a subpoena from Mr. Fitzgerald. A reporter for The New York Times, Judith Miller, who never wrote about the Wilson case, refused to cooperate with the investigation and was jailed last week for contempt of court. In addition to focusing new attention on Mr. Rove and whether he can survive the political fallout, it is sure to create new partisan pressure on Mr. Bush. Already, Democrats have been pressing the president either to live up to his promises to rid his administration of anyone found to have leaked the name of a covert operative or to explain why he does not believe Mr. Rove's actions subject him to dismissal.

The Rove-Novak exchange also leaves Mr. McClellan, the White House spokesman, in an increasingly awkward situation. Two years ago he repeatedly assured reporters that neither Mr. Rove nor several other administration officials were responsible for the leak.

The case has also threatened to become a distraction as Mr. Bush struggles to keep his second-term agenda on track and as he prepares for one of the most pivotal battles of his presidency, over the confirmation of a Supreme Court justice.

As Democrats have been demanding that Mr. Rove resign or provide a public explanation, the political machine that Mr. Rove built to bolster Mr. Bush and advance his agenda has cranked up to defend its creator. The Republican National Committee has mounted an aggressive campaign to cast Mr. Rove as blameless and to paint the matter as a partisan dispute driven not by legality, ethics or national security concerns, but by a penchant among Democrats to resort to harsh personal attacks.

But Mr. Bush said Wednesday that he would not prejudge Mr. Rove's role, and Mr. Rove was seated conspicuously just behind the president at a cabinet meeting, an image of business as usual. On Thursday, on the trip with Mr. Bush to Indiana, Mr. Rove grinned his way through a brief encounter with reporters after getting off Air Force One.

Mr. Bush's White House has been characterized by loyalty and long tenures, but no one has been at Mr. Bush's side in his journey through politics longer than Mr. Rove, who has been his strategist, enforcer, policy guru, ambassador to social and religious conservatives and friend since they met in Washington in the early 1970's. People who know Mr. Bush said it was unlikely, if not unthinkable, that he would seek Mr. Rove's departure barring a criminal indictment.

Alpha

From: "Stephen Sniegoski" <hectorpv@comcast.net>

To: "Sniegoski, Stephen" <hectorpv@comcast.net>
Subject: Downing St. Memos, Nuremberg, Illegality of the Iraq War
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 20:00:54 -0400

Friends,

Downing St. Memos and Nuremberg: Illegality of the Iraq War

My most recent article on The Last Ditch website is "The Downing Street memos and Nuremberg: The illegality of the war on Iraq" at www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_downing.htm which presents how the US attack on Iraq was illegal by the standards of the Nuremberg trial and current international law. While this was pretty obvious before the release of the Downing St. memos, those leaked memos confirm it completely.

Some excerpts:

The American Establishment has conventionally praised and invoked the 1945-46 Nuremberg trial of the Nazi leadership as a model for bringing international criminals to justice. But what if the same standards applied at Nuremberg were also applied to current U.S. policy? And a parallel trial were convened? In such a proceeding, would American leaders fare any better than the captured German leadership?

When people today think of Nazi criminality they think of the mass extermination of Jews: gas chambers, human soap, millions of bodies turned to ash in factory-like death camps. But the fact, which has largely been tossed down the memory hole, is that the extermination of Jews was not the fundamental Nazi crime cited at Nuremberg. Nor was it even the murder of noncombatant gentiles in addition to Jews. Rather, the major crime was the making of "aggressive war" — also referred to as "crimes against peace."

It is plain, then, that people knowledgeable about international law considered the attack on Iraq to be illegal long before the Downing Street memos came to light in 2005. But the leaked memos further confirm the war's illegality.

First, they confirm that the Bush administration had decided to attack Iraq and overthrow Saddam before Blix's inspectors ever set foot in Iraq. In short, not finding any WMDs would not prevent a U.S. attack

But no matter how positively the United States advertises itself and its motives, it has violated the same precepts of international law for which the Nazi leaders, and even some men who were not among the chief leaders, were severely punished. Not to worry, though: the United States can get away with its violations of international law. Unlike Nazi Germany, it has yet to be conquered by its enemies.

But none of that is of any importance to America's current leadership . . . . Judging from the American example, we must conclude that the only punishable "crime" in the struggle among nation-states is to lose a war.

In light of that rule, it is easy to understand why other countries scramble to equip themselves with the most powerful weapons they can lay their hands on.

For the entire article see: www.thornwalker.com/ditch/snieg_downing.htm

Alpha · Last edited by Alpha on Wed Jul 20, 2005 6:58 am; edited 1 time in total

I would be willing to bet that there is a likely possibility that fellow JINSA/PNAC (Israel first) operative John Bolton was in the mix as well:

NEW YORK TIMES
July 16, 2005

State Dept. Memo Gets Scrutiny
in Leak Inquiry on C.I.A. Officer
By RICHARD STEVENSON

This article was reported by Douglas Jehl, David Johnston and Richard
W. Stevenson and was written by Mr. Stevenson.

WASHINGTON, July 15 -
Prosecutors in the C.I.A. leak case have shown intense interest in a
2003 State Department memorandum that explained how a former
diplomat came to be dispatched on an intelligence-gathering mission
and the role of his wife, a C.I.A. officer, in the trip, people who
have been officially briefed on the case said.

Investigators in the case have been trying to learn whether officials
at the White House and elsewhere in the administration learned of the
C.I.A. officer's identity from the memorandum. They are seeking to
determine if any officials then passed the name along to journalists
and if officials were truthful in testifying about whether they had
read the memo, the people who have been briefed said, asking not to
be named because the special prosecutor heading the investigation had
requested that no one discuss the case.

The memorandum was sent to Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of
state, just before or as he traveled with President Bush and other
senior officials to Africa starting on July 7, 2003, when the White
House was scrambling to defend itself from a blast of criticism a few
days earlier from the former diplomat, Joseph C. Wilson IV, current
and former government officials said.

Mr. Powell was seen walking around Air Force One during the trip with
the memorandum in hand, said a person involved in the case who also
requested anonymity because of the prosecutor's admonitions about
talking about the investigation.

Investigators are also trying to determine whether the gist of the
information in the document, including the name of the C.I.A. officer,
Valerie Wilson, Mr. Wilson's wife, had been provided to the White
House even earlier, said another person who has been involved in the
case. Investigators have been looking at whether the State Department
provided the information to the White House before July 6, 2003, when
Mr. Wilson publicly criticized the way the administration used
intelligence to justify the war in Iraq, the person said.

The prosecutors have shown the memorandum to witnesses at the
grand jury investigating how the C.I.A. officer's name was disclosed
to journalists, blowing her cover as a covert operative and possibly
violating federal law, people briefed on the case said. The
prosecutors appear to be investigating how widely the document
circulated within the administration, and whether it might have been
the original source of information for whoever provided the identity
of Ms. Wilson to Robert D. Novak, the syndicated columnist who first
disclosed it in print.

On Thursday, a person who has been officially briefed on the matter
said that Karl Rove, President Bush's senior adviser, had spoken about
Ms. Wilson with Mr. Novak before Mr. Novak published a column on July
14, 2003, identifying the C.I.A. officer by her maiden name, Valerie
Plame. Mr. Rove, the person said, told Mr. Novak he had heard much the
same information, making him one of two sources Mr. Novak cited for
his information.

But the person said
*Mr. Rove first heard from Mr. Novak*
the name of Mr. Wilson's wife and her
precise role in the C.I.A.'s decision to
send her husband to Africa to investigate
a report, later discredited, that Saddam
Hussein was trying to acquire nuclear
material there.

It is not clear who Mr. Novak's original
source was, or whether Mr. Novak has
revealed the source's identity to the grand
jury.

Mr. Rove also held a conversation about Mr. Wilson's mission to Africa
with Matthew Cooper, a reporter for Time magazine, on July 11, 2003,
two days after he discussed the case with Mr. Novak. In an e-mail
message to his bureau chief provided to the grand jury by Time Inc.,
Mr. Cooper said Mr. Rove had alluded to Mr. Wilson's wife as a C.I.A.
employee, though, in Mr. Cooper's account, Mr. Rove did not use her
name or mention her status as a covert operative.

After his conversation with Mr. Cooper, The Associated Press reported
Friday, Mr. Rove sent an e-mail message to Stephen J. Hadley, then the
deputy national security adviser, saying he "didn't take the bait"
when Mr. Cooper suggested that Mr. Wilson's criticisms had been
damaging to the administration.

Mr. Rove told the grand jury in the case that the e-mail message was
consistent with his assertion that he had not intended to divulge Ms.
Wilson's identity but instead intended to rebut Mr. Wilson's
criticisms of the administration's use of intelligence about Iraq, The
A.P. reported, citing legal professionals familiar with Mr. Rove's
testimony. Dozens of White House and administration officials have
testified to the grand jury, and several officials have been called
back for further questioning.

The special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, has sought to determine
how much Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman at the time of the
leak, knew about the memorandum. Lawyers involved in the case said Mr.
Fitzgerald asked questions about Mr. Fleischer's role. Mr. Fleischer
was with Mr. Bush and much of the senior White House staff in Africa
when Mr. Powell, who was also with them, received the memorandum. A
spokeswoman for Mr. Powell said he was out of the country and could
not comment on the document. Mr. Fleischer said in an e-mail message
this week that he would not comment on the case.

Mr. Fitzgerald has also looked into any role that I. Lewis Libby, Vice
President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, may have played. Lawyers in
the case have said their clients have been asked about Mr. Libby's
conversations in the days after Mr. Wilson's article - in part based
on Mr. Libby's hand-written notes, which he turned over to the
prosecutor.

In addition, several journalists have been asked about their
conversations with Mr. Libby. At least one, Tim Russert of NBC News,
has suggested that prosecutors wanted to know whether he had told Mr.
Libby of Ms. Wilson's identity. After Mr. Russert met with Mr.
Fitzgerald, NBC said that he did not provide the information to Mr.
Libby.

The existence of the State Department memorandum has been previously
reported by news organizations including The Wall Street Journal,
Newsweek and The Daily News. But new details of how it came about and
how it circulated within the administration could offer clues into who
knew what and when.

The memorandum was dated June 10, 2003, nearly four weeks before Mr.
Wilson wrote an Op-Ed article for The New York Times in which he
recounted his mission and accused the administration of twisting
intelligence to exaggerate the threat from Iraq. The memorandum was
written for Marc Grossman, then the under secretary of state for
political affairs, and it referred explicitly to Valerie Wilson as Mr.
Wilson's wife, according to a government official who reread the
document on Friday.

When Mr. Wilson's Op-Ed article appeared on July 6, 2003, a Sunday,
Richard L. Armitage, then deputy secretary of state, called Carl W.
Ford Jr., the assistant secretary for intelligence and research, at
home, a former State Department official said. Mr. Armitage asked Mr.
Ford to send a copy of the memorandum to Mr. Powell, who was preparing
to leave for Africa with Mr. Bush, the former official said. Mr. Ford
sent it to the White House for transmission to Mr. Powell.

It is not clear who asked for the memorandum, but in the weeks before
it was written, there were several accounts in newspapers about an
unnamed former diplomat's trip to Africa seeking intelligence about
Iraq's nuclear program. On May 6, 2003, Nicholas D. Kristof, a
columnist for The Times, wrote of a "former U.S. ambassador to Africa"
who had reported to the C.I.A. and the State Department that reports
of Iraq seeking to acquire uranium in Niger were "unequivocally
wrong."

The memorandum was prepared at the State Department, relying on notes
by an analyst who was involved in meetings in early 2002 to discuss
whether to send someone to Africa to investigate allegations that Iraq
was pursuing uranium purchases. The C.I.A. was asked by Mr. Cheney's
office and the State and Defense Departments to look into the reports.

According to a July 9, 2004, Senate Intelligence Committee report, the
notes described a Feb. 19, 2002, meeting at C.I.A. headquarters on
whether Mr. Wilson should go to Niger.

The notes, which did not identify Ms. Wilson or her husband by name,
said the meeting was "apparently convened by" the wife of a former
ambassador "who had the idea to dispatch" him to Niger because of his
contacts in the region. Mr. Wilson had been ambassador to Gabon.

The Intelligence Committee report said the former ambassador's wife
had a different account of her role, saying she introduced him and
left after about three minutes.

The information in the State Department memorandum generally tracked
the information Mr. Novak laid out for Mr. Rove in their conversation,
according to the account of their exchange provided by the person
briefed on what Mr. Rove has told investigators.

But it appears to differ in at least one way, raising questions about
whether it was the original source of the material that ultimately
made its way to Mr. Novak. In his July 14, 2003, column, Mr. Novak
referred to Ms. Wilson as Valerie Plame. The State Department
memorandum referred to her as Valerie Wilson, according to the
government official who reread it on Friday.

David E. Sanger and Scott Shane contributed reporting for this
article.

http://nytimes.com/2005/07/16/politics/16memo.html

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Memo Gets Attention in Probe of CIA Leak

By BARRY SCHWEID, AP Diplomatic Writer
Tue Jul 19,10:59 PM ET

A State Department memo that has caught the attention of prosecutors describes a CIA officer's role in sending her husband to Africa and disputes administration claims that Iraq was shopping for uranium, a retired department official said Tuesday.

The classified memo was sent to Air Force One just after former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson went public with his assertions that the Bush administration overstated the evidence that Iraq was interested in obtaining uranium from Niger for nuclear weapons.

The memo has become a key piece of evidence in the CIA leak investigation because it could have been the way someone in the White House learned — and then leaked — the information that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA and played a role in sending him on the mission.

The document was prepared in June 2003 at the direction of Carl W. Ford Jr., then head of the State Department's bureau of intelligence and research, for Marc Grossman, the retired official said. Grossman was the Undersecretary of State who was in charge of the department while Secretary Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage, were traveling. Grossman needed the memo because he was dealing with other issues and was not familiar with the subject, the former official said.

"It wasn't a Wilson-Wilson wife memo," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is still under way. "It was a memo on uranium in Niger and focused principally on our disagreement" with the White House.

Armitage called Ford after Wilson's op-ed piece in The New York Times and his TV appearance on July 6, 2003 in which he challenged the White House's claim that Iraq had purchased uranium yellowcake from Niger.

Armitage asked that Powell, who was traveling to Africa with Bush, be given an account of the Wilson trip, said the former official.

The original June 2003 memo was readdressed to Powell and included a short summary prepared by an analyst who was at a 2002 CIA meeting where Wilson's trip was arranged and was sent in one piece to Powell on Air Force One the next day.

The memo said Wilson's wife worked for the CIA and suggested her husband go to Niger because he had contacts there and had served as an American diplomat in Africa. However, the official said the memo did not say she worked undercover for the spy agency nor did it identify her as Valerie Plame, which was her maiden name and cover name at the CIA.

Her identity as Plame was disclosed first by columnist Robert Novak and then by Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper. The leak investigation by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is looking into who in the Bush administration leaked Plame's identity to reporters and whether any laws were broken.

A 1982 law prohibits the deliberate exposure of the identity of an undercover CIA officer.

Wilson believes the Bush administration leaked the name as retribution for his criticism.

President Bush said Monday he would fire any member of his staff who "committed a crime," a change from his previous vow to fire anyone involved in the leak.

The past two weeks have brought revelations that top presidential aide Karl Rove was involved in leaking the identity of Plame to Novak and to Cooper.

The former State Department official stressed the memo focused on Wilson's trip and the State Department intelligence bureau's disagreement with the White House's claim about Iraq trying to get nuclear material. He said the fact that the CIA officer and Wilson were husband and wife was largely an incidental reference.

The June 2003 memo had not gone higher than Grossman until Wilson's op-ed column for The New York Times headlined "What I Didn't Find In Africa" and his TV appearance to dispute the administration. Wilson's article asked the question: "Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an invasion?"

___

On the Net:

State Department: http://www.state.gov

White House: http://www.whitehouse.gov

Alpha

Rove E-Mailed Security Official About Talk
The Associated Press

Friday 15 July 2005

Washington - After mentioning a CIA operative to a reporter, Bush confidant Karl Rove alerted the president's No. 2 security adviser about the interview and said he tried to steer the journalist away from allegations the operative's husband was making about faulty Iraq intelligence.

The July 11, 2003, e-mail between Rove and then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley is the first showing an intelligence official knew Rove had talked to Matthew Cooper just days before the Time magazine reporter divulged CIA officer Valerie Plame's secret identity.

"I didn't take the bait," Rove wrote in an e-mail obtained by The Associated Press, recounting how Cooper tried to question him about whether President Bush had been hurt by the new allegations.

The White House turned the e-mail over to prosecutors, and Rove testified to a grand jury about it last year.

Earlier in the week before the e-mail, Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had written a newspaper opinion piece accusing the Bush administration of twisting prewar intelligence, including a "highly doubtful" report that Iraq bought nuclear materials from Niger.

"Matt Cooper called to give me a heads-up that he's got a welfare reform story coming," Rove wrote in the e-mail to Hadley.

"When he finished his brief heads-up he immediately launched into Niger. Isn't this damaging? Hasn't the president been hurt? I didn't take the bait, but I said if I were him I wouldn't get Time far out in front on this."

Hadley, now Bush's national security adviser, didn't immediately return a call seeking comment Friday. Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, said his client answered all the questions prosecutors asked during three grand jury appearances, never invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination or the president's executive privilege guaranteeing confidential advice from aides.

Rove, Bush's closest adviser, turned over the e-mail as soon as prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into who leaked Plame's covert work for the CIA.

He later told a grand jury the e-mail was consistent with his recollection that his intention in talking with Cooper that Friday in July 2003 wasn't to divulge Plame's identity but to caution Cooper against certain allegations Plame's husband was making, according to legal professionals familiar with Rove's testimony.

They spoke only on condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the grand jury investigation.

Rove sent the e-mail shortly before leaving the White House early for a family vacation that weekend, already aware that another journalist he had talked with, syndicated columnist Robert Novak, was planning an article about Plame and Wilson.

Rove also knew that then-CIA Director George Tenet planned later that same day to issue a dramatic statement that took responsibility for some bad Iraq intelligence but that also called into question some of Wilson's assertions, the legal sources said.

The AP reported Thursday that Rove acknowledged to the grand jury that he talked about Plame with both Cooper and Novak before they published their stories but that he originally learned about the operative's identity from the news media, not government sources.

Republicans cheered the latest revelations Friday, saying they showed Rove wasn't trying to hurt Plame but instead was trying to informally warn reporters to be cautious about some of Wilson's claims.

"What it says is, Karl Rove wasn't the leaker, he was actually the recipient of the information not the provider," Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman said on Fox News. "So there are probably a lot of folks in Washington who have prejudged this, who have rushed to judgment who are trying to smear Karl Rove."

Democrats, however, said that even if Rove wasn't the leaker, someone still divulged Plame's identity and possibly violated the law.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi and other party leaders asked Speaker Dennis Hastert on Friday to let Congress hold hearings into the controversy regardless of the criminal probe now under way.

"In previous Republican Congresses the fact that a criminal investigation was under way did not prevent extensive hearings from being held on other, much less significant matters," Pelosi wrote.

Federal law prohibits government officials from divulging the identity of an undercover intelligence officer. But in order to bring charges, prosecutors must prove the official knew the officer was covert and nonetheless knowingly outed his or her identity.

Rove's conversations with Novak and Cooper took place just days after Wilson suggested in his opinion piece in The New York Times that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was used to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.

Summarizing a trip he made to Africa on behalf of the CIA, Wilson wrote that he'd concluded it was highly doubtful the nation of Niger had sold uranium yellowcake to Iraq. Tenet issued a lengthy statement five days later saying that he never should have allowed Bush to use the Niger information in his State of the Union address but that Wilson's report did not resolve whether Iraq was seeking uranium from abroad.

-------

Alpha

From MSNBC, 7/17/05:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8600106/

In Plame leaks, long shadows

Rove’s knowledge of CIA agent at odds with denial of role

WASHINGTON -

Karl Rove had a secret.

In public, he was masterminding President Bush's reelection and
brushing off suggestions he had played any part in an unfolding drama:

the unmasking of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

In private, the senior White House adviser was meeting, on five
occasions, with federal prosecutors to tell what he knew about the
matter.

The story he would tell prosecutors did not seem to square with the
White House's denial that it had played any role in one of the most
famous leaks since Watergate.

Rove told prosecutors he had discussed Plame in passing with at least
two reporters, including the columnist who eventually revealed her
name and role in a secret mission that would raise questions about
Bush's case for war against Iraq.

At the same time, other White House officials were whispering about
Plame, too.

Tracing the leak

It is now clear:

There has been an element of pretense to the White House strategy of
dealing with the Plame case since the earliest days of the saga.

Revelations emerging slowly at first, and in a rapid cascade over the
past several days, have made plain that many important pieces of the
puzzle were not so mysterious to Rove and others inside the Bush
administration.

White House officials were aware of Plame and her husband's
potentially damaging charge that Bush was "twisting" intelligence
about Iraq's nuclear ambitions well before the episode evolved into
Washington's latest scandal.

But as the story hurtles toward a conclusion sometime this year, there
are several elements that remain uncertain.

The most important -- did anyone commit a crime?

This article, based on interviews with lawyers and officials involved
in the case, is an effort to step back from the rapidly unfolding
events of recent weeks and clarify what is known about the Plame
affair and what key factors are still obscure.

Those people declined to be identified by name because special
prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has asked that closed-door
proceedings not be discussed.

The yellowcake incident

It all started in the early days of 2002 with Joseph C. Wilson IV, a
flamboyant ex-diplomat who had left government for a more lucrative
life of business consulting.

Wilson was a veteran of the diplomatic wars of Iraq and Africa, so it
seemed logical to some in the CIA, including his wife, Plame, to send
him on a secret mission to Niger.

Wilson's task was to determine if Iraqis had tried to purchase
yellowcake uranium from Africa to build nuclear weapons.

To a Bush administration intent on selling the American public on war
based on the threat posed by Iraq's weapons program, the yellowcake
was no small deal.

The White House would soon cite it as evidence that Saddam Hussein was
pursuing nuclear weapons.

Wilson spent a week in Niger chatting with locals about the
allegation, coming to the conclusion that the yellowcake charges were
probably unfounded.

He reported his findings to the agency -- but they never made their
way to the White House.

The story might have ended there, but Bush, Vice President Cheney and
other officials decided to make the yellowcake charges a central piece
of the administration's evidence in arguing Hussein had designs on a
dangerous program of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear
bombs.

On the march to war, Bush officials rebuffed concerns from some at the
CIA and included in his January 2003 State of the Union the now-famous
16 words:

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently
sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Wilson was floored, then furious.

Wilson set out to discredit the charge, working largely through back
channels at first to debunk it.

He called friends inside the government and the media, and told the
New York Times's Nicholas D. Kristof of his findings in Niger.

Kristof aired them publicly for the first time in his May 6, 2003,
column but did not name Wilson.

This caught the attention of officials inside Cheney's office, as well
as others involved in war planning, according to people who had talked
with them.

Defending the war

The White House, hailing the lightning-quick toppling of Hussein,
suddenly found itself on the defensive at home over its WMD claims.

It was not just Wilson, but Democrats, reporters and a few former
officials who were publicly wondering if Bush had led the nation to
war based on flimsy, if not outright false, intelligence.

Administration officials set out to rebuff their critics, Wilson in
particular.

By the time The Washington Post published Wilson's allegation
questioning the intelligence (but not citing his name) on the front
page on June, 12, 2003 -- one month before the Plame affair was public
-- Wilson was on the administration's radar screen.

The more Wilson pushed, the more the White House was determined to
push back against a man they regarded as an irresponsible provocateur.

Up until this point, Wilson had worked mostly behind the scenes, but
on July 6, he penned an op-ed in the New York Times, writing, "Some of
the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons programs was
twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."

A story detailing the allegation also appeared that day inside The
Post as Wilson appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press."

On the offensive

The White House response was swift.

There is a simple rule in politics:

Kill a story before it kills you.

The Bush team spread word to reporters that Wilson was a Democrat, a
supporter of Bush's political opponents who was sent on an
inconclusive mission that people in power knew nothing of.

Then, they went a step further.

Two days after Wilson went public, columnist Robert D. Novak told Rove
that he was hearing that Wilson had been sent on the mission at the
suggestion of his wife, who was working in the CIA, a lawyer familiar
with the conversation said.

"I heard that, too," Rove replied, according to the lawyer.

Rove said Novak had told him Plame's name and that that was the first
time he had heard it, the lawyer said.

That could be seen as being at odds with Rove's comments to CNN on
Aug. 31, 2004, when he said, "I'll repeat what I said to ABC News when
this whole thing broke some number of months ago. I didn't know her
name. I didn't leak her name."

Hunting for the source

On July 7, Bush took off for a trip to Africa. Secretary of State
Colin L. Powell, who was on the trip, carried with him a memo
containing information about Plame, as well as other intelligence on
the yellowcake claim.

It is on this trip that, prosecutors believe, some White House aides
might have learned about Plame.

The origin of the Plame information is central to the case.

Prosecutors are trying to determine if White House officials shared
information about Plame based on the State Department memo, or from
conversation with reporters, as Rove has testified, or somewhere else.

If it turns out Plame's identity was learned from the memo, it would
undermine the GOP defense that Rove and other administration officials
were simply discussing information they had learned from reporters.

Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, said he can say "categorically" that
Rove did not obtain any information about Plame from any confidential
source, such as a classified document.

A lawyer familiar with Rove's testimony hedged a bit on who precisely
told Rove about Plame, saying it may have come secondhand from another
aide, as well as from Novak.

Full court press

In Washington, Rove and others were discrediting Wilson's story even
as then-CIA director George J. Tenet said that the yellowcake
allegation should never have been included in Bush's speech.

"This did not rise to the level of certainty which should be required
for presidential speeches, and CIA should have ensured that it was
removed," Tenet said in a July 11 statement.

In a conversation that same day, Rove told Time magazine's Matthew
Cooper that Wilson's wife was in the CIA and authorized the mission to
Niger; but he did not use her name.

Afterwards, Rove e-mailed then-deputy national security adviser
Stephen J. Hadley to tell him he had waved Cooper off Wilson's claim.

A day later, Cheney's top aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, told Cooper
he had heard the same thing about Plame, and a senior administration
official flagged the role of Wilson's wife, almost in passing, to The
Washington Post's Walter Pincus.

On July 14, Novak's column ran, naming Plame for the first time and
saying two senior administration officials had provided him the
information.

The White House anti-Wilson campaign continued, but legally it did not
matter, because once Plame's name was in the public domain, Rove and
others were free to gossip about her.

White House offers public denials

Rove told MSNBC's Chris Matthews that Plame was fair game, even as
White House spokesman Scott McClellan was denying any White House role
in the leak.

"I'm telling you flatly that that is not the way this White House
operates," the spokesman told reporters July 22.

McClellan was usually careful to stress involvement in any illegal
leak, though his public statements clearly left an impression of a
White House aloof to the affair.

CIA officials believed that the revealing of Plame's identity was a
potential crime and contacted the Justice Department to investigate.

CIA officials maintain that Plame never ordered up the trip.

It is not clear when the White House realized Plame might have been a
covert operative, but Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) called for an
FBI probe 10 days after the Novak column was published.

It would be a crime to reveal her name only if a government official
knew that Plame had covert status and knew that the government was
actively concealing her identity.

The uproar over the leak was ephemeral, as the story seemed to wilt in
the summer heat.

But in late September, a senior White House official was quoted as
telling The Post at least six reporters had been told of Plame before
Novak's column, "purely and simply out of revenge."

Two days later, Bush was told that the Justice Department was
investigating whether someone had unlawfully leaked the identity of an
undercover agent.

Leak becomes a federal case

Chicago U.S. Attorney Fitzgerald was named special counsel three
months later, setting in motion an aggressive investigation that would
soon force about a dozen administration officials to testify, compel
the Supreme Court to consider the age-old question of how much
protection a reporter can provide a source, and land one reporter, the
New York Times's Judith Miller, behind bars for refusing to testify.

Her role remains a mystery, because she never wrote a story.

Fitzgerald subpoenaed White House phone records and e-mails, guest
lists for parties and information about the State Department memo
reportedly brought aboard Air Force One.

What started out as a simple investigation into a leak evolved slowly
at first, swiftly in the early days of 2004, into a wider probe of
other potential illegalities.

Bush and Cheney were asked to talk to investigators informally, while
a parade of officials from Powell to Rove to McClellan appeared before
the grand jury.

Lawyers who have sat in on the prosecutors' interviews said Fitzgerald
cast a wide net, adopting a broad view of the case.

Some witnesses were asked only about the initial disclosure, others
about possible misstatements during the investigative phase.

Some were brought in several times.

Rove, for example, was grilled by FBI agents twice in formal meetings
and asked to respond to questions in informal settings, and appeared
three times before the grand jury -- all between October 2003 and
October 2004, said a person familiar with his testimony.

Reporters obtained releases from sources such as Libby to discuss
confidential conversations, while others refused.

Cooper and Miller, in a case that reached and was rejected by the
Supreme Court, refused to reveal sources and were held in contempt.
Cooper was released by Rove to talk; Miller is sitting in an
Alexandria jail.

The showdown over sources has already impeded at least two major media
outlets.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer, fearing criminal prosecution, has decided
against publishing two investigative pieces not related to the Plame
controversy because they were based on anonymous leaks.

And Time reporters have said that at least two sources have told them
they would no longer provide information because the company turned
over documents in the Plame case.

As for the Bush administration, the investigation has exposed how an
administration that publicly deplores leaking has engaged aggressively
in the practice to advance its goals.

Yet much of the case remains a mystery.

Did the White House leak the identity of a CIA operative?

Is it a crime?

Did Bush have any knowledge of it?

Will Fitzgerald have spent this much time pressuring officials and
reporters and not deliver an indictment?

Those questions may be answered soon, as the grand jury's term is set
to expire in October.

Alpha · Last edited by Alpha on Tue Jul 19, 2005 6:53 pm; edited 4 times in total

You might want to access the following message thread before reading the following Associated Press article:

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.politics.bush/browse_frm/thread/a7b3e62f3d84c1d6/129cd1480ec20ad9#129cd1480ec20ad9

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

Top Cheney Aide Among Sources in CIA Story

By PETE YOST,

Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 48 minutes ago

Vice President Dick Cheney's top aide was among the sources for a Time magazine reporter's story about the identity of a CIA officer, the reporter said Sunday.

Until last week, the White House had insisted for nearly two years that vice presidential chief of staff Lewis Libby and presidential adviser Karl Rove were not involved in the leaks of CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity.

The White House refused last week to repeat those assertions when it was revealed that Rove had told Time reporter Matt Cooper that the wife of Bush administration critic Joseph Wilson apparently works at the CIA and that she had authorized his trip to Africa. The CIA dispatched Wilson to check out a report that the government of Niger had sold yellowcake uranium to Iraq for nuclear weapons.

Cooper said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that he spoke to Libby after first learning about Wilson's wife from Rove.

According to Cooper, Libby and Rove were among the government officials referred to in Cooper's subsequent Time story that said Wilson's wife was a CIA official and that she was involved in sending her husband on a trip to Africa.

Cooper's article was headlined, "A War on Wilson?"

On Sunday, Cooper also said there may have been other sources for that information. He declined to elaborate.

In a first-person account in the latest issue of Time, Cooper said Rove ended their telephone conversation with the words, "I've already said too much." Cooper speculated that Rove could have been worried about being indiscreet or "it could have meant he was late for a meeting or something else."

Republicans are responding to the revelations about Rove's role in the leak by saying that the deputy White House chief of staff first heard about Wilson's wife from a reporter.

The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Ken Mehlman, told NBC that the disclosure about getting the information from a reporter vindicates Rove and that Democrats who have called for Rove's dismissal should apologize.

But John Podesta, former White House chief of staff in the Clinton administration, said the White House's assurance in 2003 that Rove was not involved in the leak "was a lie." Rove's credibility "is in shreds," said Podesta, who appeared with Mehlmen.

Wilson was the top U.S. diplomat in Iraq during the Persian Gulf War.

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

http://www.boston.com/ae/media/articles/2005/07/18/reporter_ties_cheney_aide_to_cia_story/?rss_id=Boston+Globe+--+Front+Page

Reporter ties Cheney aide to CIA story
Time identifies chief of staff as 2d source
By Diedtra Henderson, Globe Staff | July 18, 2005

WASHINGTON -- I. Lewis ''Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of
staff, was a second source for a Time magazine article that revealed the
identity of a covert CIA agent, the magazine reported yesterday,
undercutting repeated White House denials.

For two years, the Bush administration has said that neither top
presidential adviser Karl Rove nor Libby was involved in identifying Valerie
Plame, the covert CIA agent first named in a July 2003 article by syndicated
columnist Robert Novak.

Last week, Rove, Bush's deputy chief of staff, was identified as a
confidential source of Time reporter Matthew Cooper and that disclosure led
to some Democrats calling for Rove's resignation while others pressed for
the revocation of his security clearance. The disclosure also resulted in
the White House no longer denying Rove's involvement and instead declining
to comment because the matter is under investigation.

The partisan attacks are expected to continue this week with Libby -- a
neoconservative and member of the team planning for the war -- being linked
again to the story, and as Congress hears testimony backing a federal shield
law to protect reporters from testifying about unnamed sources. It was
reported last year that Libby waived a confidentiality agreement with
Cooper, allowing him to give testimony, but the topic of their conversation
was not known.

Republicans continued yesterday to defend Rove. Republican National
Committee chairman Ken Mehlman, appearing on NBC's ''Meet the Press," argued
that Rove learned of Plame's identity from journalists, and that Democrats
are attacking Rove based on information that exonerates Rove. Mehlman said
Democrats owe Rove an apology.

A lawyer familiar with Rove's grand jury testimony told the Associated Press
yesterday that Rove learned about the CIA officer either from the media or
from someone in government who said the information came from a journalist.
The lawyer spoke on condition of anonymity because the federal investigation
is continuing.

Also appearing on ''Meet the Press," John Podesta, chief of staff during the
Clinton administration, said if Rove had ''an ounce of character," he would
resign. ''Mr. Rove has created a tremendous credibility problem for this
White House, for this president, for this country on a matter of utmost
national security," he said. ''The one thing that is unassailable at the end
of this week is that Mr. Rove did not tell the truth in 2003."

In a first-person article about his grand jury testimony in this week's
issue of Time, Cooper said he called Rove about Joseph C. Wilson IV, author
of a New York Times op-ed article on his mission to Niger in which he found
no evidence that Saddam Hussein was trying to procure uranium to make
nuclear weapons. The Bush administration justified going to war in Iraq as
necessary to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and Wilson's
article said it twisted intelligence to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.

Critics of the administration have charged that Plame's cover was
deliberately leaked as retribution for Wilson's article. Knowingly revealing
the identity of covert personnel is a felony.

During the conversation with Rove, Cooper learned that Wilson's wife -- whom
Rove did not name -- worked at the CIA on weapons of mass destruction and
that she -- not Cheney -- was responsible for sending Wilson to Africa. Rove
ended the call by saying he had ''already said too much," though Cooper was
not sure what he meant.

The next day, Cooper repeated details gleaned from Rove to Libby. According
to Cooper's article in this week's Time, Libby, speaking on the record,
denied Cheney had any role in or knowledge of Wilson's trip to Niger. At one
point, when the conversation was on background, Cooper asked about Wilson's
wife sending her husband to Niger. ''Libby replied, 'Yeah, I've heard that,
too,' or words to that effect," according to the article. His article
reveals the ''microscopic, excruciating detail" sought by the grand jury and
special prosecutor in his 2 1/2 hours of testimony Wednesday and echoes
comments he made yesterday on news shows.

Meanwhile, investigators, in an effort to determine the source of the leak,
are focusing on a 2003 State Department memo that details why Wilson was
chosen for the trip and what role Plame played in his selection, according
to reports in The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.

Special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, who is investigating the leak, has
focused on a classified memo and meeting notes sent by State Department
officials to then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, the Los Angeles Times
reported. The day after Wilson's op-ed article was published, Bush traveled
to Africa on Air Force One. Powell, also on Air Force One, had a copy of the
classified documents. The New York Times reported that Powell was walking
around the aircraft with the memo in his hands. Cooper wrote that he first
spoke to the special prosecutor in August 2004, giving ''limited testimony"
in his attorney's office about his interview with Libby. ''Like Rove, Libby
never used Valerie Plame's name or indicated that her status was covert, and
he never told me that he had heard about Plame from other reporters," Cooper
wrote.

Cooper's account of his grand jury testimony, which he gave last week, said
Fitzgerald's questions hinted at the investigation's direction. ''He asked
me several different ways if Rove indicated how he had heard that Plame
worked at the CIA," Cooper wrote. ''(He did not, I told the grand jury.)
Maybe Fitzgerald is interested in whether Rove knew her CIA ties through a
person or through a document," Cooper wrote.

Cooper's notes and e-mail messages turned over to the special prosecutor by
Time -- over the reporter's objections -- indicate that Rove told him
''material was going to be declassified in the coming days that would cast
doubt on Wilson's mission and his findings." Speaking on ''Meet the Press,"
Cooper said there may have been government officials other than Rove and
Libby who were sources for his article. Asked on CNN's ''Reliable Sources"
about a third unnamed administration source, ''a policy person in Africa,"
Cooper declined comment.

Cooper wrote that sitting before the grand jury, which hears testimony in
secret, he was struck by the mostly African-American, mostly female group
and their inquisitiveness as they sat in black vinyl chairs and at desks
''as if it were a shabby classroom at a rundown college." Cooper and New
York Times reporter Judith Miller fought such testimony to the Supreme
Court. They lost. Miller remains jailed in Alexandria, Va.

Cooper wrote that he was surprised to be questioned extensively about
welfare reform, a reporting topic he shelved in favor of the Wilson story.
''To me, this suggested that Rove may have testified that we had talked
about welfare reform," Cooper wrote.

Robert Luskin, Rove's attorney, declined comment yesterday.

This week, Cooper will testify before Congress on behalf of a federal shield
law that could have helped him avoid testifying before the grand jury.

For the most part, Republicans have stood firm behind the White House.
Yesterday, however, Representative Roy Blunt of Missouri, the third-ranking
House Republican, appeared on CBS's ''Face the Nation." Responding to a
question about the administration's previous denials of Rove's involvement,
Blunt said the administration needs ''to be very thoughtful about what they
say and be sure that their credibility is sustained."

Alpha · Last edited by Alpha on Mon Jul 18, 2005 7:18 am; edited 1 time in total

White House Mum on Disclosure in CIA Leak
By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer 54 minutes ago

The White House is maintaining silence over the leak of a CIA officer's identity despite a journalist's disclosure that Vice President Dick Cheney's top aide was a source for a story about the intelligence agent.

A role for Cheney chief of staff Lewis Libby is among details revealed Sunday by Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper, who wrote a first-person account in this week's issue.

Recounting a July 11, 2003, conversation with senior Bush political adviser Karl Rove, Cooper recalled that Rove told him, "I've already said too much" after revealing that the wife of administration critic Joseph Wilson apparently worked at the CIA.

Cooper speculated that Rove could have been "worried about being indiscreet, or it could have meant he was late for a meeting or something else."

"I don't know, but that signoff has been in my memory for two years," Cooper wrote.

Until it refused to issue more denials last week, the White House had insisted for nearly two years that Libby and Rove had no connection to the leak of the identity of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame.

On Sunday, Bush administration spokesman David Almacy declined to comment about Libby, citing an independent counsel's ongoing investigation of the case.

Cooper said the 2003 phone call with Rove was the first time he had heard anything about Wilson's wife.

He said he had a subsequent conversation about Wilson and his wife with Libby.

According to Cooper, "Libby replied, 'Yeah, I've heard that too' or words to that effect" when Cooper asked if Libby had heard anything about Wilson's wife sending her husband to the African nation of Niger to investigate the possible sale of uranium to Iraq for nuclear weapons.

As part of Patrick Fitzgerald's criminal probe of the identity leak, Cooper testified about his conversation with Libby in a deposition at his lawyer's office in August 2004. Libby, as Rove did this month, provided a specific waiver of confidentiality. In a grand jury appearance last Wednesday, Cooper gave his account of what Rove told him.

Cooper also said there may have been other government officials who were sources for his article. Time posted "A War on Wilson?" on its Web site on July 17, 2003.

In an effort to quell a chorus of calls to fire Rove, Republicans said Sunday that he first learned about Plame's identity from the news media.

"The information exonerates and vindicates, it does not implicate" Rove, Republican Party chairman Ken Mehlman said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "Folks involved in this, frankly, owe Karl Rove an apology."

There were no takers.

The White House's assurance in 2003 that Rove was not involved in the leak of the CIA officer's identity "was a lie" and Rove's credibility "is in shreds," said John Podesta, who was chief of staff in the Clinton White House.

It is unclear whether a journalist first revealed the information to Rove, as Mehlman said.

A lawyer familiar with Rove's grand jury testimony said Rove learned about the CIA officer either from the media or from someone in government who said the information came from a journalist. The lawyer spoke on condition of anonymity because the federal investigation is continuing.

Appearing on CBS' "Face the Nation," Wilson said, "I believe that using the West Wing of the White House to be engaged in a smear campaign is an outrageous abuse of power."

The CIA sent Wilson to check out intelligence that the government of Niger had a deal for the sale of yellowcake uranium to Iraq. Wilson did not find that such a deal took place.

Five days before Cooper's conversation with Rove, an op-ed piece by Wilson had appeared in The New York Times suggesting the Bush administration had manipulated pre-war intelligence to justify an invasion of Iraq.

In 2003, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the idea that Rove was involved in leaking information about Wilson's wife was "ridiculous."

"There's no evidence that (Rove has) done anything criminally wrong," Sen. Lindsey Graham (news, bio, voting record), R-S.C., said on CBS. He said the American people are taking the controversy "for what it is — politics."

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

In Plame Leaks, Long Shadows

By Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen
The Washington Post

Sunday 17 July 2005

Rove knew of CIA agent, husband's role in criticizing Bush.
Karl Rove had a secret.

In public, he was masterminding President Bush's reelection and brushing off suggestions he had played any part in an unfolding drama: the unmasking of CIA operative Valerie Plame. In private, the senior White House adviser was meeting, on five occasions, with federal prosecutors to tell what he knew about the matter.

The story he would tell prosecutors did not seem to square with the White House's denial that it had played any role in one of the most famous leaks since Watergate. Rove told prosecutors he had discussed Plame in passing with at least two reporters, including the columnist who eventually revealed her name and role in a secret mission that would raise questions about Bush's case for war against Iraq. At the same time, other White House officials were whispering about Plame, too.

It is now clear: There has been an element of pretense to the White House strategy of dealing with the Plame case since the earliest days of the saga. Revelations emerging slowly at first, and in a rapid cascade over the past several days, have made plain that many important pieces of the puzzle were not so mysterious to Rove and others inside the Bush administration. White House officials were aware of Plame and her husband's potentially damaging charge that Bush was "twisting" intelligence about Iraq's nuclear ambitions well before the episode evolved into Washington's latest scandal.

But as the story hurtles toward a conclusion sometime this year, there are several elements that remain uncertain. The most important -- did anyone commit a crime?

This article, based on interviews with lawyers and officials involved in the case, is an effort to step back from the rapidly unfolding events of recent weeks and clarify what is known about the Plame affair and what key factors are still obscure. Those people declined to be identified by name because special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has asked that closed-door proceedings not be discussed.

It all started in the early days of 2002 with Joseph C. Wilson IV, a flamboyant ex-diplomat who had left government for a more lucrative life of business consulting. Wilson was a veteran of the diplomatic wars of Iraq and Africa, so it seemed logical to some in the CIA, including his wife, Plame, to send him on a secret mission to Niger. Wilson's task was to determine if Iraqis had tried to purchase yellowcake uranium from Africa to build nuclear weapons.

To a Bush administration intent on selling the American public on war based on the threat posed by Iraq's weapons program, the yellowcake was no small deal. The White House would soon cite it as evidence that Saddam Hussein was pursuing nuclear weapons.

Wilson spent a week in Niger chatting with locals about the allegation, coming to the conclusion that the yellowcake charges were probably unfounded. He reported his findings to the agency -- but they never made their way to the White House.

The story might have ended there, but Bush, Vice President Cheney and other officials decided to make the yellowcake charges a central piece of the administration's evidence in arguing Hussein had designs on a dangerous program of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear bombs. On the march to war, Bush officials rebuffed concerns from some at the CIA and included in his January 2003 State of the Union the now-famous 16 words: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Wilson was floored, then furious.

Wilson set out to discredit the charge, working largely through back channels at first to debunk it. He called friends inside the government and the media, and told the New York Times's Nicholas D. Kristof of his findings in Niger. Kristof aired them publicly for the first time in his May 6, 2003, column but did not name Wilson. This caught the attention of officials inside Cheney's office, as well as others involved in war planning, according to people who had talked with them.

The White House, hailing the lightning-quick toppling of Hussein, suddenly found itself on the defensive at home over its WMD claims. It was not just Wilson, but Democrats, reporters and a few former officials who were publicly wondering if Bush had led the nation to war based on flimsy, if not outright false, intelligence.

Administration officials set out to rebuff their critics, Wilson in particular. By the time The Washington Post published Wilson's allegation questioning the intelligence (but not citing his name) on the front page on June, 12, 2003 -- one month before the Plame affair was public -- Wilson was on the administration's radar screen.

The more Wilson pushed, the more the White House was determined to push back against a man they regarded as an irresponsible provocateur.

Up until this point, Wilson had worked mostly behind the scenes, but on July 6, he penned an op-ed in the New York Times, writing, "Some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons programs was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." A story detailing the allegation also appeared that day inside The Post as Wilson appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press."

The White House response was swift. There is a simple rule in politics: Kill a story before it kills you. The Bush team spread word to reporters that Wilson was a Democrat, a supporter of Bush's political opponents who was sent on an inconclusive mission that people in power knew nothing of.

Then, they went a step further.

Two days after Wilson went public, columnist Robert D. Novak told Rove that he was hearing that Wilson had been sent on the mission at the suggestion of his wife, who was working in the CIA, a lawyer familiar with the conversation said. "I heard that, too," Rove replied, according to the lawyer. Rove said Novak had told him Plame's name and that that was the first time he had heard it, the lawyer said.

This could be seen as being at odds with Rove's comments to CNN on Aug. 31, 2004, when he said, "I'll repeat what I said to ABC News when this whole thing broke some number of months ago. I didn't know her name. I didn't leak her name."

The next day, July 7, Bush took off for a trip to Africa. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who was on the trip, carried with him a memo containing information about Plame, as well as other intelligence on the yellowcake claim. It is on this trip that, prosecutors believe, some White House aides might have learned about Plame.

The origin of the Plame information is central to the case. Prosecutors are trying to determine if White House officials shared information about Plame based on the State Department memo, or from conversation with reporters, as Rove has testified, or somewhere else. If it turns out Plame's identity was learned from the memo, it would undermine the GOP defense that Rove and other administration officials were simply discussing information they had learned from reporters.

Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, said he can say "categorically" that Rove did not obtain any information about Plame from any confidential source, such as a classified document. A lawyer familiar with Rove's testimony hedged a bit on who precisely told Rove about Plame, saying it may have come secondhand from another aide, as well as from Novak.

In Washington, Rove and others were discrediting Wilson's story even as then-CIA director George J. Tenet said that the yellowcake allegation should never have been included in Bush's speech. "This did not rise to the level of certainty which should be required for presidential speeches, and CIA should have ensured that it was removed," Tenet said in a July 11 statement.

In a conversation that same day, Rove told Time magazine's Matthew Cooper that Wilson's wife was in the CIA and authorized the mission to Niger; but he did not use her name. Afterwards, Rove e-mailed then-deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley to tell him he had waved Cooper off Wilson's claim.

A day later, Cheney's top aide, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, told Cooper he had heard the same thing about Plame, and a senior administration official flagged the role of Wilson's wife, almost in passing, to The Washington Post's Walter Pincus.

On July 14, Novak's column ran, naming Plame for the first time and saying two senior administration officials had provided him the information. The White House anti-Wilson campaign continued, but legally it did not matter, because once Plame's name was in the public domain, Rove and others were free to gossip about her.

Rove told MSNBC's Chris Matthews that Plame was fair game, even as White House spokesman Scott McClellan was denying any White House role in the leak. "I'm telling you flatly that that is not the way this White House operates," the spokesman told reporters July 22. McClellan was usually careful to stress involvement in any illegal leak, though his public statements clearly left an impression of a White House aloof to the affair.

CIA officials believed that the revealing of Plame's identity was a potential crime and contacted the Justice Department to investigate. CIA officials maintain that Plame never ordered up the trip.

It is not clear when the White House realized Plame might have been a covert operative, but Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) called for an FBI probe 10 days after the Novak column was published. It would be a crime to reveal her name only if a government official knew that Plame had covert status and knew that the government was actively concealing her identity.

The uproar over the leak was ephemeral, as the story seemed to wilt in the summer heat. But in late September, a senior White House official was quoted as telling The Post at least six reporters had been told of Plame before Novak's column, "purely and simply out of revenge." Two days later, Bush was told that the Justice Department was investigating whether someone had unlawfully leaked the identity of an undercover agent.

Chicago U.S. Attorney Fitzgerald was named special counsel three months later, setting in motion an aggressive investigation that would soon force about a dozen administration officials to testify, compel the Supreme Court to consider the age-old question of how much protection a reporter can provide a source, and land one reporter, the New York Times's Judith Miller, behind bars for refusing to testify. Her role remains a mystery, because she never wrote a story.

Fitzgerald subpoenaed White House phone records and e-mails, guest lists for parties and information about the State Department memo reportedly brought aboard Air Force One. What started out as a simple investigation into a leak evolved slowly at first, swiftly in the early days of 2004, into a wider probe of other potential illegalities. Bush and Cheney were asked to talk to investigators informally, while a parade of officials from Powell to Rove to McClellan appeared before the grand jury.

Lawyers who have sat in on the prosecutors' interviews said Fitzgerald cast a wide net, adopting a broad view of the case. Some witnesses were asked only about the initial disclosure, others about possible misstatements during the investigative phase. Some were brought in several times. Rove, for example, was grilled by FBI agents twice in formal meetings and asked to respond to questions in informal settings, and appeared three times before the grand jury -- all between October 2003 and October 2004, said a person familiar with his testimony.

Reporters obtained releases from sources such as Libby to discuss confidential conversations, while others refused. Cooper and Miller, in a case that reached and was rejected by the Supreme Court, refused to reveal sources and were held in contempt. Cooper was released by Rove to talk; Miller is sitting in an Alexandria jail.

The showdown over sources has already impeded at least two major media outlets. The Cleveland Plain Dealer, fearing criminal prosecution, has decided against publishing two investigative pieces not related to the Plame controversy because they were based on anonymous leaks. And Time reporters have said that at least two sources have told them they would no longer provide information because the company turned over documents in the Plame case.

As for the Bush administration, the investigation has exposed how an administration that publicly deplores leaking has engaged aggressively in the practice to advance its goals.

Yet much of the case remains a mystery. Did the White House leak the identity of a CIA operative? Is it a crime? Did Bush have any knowledge of it? Will Fitzgerald have spent this much time pressuring officials and reporters and not deliver an indictment? Those questions may be answered soon, as the grand jury's term is set to expire in October.

Alpha · Last edited by Alpha on Sun Jul 24, 2005 11:46 pm; edited 2 times in total

Forwarded:

Don't you know that Rove was fired from the 1st Bush, Sr. Campaign for the following:

Sources close to the former president (GHWBush) say Rove was fired from the 1992 Bush presidential campaign after he planted a negative story with columnist Robert Novak about dissatisfaction with campaign fundraising chief and Bush loyalist Robert Mosbacher Jr. It was smoked out, and he (Rove) was summarily ousted.

This is from the article by Ron Suskind, 1/1/03

http://www.ronsuskind.com/newsite/articles/archives/000032.html

P.S. What is so amazing is that Novak has done this with Karl before.....
More:
Novak's own statement about Valerie Plame contradicts story that HE told Rove about
Plame, and not vice versa, Appears to be a lie from either Novak or Rove.
Today's big story is that Rove supposedly never gave Valerie Plame's
name to Novak - but rather that Novak mentioned Plame was CIA and
Rove said "yeah I heard that too," or something to that effect.
In fact, here's what Novak said in his first interview
(http://foi.missouri.edu/voicesdissent/columnistnames.html) that we
know of just after he leaked Plame's name in print: Novak, in an
interview, said his sources had come to him with the information. "I
didn't dig it out, it was given to me," he said. "They thought it
was significant, they gave me the name and I used it."Read that
again. I didn't dig it out, it was given to me - they gave me the
name. That does not jibe with Rove's anonymous buddy telling the NYT
that it was Novak who first brought up Plame as CIA and NOT Rove.
Not that any of this matters. Rove confirmed the identity of a CIA
agent to Novak, he affirmatively outed that agent to TIME, and then
he and the White House lied about it to the media and the American
public for two years. But it is interesting to note that this new
story from Rove's handlers totally contradicts what Novak himself
said two years ago.
So who's lying - Novak or Rove?BOTH !!!!!!!!!!!!!
PS Another possibility is that Rove wasn't one of the "two
administration officials" who told Novak about Plame. In that case,
we've got two more, and not one more, Bush administration traitor on the loose.

http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/07/novaks-own-statement-contradicts-story.html

http://foi.missouri.edu/voicesdissent/columnistnames.html

War Without End

The global war against terror, news about the illegal invasion of Iraq, the corporate puppet presidents, the war criminal Tony Blair, September 11th 2001, the USS Liberty and New World Order crimes against humanity.

Rove-gate: Who Leaked to the Leakers? This isn't about Rove