Beating about the Bush

Simon Hoggart
Saturday April 14, 2007
The Guardian

American joke: "What's the difference between Iraq and Vietnam? George W Bush had an exit strategy for Vietnam." It's startling to see how much the American press has turned against the president. Partly it's because every new president starts with a very fair wind, so the disenchantment is greater.

And there is a view that, however much you might dislike the man, the office deserves a degree of respect. Even in the darkest days of the soon-to-end Carter presidency in 1980, when his attempt to rescue the hostages in Tehran failed catastrophically, you'd hear people apologise for being rude about him, because after all he was still the president and commander in chief. In Britain we tend to the view that all politicians are much the same, and while some may look more promising than others, in the end they'll let you down.

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But the mood has turned completely against George W, even in rock solid Republican states. They don't really have chattering classes in the states, but they do have the pontificating classes, and they certainly know what they think now. Take Joe "Primary Colors" Klein, writing in Time magazine: "I've tried hard to be respectful to the man and his office, but the three defining sins of the Bush administration - arrogance, incompetence, cynicism - are congenital: it is increasingly difficult to imagine yet another two years of slow bleed with a leader so clearly unfit to lead."

· With that in mind I went to a talk by Joseph Wilson (I'm on my annual visit to the Conference on World Affairs - a splendid piss-up with speeches, held in Boulder, Colorado). Wilson is the career diplomat who served Bush's father in Baghdad during the first Gulf war. In 2002 he was sent to Niger to investigate claims by the British government that Saddam had bought 500 tons of "yellowcake" - uranium-bearing ore.

He quickly discovered there was no truth in the story, so was shocked to hear it delivered as fact by Bush Jr in his 2003 State of the Union speech. When he wrote an article pointing out this fib, the administration set out to discredit him and finally - treasonously, he says - named his wife as a covert CIA agent. The details are complicated, but it's why Lewis Libby, the former chief of staff of the vice-president, has been convicted of perjury and other offences, and might even end up in the slammer.

So Wilson is a hero to anyone who is anti-war, and his speech was interrupted by much loud cheering (in American terms, Boulder is pretty leftwing). "We spend 20 times as much on intelligence as the British, who have no presence in Niger, so does it make any sense to believe what your own intelligence service tells you is baseless?" he asked.

The invasion of Iraq, he said, was "a war not to defend our nation, but to validate an academic theory". It's generally assumed that Libby's lawyers will try to spin the appeal process out until after the 2008 election, when Bush will be able to pardon him. But as Jeffrey Toobin writes in another grand pontificating journal, the New Yorker, "George Bush should not be giving pardons; he should be begging the nation's".

Valerie Plame case The Valerie Plame case: My wife, the CIA agent, by Joe Wilson

Valerie Plame broke cover this week to give her side of a story that has engulfed the White House in scandal and led to the conviction of the Vice President's chief of staff for perjury. Here her husband, Joe Wilson, whose opposition to the Iraq war is thought to have provoked her 'outing', talks to Andrew Buncombe about their ordeal

Published: 18 March 2007

The removal men have been and gone, and the elegant house in Georgetown's Charleston Terrace, with its huge door knocker in the shape of a lion's head, stands empty. Its new occupants, a woman from Oman and her husband who works for the World Bank, are getting ready to move in.

For the best part of 10 years the house, with its expansive views of the Washington Monument, was home to former ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame. They signed their names to its deeds in May 1998 and moved in shortly afterwards. But two weeks ago the couple, who for almost four intense years have been at the centre of one of Washington's most closely followed stories, closed that heavy-set door one final time and headed west. Their destination was New Mexico and what they hope will be a new chapter in their lives.

"Santa Fe. We thought it would it would be a nice place to raise our kids," Mr Wilson, 57, tells The Independent on Sunday, referring to the couple's seven-year-old twins, Trevor and Samantha. "We are from the west. We have been going back and forth for a number of years. Santa Fe appeals to us. It's an international city, there's an opera. And Valerie has been going to [the US nuclear laboratory at] Los Alamos for years as part of her activities."

Put most simply, the reason they no longer have a reason to be in Washington is that Mr Wilson's wife no longer has a job here. In the summer of 2003, a conservative newspaper columnist revealed that, according to White House sources, Mr Wilson's wife was a covert CIA operative, working on weapons of mass destruction. Her outing set off a series of events that this month resulted in the conviction for perjury of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

But her outing - widely believed to have been carried out by the highest levels of the Bush administration in an act of revenge against Mr Wilson after he showed President Bush's claims about Iraq's nuclear ambitions to be false - had more straightforward ramifications. As Ms Plame herself told a congressional committee last week during a rare public appearance, with her cover blown she was out of a job. "My name and identity were carelessly and recklessly abused by senior officials in the White House and State Department," she said. "I could no longer perform the work for which I had been highly trained."

Her appearance before a House committee was noteworthy less for what she said but because she was saying anything at all. For the past four years in which she and Mr Wilson have watched as federal investigators examined who was involved in the leaking of her identity, Ms Plame has kept largely quiet. While Mr Wilson has railed against the actions of the Bush administration, she has borne in mind her training as a covert operative and allowed her husband to take the spotlight.

That is not to say she has kept out of sight. Indeed, since 2003 Ms Plame, 43, and Mr Wilson have become something of a fixture on Washington's liberal cocktail circuit. They have attended parties, gone to openings and accepted invitations to all manner of events, especially those organised by Democrats. Recently they had dinner with leading Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Hillary Clinton. Last year, they even took up an invitation from ABC News to attend the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) dinner, also attended by George and Laura Bush.

It is just that, at these events, the striking Ms Plame was careful not to stir controversy and said very little. Her behaviour at a small, invitation-only party held in the spring of 2004 to launch her husband's book The Politics of Truth was typical of the way Ms Plame behaved. The event was held in the Washington home of a former US ambassador to Portugal. Throughout the evening, at which the IoS was among the guests, Ms Plame remained in the background, content to talk quietly with friends. When her husband made a short speech in which he thanked her, she remained standing with her circle, unwilling to become the focus of people's attention.

Likewise, a report in The Washington Post about an October 2003 party at the home of former NBC White House correspondent Campbell Brown noted that Mr Wilson openly voiced his criticisms of the administration. "The buzz, though," said the Post, "focused on a shy and attractive blonde who sat nibbling finger sandwiches and discreetly introduced herself only as 'Valerie'."

The Wilsons' strategy has not been without its slips. For the January 2004 edition of Vanity Fair, for example, the couple posed for a now notorious photograph in Mr Wilson's open-top Jaguar, he with one arm hanging casually over the door and she wearing a head-scarf and dark-glasses. "The pictures should not be able to identify her, or are not supposed to," Mr Wilson later said. "She's still not going to answer any questions and there will not be any pictures that compromise her."

But given that Mr Wilson had until that point insisted his wife would rather "break her arm" than be photographed, even some of the couple's supporters began to wonder whether he had grown a little too fond of the attention he was getting.

Certainly, Mr Wilson has never shied away from publicity. He has appeared on television, given speeches and lectures, and is now co-operating with producers at Warner Bros on a film about the couple's lives. He has given his support to various Democratic candidates, including Senator John Kerry in his 2004 presidential campaign.

But the former Californian "surf dude", who as a US diplomat in Iraq once faced down Saddam Hussein, insists he is driven by principle rather than ego. "There are lots of good old sayings," he says, speaking by phone from Utah at the weekend. "Americans stand up and fight for our liberties against those that try to usurp our [rights]."

Ms Plame's preference for keeping a lower profile is apparently genuine. Friends of the couple say that she has always been a pleasant, easy-going woman whose prime concern has been the welfare of her children. They insist that when she told them she was an energy consultant for Brewster, Jennings and Associates (a fictitious front company invented by the CIA), they had no reason not to believe her. No one thought for a moment she was a spy.

"They are our dearest friends ... She is a nice, nice woman. As normal and as natural as possible," says David Tillotson, a neighbour of the Wilsons in Charleston Terrace. "We had no idea [of her real profession]. They have two seven-year-old twins. I have a lap pool ... with a wooden door to the outside, and very often during the summer they would come over and go swimming. Very often [it would be just] Valerie and the children. They would come and swim and we would sit and talk."

And when the news of Ms Plame's identity became public, the Tillotsons' relationship with the Wilsons changed very little. At the same time, Ms Plame talked very little about her "other" life. "Valerie is a very private person. She does not go in for that," says Mr Tillotson, a lawyer. "We know her at a different level."

Mr Wilson first met Ms Plame in 1997 at a party at the home of Turkey's ambassador to the US. In his memoir, he says when he saw her he was immediately smitten. "I looked up and saw across the room this willowy blonde, resembling a young Grace Kelly," he writes. It was on their third or fourth date during a "heavy make-out" session that she revealed to Mr Wilson, who as a former diplomat had classified clearance, the truth about herself.

That truth involved joining the CIA when she was just 22 and fresh out of college in Pennsylvania, a tough initiation at "the Farm", the agency's training facility at Camp Peary, Virginia, and then assignments in Athens and London, where she had posed as a student at the London School of Economics (LSE). Like Mr Wilson she had also been previously married, he twice. When they met, she was based in Brussels but that same year she moved back to Washington, reportedly because the CIA believed her name had been on a list handed to the Russians by the double agency Aldrich Ames in 1994 and that she may have been compromised.

The future for the Wilsons is somewhat unclear. The former diplomat has previously worked as a consultant to US businesses looking to invest in challenging overseas environments, and he says he has a number of projects that he intends to follow. For her part, Ms Plame is still awaiting clearance from the CIA for the publication of her own memoir, entitled Fair Game, a title based on President Bush's special adviser Karl Rove's description of her to a television journalist. The book reportedly earned her an advance of $2.5m. Then there is the little matter of who will play her in the movie.

In the meantime, the couple are busy setting up home in a three-bedroom adobe-style home complete with guest quarters. According to a report in the Albuquerque Journal, the property is set among piñon and aspen trees and has a patio that looks out over the nearby Jerez Mountains. Intriguingly, the property comes with 11 fireplaces. But, best of all given Ms Plame's previous life, the front door of their new home is fitted with a postigo, a small wooden shutter that allows the occupant to look and see just who is knocking.

The golden couple targeted by White House machine

By Andrew Buncombe in Washington
Published: 07 March 2007

The way Joe Wilson tells it, the first time he met the woman who would become his third wife the world went into slow motion. He smiled at Valerie Plame at a reception at the Washington home of the Turkish ambassador. "Suddenly I saw nobody else in a throng that must have numbered 200 people," he later recalled.

Yet if their first meeting was the stuff of fairy tales the past four years have been anything but. The couple have found themselves at the centre of a bitter controversy linked directly to the American and British governments' use and manipulation of faulty intelligence to make the case for war against Iraq.

The backdrop to the controversy were "the 16 words" included in President George Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address. In that speech, Mr Bush said: 'The British Government has learnt that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Mr Wilson, 57, knew that claim to be false. In 2002, the former diplomat had travelled to Niger at the behest of the CIA to investigate "intelligence" that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium from the west African nation to develop a nuclear weapons programme. The "intelligence" was based on documents that the CIA had obtained from Italian intelligence agents. These documents were later proved to be forgeries by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Mr Wilson, who had once served as a US diplomat in Niamey, the capital of Niger, took less than a week to conclude the claims were false. Because of the structure of the country's uranium industry and its control by an international consortium, there was no way Niger could have exported more uranium without drawing attention. He had reported as much to the CIA.

Yet neither the Bush or Blair governments took any notice. In September 2002 a British dossier on Iraq claimed Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium from Africa and four months later came Mr Bush's speech. Mr Wilson started hinting to journalists that this was an area worthy of investigation.

In June 2003, speaking on the understanding that he not be named, Mr Wilson told the Independent on Sunday that not only had the administration misled the American people but that his report debunking the claims had almost certainly been passed to London. A week later he wrote a signed piece in the New York Times entitled "What I Did not Find in Africa". He wrote: "Questioning the selective use of intelligence to justify the war in Iraq is neither idle sniping nor 'revisionist history' as Mr Bush has suggested. The act of war is the last option of a democracy, taken when there is a grave threat to our national security."

The White House was furious. Led by Mr Bush's special adviser, Karl Rove, and the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney, it set out to discredit Mr Wilson. It did so by going after his wife.

A week after Mr Wilson's article appeared, a piece written by the conservative columnist Robert Novak claimed the former diplomat had been sent to Niger at the suggestion of his wife, whom he named and identified as a CIA officer - potentially a federal crime. In reality, Novak's offence was potentially much greater; Ms Plame was not just a CIA employee, she was apparently working as a NOC or non-official cover, considered among the most covert.

It was Mr Novak's column and the effort to discover who had been its source that led federal prosecutors to investigate and ultimately charge Mr Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Ironically, while it emerged Libby did speak to journalists, it was Richard Armitage - then the deputy secretary of state - who was Mr Novak's primary source.

The couple, who have two young children, have now become fixtures on the liberal party circuit in Washington. Mr Wilson penned a memoir, The Politics of Truth while Ms Plame secured $2.5m to write her own book, Fair Game. The couple also filed a civil lawsuit against Mr Cheney, Mr Libby and Mr Rove seeking damages.

Key figures in Plame leak case

Patrick Fitzgerald

The federal attorney for Northern Illinois was appointed to the Plame leak case in 2003, and had earlier exposed a network of bribery involving the state's then governor George Ryan, who was jailed for corruption.

Judith Miller

The former New York Times reporter was jailed in 2005, after refusing to reveal to the grand jury that Mr Libby was her source for the fact that Joseph Wilson's wife worked for the CIA.

Dick Cheney

Madevisits to the CIA, in what critics say was a deliberate effort to pressure analysts to draw the most ominous conclusions from available intelligence.

STATEMENT IN RESPONSE TO JURY’S VERDICT IN U.S. V. I. LEWIS “SCOOTER” LIBBY; See Joe on Olbermann tonight

For Immediate Release March 6, 2007

Contact: Naomi Seligman Steiner - 202.408.5565 / press@citizensforethics.org

STATEMENT IN RESPONSE TO JURY’S VERDICT IN U.S. V. I. LEWIS “SCOOTER” LIBBY

Washington, DC – First, Valerie and Joseph Wilson would like to express their appreciation to Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald and the entire team of federal prosecutors for their professionalism and hard work. Their prosecution of a senior White House official illustrates that we are a nation of laws and that no man is above the law. The Wilsons respect the jury’s verdict and thank the jurors for their service. The entire Wilson team is pleased by today’s verdict and believes that justice has been served in this case.

The Wilsons will continue to pursue the civil case against Vice President Cheney, Mr. Libby, Mr. Rove and Mr. Armitage because it hinges on additional and different facts from those underlying the criminal case. The criminal trial was about whether or not Mr. Libby obstructed justice and committed perjury by lying to FBI agents and the grand jury about the fact that he had disclosed to reporters that Valerie Wilson worked for the CIA. The civil suit, on the other hand, hinges on whether or not the defendants violated the constitutional rights of Valerie and Joe Wilson by making those disclosures in a concerted effort to retaliate against Joe Wilson for revealing the falsity of the president’s rationale for the Iraq war.

Disturbing facts emerged from the criminal trial that are highly relevant to the civil case. For example, the American public learned details of how Vice President Cheney orchestrated the concerted White House effort to discredit and retaliate against Joe Wilson. Towards that end, the vice president enlisted the aid of other senior administration officials including former press secretary Ari Fleischer, vice presidential assistant Cathie Martin and presidential advisor Karl Rove. Testimony in the criminal case also confirmed that Mr. Libby spoke to numerous reporters in an effort to persuade at least one of them to publicly reveal Mrs. Wilson’s covert status.

Melanie Sloan, CREW’s executive director and counsel to the Wilsons, stated, “The civil case may provide the American public with its only opportunity to hear directly from Vice President Cheney, Mr. Libby, Mr. Rove and Mr. Armitage about what really took place behind the scenes after Joe Wilson exposed the truth about the administration’s justification for the Iraq war.”

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Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) is a non-profit legal watchdog group dedicated to holding public officials accountable for their actions.

For more information, please visit www.citizensforethics.org or contact Naomi Seligman Steiner at 202.408.5565/press@citizensforethics.org.

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Cheney's fixation

H.D.S. GREENWAY

By H.D.S. Greenway | February 27, 2007

WHAT THE perjury trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby really revealed was the astonishing lengths to which Vice President Dick Cheney and others in the Bush administration went to discredit Ambassador Joseph Wilson for his 2003 claim that the administration had been dead wrong about Saddam Hussein trying to buy material from Niger to make nuclear weapons. The intensity and single mindedness of this pursuit leapt out from the testimony.

The decision to "out" a covert CIA officer, Wilson's wife, which is a federal crime, showed a kind of desperation. The concept that she had sent her husband to Niger on some kind of boondoggle, instead of to investigate the Saddam sale, is bizarre in the extreme. With all due respect, Niger is neither Wilson's, or anybody else's, ideal boondoggle destination.

Second , the intensity of the Wilson smear campaign, long meetings with favored reporters in hotels and on the phone, even the using of classified information, seems obsessive.

As The New York Times put it: The evidence shows Cheney and Libby "countermanding and even occasionally misleading colleagues at the highest levels of Mr. Bush's inner circle" as they pursued a "covert public relations campaign ," not only to protect the case for going to war, but also Cheney's connection to flawed intelligence.

There you have it. In the most dysfunctional administration of our time, the vice president's office felt free to use classified information to bolster a false impression of Saddam's nuclear capabilities -- going to absurd lengths to keep the truth from the American people and perhaps even the White House. According to testimony, Cheney got Bush to declassify secret material, but the president was not told how Cheney was going to use it.

As for Wilson, his crime was to shout that the emperor had no clothes. And that had to be discredited and Wilson punished by hurting his wife.

We now know, of course, that weapons of mass destruction were more of an excuse, not the reason to go to war. Oh, the administration expected to find some, but, as the then deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz would later say, WMD was just the thing everyone in the administration could agree on.

We know now that the real reason for invading Iraq was the neoconservative mantra, that Bush bought into after 9/11, that if we could only seize Iraq and make it over in our image we could transform the Middle East into a region favorable to America and Israel's interests.

--MORE--

Dick's Talking Points

February 06, 2007

by emptywheel

emptywheel@earthlink.net

I made the point the other day that if Cheney were put on the stand, he might be put in a place where he refuted some of Libby's testimony. Specifically, Cheney might have to admit that he and Libby talked about revealing Plame's identity with reporters during the week of July 6. And this presents a problem, because it either means both Libby and Cheney would claim to have forgotten about Plame's ID, then learned it again as if it were new the week of the leak. Or, they'd effectively be admitting to leaking Plame's ID after having learned of it through classified channels, making it a possible violation of the IIPA (barring, of course, a Cheney claim to have declassified Plame's identity before leaking it to reporters, which is where I think we are heading).

But given what we know about how Cheney's own talking points on Plame evolved between June 10 and July 14, it is almost impossible for Cheney to argue that he--like Libby--forgot Plame's ID and learned it as if it were new. Which of course makes it difficult for Libby to argue that he forgot. If his boss was actively remembering, what are the chances Libby was actively forgetting? Huh.

So here's the evolution of Cheney's talking points, as best as I can reconstruct them.

Martin's News, June 11
The first that we know Cheney to have learned of Plame's CIA employee was when Cathie Martin told him (and Libby) in his office. Here's how Martin explains it:

[Cathie Martin]: First [conversation with Harlow] was pleasant [emphasizes] I had never spoken to him before, talked about press reports, I was asking him, "we didn't send him." so I was saying to him, you must have sent him, who is this guy, what are you saying to the press, they're not taking my word for it. I remember him being, I didn't know who he [Wilson] was either, but apparently his name is Joe Wilson he was a charge in Baghdad, and his wife works over here. I understand charge to be diplomat who works overseas. Had been a charge, former is my recollection of what that meant. [Martin h]as notes, but the notes don't have a precise date. Asked to see VP and shortly thereafter told him and Scooter was there as well, told them what I had learned. It was the same day. I remember going into VP's office Scooter was there which was pretty normal. He told me Ambassador's name and apparently he was a charge and his wife works at CIA. Don't remember any specific response.

Given the phone records from Harlow to OVP Press Office, this conversation appears to have taken place on June 11, possibly June 10. While Martin doesn't remember any response, the testimony suggests that Libby elicited this call to Martin when he called Grenier and asked him to state that Defense and State, as well as OVP, had expressed an interest in the Niger intelligence. At this point, then, the talking points focused on shifting the focus away from OVP and pointing it more generally to Defense, State, and OVP.

Cheney's News, June 18?
I'm going to place the second "talking point" on June 18. I'm guessing that's when Cheney really spoke to Libby and told him Plame worked in Counter-Proliferation.

I first raised some reasons to doubt Libby's dating of that meeting in this post. But apparently I'm not alone--like me, the FBI took a look at the note, noticed the date had been changed, and came to suspect that Libby altered the note after the fact. Here's what Libby said about altering the date:

L: June 12, but this symbol means I'm not sure.

F: What's this to the right?

L: It's a note later explaining that this is a telephone conversation with the VP about Iraq uranium and the Kristof article… it's indicating that this is something someone told the VP… and then this says the wife works for the Counterproliferation Division.

At some point he switches from telling me what someone else told him to talking points for the press — e.g., that we didn't know about forgeries until the IAEA said so. (these are the three/four points mentioned earlier — but "forgeries" somehow replaces the NIE as point three??)

F: Under the 12, were you correcting something?

L: Might ahve been an 18, then corrected it to 12… realized it wasn't the 18th. I couldn't tell without a microscope. (laughs)

F: Do you know how much later you added the material about VP, Kristof, Iraq, etc.? June, July, October?

L: Might have been June, but I don't know.

One thing that supports the notion that this note postdates the Pincus article is that it doesn't mention the Pincus article at all--and, as Jeff points out, it echoes a word Kristof used in the lede of his second column on this, "behest." That second column was published on June 13, a day after the Pincus article.

The curious thing about this timing, if it is correct (though frankly, it'd be true if this conversation took place any day after June 11) is that it suggests Cheney learned of Plame's employ at CIA then went to find more details. It suggests they deliberately learned where Plame worked, which further suggests they knew enough details to know she was covert.

In any case, on this mystery date, these are the talking points Cheney gave Libby:

functional office
CP--his wife works works in that division

Debriefing took place here
& was meeting in the region

4) OVP and Defense and State -- expressed strong interest in issue
1) didn't know about mission

2) didn't get report back

3) didn't have any indication of forgery was from IAEA

These talking points, one through four (or rather, in VP count, four to one through three), seem to focus on a response to the Kristof/Pincus/Kristof articles. Already, Dick has had to admit that he did express an interest in the underlying intelligence. Though he's still trying to implicate State and Defense in that interest too (I've asked before--is this Bolton at State and Feith at Defense, in which case he might as well have said OVP and OVP and OVP). And though the info on Wilson's debriefing and Plame's employ aren't part of the talking points yet, they're definitely part of Dick's understanding of the case.

Martin's Operative Talking Points

Now, there are an interim set of talking points that aren't really Cheney's talking points, but at least show how OVP was responding to this issue publicly from the mystery June date and July 6, when Wilson's oped comes out. These are Cathie Martin's talking points, which she says she had been using prior to July 6, and therefore had on hand to send to Ari for his July 7 press briefing. These talking points are:

• The Vice President's office did not request the mission to Niger.
• The Vice President's office was not informed of Joe Wilson's mission.
• The Vice President's office did not receive a briefing about Mr. Wilson's mission after he returned.
• The Vice President's office was not aware of Mr. Wilson's mission until recent press reports accounted for it.

At some point, I'll come back to assess the veracity of these talking points. But for the moment, note how the talking points evolve as they move from Cheney to Libby to Martin. The talking points lose all reference to Plame and the forgeries (curious, that). OVP appears to have given up its efforts to say that State (Bolton?) and Defense (Feith?) were interested in this as well, and now retreat to the "Vice President's office did not request the mission to Niger." to which they add the "not informed of mission" talking point. Of course, this leaves them in a precarious position. "Vice President's office did not request the mission to Niger" is close parsing here, since it's clear that OVP asked for more information and it's also clear that Dick's briefer said they'd get DO to get its contacts to look into the allegations. It's that precarious position that probably ended up getting them in trouble.

Cheney's Annotated Copy of Wilson's Op-ed, July 6?

And then we have Cheney's annotations on Wilson's op-ed. Libby has argued in this grand jury appearance that Cheney didn't take those notes contemporaneously, that he just came back after the Novak article and wrote them down, having conveniently decided to save the dead tree version of the op-ed, and brought it back to DC from Jackson Hole, where he had spent the long weekend.

I'm going to make an executive decision and label that story a bunch of horseshit, and assume that Cheney read and annotated the Wilson op-ed on July 6, when it came out.

In which case, we have Cheney writing a new set of talking points on July 6:

Have they done this sort of thing?

Send an Amb to answer a question?

Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us?

Or did his wife send him on a junket?

A pretty dramatic shift in talking points, even from the Libby ones from June 12 18. But note the focus. Cheney is attacking the genesis of the trip. This is significant, obviously, since he raises Plame. But it's also significant because it goes to the precarious position of OVP--that they had in fact asked for more information, which led to Wilson's trip. He's trying to attack what happened between the time he asked for more information and the time that Wilson got sent.

It's in that context that Cheney uses Plame's purported role in Wilson's trip as a talking point. It's absolutely damning, if we can prove that Cheney read this op-ed before the leaks started in earnest.

And I think we can prove that.

Cheney's Talking Points, July 8

There's one more reason why I'm fairly certain that Libby's story is horseshit Cheney wrote his notes on Wilson's op-ed contemporaneously. That's because part of the notes he wrote on Wilson's op-ed show up in the new talking points he dictates to Cathie Martin on July 8. Those talking points read:

It is not clear who authorized Joe Wilson's trip to Niger.

He did not travel to Niger at the request of the Vice President.

• The Vice President's office did not request the mission to Niger.
• The Vice President's office was not informed of Joe Wilson's mission.
• The Vice President's office did not received a briefing about Mr. Wilson's mission after he returned.
• The Vice President's office was not aware of Mr. Wilson's mission until this spring when the press reported it.

According to Mr. Wilson's own account, he was unpaid for his services.

Mr. Wilson never saw the documents he was allegedly trying to verify on his trip to Niger.

Mr. Wilson has said he was convinced that Niger could not have provided uranium to Iraq but, in fact, Niger did provide uranium to Iraq in the 1980's--200 tons of which are currently under IAEA seal.

Mr. Wilson provided no written report to the CIA or any other agency of his trip to Niger when he returned.

The Vice President was unaware of Joe Wilson, his trip or any conclusions he may have reached until this spring when it was reported in the press--over year after Mr. Wilson's trip.

Six months after his trip, the considered judgment of the intelligence community was that Saddam Hussein had indeed undertaken a vigorous effort to acquire uranium from Africa according to the National Intelligence Estimate. [my emphasis]

If you look at the original dictated notes, this draft, and the final, you can see most of what they were thinking. Cheney gave Martin a bunch of new talking points, several of them directly at that precarious position of theirs--their claims that they had nothing to do with Wilson's trip. They add that "it's not clear who authorized Wilson's trip." Reiterate that it was not at the request of Cheney (and Martin adds in all the talking points she had been using--the ones she gave to Ari to use).

And note that they shift their talking point about the awareness of Wilson's trip. Previously, they said, "the Vice President's office" was not aware of Wilson's trip (these are from the Ari talking points). Now they get more specific: "The Vice President was unaware of Joe Wilson, his trip, or any conclusions." As I will show in a later post, I suspect they realized they had learned of Wilson's trip, at least by March if not by February. So they could no longer claim that everyone in OVP (that'd be Scooter) was unaware of Wilson's trip, only that Cheney was unaware of the trip.

There's a lot more in these talking points, including the specious argument that since Niger gave Iraq uranium in the 1980s, before the consortium took over in Niger, then it was perfectly plausible they would do so again. And this is when they start referencing the NIE publicly, even though (as Martin's notes indicate) she wasn't sure she should refer to what she still believed to be classified conclusions from the NIE.

But the important point about these talking points is that Cheney references Wilson's op-ed. As hard as Libby tries, he cannot claim that Cheney only read Wilson's op-ed after the Novak article. Cheney uses an attack--the ridiculous attack about Wilson going pro bono--that he wrote in his op-ed talking points in the talking points he dictated to Martin on July 8.

Cheney's Potential Talking Point, July 12

And then there are the talking points that Cheney dictates to Libby on July 12 aboard Air Force 2.

On the Record

• The Vice President heard in his regular intelligence briefing that Iraq was trying to acquire Uranium from Niger. As part of the regular briefing process, the Vice President asked a question about the implication of Iraq trying to acquire Uranium from Niger. (Note: During the course of the year, the Vice President asks the Agency many questions.) The Agency responded within a day or two. The Agency said that they had reporting suggesting the possibility of such a transaction but the reporting lacked detail. The Agency pointed out that Iraq already had 500 tons of yellowcake, portions of which came from Niger according to the IAEA.
• The Vice President was unaware of the Joe Wilson trip and did not know about it until June of this year, when it was first discussed in the press.
• The Vice President did not see Wilson's trip report until recently.
• The Vice President saw the NIE last fall, which he took to be authoritative.

Deep Background (as Administration Official)

• The only written record of Joe Wilson trip included that "the former Prime Minister of Niger said he had been approached and met with a delegation of Iraqi officials in what he believed to be an effort to acquire more Uranium in 1999."

Notes

• Give straight report on NIE
• Mention "vigorously pursue."

In addition to dictating these written talking points on the plane, Libby has testified, Cheney may have talked about leaking Plame's identity to reporters.

Beyond the Plame addition unrecorded in the notes, though, there are a few interesting additions. First, Cheney has given up his efforts to pretend his request wasn't the genesis of the trip. There's a lot of disingenuousness in his explanation of the genesis of the trip, but he appears to have resigned himself to admitting to having set off the chain of events that led to Wilson getting sent.

The caveats about who saw what are now all limited to the Vice President--don't want to go on the record with easily disproven claims (though I'll work on them...). And then there's the bit that was somewhat new--the urge to leak inaccurate claims about the Mayaki part of Wilson's report, and the willingness to leak the NIE to all comers. Libby had wanted to add that to the talking points earlier in the week (see Libby's notes on the draft of Cheney's talking points), but only after Tenet's statement did they add it to explicit talking points (though Libby tried to go there with Judy on July 8). Clearly, OVP was ratcheting up its attacks, even after Tenet had admitted that the 16 words shouldn't have been in the SOTU.

Which makes the Plame tidbit all the more interesting. I firmly believe that Dick ordered Libby to leak Plame's identity to Judy Miller on July 8. But here Cheney is, discussing more widespread dissemination of her identity (knowing full well, of course, that Novak's article had hit the wires...). The mention of Plame shows a continuity of knowledge from when Cheney read the op-ed (some time on or before July 8), through the time Libby learned it as if it was new, to the time when Cheney was maybe talking about leaking Plame's ID on July 12.

Libby may be arguing that he forgot Plame's identity and learned it as if it were new. But there appears to be a clear continuity in Cheney's knowledge of Plame's identity. Which sort of makes Libby's "as if it were new" claims ring hollow.

February 06, 2007 at 15:10 in Bush/Republican Scandals, Contributor--emptywheel | Permalink

Why Dick Cheney Cracked Up: FRANK RICH - Cover-Up Crumbles

REPOSTED
THE COMPLETE ARTICLE WITH ALL HYPERLINKS

The New York Times
OP-ED COLUMNIST

Why Dick Cheney Cracked Up

By FRANK RICH

Published: February 4, 2007

Thanks to the commotion caused by the White House leak case, damning evidence has slowly dribbled out.

IN the days since Dick Cheney lost it on CNN, our nation’s armchair shrinks have had a blast. The vice president who boasted of “enormous successes” in Iraq and barked “hogwash” at the congenitally mild Wolf Blitzer has been roundly judged delusional, pathologically dishonest or just plain nuts. But what else is new? We identified those diagnoses long ago. The more intriguing question is what ignited this particularly violent public flare-up.

The answer can be found in the timing of the CNN interview, which was conducted the day after the start of the perjury trial of Mr. Cheney’s former top aide, Scooter Libby. The vice president’s on-camera crackup reflected his understandable fear that a White House cover-up was crumbling. He knew that sworn testimony in a Washington courtroom would reveal still more sordid details about how the administration lied to take the country into war in Iraq. He knew that those revelations could cripple the White House’s current campaign to escalate that war and foment apocalyptic scenarios about Iran. Scariest of all, he knew that he might yet have to testify under oath himself.

Mr. Cheney, in other words, understands the danger this trial poses to the White House even as some of Washington remains oblivious. From the start, the capital has belittled the Joseph and Valerie Wilson affair as “a tempest in a teapot,” as David Broder of The Washington Post reiterated just five months ago. When “all of the facts come out in this case, it’s going to be laughable because the consequences are not that great,” Bob Woodward said in 2005. Or, as Robert Novak suggested in 2003 before he revealed Ms. Wilson’s identity as a C.I.A. officer in his column, “weapons of mass destruction or uranium from Niger” are “little elitist issues that don’t bother most of the people.” Those issues may not trouble Mr. Novak, but they do loom large to other people, especially those who sent their kids off to war over nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and nonexistent uranium.

In terms of the big issues, the question of who first leaked Ms. Wilson’s identity (whether Mr. Libby, Richard Armitage, Ari Fleischer or Karl Rove) to which journalist (whether Mr. Woodward, Mr. Novak, Judith Miller or Matt Cooper) has always been a red herring.
---

The explanation for the hysteria has long been obvious. The White House was terrified about being found guilty of a far greater crime than outing a C.I.A. officer: lying to the nation to hype its case for war.

THE COMPLETE ARTICLE WITH ALL HYPERLINKS

Vice President's Shadow Hangs Over Trial

Testimony Points Out Cheney's Role in Trying to Dampen Joseph Wilson's Criticism

By R. Jeffrey Smith and Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, February 4, 2007; A05

Vice President Cheney's press officer, Cathie Martin, approached his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on Air Force Two on July 12, 2003, to ask how she should respond to journalists' questions about Joseph C. Wilson IV. Libby looked over one of the reporters' questions and told Martin: "Well, let me go talk to the boss and I'll be back."

On Libby's return, Martin testified in federal court last week, he brought a card with detailed replies dictated by Cheney, including a highly partisan, incomplete summary of Wilson's investigation into Iraq's suspected weapons of mass destruction program.

Libby subsequently called a reporter, read him the statement, and said -- according to the reporter -- he had "heard" that Wilson's investigation was instigated by his wife, an employee at the CIA, later identified as Valerie Plame. The reporter, Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, was one of five people with whom Libby discussed Plame's CIA status during those critical weeks that summer.

After seven days of such courtroom testimony, the unanswered question hanging over Libby's trial is, did the vice president's former chief of staff decide to leak that disparaging information on his own?

No evidence has emerged that Cheney told him to do it. But Cheney's dictated reply is one of many signs to emerge at the trial of the vice president's unusual attentiveness to the controversy and his desire to blunt it. His efforts included the extraordinary disclosure of classified information, including one-sided synopses of Wilson's report and a 2002 intelligence estimate on Iraq.

Under questioning from FBI agent Deborah S. Bond, Libby acknowledged that he and Cheney "may have talked" aboard the plane from Norfolk that day about whether to make public Plame's CIA employment, Bond testified Thursday.

Her testimony brought Cheney closer than ever to the heart of the controversy surrounding the Bush administration's efforts to discredit Wilson, who had accused the White House of twisting intelligence he had gathered as it sought to justify the invasion of Iraq.

White House officials testified that Cheney was irritated because he thought Wilson had alleged the vice president sent him on the fact-finding trip to Niger but rejected the investigation's conclusions. Time after time at the height of the controversy, they said, Cheney directed the administration's response to Wilson's criticism and Libby carried it out.

Cheney personally dictated other talking points for use by the White House press office; helped negotiate the wording of a key statement by then-CIA Director George J. Tenet; instructed Libby to deal directly with selected reporters; told Libby to disclose selected passages from the national intelligence estimate and other classified reports; and held a luncheon for conservative columnists to discuss the controversy.

Throughout this period, Cheney kept a news clipping of Wilson's criticisms on his desk, annotated with the question, "did his wife send him on a junket?" according to court statements. Libby told a grand jury that he and Cheney discussed it on multiple occasions each day.

Randall Eliason, a former chief of public corruption prosecutions for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington, said, "There has been significant evidence of how deeply the vice president was involved. If Cheney is personally, deeply involved in it, it's Libby's job to be personally, deeply involved."

Wilson was a former U.S. ambassador dispatched by the CIA the previous year -- at the suggestion of his wife but on a decision by other officials -- to determine whether Iraq had recently tried to acquire nuclear materials from Niger. The agency later said that it was responding to inquiries made by Cheney's office, the State Department and the Defense Department.

On July 6, 2003, 16 months after his return, Wilson publicly accused the administration of ignoring his report, which debunked the Iraq-Niger speculation, and of twisting his information to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Wilson's allegations provoked a political firestorm. Within days, the White House was forced to repudiate a key assertion President Bush had made in his State of the Union address, and Tenet issued an unusual public apology for failing to stop the president from making it. But rather than tamping down the controversy, the administration's backtracking only "made it flare up," as then-White House spokesman Ari Fleischer testified last week.

In its response, the White House wound up training its fire not only on the substance of Wilson's allegations but on him personally, trial testimony has shown.

Over the course of that week in July, bracketed by Wilson's published criticism and Cheney's flight back from Norfolk, three senior White House officials -- Libby, Fleischer and special presidential assistant Karl Rove -- inaccurately told or suggested to five reporters that Wilson had been dispatched to Niger by Plame, according to the testimony. Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage separately told columnist Robert D. Novak that Plame worked at the CIA, and Novak made that news public July 14.

The belittling implication of the disclosure, as Fleischer and others testified last week, was that nepotism, rather than Wilson's knowledge and experience, lay behind his involvement in the matter.

While Cheney and Libby have asserted that their sole intent in contacting journalists was to defend the credibility of their policy, prosecutors disclosed new evidence on Wednesday that the administration was focusing on Wilson himself. Cheney's then-communications director, Mary Matalin, advised Libby in a phone call July 10, prosecutor Peter Zeidenberg said.

Matalin, according to notes Libby made of the conversation, called Wilson "a snake" and warned that his "story has legs," Zeidenberg said. She laid out a plan: "We need to address the Wilson motivation. We need to be able to get the cable out. Declassified. The president should wave his wand."

While arguing unsuccessfully that the jury should see all of Libby's notes on the conversation, Zeidenberg said, "All we have heard from the defense all along is that Mr. Libby was only interested in responding on the merits." He said it was significant that Libby wrote down word for word "an extremely negative and ad hominem attack, if you will, about a critic."

Plame's employment at the CIA was classified, making it illegal for any official to knowingly and intentionally disclose it. Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald's 22-month investigation did not produce charges of that offense.

But Libby was indicted on charges of making false statements, obstruction of justice and perjury for denying that he was aware of Plame's employment and had disclosed it to journalists.

In courtroom testimony, witnesses have asserted that Cheney and two others told Libby about Plame in June, and that he told two journalists and Fleischer -- who in turn said he told two more journalists. It was, in short, a hot topic of gossip by the administration.

According to Martin's testimony, Cheney directed her early in the week of July 6 to keep track of daily news coverage of the controversy, including "who was continuing to comment." During a meeting on Capitol Hill, Martin said, Cheney "dictated to me what he wanted me to say" about it to reporters.

In a meeting July 8, Martin said, Cheney also decided that Libby would call NBC News reporters Andrea Mitchell and David Gregory to discuss the matter. Martin said she walked out during Libby's subsequent calls to the reporters.

After Mitchell suggested in a broadcast that the White House was "pushing blame" for the mess toward the CIA, Martin said, then-deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley looked directly at Martin during a staff meeting and said such efforts were improper. At that moment, Martin said, Libby "looked down," in effect leaving her to absorb the blame.

Three months later, White House spokesman Scott McClellan publicly cleared Rove of leaking Plame's name -- inaccurately, as it turned out -- but provided no such statement about Libby.

According to Cheney's own notes, introduced at the trial last week, Cheney told McClellan that such a statement "has to happen today. Call out key press saying same thing about Scooter as Karl. Not going to protect one staffer and sacrifice the guy that was asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder because of the incompetence of others."

Staff writer Amy Goldstein contributed to this report.

Why Dick Cheney Cracked Up: FRANK RICH - Cover-Up Crumbles

THE COMPLETE ARTICLE WITH ALL HYPERLINKS
The New York Times
OP-ED COLUMNIST

Why Dick Cheney Cracked Up

By FRANK RICH

Published: February 4, 2007

Thanks to the commotion caused by the White House leak case, damning evidence has slowly dribbled out.

IN the days since Dick Cheney lost it on CNN, our nation’s armchair shrinks have had a blast. The vice president who boasted of “enormous successes” in Iraq and barked “hogwash” at the congenitally mild Wolf Blitzer has been roundly judged delusional, pathologically dishonest or just plain nuts. But what else is new? We identified those diagnoses long ago. The more intriguing question is what ignited this particularly violent public flare-up.

The answer can be found in the timing of the CNN interview, which was conducted the day after the start of the perjury trial of Mr. Cheney’s former top aide, Scooter Libby. The vice president’s on-camera crackup reflected his understandable fear that a White House cover-up was crumbling. He knew that sworn testimony in a Washington courtroom would reveal still more sordid details about how the administration lied to take the country into war in Iraq. He knew that those revelations could cripple the White House’s current campaign to escalate that war and foment apocalyptic scenarios about Iran. Scariest of all, he knew that he might yet have to testify under oath himself.

Mr. Cheney, in other words, understands the danger this trial poses to the White House even as some of Washington remains oblivious. From the start, the capital has belittled the Joseph and Valerie Wilson affair as “a tempest in a teapot,” as David Broder of The Washington Post reiterated just five months ago. When “all of the facts come out in this case, it’s going to be laughable because the consequences are not that great,” Bob Woodward said in 2005. Or, as Robert Novak suggested in 2003 before he revealed Ms. Wilson’s identity as a C.I.A. officer in his column, “weapons of mass destruction or uranium from Niger” are “little elitist issues that don’t bother most of the people.” Those issues may not trouble Mr. Novak, but they do loom large to other people, especially those who sent their kids off to war over nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and nonexistent uranium.

In terms of the big issues, the question of who first leaked Ms. Wilson’s identity (whether Mr. Libby, Richard Armitage, Ari Fleischer or Karl Rove) to which journalist (whether Mr. Woodward, Mr. Novak, Judith Miller or Matt Cooper) has always been a red herring.
---

The explanation for the hysteria has long been obvious. The White House was terrified about being found guilty of a far greater crime than outing a C.I.A. officer: lying to the nation to hype its case for war.

THE COMPLETE ARTICLE WITH ALL HYPERLINKS

Some dare call it - Treason!

Jan 27, 2006

Yesterday in a recent post I discussed the not terribly surprising revelation by Senator Rockefeller that Dick Cheney had been yanking Sen Roberts leash and blocking completely of Senates Phase II Investigation for over two years.

Never mind Impeachment, in that diary I said the T-Word.

Treason

On that point a few comments were skeptical, and it is that point which I wish to address today. Former CIA Operative Larry C Johnson, who worked side by side with Valerie Wilson has stated the following last August.

There was nothing on the public record or in any public document identifying Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA operative. That information was classified. Sending Joe on a mission to Africa does not point the finger at her. Moreover, she did not make the decision to send him.

Johnson continued.

Regardless of Armitage's role as an initial source for Novak, we are still left with the fact that Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Scooter Libby abused their power and were actively engaged in a coordinated effort to discredit Joe Wilson for his behind the scene efforts to alert the public to the falsehoods in the President's State of the Union address.

While Richard Armitage may have had no malicious intent, the same cannot be said for Cheney, Libby and Rove. They knew exactly what they were doing. According to The Washington Post, during the week of July 6, 2003, "two top White House officials disclosed Plame's identity to at least six Washington journalists." Sometime after Novak's column appeared, Rove called Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC's "Hardball" and told him that Mr. Wilson's wife was "fair game."

Although the Libby Trial is ongoing and has yet to reach a verdict - can there by anyone who truly believes that the VP's Office wasn't directly involved in the leaking of Valerie Plame-Wilson's CIA identity to the press?

Even if you believe Libby's claims that "he heard her name from Tim Russert" or other members of the media - the question remains, who told them?

Although the issue of Plame's CIA status has been left out of this trial, it is an issue we should not ignore.

In my previous diary I quoted from the testimony of the Vice Presidents CIA briefer (who told him that Plame was associated with the agency) in June 2003.

"I thought there was a very grave danger to leaking the name of a CIA officer," the briefer from Langley, Craig Schmall, said he told Messrs. Cheney and Libby during a morning session at the vice president's residence. "Foreign intelligence services where she served now have the opportunity to investigate everyone whom she had come in contact with. They could be arrested, tortured, or killed."

My point yesterday was that this proves that revelation of Plame's identity by Robert Novak and his subsequent revelation that Plame's cover job working for Brewter-Jennings was a CIA Front Agency (which was intent on preventing Iran from going Nuclear) - were both immensely damaging to our intelligence efforts and did aid and comfort our enemies.

Anyone remember that crazy trapeze scene from the first Mission Impossible movie - where Tom Cruise steals the "NOC List"? That list is real, it hold the names and identities of each of the CIA deep (Non-Official) Cover agents. Well Valerie Plame-Wilson was a NOC.

One skeptical commenter, Steve Davis yesterday responded with...

No it doesn't. Treason is a specific crime

in the United States that consists solely of providing aid and comfort to the enemy. Outing a CIA agent is not providing aid and comfort to the enemy because we were not officially at war with anybody when it was done. And unfortunately, if it was done by the Vice President, the executive branch has enormous leeway in declassifying information, so they probably get a pass.

Yes, we were at War, the Iraq War Resolution had been passed and signed the previous October.

Yes, the Vice President does have the ability to declassify information due to an executive order from March 25th, which was just a few weeks after Joe Wilson's second interview on CNN where he criticized the Administration Iraq-Nuclear claims.

However, the Vice President did not unilaterally declassify Plame's status. Declassification is a very specific procedure, which requires the affecting agencies to be notified and all relevant documents to be updated and remarked.

I should know, I worked in a classified environment for a dozen years at Northrup-Grumman where the B2 Bomber was secretly developed and built during the 80's. At the time I had a Top Secret SAR (Special Access Required) Clearance which is equivelent to that required by those currently working on the "Terrorist Surveillance Program". SAR is used to compartmentalize information - simple having a TS clearance itself isn't enough, you have to be cleared for that specfic program.

From the above mentioned Executive Order.

(b) It is presumed that information that continues to meet the classification requirements under this order requires continued protection. In some exceptional cases, however, the need to protect such information may be outweighed by the public interest in disclosure of the information, and in these cases the information should be declassified. When such questions arise, they shall be referred to the agency head or the senior agency official. That official will determine, as an exercise of discretion, whether the public interest in disclosure outweighs the damage to the national security that might reasonably be expected from disclosure.

All Secret Material must be marked with a caveat denoting the level of clearance required, and project id, either at the top or sides of the document. This would be true of any documents mentioning Plame's Status with CIA, and if that information were to be declassifed - all those documents would have to be changed.

That didn't with Valerie Wilson's status happen prior to Novak's column - despite Bush's cryptic claims otherwise.

Just like Rove, Libby and Cheney in 1982 I signed a Classified Information Non-Disclosure Agreement.

Which states that an person who has been trusted with classified information not confirm or deny the validity of that information even with members of the press.

Question 19: If information that a signer of the SF 312 knows to have been classified appears in a public source, for example, in a newspaper article, may the signer assume that the information has been declassified and disseminate it elsewhere?

Answer: No. Information remains classified until it has been officially declassified. Its disclosure in a public source does not declassify the information. Of course, merely quoting the public source in the abstract is not a second unauthorized disclosure. However, before disseminating the information elsewhere or confirming the accuracy of what appears in the public source, the signer of the SF 312 must confirm through an authorized official that the information has, in fact, been declassified. If it has not, further dissemination of the information or confirmation of its accuracy is also an unauthorized disclosure.

Under this agreement and the law, classified information can not be shared with anyone who does not have the appropriate clearance to receive the infomation.

Sometime around June 2003, Cheney's CIA briefer told him that Plame worked for the agency - it would have also been incumbent upon the briefer to let Cheney know the classification level of this information. (That info should have been SAR level at least IMO, but since I've never worked directly with CIA data I could be mistaken on this detail)

Either way Cheney couldn't possibly share it with anyone else without a clearance or declassifying it before hand. Libby had a clearance, Rove had a clearance - but Robert Novak and Judith Miller did not.

Let's get back to the point, anyone sharing classified information with the specific intent of doing harm to this nation and/or aiding our enemies - is guilty of Treason

18 USC § 2381.

Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

It can not be doubted that revealing the identity of NOC and her front agency working an Nuclear Proliferation does give aid and comfort to our enemies particularly Iran and North Korea - who both happen to now have very strong Nuclear programs, something that some members of the Bush Administration have been secretly rooting for.

This astonishing revelation was buried in the middle of a Washington Post story published yesterday. Glenn Kessler reports from Moscow as he accompanies Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice:

Before North Korea announced it had detonated a nuclear device, some senior officials even said they were quietly rooting for a test, believing that would finally clarify the debate within the administration.

Until now, no U.S. official in any administration has ever advocated the testing of nuclear weapons by another country, even by allies such as the United Kingdom and France.

This is clear indication of intent - this is motive for the crime.

Hiding the fact that this information has been illegally shared as Sen Roberts did is Misprision of treason Treason...

18 USC § 2382

Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States and having knowledge of the commission of any treason against them, conceals and does not, as soon as may be, disclose and make known the same to the President or to some judge of the United States, or to the governor or to some judge or justice of a particular State, is guilty of misprision of treason and shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than seven years, or both.

In 1953 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for Espionage after they revealed Nuclear Secrets to Russia.

If you want an example of taking this view too far, last June Rep Peter King has argued that the New York Times Staff should be tried under the Espionage Act for revealing information about the secret tracking of Banking Transactions. Never mind the fact that this information had already been released by the government itself, and the fact that the Espionage Act would apply to the government employees who revealed the information - not the Times who was cleared to receive it in the first place.

In the 80's one co-worker of mine at Northrop named Thomas Cavanaugh (although I didn't know him) was sentenced to two life sentences for attempting to smuggle classified information to Russian agents in order to help pay off his enourmous credit card debt.

How can we hold Government Agents such as Rove, Libby and Cheney to a lower standard than we held the Rosenbergs or Cavanagh?

Clearly what they have done - is Treason.

It's well past time we started calling this situation exactly what it is - if only to start opening the Overton Window a crack.

Vyan, vyan1.geo@yahoo.com

Joe Wilson Vindicated

Wednesday, 24 January 2007

by Larry C Johnson

The Bush/Cheney acolytes keen on smearing Joe Wilson took a couple of gut shots at the Scooter Libby trial today. One of the documents released to the public confirms Wilson's account of how he came to be sent to Niger, what he found, and what he reported to CIA debriefers.

Part of the smear effort, which was led by Kansas Senator Pat Roberts from his perch as head of the Senate Intelligence Committee (SSCI), insisted that Joe's trip to Niger actually revealed that Iraq was trying to buy uranium. According to p. 46 of the July 2004 SSCI report on Iraq, the Republican's reported hearsay about what Joe found:

Not so fast boys and girls. During yesterday's testimony key documents were introduced into evidence. One of these was the INR memo about the Niger affair.

Download inr_memo.pdf

Buried in the appendix of the this document is the redacted intelligence report, known in CIA parlance as a "TD". Take a look for yourself at what the CIA debriefers reported:

The following TD shows that Joe met with two key former Nigerien officials--former Prime Minister Ibrahim Mayaki and former Minister of Energy and Mines Boucar Mai Manga. The INR memo records that Joe Wilson supported the INR position that the Embassy was quite capable of reporting on this matter without his intervention. Joe was not advocating to go to Niger and his wife, Valerie, was not in the meeting when this issue came up. (She had only introduced him at the start of the meeting.) The CIA ultimately prevailed and sent Joe to Niger. In coordination with the U.S. Ambassador to Niger, Joe agreed to meet with only former officials who were witting of the uranium program.

So what did Joe learn? Here's the reader's digest version (you can read the full report for yourself below).

• Former Prime Minister Mayaki told Joe he had rebuffed an effort in June of 1999 to arrange a meeting with the Iraqis he supported the U.S. sanction. He said, "if there had been any rogue state during his tenure, he would have seen the contract."
• Former Minister of Enerty Manga said, "there were no sales outside of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) since the mid-1980s". He went on to tell Ambassador Wilson that the uranium was tightly controlled and accounted for from the time it is mined until the time it is loaded onto ships.

There is nothing in this report to support the notion that Iraq had succeeded evading UN sanctions and purchased large quantities of yellowcake uranium. NOTHING! You can also see for yourself how the Republicans on the SSCI tried to mislead the American people in the July 2004 report. After you read the following report could you brief the President of the United States that Iraq had acquired yellowcake uranium and had restarted its nuclear program? No way in hell!

That's why Cheney and Libby were so intent on trying to shut up Joe Wilson. He told the truth.

Posted by Larry Johnson on Wednesday, 24 January 2007 at 20:29 | Permalink