posted April 06, 2006 12:28 PM            

APRIL 6--A former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney told a federal grand jury that President George W. Bush authorized him to leak information from a classified intelligence report to a New York Times reporter. Details of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's testimony were included in a court filing made yesterday by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, who is prosecuting Libby for perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements in connection with the probe into the leaking of CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity. According to Fitzgerald's filing, an excerpt of which you'll find below, Libby, 55, testified in 2003 that he provided reporter Judith Miller with information from a classified National Intelligence Estimate after being told by Cheney that Bush "specifically had authorized" him to "disclose certain information in the NIE." Libby also testified that Cheney specifically directed him to speak to other reporters about information in the classified NIE (which addressed Iraq's purported weapons of mass destruction programs) as well as a cable authored by Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson. The leaking of the classified material was apparently done in an effort to counter claims made by Wilson regarding the White House's justification for invading Iraq. The Fitzgerald filing also notes that Libby told grand jurors that he conferred with David Addington, Cheney's counsel, about the leak directive and that Addington told him "that Presidential authorization to publicly disclose a document amounted to a declassification of the document." While both Bush and Cheney have been interviewed by Fitzgerald, it is unknown whether they confirmed or disputed Libby's assertion that he was authorized to disclose findings in classified reports. Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff, resigned his White House post last October following his indictment on five felony counts. (7 pages)
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0406061libby1.html
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This is just one of many similar stories out today.

posted April 06, 2006 02:13 PM            

Libby did not leak "classified" information to a reporter or multiple reporters.

Valerie Plame was not an "undercover/covert" CIA agent.

No law was broken by the disclosure of her identity.

The first duty of a prosecutor is to determine if any law has been broken before proceeding to determine who did it.

Fitzgerald had all the information he needed and the resources to determine that Plame was not covered by the statute...having been stateside and not in any undercover/covert capacity for more than 6 years.

Since no law was broken, that should have been the end of the investigation and the file should have been closed.

Fitzgerald is a grandstanding, attention seeking prosecutor seeking headlines and career advancement and should be canned...immediately.

Plame's husband...who Plame recommended to go to Africa and hold hands with his contact there...Joe Wilson is a liar..a liar who admitted under oath in the 9/11 Commission hearing that he lied. He should have been exposed as a liar and he was.

Wilson to the "African leader"
Hello your Excellency, long time no see. Valerie sends her love..kiss-kiss..and this fine bottle of wine..French of course.

Before I get to the substance of my mission, I want to preface my questions with some information which I believe might save your government some embarrassment.

You know Saddam's Iraq is under UN sanctions in that all war making materials are specifically banned from shipment to Iraq from any other nation.

I'm sure you also know materials with which any weapons of mass destruction could be made are also specifically banned from shipment by any nation to Iraq.

Being the wise leader you are, I'm sure you are aware any nation engaged in supplying any components of WMD to Iraq would most likely be sanctioned itself by the UN Security Council with serious consequences. Negotiating a purchase of banned materials would be severely frowned on by the UN Security Council as well.

Certain allegations have been made by the British that Saddam's Iraq sought "uranium/yellow cake" from Africa during the period such uranium was specifically prohibited to Iraq.

My mission is to confirm the British allegation or conversely to debunk the allegation.

In view of all I've told you my dear friend, how would you answer the questions; did Saddam's Iraq seek to purchase uranium from your nation and did your nation enter into talks with Saddam's Iraq to supply uranium to Iraq?

"African leader"
Thank you Mr. Ambassador; of course, neither myself or anyone in my government would ever violate UN rules, regulations, Resolutions or sanctions which would jeopardize our standing in the International Community of nations.

Thank you dear friend, it's just as Valerie and I thought; there's no truth to the British allegation and I'll report that back to my government.

Now that unpleasant business is out of the way, are you free to do lunch? I have a rather generous per diem and it seems such a waste to let it go unused.

posted April 06, 2006 06:38 PM              

The Hon. Pat Roberts, Chairman, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
The Hon. Jay Rockefeller, Vice Chairman, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

Dear Sen. Roberts and Sen. Rockefeller,

I read with great surprise and consternation the Niger portion of Sens. Roberts, Bond and Hatch's additional comments to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee's Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Assessment on Iraq. I am taking this opportunity to clarify some of the issues raised in these comments.

First conclusion: "The plan to send the former ambassador to Niger was suggested by the former ambassador's wife, a CIA employee."

That is not true. The conclusion is apparently based on one anodyne quote from a memo Valerie Plame, my wife, sent to her superiors that says, "My husband has good relations with the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity." There is no suggestion or recommendation in that statement that I be sent on the trip. Indeed it is little more than a recitation of my contacts and bona fides. The conclusion is reinforced by comments in the body of the report that a CPD [Counterproliferation Division] reports officer stated that "the former ambassador's wife 'offered up his name'" (page 39) and a State Department intelligence and research officer stated that the "meeting was 'apparently convened by [the former ambassador's] wife who had the idea to dispatch him to use his contacts to sort out the Iraq-Niger uranium issue."

In fact, Valerie was not in the meeting at which the subject of my trip was raised. Neither was the CPD reports officer. After having escorted me into the room, she [Valerie] departed the meeting to avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest. It was at that meeting where the question of my traveling to Niger was broached with me for the first time and came only after a thorough discussion of what the participants did and did not know about the subject. My bona fides justifying the invitation to the meeting were the trip I had previously taken to Niger to look at other uranium-related questions as well as 20 years living and working in Africa, and personal contacts throughout the Niger government. Neither the CPD reports officer nor the State analyst were in the chain of command to know who, or how, the decision was made. The interpretations attributed to them are not the full story. In fact, it is my understanding that the reports officer has a different conclusion about Valerie's role than the one offered in the "additional comments." I urge the committee to reinterview the officer and publicly publish his statement.

It is unfortunate that the report failed to include the CIA's position on this matter. If the staff had done so it would undoubtedly have been given the same evidence as provided to Newsday reporters Tim Phelps and Knut Royce in July 2003. They reported on July 22 that:

"A senior intelligence officer confirmed that Plame was a Directorate of Operations undercover officer who worked 'alongside' the operations officers who asked her husband to travel to Niger. But he said she did not recommend her husband to undertake the Niger assignment. 'They [the officers who did ask Wilson to check the uranium story] were aware of who she was married to, which is not surprising,' he said. 'There are people elsewhere in government who are trying to make her look like she was the one who was cooking this up, for some reason,' he said. 'I can't figure out what it could be.' 'We paid his [Wilson's] airfare. But to go to Niger is not exactly a benefit. Most people you'd have to pay big bucks to go there,' the senior intelligence official said. Wilson said he was reimbursed only for expenses." (Newsday article "Columnist Blows CIA Agent's Cover," dated July 22, 2003).

In fact, on July 13 of this year, David Ensor, the CNN correspondent, did call the CIA for a statement of its position and reported that a senior CIA official confirmed my account that Valerie did not propose me for the trip:

"'She did not propose me,' he [Wilson] said -- others at the CIA did so. A senior CIA official said that is his understanding too."

Second conclusion: "Rather than speaking publicly about his actual experiences during his inquiry of the Niger issue, the former ambassador seems to have included information he learned from press accounts and from his beliefs about how the Intelligence Community would have or should have handled the information he provided."

This conclusion states that I told the committee staff that I "may have become confused about my own recollection after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that the names and dates on the documents were not correct." At the time that I was asked that question, I was not afforded the opportunity to review the articles to which the staff was referring. I have now done so.

On March 7, 2003, the director general of the IAEA reported to the U.N. Security Council that the documents that had been given to him were "not authentic." His deputy, Jacques Baute, was even more direct, pointing out that the forgeries were so obvious that a quick Google search would have exposed their flaws. A State Department spokesman was quoted the next day as saying about the forgeries, "We fell for it." From that time on the details surrounding the documents became public knowledge and were widely reported. I was not the source of information regarding the forensic analysis of the documents in question; the IAEA was.

The first time I spoke publicly about the Niger issue was in response to the State Department's disclaimer. On CNN a few days later, in response to a question, I replied that I believed the U.S. government knew more about the issue than the State Department spokesman had let on and that he had misspoken. I did not speak of my trip.

My first public statement was in my article of July 6 published in the New York Times, written only after it became apparent that the administration was not going to deal with the Niger question unless it was forced to. I wrote the article because I believed then, and I believe now, that it was important to correct the record on the statement in the president's State of the Union address which lent credence to the charge that Iraq was actively reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. I believed that the record should reflect the facts as the U.S. government had known them for over a year. The contents of my article do not appear in the body of the report and it is not quoted in the "additional comments." In that article, I state clearly that "as for the actual memorandum, I never saw it. But news accounts have pointed out that the documents had glaring errors -- they were signed, for example, by officials who were no longer in government -- and were probably forged. (And then there's the fact that Niger formally denied the charges.)"

The first time I actually saw what were represented as the documents was when Andrea Mitchell, the NBC correspondent, handed them to me in an interview on July 21. I was not wearing my glasses and could not read them. I have to this day not read them. I would have absolutely no reason to claim to have done so. My mission was to look into whether such a transaction took place or could take place. It had not and could not. By definition that makes the documents bogus.
http://electromagnet.us/dogspot/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=203

posted April 06, 2006 07:21 PM            

Joe Wilson lied about who proposed him for the Africa inquiry. His wife did and the Senate Committee produced the memo she wrote to that effect.

Joe Wilson lied about a forged purchase order document he purported to have debunked.

Joe Wilson lied about who sent him to Africa in the first place. Dick Cheney DID NOT send Wilson to Iraq.

Joe Wilson admitted in front of the Committee he took literary license in some of what he said in print.

Joe Wilson lied in print about what he told the CIA when he returned to the US from Africa.

Our Man in Niger
Exposed and discredited, Joe Wilson might consider going back.

Joe Wilson's cover has been blown. For the past year, he has claimed to be a truth-teller, a whistleblower, the victim of a vast right-wing conspiracy — and most of the media have lapped it up and cheered him on.

After a whirl of TV and radio appearances during which he received high-fives and hearty hugs from producers and hosts (I was in some green rooms with him so this is eyewitness reporting), and a wet-kiss profile in Vanity Fair, he gave birth to a quickie book sporting his dapper self on the cover, and verbosely entitled The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity: A Diplomat's Memoir.

The book jacket talks of his "fearless insight" (whatever that's supposed to mean) and "disarming candor" (which does not extend to telling readers for whom he has been working since retiring early from the Foreign Service).

The biographical blurb describes him as a "political centrist" who received a prize for "Truth-Telling," though a careful reader might notice that the award came in part from a group associated with The Nation magazine — which only Michael Moore would consider a centrist publication.

But now Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV — he of the Hermes ties and Jaguar convertibles — has been thoroughly discredited. Last week's bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report concluded that it is he who has been telling lies.

For starters, he has insisted that his wife, CIA employee Valerie Plame, was not the one who came up with the brilliant idea that the agency send him to Niger to investigate whether Saddam Hussein had been attempting to acquire uranium. "Valerie had nothing to do with the matter," Wilson says in his book. "She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip." In fact, the Senate panel found, she was the one who got him that assignment. The panel even found a memo by her. (She should have thought to use disappearing ink.)

Wilson spent a total of eight days in Niger "drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people," as he put it. On the basis of this "investigation" he confidently concluded that there was no way Saddam sought uranium from Africa. Oddly, Wilson didn't bother to write a report saying this. Instead he gave an oral briefing to a CIA official.

Oddly, too, as an investigator on assignment for the CIA he was not required to keep his mission and its conclusions confidential. And for the New York Times, he was happy to put pen to paper, to write an op-ed charging the Bush administration with "twisting," "manipulating" and "exaggerating" intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs "to justify an invasion."

In particular he said that President Bush was lying when, in his 2003 State of the Union address, he pronounced these words: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

We now know for certain that Wilson was wrong and that Bush's statement was entirely accurate.

The British have consistently stood by that conclusion. In September 2003, an independent British parliamentary committee looked into the matter and determined that the claim made by British intelligence was "reasonable" (the media forgot to cover that one too). Indeed, Britain's spies stand by their claim to this day. Interestingly, French intelligence also reported an Iraqi attempt to procure uranium from Niger.

Yes, there were fake documents relating to Niger-Iraq sales. But no, those forgeries were not the evidence that convinced British intelligence that Saddam may have been shopping for "yellowcake" uranium. On the contrary, according to some intelligence sources, the forgery was planted in order to be discovered — as a ruse to discredit the story of a Niger-Iraq link, to persuade people there were no grounds for the charge. If that was the plan, it worked like a charm.

But that's not all. The Butler report, yet another British government inquiry, also is expected to conclude this week that British intelligence was correct to say that Saddam sought uranium from Niger.

And in recent days, the Financial Times has reported that illicit sales of uranium from Niger were indeed being negotiated with Iraq, as well as with four other states.

According to the FT: "European intelligence officers have now revealed that three years before the fake documents became public, human and electronic intelligence sources from a number of countries picked up repeated discussion of an illicit trade in uranium from Niger. One of the customers discussed by the traders was Iraq."

There's still more: As Susan Schmidt reported — back on page A9 of Saturday's Washington Post: "Contrary to Wilson's assertions and even the government's previous statements, the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence."

The Senate report says fairly bluntly that Wilson lied to the media. Schmidt notes that the panel found that, "Wilson provided misleading information to the Washington Post last June. He said then that he concluded the Niger intelligence was based on a document that had clearly been forged because 'the dates were wrong and the names were wrong.'"

The problem is Wilson "had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports," the Senate panel discovered. Schmidt notes: "The documents — purported sales agreements between Niger and Iraq — were not in U.S. hands until eight months after Wilson made his trip to Niger."

Ironically, Senate investigators found that at least some of what Wilson told his CIA briefer not only failed to persuade the agency that there was nothing to reports of Niger-Iraq link — his information actually created additional suspicion.

A former prime minister of Niger, Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, told Wilson that in June 1999, a businessman approached him, insisting that he meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations." Mayaki, knowing how few commodities for export are produced by impoverished Niger, interpreted that to mean that Saddam was seeking uranium.

Another former government official told Wilson that Iran had tried to buy 400 tons of uranium in 1998. That's the same year that Saddam forced the weapons inspectors to leave Iraq. Could the former official have meant Iraq rather than Iran? If someone were to try to connect those dots, what picture might emerge?

Schmidt adds that the Senate panel was alarmed to find that the CIA never "fully investigated possible efforts by Iraq to buy uranium from Niger destined for Iraq and stored in a warehouse in Benin."

I was the first to suggest, here on National Review Online a year ago ("Scandal!" and "No Yellowcake Walk"), that Wilson should not have been given this assignment, that he had no training or demonstrated competence as an investigator, that his inquiry had been obviously superficial and that, far from being a "centrist," he was a partisan with an ax to grind.

But my complaint was really less with Wilson than it was with the CIA for sending him, rather than an experienced spy or investigator, to check out such an important and sensitive matter as whether one of the world's most vicious killers had been trying to buy the stuff that nuclear weapons are made of.

For this, I received a couple of dishonorable mentions in Wilson's memoir. He has a chapter called "What I Didn't Find in Africa," which might be used as a case study for CIA trainees and others who need to understand the fundamental principle of logic that "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." In other words, Wilson fails to grasp that because he didn't find proof that Saddam was seeking African uranium does not mean that proof was not there to be found.

In reaction to his "fearless candor" and "disarming insight" about the "sixteen-word lie," Wilson writes that "right-wing hatchet men were being wheeled out to attack me. More ominously, plots were being hatched in the White House that would betray America's national security.

He writes: "Clifford May was first off the mark, spewing uninformed vitriol in a piece in National Review Online blindly operating on the principle that facts, those pesky facts, just do not matter."

Well, facts, those pesky facts do matter and a bipartisan Senate investigative committee has now established that Wilson has had very few in his possession. And, for the record, I was never advised anything about Wilson by anyone serving in the White House, the administration, or the Republican party. I never even had a discussion about him with such folks.

There is much more that could be said about the Wilson affair, and certainly many questions that ought to be both asked and answered. But in the interest of time and space, let me leave you with just one: Now that we know that Mrs. Wilson did recommend Mr. Wilson for the Niger assignment, can we not infer that she was working at CIA headquarters in Langley rather than as an undercover operative in some front business or organization somewhere?

As I suggested in another NRO piece (Spy Games), if that is the case — if she was not working undercover and if the CIA was not taking measures to protect her cover — no law was broken by columnist Bob Novak in naming her, or by whoever told Novak that she worked for the CIA.

It is against the law to knowingly name an undercover agent. It is not against the law to name a CIA employee who is not an undercover agent. For example, I know the identity of "Anonymous," the CIA employee who has now written a book trashing the Bush administration for its policies. But since he is not — to the best of my knowledge — a covert operative, I would be committing no crime were I to name him in this piece. Nor, I should add, did he attempt to hide his employment when we sat across a dinner table some months ago.

I don't think Joe Wilson is an evil man. I do think he is an angry partisan and an opportunist. According to my sources, during most of his diplomatic career he specialized in general services and administration, which means he was not the political or economic adviser to the ambassador, rather he was the guy who makes sure the embassy plumbing is working and that the commissary is stocked with Oreos and other products the ambassador prefers.

Just prior to the Gulf War, he did serve in Iraq, a hot spot to be sure, but that was under Ambassador April Glaspie, who failed to make it clear to Saddam that invading Kuwait would elicit a robust response from Washington. I doubt that Wilson advised her to do otherwise. I rather doubt she asked. As he says in his book, she was giving him an "on-the-spot education in Middle Eastern diplomacy. It was a part of the world in which I had no experience."

In 1991, Wilson's book jacket boasts, President George H.W. Bush praised Wilson as "a true American hero," and he was made an ambassador. But for some reason, he was assigned not to Cairo, Paris, or Moscow, places where you put the best and the brightest, nor was he sent to Bermuda or Luxembourg, places you send people you want to reward. Instead, he was sent to Gabon, a diplomatic backwater of the first rank.

After that, he says in his memoir, "I had risen about as high as I could in the Foreign Service and decided it was time to retire." Well, that's not exactly accurate either. He could have been given a more important posting, such as Kenya or South Africa, or he could have been promoted higher in the senior Foreign Service (he made only the first of four grades). Instead, he was evidently (according to my sources) forced into involuntary retirement at 48. (The minimum age for voluntary retirement in the Foreign Service is 50.) After that, he seems to have made quite a bit of money — doing what for whom is unclear and I wish the Senate committee had attempted to find out.

But based on one op-ed declaring 16 words spoken by the president a lie, he transformed himself into an instant celebrity and, for a while, it seemed, a contender for power within the chien-mange-le-chien world of foreign policy. That dream has now probably evaporated. It is hard to see how a President John Kerry would now want Wilson in his inner circle. But if he desired to return to Gabon or Niger I, for one, would not be among those opposing him.

posted April 06, 2006 10:10 PM              

Legitimate questions have arisen about how remarks on alleged Iraqi attempts to obtain uranium in Africa made it into the President’s State of the Union speech. Let me be clear about several things right up front. First, CIA approved the President’s State of the Union address before it was delivered. Second, I am responsible for the approval process in my Agency. And third, the President had every reason to believe that the text presented to him was sound. These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the President.

For perspective, a little history is in order.

There was fragmentary intelligence gathered in late 2001 and early 2002 on the allegations of Saddam’s efforts to obtain additional raw uranium from Africa, beyond the 550 metric tons already in Iraq. In an effort to inquire about certain reports involving Niger, CIA’s counter-proliferation experts, on their own initiative, asked an individual with ties to the region to make a visit to see what he could learn. He reported back to us that one of the former Nigerien officials he met stated that he was unaware of any contract being signed between Niger and rogue states for the sale of uranium during his tenure in office. The same former official also said that in June 1999 a businessman approached him and insisted that the former official meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss “expanding commercial relations” between Iraq and Niger. The former official interpreted the overture as an attempt to discuss uranium sales. The former officials also offered details regarding Niger’s processes for monitoring and transporting uranium that suggested it would be very unlikely that material could be illicitly diverted. There was no mention in the report of forged documents -- or any suggestion of the existence of documents at all.

Because this report, in our view, did not resolve whether Iraq was or was not seeking uranium from abroad, it was given a normal and wide distribution, but we did not brief it to the President, Vice-President or other senior Administration officials. We also had to consider that the former Nigerien officials knew that what they were saying would reach the U.S. government and that this might have influenced what they said.

In the fall of 2002, my Deputy and I briefed hundreds of members of Congress on Iraq. We did not brief the uranium acquisition story.

Also in the fall of 2002, our British colleagues told us they were planning to publish an unclassified dossier that mentioned reports of Iraqi attempts to obtain uranium in Africa. Because we viewed the reporting on such acquisition attempts to be inconclusive, we expressed reservations about its inclusion but our colleagues said they were confident in their reports and left it in their document.

In September and October 2002 before Senate Committees, senior intelligence officials in response to questions told members of Congress that we differed with the British dossier on the reliability of the uranium reporting.

In October, the Intelligence Community (IC) produced a classified, 90 page National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq’s WMD programs. There is a lengthy section in which most agencies of the Intelligence Community judged that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Let me emphasize, the NIE’s Key Judgments cited six reasons for this assessment; the African uranium issue was not one of them.

But in the interest of completeness, the report contained three paragraphs that discuss Iraq’s significant 550-metric ton uranium stockpile and how it could be diverted while under IAEA safeguard. These paragraphs also cited reports that Iraq began “vigorously trying to procure” more uranium from Niger and two other African countries, which would shorten the time Baghdad needed to produce nuclear weapons. The NIE states: “A foreign government service reported that as of early 2001, Niger planned to send several tons of pure “uranium” (probably yellowcake) to Iraq. As of early 2001, Niger and Iraq reportedly were still working out the arrangements for this deal, which could be for up to 500 tons of yellowcake.” The Estimate also states: “We do not know the status of this arrangement.” With regard to reports that Iraq had sought uranium from two other countries, the Estimate says: “We cannot confirm whether Iraq succeeded in acquiring uranium ore and/or yellowcake from these sources.” Much later in the NIE text, in presenting an alternate view on another matter, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research included a sentence that states: “Finally, the claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are, in INR’s assessment, highly dubious.”

An unclassified CIA White Paper in October made no mention of the issue, again because it was not fundamental to the judgment that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, and because we had questions about some of the reporting. For the same reasons, the subject was not included in many public speeches, Congressional testimony and the Secretary of State’s United Nations presentation in early 2003.

The background above makes it even more troubling that the 16 words eventually made it into the State of the Union speech. This was a mistake.

Portions of the State of the Union speech draft came to the CIA for comment shortly before the speech was given. Various parts were shared with cognizant elements of the Agency for review. Although the documents related to the alleged Niger-Iraqi uranium deal had not yet been determined to be forgeries, officials who were reviewing the draft remarks on uranium raised several concerns about the fragmentary nature of the intelligence with National Security Council colleagues. Some of the language was changed. From what we know now, Agency officials in the end concurred that the text in the speech was factually correct - i.e. that the British government report said that Iraq sought uranium from Africa. This should not have been the test for clearing a Presidential address. 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.
http://www.cia.gov/cia/public_affairs/press_release/2003/pr07112003.html

posted April 06, 2006 11:18 PM            

Entirely true and the British government stand by that intelligence today.

Second, the alternative view of the CIA was that the information was not sound...but that was the alternative view and not the primary viewpoint of the CIA.

Third, yellow cake IS uranium and this wording appears in the information you posted: "These paragraphs also cited reports that Iraq began “vigorously trying to procure” more uranium from Niger and two other African countries, which would shorten the time Baghdad needed to produce nuclear weapons. The NIE states: “A foreign government service reported that as of early 2001, Niger planned to send several tons of pure “uranium” (probably yellowcake) to Iraq."

Fourth, the President did NOT say a word about "natural uranium".

posted April 07, 2006 12:17 AM              

one wouldnt get the idea from what wilson or tenet said that it was misleading and weak to announce to the u.s people a secondhand finding from a foreign intelligence service as a reason for invading another country

posted April 07, 2006 01:53 AM            

That's been borne out by 3 commissions and it's irrefutable.

posted April 07, 2006 05:06 PM            

Valerie Plame's identity with the CIA was confidential, right?

Someone leaked it, right?

Neither Bush nor Cheney took credit for the leak when it happened, right?

So if the President and Vice President have authority to declassify information, and did so, why wouldn't they just be upfront about it and not waste taxpayer money on an investigation in which members of their staff get pinched for perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements?

posted April 07, 2006 08:34 PM              

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, Helen, that's assuming a lot of things. First of all, that is not the way this White House operates. The President expects everyone in his administration to adhere to the highest standards of conduct. No one would be authorized to do such a thing. Secondly, there -- I've seen the anonymous media reports, and if I could find out who "anonymous" was, it would make my life a whole lot easier. But --

Q Does he think it didn't come from here?

MR. McCLELLAN: But we've made it very clear that anyone -- anyone -- who has information relating to this should report that information to the Department of Justice.

Q Does he doubt it came from the White House?

MR. McCLELLAN: I'm sorry?

Q Does he doubt?

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, there's been no information that has been brought to our attention, beyond what we've seen in the media reports, to suggest White House involvement.

Q Will the President move aggressively to see if such a transgression has occurred in the White House? Will he ask top White House officials to sign statements saying that they did not give the information?

MR. McCLELLAN: Bill, if someone leaked classified information of this nature, the appropriate agency to look into it would be the Department of Justice. So the Department of Justice is the one that would look in matters like this.

Q You're saying the White House won't take a proactive role?

MR. McCLELLAN: Do you have any specific information to bring to my attention suggesting White House involvement?

Q If you would --

MR. McCLELLAN: I haven't seen any.

Q Would you not want to know whether someone had leaked information of this kind?

MR. McCLELLAN: The President has been -- I spoke for him earlier today -- the President believes leaking classified information is a very serious matter. And it should be --

Q So why doesn't he want --

MR. McCLELLAN: -- pursued to the fullest extent --

Q Right, so why --

MR. McCLELLAN: -- by the appropriate agency. And the appropriate agency is the Department of Justice.

Q Why wouldn't he proactively do that, ask people on the staff to say that they had not leaked anything?

MR. McCLELLAN: Do you have specific information to suggest White House involvement? I saw a media report that said "senior administration officials." That's an anonymous source that could include a lot of people. I've seen a lot of "senior administration officials" in media stories.

Q Would they know -- to the White House?

Q Scott, when you say that it should be pursued by the Justice Department -- Justice has not said whether it actually is conducting an investigation. Does the President want the Justice Department to investigate this matter?

MR. McCLELLAN: If someone leaked classified information of the nature that has been reported, absolutely, the President would want it to be looked into. And the Justice Department would be the appropriate agency to do so.

Q And do you know that they are doing this?

MR. McCLELLAN: That's a question you need to ask the Department of Justice. My understanding is that if something like this happened and it was referred to the Department of Justice, then the Department of Justice would look to see whether or not there is enough information to pursue it further. But those are questions you need to ask the Department of Justice.

Q But, Scott, something like this did happen, right? Bob Novak had information he should not have had, that he was not authorized to have. So something --

MR. McCLELLAN: Terry, all I can tell you is what I've seen in the media reports. And I've seen different statements in the media reports from, the CIA hasn't confirmed or denied that this was a covert agent for the CIA; I've seen media reports to suggest that it was referred to the Department of Justice, and that -- and comments the Department of Justice would look into it.

Q So the President of the United States doesn't know whether or not this classified information was divulged, and he is only getting his information by reading the media?

MR. McCLELLAN: I'm sorry?

Q He does not know whether or not the classified information was divulged here, and he's only getting his information from the media?

MR. McCLELLAN: No, we don't know -- we don't have any information that's been brought to our attention beyond what we've seen in the media reports. I've made that clear.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/09/20030929-7.html#1

posted April 08, 2006 01:07 AM              

If Democrats don't do it now they are clearly complicit

by Paul Joseph Watson - April 7, 2006

Today's White House admission that George W. Bush authorized the leak of, and let's not beat around the bush and call it an 'intelligence report' like the yellow bellies at Reuters, the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame as a political stunt in retaliation for Joe Wilson's refusal to be the snake oil salesman for their rigged war, is the final nail in the coffin proving we have a dictatorship in Washington.

Dictatorships are not always defined by funny hand salutes and gas chambers. The dictionary definition mentions neither, but it does mention "absolute or despotic control or power."

Is a President who argues he can do anything even if it breaks the law, and an entire cabinet who agree, exercising absolute power?

Is somebody who is above the law and whose advisors and cabinet members write memos stating he is above the law exercising absolute power?

How about totalitarianism? Definition "a form of government in which the ruler is an absolute dictator (not restricted by a constitution or laws or opposition)."

Alberto Gonzales again put George Bush above the law today when he indicated that the administration could outright (not that they haven't been doing so in secret for decades) authorize wiretaps of domestic American citizen's phone calls without a warrant. This is a clear violation of the 4th amendment to the US Constitution.

Bush's own advisor John Yoo is on the public record as arguing that no law could prevent the President from ordering children to be tortured by means of crushing their genitals. No, this isn't the Frist fake Fox News hoax - that was his actual argument in a December 1st debate in Chicago with Notre Dame professor and international human rights scholar Doug Cassel.

Bush's Commander in Chief designation gives him the right to resort to anything, including mass genocide, if it is done in the name of protecting the American people, according to the White House. It doesn't matter if it is unconstitutional. Is this being unrestricted by laws or opposition? If the answer is yes then we are living under totalitarianism by its very definition

"If anyone in this administration was involved in it (the CIA leak), they would no longer be in this administration." White House spokesman Scott McClellan, September 29 2003

By the White House's own admission Bush should immediately be removed from the Oval Office.

If Bush started dropping babies out of Air Force One for fun would this be grounds for impeachment?

Neo-cons and fake conservatives will continue to defend Bush to the hilt whatever he does because their childish egos are already invested in his every word and action. The invasion of the body snatchers scenario has already passed and Bush's remaining 30 odd per cent of support is likely to remain until the bitter end.

If Democrats don't initiate impeachment proceedings immediately then we know without a doubt that they are complicit and have already been promised huge kickbacks in the next two elections for keeping their noses out.

The handful of truly independent thinking Congressmen and Senators such as Ron Paul and Tom Tancredo need to be the ones to get the impeachment ball rolling, if only to expose the Democrats for the collaborators they are.

posted April 08, 2006 02:46 AM              

I just love this final nail in George W. Bush's and his corrupt government's coffin.

Recent polls are showing that Bush's approval rating is the lowest in history for a president this early in his second term even though second terms are rough anyway. The ratings sink by the day. As of today Bush's approval rating is anywhere from 30% - 33% depending on the poll. When you consider that only 25% of people control the wealth in America it isn't difficult to see that only those people who are prospering from Bush's corrupt administration still support him. The other 5%-8% mistake blind allegiance to Bush and his cause as patriotism when the true patriots are the ones fighting for democracy and the constitution.

Rainbow, regarding impeachment, everything is pointing to the Dems winning back the majority in Congress in the Nov. election. Even this early in the campaigning the Democrat candidates are leading the Republican imcumbants in four major states including Montana and Ohio, two red states. I can guarantee you that the first thing on the Dems agenda when they have the majority in Congress again is going to be to call for Bush's impeachment. There is already a call for Censuring Bush, the first move to impeachment. It may even happen before the election in Nov. after this evidence that Bush authorized the leak. Everyone in the country knew it went all the way to the top and now there is concrete evidence.

This is another victory for Democracy in America.

Question for Jwhop:

posted April 08, 2006 12:07 PM              

Bush and Cheney have both claimed that they have the authority to declassify information like this, but you and I both know there's a big difference between formally declassifying a document for all to see and selectively leaking state secrets to the media in order to undercut an administration's critics.

One of those actions is part of the honorable pursuit of open and accountable government. The other is what George Bush did. "

When an opponent is counteracting charges like this though ads it means that the Dems are fighting the battle on their own turf.

In Ohio, Republican incumbent Mike DeWine bought his first TV ads of the cycle just last week. The ads highlight DeWine's advocacy for children's health care and, in a transparent effort to distance himself from the increasingly unpopular George Bush, label DeWine as an "independent" voice.

The only problem, of course, is that DeWine hasn't been independent at all. In fact, he has voted in lockstep with George Bush's extreme agenda a whopping 92% of the time. A fancy TV ad with some cute little kids can't change history.

In Montana, Conrad Burns has launched a TV and radio media campaign that is an obvious response to the savaging he has taken in the press due to his buddy-buddy connections to convicted Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

We all know that "The Hammer", Tom DeLay is waaaaaaay too arrogant and convinced he is so powerful that he is above the law to have resigned from the congressinal race on his own. We all know that the Republican Party asked him to step down because due to his indictment charges for overt corruption he had become a scandal to the Party and a major liability to Bush.

Funny thing about that though is that it isn't going to do any good because Bush is his own liability. Why? Because the Bush administration has personally waged an all war against the elderly and middle class citizens of this country which continues on in the Immigration bill. Those are the vast majority of voters and the most reliable voters in this country. Bush, being so corrupt himself and whose God is the dollar sign, chose to cater to the wealthy and corporate minorites instead of the majority of voters. Not a wise move but predictable from the source. Even the most limited amount of intelligence and wisdom should dictate that you don't crap on the vast majority of voters in this country and expect to come out on top.

Hasta la Vista Bush!!!

posted April 08, 2006 06:13 PM              

Boo shoo ni taw way!

Soooooo glad you're here....

posted April 08, 2006 06:22 PM              

John Prados
April 07, 2000

John Prados is a senior fellow of the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C., and author of Hoodwinked: The Documents that Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War (The New Press).

The irony is so thick you can cut it with a knife. Just a few months ago defenders of the Bush administration were lambasting Justice Department prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald for engaging in a fishing expedition that might hurt President George W. Bush. The pundits considered Fitzgerald’s indictment for perjury of former vice-presidential aide I. Lewis (“Scooter”) Libby to be politically motivated and wrong.

To recap, Libby’s alleged perjury occurred during his testimony to a grand jury investigating the blown cover of CIA clandestine officer Valerie Plame Wilson, bound up in a White House bid to neutralize criticism of the Iraq war. The Plame affair started as an effort to discredit Ambassador Joseph Wilson, whom the CIA had sent to Niger to look into charges that Iraq was buying uranium ore there. Wilson found nothing to substantiate the claim and subsequently became a critic of Bush’s resort to war. His wife was outed in an attempt to undermine Wilson’s charges.

Continued legal filings in the case now reveal Prosecutor Fitzgerald as a guardian of White House secrets and Scooter Libby plus his defense team as assiduously implicating President Bush.

For those who questioned George Bush’s modus operandi in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq and afterwards these are perhaps not unexpected developments. But the gradual emergence of the contents of the Libby grand jury testimony is important not only because it contradicts the president’s public denials of the leaks, but also for potentially placing the president at the center of a smear campaign.

Prosecutor Fitzgerald’s April 5 response to the Libby team’s latest motion to compel discovery of a vast array of documents discloses that Vice President Dick Cheney told Libby that President Bush had “specifically” authorized officials in the summer of 2003 to reveal certain contents of the secret U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. There will be an argument over whether Bush or Cheney actually had that authority (which is vested in the Director of Central Intelligence by a law on the books since 1949) but that is not the concern here. Rather, the disclosure of this deliberate Bush leak—given to Judith Miller of The New York Times and others—provides new evidence that the White House regarded the top secret NIE not as an intelligence appreciation but as fodder for political warfare. In fact on July 12 Cheney ordered Libby to speak to the press about the NIE.

The new evidence also says something about Bush secrecy. This administration has moved on many levels to restrict public—and even official—access to information. Cutting off flows of data formerly routinely provided to Congress or the public, defenestrating access to the records of former presidents mandated by the Presidential Records Act, curbing the Freedom of Information Act, refusing to describe to Congress its domestic communications interception program and most recently reclassifying documents in the public domain for years. Suddenly we see President Bush, without a care, releasing secret records he felt would bolster his case.

Moreover, the way in which this was done should send shudders down the spine: according to the Fitzgerald filing, Scooter Libby told the grand jury that “he understood that even in the days following his conversation with Ms. Miller, other key officials—including Cabinet level officials—were not made aware of the earlier declassification even as those officials were pressed to carry out a declassification of the NIE, the report about Wilson’s trip and another classified document dated January 24, 2003,” evidently a reference to the materials assembled by CIA officer Robert Walpole regarding Iraq’s weapons programs and used for Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s speech to the United Nations Security Council a couple of weeks later. If Libby’s testimony is accurate, documents were to be simultaneously deemed secret and declassified, depending upon White House whim, convenience, or legal liability.

This is the same administration that is seeking to prosecute those who leaked information considered less favorable to its cause, such as the fact of the National Security Agency’s dubious domestic spying program or the existence of the CIA’s secret prison network. Under the interpretation of the Espionage Act the Bush Justice Department is using to prosecute two former employees of the American Israel Public Affairs

Committee, even reporters who gain access to such information, media that inform the public of it, or persons who merely possess the information are currently at risk, although the statute appears to criminalize only the act of leaking. Indeed, the law makes it necessary for the NIE data not to be classified in order for Libby to legally leak it. There may be an argument here that under the Bush interpretation of the statute the act of declassification to abet a leak could amount to a criminal conspiracy, in this case by President George Bush himself.

Those who contend that there was no Bush effort to make political use of intelligence in the months leading up to the war will now have an even harder time of it. At various points during those months there were similarly orchestrated leaks—of claims about aluminum tubes supposedly being used in an Iraqi nuclear weapons program and of alleged ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda to name just two. And there were carefully prepared occasions where Bush officials took advantage of those leaks to advance the cause of war. The events of July 2003 demonstrate that this was a standard administration tactic, not an aberration. Given the circumstances, the need for a “Phase II” investigation of the political use of intelligence for the Iraq war becomes inescapable.

The most important aspect of the new evidence is that it locates the center of the effort to discredit Ambassador Wilson, and of the actions taken to further that aim, squarely within the Oval Office. If that project rose to the level of a criminal conspiracy, or if anything done to further that goal was in fact illegal, it is George W. Bush who must be called to account. That is a very troubling development indeed. The censure motion introduced by Wisconsin Senator Russell Feingold may turn out to be merely the opening salvo in a very intense political battle.

posted April 08, 2006 06:39 PM              

Saturday, April 8, 2006

By TOM RAUM
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

WASHINGTON -- President Bush insists a president "better mean what he says." Those words could return to haunt him.

After long denouncing leaks of all kinds, Bush is confronted with a statement - unchallenged by his aides - that he authorized a leak of classified material to undermine an Iraq war critic.

The allegation in the CIA leak case threatens the credibility of a president already falling in the polls, and it gives Democrats fresh material to accuse him of hypocrisy.
"In politics, what gets bad gets worse," said GOP strategist Ed Rogers. "And we've been on a a bad roll for quite some time. We're in an environment now where every mistake is a metaphor."

Critics were quick to portray the Bush-leak report as a fresh sign of a failed Iraq policy, manipulated intelligence and a lack of presidential veracity. Honesty was once seen by Americans as one of Bush's strongest character traits, but polls show that perception has waned in Bush's second term.

Causing the furor is a court filing that revealed that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former top aide, told a federal grand jury that Bush authorized him to leak classified information on Iraq to reporters in mid-2003.

Libby is charged with lying and obstructing an investigation into whether the administration intentionally revealed the identity of a CIA operative, Valerie Plame, to undermine her husband's public criticism of the Iraq war.

As president, Bush has wide latitude to declassify material. And there was nothing in the legal papers filed by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to suggest Bush or Cheney did anything illegal, or had specifically authorized Libby to identify Plame.

posted April 08, 2006 06:41 PM              

By David Stout
The New York Times

Friday 07 April 2006

Washington - The White House tried today to quell the furor over the leaking of sensitive pre-war intelligence on Iraq, as President Bush's spokesman insisted that the president had the authority to declassify and release information "in the public interest" and had never done so for political reasons.

The spokesman, Scott McClellan, said a decision was made to declassify and release some information to rebut "irresponsible and unfounded accusations" that the administration had manipulated or misused pre-war intelligence to buttress its case for war.

"That was flat-out false," Mr. McClellan said.

Mr. McClellan was barraged at a news briefing by questions over assertions by I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, that President Bush authorized him, through Mr. Cheney, in July 2003 to disclose key parts of what was until then a classified pre-war evaluation, or National Intelligence Estimate, on Iraq.

At the time, the Pentagon had hardly finished basking in the easy military victory when it was caught up in questions over the failure to find deadly unconventional weapons in Iraq - the main rationale for going to war.

One of the findings in the pre-war intelligence data was that Saddam Hussein was probably seeking fuel for nuclear reactors.

Mr. McClellan said the Democrats who pounced on Mr. Libby's assertions that Mr. Bush had given him, through the vice president, the authority to talk to a reporter about some material in the intelligence estimate were "engaging in crass politics" in refusing to recognize the distinction between legitimate disclosure of sensitive information in the public interest and the irresponsible leaking of intelligence for political reasons.

Mr. Libby told a grand jury he discussed the intelligence estimate with Judith Miller, then with The New York Times, on July 8, 2003. Ten days later, the intelligence estimate was formally declassified, a move that Mr. McClellan said again and again was in the public interest and not politically motivated. Mr. McClellan deflected questions on what role, if any, Mr. Bush had in setting the parameters of Mr. Libby's discussion with Ms. Miller.

Meanwhile, Democrats continued to assail the administration.

"This is a serious allegation with national security consequences," Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the minority leader, said today on the Senate floor. "It directly contradicts previous statements made by President Bush, it continues a pattern of misleading by this Bush White House, and it raises somber and troubling questions about the Bush administration's candor with the Congress and the public."

Mr. Reid said it was time for the president to say whether, in fact, he authorized the disclosure of the pre-war intelligence, as Mr. Libby said he had. "He must tell the American people whether the Bush Oval Office is the place where the buck stops, or the leaks start," Mr. Reid said.

Mr. McClellan was in the somewhat odd position of not disputing that President Bush was involved in the disclosure of hitherto classified information, while describing any such disclosure as being in the public good.

Mr. McClellan, who noted that a president has the authority to declassify intelligence, said today that he was "not getting into confirming or denying things, because I'm not commenting at all on matters relating to an ongoing legal proceeding."

He was alluding to the trial of Mr. Libby, the vice president's former chief of staff, on charges that Mr. Libby committed perjury and engaged in obstruction of justice in connection with an inquiry over who unmasked Valerie Wilson, an undercover officer for the Central Intelligence Agency, in the summer of 2003.

The unmasking occurred shortly after Ms. Wilson's husband, the former diplomat Joseph Wilson, wrote in The New York Times that he doubted reports that Iraq was trying to obtain uranium from Niger.

Some Democrats accused the White House at the time of destroying Ms. Wilson's cover to retaliate against her husband, but the White House repeatedly denied the accusations.

Mr. McClellan was asked today whether the president's own words at the time ("If there's a leak out of this administration, I want to know who it is") and Mr. Libby's recent assertion, contained in a court filing, demonstrated inconsistency, at best.

Not at all, Mr. McClellan said. "Declassifying information and providing it to the public when it is in the public interest is one thing," he said. "But leaking classified information that could compromise our national security is something that is very serious. And there is a distinction" - a distinction Democrats refuse to see, he said repeatedly.

posted April 08, 2006 08:34 PM            

"Declassifying information and providing it to the public when it is in the public interest is one thing, but leaking classified information that could compromise our national security is something that is very serious. And there is a distinction."

Talk about childish and immature! These are kid's tactics, and anyone who believes otherwise is plain foolish.

The issue isn't about one leak versus another leak. The issue is the compromising the identity of a covert CIA officer. This is our government selling out not only it's own citizen, but it's own public servant for political reasons in an attempt to justify war and quell dissenters.

posted April 08, 2006 09:29 PM              

You always know when someone is lying because they are always contradicting themselves. The truth is consistent. Lies, however, show many contradictions because a liar forgets what he said. The truth is something no one forgets. Therefore it remains consistent.

What we call hypocrisy from Bush and his administration is nothing more than the contradictions that arise from lies and deceit.

posted April 09, 2006 02:16 PM            

A leak is an unauthorized disclosure of confidential or classified information to the press or others.

The President is fully authorized to declassify any classified information in pursuit of informing the public or for any other reason he may choose to do so.

When the President authorizes the release of such information it ISN'T a leak.

Further, the public had every right to know Joe Wilson was lying both in print and public statements about the administration, what he found out on his trip to Niger, who recommended him for the job, who the hell arranged to have him go to Niger and to whom he was supposed to deliver his report. Hint...it wasn't Dick Cheney.

Even if the administration's motive had been to discredit and punish the little bag of lint named Joe Wilson...so what? That isn't a crime in any sense of the word. In fact, it's just exactly what the administration should do when some lying leftist jerk is lying to the public about administration policy.

Joe Wilson is a liar on all counts. Leftists are pi*sing into the wind...as usual.

A Good Leak
President Bush declassified some of the intelligence he used to decide on war in Iraq. Is that a scandal?

Sunday, April 9, 2006; Page B06

PRESIDENT BUSH was right to approve the declassification of parts of a National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq three years ago in order to make clear why he had believed that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons. Presidents are authorized to declassify sensitive material, and the public benefits when they do. But the administration handled the release clumsily, exposing Mr. Bush to the hyperbolic charges of misconduct and hypocrisy that Democrats are leveling.

Rather than follow the usual declassification procedures and then invite reporters to a briefing -- as the White House eventually did -- Vice President Cheney initially chose to be secretive, ordering his chief of staff at the time, I. Lewis Libby, to leak the information to a favorite New York Times reporter. The full public disclosure followed 10 days later. There was nothing illegal or even particularly unusual about that; nor is this presidentially authorized leak necessarily comparable to other, unauthorized disclosures that the president believes, rightly or wrongly, compromise national security. Nevertheless, Mr. Cheney's tactics make Mr. Bush look foolish for having subsequently denounced a different leak in the same controversy and vowing to "get to the bottom" of it.

The affair concerns, once again, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV and his absurdly over-examined visit to the African country of Niger in 2002. Each time the case surfaces, opponents of the war in Iraq use it to raise a different set of charges, so it's worth recalling the previous iterations. Mr. Wilson originally claimed in a 2003 New York Times op-ed and in conversations with numerous reporters that he had debunked a report that Iraq was seeking to purchase uranium from Niger and that Mr. Bush's subsequent inclusion of that allegation in his State of the Union address showed that he had deliberately "twisted" intelligence "to exaggerate the Iraq threat." The material that Mr. Bush ordered declassified established, as have several subsequent investigations, that Mr. Wilson was the one guilty of twisting the truth. In fact, his report supported the conclusion that Iraq had sought uranium.

Mr. Wilson subsequently claimed that the White House set out to punish him for his supposed whistle-blowing by deliberately blowing the cover of his wife, Valerie Plame, who he said was an undercover CIA operative. This prompted the investigation by Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald. After more than 2 1/2 years of investigation, Mr. Fitzgerald has reported no evidence to support Mr. Wilson's charge. In last week's court filings, he stated that Mr. Bush did not authorize the leak of Ms. Plame's identity. Mr. Libby's motive in allegedly disclosing her name to reporters, Mr. Fitzgerald said, was to disprove yet another false assertion, that Mr. Wilson had been dispatched to Niger by Mr. Cheney. In fact Mr. Wilson was recommended for the trip by his wife. Mr. Libby is charged with perjury, for having lied about his discussions with two reporters. Yet neither the columnist who published Ms. Plame's name, Robert D. Novak, nor Mr. Novak's two sources have been charged with any wrongdoing.

As Mr. Fitzgerald pointed out at the time of Mr. Libby's indictment last fall, none of this is particularly relevant to the question of whether the grounds for war in Iraq were sound or bogus. It's unfortunate that those who seek to prove the latter would now claim that Mr. Bush did something wrong by releasing for public review some of the intelligence he used in making his most momentous decision.

The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/08/AR2006040800895.html

And all the little leftists go boo hoo hoo.

posted April 09, 2006 02:38 PM              

A related area of debate is exactly when the information Bush declassified can be deemed to have been, in fact, declassified - when the president gave permission for the private briefings, for now an unrevealed date, or on July 18, 2003, when the White House formally announced the declassification of much of the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). To Jeffrey Smith, former general counsel of the CIA, this is a relevant question.

"At least in my mind, there's a difference between declassification - which is a formal step in which information is put officially on the public record - and a leak," says Mr. Smith. "Here, what appears to have happened is the White House wanted to get this information out, but selectively gave certain portions of the NIE to a reporter without attribution. That's not declassification; that's a leak."

posted April 09, 2006 02:57 PM            

FOR THE LEFT, “FITZMAS” CAME YESTERDAY.

A court brief filed by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald states President Bush and Vice President Cheney declassified portions of the National Intelligence Estimate, allowing I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby to defend the administration in interviews with the press. In a typically mendacious sleight-of-hand, the Left has conflated this with the outing of non-covert CIA desk jockey Valerie Plame, intimating this “proves” Bush named her to “punish” her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV. Although Fitzgerald’s brief actually has nothing to do with the Plame leak – which he has never been treated as a crime – the Left has all but introduced articles of impeachment. Before the inevitable media storm swells these minor revelations into a political tsunami, it is important to note the administration appears guilty of neither lawbreaking nor even hypocrisy.

The Left Finds Its (Latest) Watergate

Not that facts will get in the way of a media feeding frenzy. The media elites have their Vietnam; now, they believe they have found their Watergate. Catherine Crier, sitting in last night for the vacationing conservative host of MSNBC’s “Scarborough Country,” declaimed, “If the charges are true, the president may have some explaining to do in this messy, two-year saga.” The New York Times hinted darkly that Fitzgerald’s revelations “point to Bush and Cheney as setting in motion a leak campaign to the press that ended in Plame’s blown cover.”

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-NY, also saw conspiracies at work. “The more we hear, the more it is clear this goes beyond Scooter Libby,” he said. “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.” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid added, “It's time for the president to come clean about his involvement in the leak case.” (“Come clean” apparently being Reid’s favorite elocution. No wonder they call him “Dingy Harry.”)

Getting to the Left’s real agenda, DNC Chair Howard Dean listed this as grounds for Bush’s removal from office. “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,” he said.

Once-and-future failed presidential candidate John Kerry implied the president should resign over the controversy. “Two and a half years ago, President Bush…said he’d fire whoever leaked classified information, and now we know the president himself authorized it. Now we know that the president's search for the leaker needs to go no further than a mirror.”

Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin cajoled for disciplinary action on the Senate floor: “The president and the vice president must be held accountable. Accountable for misleading the American people, accountable for the disclosure of classified material for political purposes. It is as serious as it gets in this democracy.”

In addition to Sen. Russ Feingold’s motion to censure the president for wiretapping al-Qaeda terrorists, Rep. John Conyers has held faux impeachment hearings and called Bush’s presidency “Treasongate.” (If Democrats retake the House this fall, Conyers will become chairman of the Judiciary Committee with ample time to indulge his juridical passions.)

One of Conyers’ supporters, far-Left New York Rep. Maurice Hinchey, a member of the Progressive Caucus, thundered yesterday, “How dare President Bush and Vice President Cheney say they want to prosecute those who leaked the NSA domestic surveillance program when they themselves authorized the disclosure of information from some of the most highly sensitive documents in the government.” He asserted another imaginative pretext for impeachment: “President Bush and other top members of his administration knowingly lied about uranium to the Congress, which is a crime.”

The leftist blog Democratic Underground rehearsed the Left’s current party line: “The President is NOT authorized to declassify a Covert Agent.” At once, the Left has declared Bush guilty of uncovering Plame (whose identity “was not much of a secret” according to Robert Novak) and eligible for impeachment.

No Lawbreaking

But what Bush and Cheney authorized had nothing to do with Valerie Plame. Joshua Gerstein, who broke the story of Fitzgerald’s document in Thursday’s New York Sun, told Crier the information Bush approved for dissemination was unrelated to “the most sensitive information…[the identity of] Valerie Plame or her husband, Joseph Wilson.” Other media outlets also announce this fact.

* Reuters: “The court documents did not say that Bush or Cheney authorized Libby to disclose Plame's identity.”

* The Associated Press: “There was no indication in the filing that either Bush or Cheney authorized Libby to disclose Valerie Plame's CIA identity.”

* Even the breathless New York Times noted Fitzgerald “stopped short” of accusing Bush or Cheney or any wrongdoing.

Nor have Bush and Cheney been accused of breaking any law. In his Sun article, Gerstein wrote:

The court papers from the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, do not suggest that Mr. Bush violated any law or rule…Mr. Bush's alleged instruction to release the conclusions of the intelligence estimate appears to have been squarely within his authority and Mr. Fitzgerald makes no argument that it was illegal.

The Washington Post ran a sidebar indicating, [b]“Legal experts say that President Bush had the unquestionable authority to approve the disclosure of secret CIA information to reporters.”

What Actually Happened

Invoking an Executive Order that gives the president and vice president authority to change the status of classified documents, in July 2003 President Bush declassified portions of the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. The document had been compiled the previous fall at the request of Senate Democrats Durbin, Levin, Graham, and Feinstein. It was completed on October 1, 2002.

Portions of the NIE had been disseminated from that moment forward. Reporters asked Ari Fleischer about findings of “the National Intelligence Estimate” in four separate questions during a press briefing just eight days later, on October 9, 2002. Based on its conclusions, most Congressional leftists voted to authorize the use of force against Iraq.

Months after Bush’s 2003 State of the Union Address, and after Operation Iraqi Freedom had commenced, Joe Wilson wrote his infamous op-ed claiming he found no evidence Saddam Hussein had attempted to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger. According to Fitzgerald’s court document, this is when Dick Cheney “expressed concerns to defendant [Libby] regarding whether Mr. Wilson’s trip was legitimate or whether it was in effect a junket set up by Mr. Wilson’s wife,” CIA agent Valerie Plame. These “concerns” probably stemmed from Wilson’s own account of “sipping sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people” – at poolside. They were undoubtedly exacerbated by the fact Cheney knew the CIA concluded Wilson’s trip “lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal”; that is, Wilson’s debriefing led Langley to believe Saddam had approached Niger for yellowcake. Cheney’s concerns proved justified: we now know Plame campaigned for the Agency to send her husband to investigate “this crazy report.” Both Wilsons were partisan, antiwar Democrats who had given thousands of dollars in campaign cash to such leftists as Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, Charlie Rangel, and Hillary Clinton. On July 6, 2003, Wilson went public in an attempt to discredit the war, shortly before landing a position with John Kerry’s presidential campaign.

At the same time, leftist senators, many of whom voted to support the war, had turned their back on the troops now in harm’s way. Just after Wilson’s op-ed, Ted Kennedy accused President Bush of “politicizing intelligence and falsifying facts to justify resort to war.” (Soon, he would claim the war was a “fraud” neocons “made up in Texas.”) Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-CA, told a crowd at UC-Berkeley, “This administration took part fact and part supposition…and they shaped it to reach a preconceived conclusion for the use of force, something that they had determined to do sometime well before March of this year.” Even Jay Rockefeller huffed, “Signs of a weapons program are very different than the stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons that were a certainty before the war.”

Against this onslaught, President Bush declassified the NIE’s “Key Findings.” Bush, through Cheney, gave Scooter Libby the green light to discuss portions of the NIE with reporters and made the “Key Findings” available to the public on July 18, 2003. Although Congress had been privy to its contents, and its outlines had long been circulated in the media, now everyone could see the intelligence community’s assessment, which was more dire than any picture President Bush presented. (It was, after all, drawn up by George Tenet’s CIA; Tenet told Bush the case for Saddam’s WMDs was “a slam dunk”.) Among its conclusions:

* Saddam “could make a nuclear weapon within several months to a year”;

* “Iraq possesses proscribed chemical and biological weapons and missiles”; and
“Iraq's offensive [biological weapons] programs are active and that most elements are larger and more advanced than they were before the Gulf war.”

This was no attempt to “punish” Wilson – who by now fraudulently claimed to have seen forged documents the CIA did not possess while he was working for them. This was an attempt to defend the integrity of the war American fighting men and women were still waging halfway around the world. (If he did feel reprimanded, Wilson eased his pain by signing a book contract and posing for glossy pictures with his “covert” wife.)

In typical fashion, leftists now blame Bush for declassifying a harmless portion of the NIE in order to defend himself from their own scurrilous and disingenuous attacks.

Those wise enough to understand Bush is on solid legal ground have accused him of hypocrisy. John Nichols wrote on The Nation’s blog yesterday:

The White House initial response Thuesday [sic.] was to refuse to comment on Libby's testimony, which has called into serious question the president’s October, 2003, assertion that: “I don't know of anyone in my administration who has leaked. If somebody did leak classified information, I'd like to know it, and we'll take the appropriate action.”

Likewise, MSNBC anchor Dan Abrams told Tucker Carlson he had clips of President Bush’s statements on leaking classified material paused for replay. Both are referring to President Bush’s statements of September 30, 2003, when he said:

There are too many leaks of classified information in Washington…And if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of…I don’t know anybody in my administration that leaked classified information. If somebody did leak classified information, I'd like to know it, and we'll take the appropriate action.

Others, like Rep. Hinchey, cite President Bush’s concern over recent leaks as proof of his dishonesty. But there is no contradiction here; Bush did not leak classified information. It is impossible to leak classified information that has already been declassified. Moreover, the NIE findings manifestly posed no threat to national security. The conclusions the CIA drew may have been incorrect, in which case, Senate Democrats should have been thankful for the chance to improve its intelligence gathering capabilities, since one of their own, Frank Church, helped destroy them in the 1970s, and their last presidential candidate proposed a $1.5 billion cut in intelligence funding.

The Pot and the Kettle

Finally, the media have questioned whether this NIE non-classified non-leak was “politicized.” In a story exonerating Bush of any legal wrongdoing, the Washington Post quotes lawyer Jeffrey H. Smith: “It is a question of whether the classified National Intelligence Estimate was used for domestic political purposes.”

The Post raised no such questions last November 2, when reporter Dana Priest leaked the existence of classified CIA prisons in Eastern Europe on its front page. “These prisoners, some of whom were originally taken to black sites, are delivered to intelligence services in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Afghanistan and other countries, a process sometimes known as ‘rendition,’” Priest wrote. “While the first-tier black sites are run by CIA officers, the jails in these countries are operated by the host nations, with CIA financial assistance and, sometimes, direction.” These revelations probably led to the al-Qaeda attack in Jordan that killed 56 people [1] one week to the day later. One month later, The New York Times broke news of the classified NSA anti-terrorist spy program, informing terrorists of the tools America is using to prevent a second 9/11. Coincidentally, the story appeared the same week the Senate was debating reauthorization of the Patriot Act. That, too, raises questions whether someone leaked this classified information “for domestic political purposes.”

Unlike the media's disregard for national security, nothing President Bush declassified, whether out of concern for troop morale or political self-defense, placed the United States at risk. The NIE revelations displayed the rationale behind the president's decision to take America into war – a rationale then under heavy fire from the partisan Left – and demonstrated the shoddy state of the CIA’s prewar intelligence vis-à-vis Iraq. The same Left that equally condemned Soviet and American nuclear stockpiles can discern no moral distinction between illegal leaks that hurt our troops and declassification that helps them. They only vaguely emote that Bush's actions must be much worse.

The facts are: President Bush did not leak Valerie Plame's name, did not break any law, did not leak any classified information, and released only those facts that would stifle those who were destroying troop morale.

posted April 09, 2006 03:20 PM            

LEAK
To permit the escape, entry, or passage of something through a breach or flaw: rusted pipes that were beginning to leak; a boat leaking at the seams.

To escape or pass through a breach or flaw: helium leaking slowly from the balloon.
Informal. To become publicly known through a breach of secrecy: The news has leaked.
v. tr.

posted April 09, 2006 05:09 PM            

Are you saying that you agree with our government selling out it's own public servants?