[quote]Brad61 wrote:
Zap Branigan wrote:
Again the Dems are overplaying their hand.
What’s that burning smell?
Oh, it’s just the last shred of George Bush’s credibility, going up in flames.
Eight different public denials to the press, where Bush pretended that the leak was a big mystery.[/quote]
It is very Clintonesque. He should be ashamed of himself.
Why doesn’t the media ever report all the good news, about the president’s leak?
[quote]Brad61 wrote:
Why doesn’t the media ever report all the good news, about the president’s leak?[/quote]
Why is the focus on the minority of information he leaked, instead of all of the classified info he didn’t leak?
How many children have graduated from high school during the Bush administration… how many new high schools were built… come on, lets get some seriously important news on the television!
Not surprisingly, I haven’t seen any “sorrys” from any of the people on this thread now that it has become public that Richard Armitage – a foe of the president’s Iraq policy – leaked Joe Wilson’s name. Without the knowledge or consent of any of the really Bad Guys, like Dick Cheney or George Bush or Halliburton.
I also haven’t heard a peep out of the democrat leadership on this, or any calls for special prosecutors, or apologies from the kooks and reporters and TV heads who said loudly for years that it was that evil George Bush out to get someone who opposed his war policies.
I bet W is really looking forward to your written apology, because he knows your interest in the story had to do with protecting joe wilson and national security, not in fact with smearing someone who has policy differences with you.
Plame Out
The ridiculous end to the scandal that distracted Washington.
By Christopher Hitchens
Richard Armitage
I had a feeling that I might slightly regret the title (“Case Closed”) of my July 25 column on the Niger uranium story. I have now presented thousands of words of evidence and argument to the effect that, yes, the Saddam Hussein regime did send an important Iraqi nuclear diplomat to Niger in early 1999. And I have not so far received any rebuttal from any source on this crucial point of contention. But there was always another layer to the Joseph Wilson fantasy. Easy enough as it was to prove that he had completely missed the West African evidence that was staring him in the face, there remained the charge that his nonreport on a real threat had led to a government-sponsored vendetta against him and his wife, Valerie Plame.
In his July 12 column in the Washington Post, Robert Novak had already partly exposed this paranoid myth by stating plainly that nobody had leaked anything, or outed anyone, to him. On the contrary, it was he who approached sources within the administration and the CIA and not the other way around. But now we have the final word on who did disclose the name and occupation of Valerie Plame, and it turns out to be someone whose opposition to the Bush policy in Iraq has – like Robert Novak’s – long been a byword in Washington. It is particularly satisfying that this admission comes from two of the journalists – Michael Isikoff and David Corn – who did the most to get the story wrong in the first place and the most to keep it going long beyond the span of its natural life.
As most of us have long suspected, the man who told Novak about Valerie Plame was Richard Armitage, Colin Powell’s deputy at the State Department and, with his boss, an assiduous underminer of the president’s war policy. (His and Powell’s – and George Tenet’s --fingerprints are all over Bob Woodward’s “insider” accounts of post-9/11 policy planning, which helps clear up another nonmystery: Woodward’s revelation several months ago that he had known all along about the Wilson-Plame connection and considered it to be no big deal.) The Isikoff-Corn book, which is amusingly titled Hubris, solves this impossible problem of its authors’ original “theory” by restating it in a passive voice:
The disclosures about Armitage, gleaned from interviews with colleagues, friends and lawyers directly involved in the case, underscore one of the ironies of the Plame investigation: that the initial leak, seized on by administration critics as evidence of how far the White House was willing to go to smear an opponent, came from a man who had no apparent intention of harming anyone.
In the stylistic world where disclosures are gleaned and ironies underscored, the nullity of the prose obscures the fact that any irony here is only at the authors’ expense. It was Corn in particular who asserted – in a July 16, 2003, blog post credited with starting the entire distraction – that:
The Wilson smear was a thuggish act. Bush and his crew abused and misused intelligence to make their case for war. Now there is evidence Bushies used classified information and put the nation’s counter-proliferation efforts at risk merely to settle a score. It is a sign that with this gang politics trumps national security.
After you have noted that the Niger uranium connection was in fact based on intelligence that has turned out to be sound, you may also note that this heated moral tone (“thuggish,” “gang”) is now quite absent from the story. It turns out that the person who put Valerie Plame’s identity into circulation was a staunch foe of regime change in Iraq. Oh, that’s all right, then. But you have to laugh at the way Corn now so neutrally describes his own initial delusion as one that was “seized on by administration critics.”
What does emerge from Hubris is further confirmation of what we knew all along: the extraordinary venom of the interdepartmental rivalry that has characterized this administration. In particular, the bureaucracy at the State Department and the CIA appear to have used the indiscretion of Armitage to revenge themselves on the “neoconservatives” who had been advocating the removal of Saddam Hussein. Armitage identified himself to Colin Powell as Novak’s source before the Fitzgerald inquiry had even been set on foot. The whole thing could?and should?have ended right there. But now read this and rub your eyes: William Howard Taft, the State Department’s lawyer who had been told about Armitage (and who had passed on the name to the Justice Department)
also felt obligated to inform White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. But Powell and his aides feared the White House would then leak that Armitage had been Novak’s source?possibly to embarrass State Department officials who had been unenthusiastic about Bush’s Iraq policy. So Taft told Gonzales the bare minimum: that the State Department had passed some information about the case to Justice. He didn’t mention Armitage. Taft asked if Gonzales wanted to know the details. The president’s lawyer, playing the case by the book, said no, and Taft told him nothing more.
“[P]laying the case by the book” is, to phrase it mildly, not the way in which Isikoff and Corn customarily describe the conduct of the White House. In this instance, however, the evidence allows them no other choice. But there is more than one way in which a case can be played by the book. Under the terms of the appalling and unconstitutional Intelligence Identities Protection Act (see “A Nutty Little Law,” my Slate column of July 26, 2005), the CIA can, in theory, “refer” any mention of itself to the Justice Department to see if the statute?denounced by The Nation and the New York Times when it was passed?has been broken. The bar here is quite high. Perhaps for that reason, Justice sat on the referral for two months after Novak’s original column. But then, rather late in the day, at the end of September 2003, then-CIA Director George Tenet himself sent a letter demanding to know whether the law had been broken.
The answer to that question, as Patrick Fitzgerald has since determined, is “no.” But there were plenty of senior people who had known that all along. And can one imagine anybody with a stronger motive to change the subject from CIA incompetence and to present a widely discredited agency as, instead, a victim, than Tenet himself? The man who kept the knowledge of the Minnesota flight schools to himself and who was facing every kind of investigation and obloquy finally saw a chance to change the subject. If there is any “irony” in the absurd and expensive and pointless brouhaha that followed, it is that he was abetted in this by so many who consider themselves “radical.”
Is this “dig up old threads” week?
Anyhow, it’s still too early to say that all actions are excused, because it is very possible that actions were taken by multiple parties for various reasons.
There is still a question of ethics, such as making use of the leak for purposes of gain, instead of actually performing the leak.
Anyway, like we here really need to issue apologies. While a pile of bullshit that is. We’re a bunch of retards in a politics forum, who gives a shit.
Now, if I was the publisher of a major media outlet and I had taken a public stance in that forum, then maybe I’d have something to say.
[quote]vroom wrote:
Now, if I was the publisher of a major media outlet and I had taken a public stance in that forum, then maybe I’d have something to say.
[/quote]
You should be the publisher of the NYT – not a peep from their editorial page since the Armitage story broke, and they were quite frothy on the whole subject…
If my memory doesn’t decieve me, Plames name wasn’t leaked once to Novak. It was leaked several times to other reporters as well.
Who told them?
Hey lumpy,
Another trumped up scandal that has fallen flat.
Great job, democrats!!!
I’m waiting for your apology.
crickets…crickets…crickets.
JeffR
[quote]Wreckless wrote:
If my memory doesn’t decieve me, Plames name wasn’t leaked once to Novak. It was leaked several times to other reporters as well.
Who told them?[/quote]
Nice dodge.
JeffR
It just seems a little bit self-serving - if not downright dishonest- for the same reporters that were creaming their pants at the thought of busting the Bush Admin to be so deathly quiet now that they have a real person to go after.
Armitage is your man - where is the same dogged determination to get at the truth now?
[quote]JeffR wrote:
Hey lumpy,
Another trumped up scandal that has fallen flat.
Great job, democrats!!!
I’m waiting for your apology.
crickets…crickets…crickets.
JeffR[/quote]
It would feel weird for apologizing for nothing changing, wouldn’t it? As the author of the armitage allegation says himself:
Armitage’s role aside, the public record is without question: senior White House aides wanted to use Valerie Wilson’s CIA employment against her husband. Rove leaked the information to Cooper, and Libby confirmed Rove’s leak to Cooper. Libby also disclosed information on Wilson’s wife to New York Times reporter Judith Miller.
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/capitalgames?bid=3&pid=116511
and
The Armitage leak was not directly a part of the White House's fierce anti-Wilson crusade. But as Hubris notes, it was, in a way, linked to the White House effort, for Amitage [sic] had been sent a key memo about Wilson's trip that referred to his wife and her CIA connection, and this memo had been written, according to special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald [who was appointed to investigate the Plame leak], at the request of I. Lewis Scooter Libby, the vice president's chief of staff.
Libby had asked for the memo because he was looking to protect his boss from the mounting criticism that Bush and Cheney had misrepresented the WMD intelligence to garner public support for the invasion of Iraq.
The memo included information on Valerie Wilson's role in a meeting at the CIA that led to her husband's trip. This critical memo was -- as Hubris discloses -- based on notes that were not accurate. (You're going to have to read the book for more on this.) But because of Libby's request, a memo did circulate among State Department officials, including Armitage, that briefly mentioned Wilson's wife.
sorry JeffR, wrong again.
(I’d love to see the logic in your brain explaining that an additional admission changes pre-existing admissions.)
Nice retrospective on the scandal that wasn’t:
BTW, Merry Fitzmas… Heh.
[quote]rainjack wrote:
It just seems a little bit self-serving - if not downright dishonest- for the same reporters that were creaming their pants at the thought of busting the Bush Admin to be so deathly quiet now that they have a real person to go after.
Armitage is your man - where is the same dogged determination to get at the truth now?
[/quote]
uhmm…
Armitage(1 of how many?)–Novak
Rove—Cooper
Libby—Miller
more of a group effort wouldn’t ya say?
[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
Of course he has the power.
The cover up is a big mistake. He deserves to catch heat for the coverup but to pretend he did not have the right or this has national security implications is foolish.
Again the Dems are overplaying their hand.
[/quote]
No one is denying his power. He has the power to do many thing; many of those things require certain processes to be followed to ensure national security’s interests are held to account before the President’s own.
He has the power to declare war, too but he must ask permission from congress.
He can’t just decide to “declassify” certain information because it suits his interests–we usually call the process ‘checks and balances’. This president doesn’t seem to care about that.
Here is the Irony:
This guy is president for only 8 years yet we get to feel the effects of his ‘legacy’ for decades.
50 yrs from now he will get the bid for
WORST.
PRESIDENT.
EVER. <in “comic-book-guy’s” voice>
Armitage turned up the facts for the memo at Libby’s request.
The facts of the memo were requested so that Libby and pals could discredit Wilson through smearing Plame.
The problem is Armitage will eventually lose his security clearance and Libby will never have is security clearance re-instated.
At the end of the day BB’s a weak-stick hack.
[quote]Marmadogg wrote:
Armitage turned up the facts for the memo at Libby’s request.
The facts of the memo were requested so that Libby and pals could discredit Wilson through smearing Plame.
The problem is Armitage will eventually lose his security clearance and Libby will never have is security clearance re-instated.
At the end of the day BB’s a weak-stick hack.[/quote]
Yeah, let me just repost this little link for your perusal and enjoyment:
It’s always fun reading you run out of coherent arguments – which, in this case, happened about 3 years ago – and watch you start spouting your drivel.
As I’ve said before, you’ve obviously been saving up your Ovaltine proofs of purchase to get that great secret Little Orphan Annie decoder ring so you can divine all these secrets that us lowly civilians don’t have access to from the released information.
Just in case anyone has lost track, how many of your predictions have come true so far? Oh, that’s right: None.
Maybe you’ll get one eventually – just like infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters will eventually produce Hamlet…
For your benefit, here’s the same link again:
http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2006/09/wapo_whacks_wil.html
With the relevant excerpt:
KEEPIN’ HOPE ALIVE: The chorus from the left will harmonize in response to this from the Wapo:
[i] Unaware that Ms. Plame’s identity was classified information, Mr. Armitage reportedly passed it along to columnist Robert D. Novak “in an offhand manner, virtually as gossip,” according to a story this week by the Post’s R. Jeffrey
...It follows that one of the most sensational charges leveled against the Bush White House -- that it orchestrated the leak of Ms. Plame's identity to ruin her career and thus punish Mr. Wilson -- is untrue.[/i]
Not necesarily! Although it takes a fantasist to imagine that the White House orchestrated the leak to Novak by way of Armitage (I bet I could find one!), what about the leaks to Matt Cooper and Judy Miller?
With Cooper, it is clear (to some) that after Karl Rove learned from Novak that a column about Wilson and Plame was imminent, Rove ruthlessly sat by the phone and waited for Matt Cooper to call him and ask about Niger.
Then when Cooper interviewed Libby the next day, Libby was so brutal and crafty that he never raised the subject of Ms. Plame, but offered something like “I heard that, too” when Cooper asked him about her.
And the Judy Miller leak? Libby was so intent on besmirching Wilson with the nepotism charge that he forgot to tell Judy that Ms. Plame had a role in arranging her husband’s trip to Niger.
And Special Counsel Fitzgerald still can’t prove that Libby was aware of Ms. Plame’s classified status back when he was conspiring to punish Joe by outing hs wife ( http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2006/05/shorter_trounci.html ). (Too bad Libby didn’t use his psychic powers to get the truth about Saddam’s WMDs…). Oh well - Fitzgerald only had two years to look into this. The truth will emerge any day now, or at least, within the next 24 business hours ( http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x1186820 ).
Let’s enjoy today’s Washington Post editorial:
EXCERPT:
[i]it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame’s CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming ? falsely, as it turned out ? that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush’s closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It’s unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.
Obviously you’ll need to read the whole thing for yourself, but if I’m not going to paste it all you’re going to have to click for yourself to get it…
[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:
Nice retrospective on the scandal that wasn’t:
BTW, Merry Fitzmas… Heh.[/quote]
It’s weird that in finding out Armitage viewed a memo requested by Libby in an effort to protect his boss, by discrediting Wilson (falsely) somehow makes the “scandal” go away.
The WP editorial by Fred Hiatt is an insult to those that can read/have average or above I.Q’s.
he’s dishonest here:
Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming – falsely, as it turned out – that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials.
wilson’s editorial said:
“Though I did not file a written report, there should be at least four documents in United States government archives confirming my mission. The documents should include the ambassador’s report of my debriefing in Niamey, a separate report written by the embassy staff, a C.I.A. report summing up my trip, and a specific answer from the agency to the office of the vice president (this may have been delivered orally). While I have not seen any of these reports, I have spent enough time in government to know that this is standard operating procedure.”
This was true. Totally true. Hiatt’s a liar. Moving on…
Hiatt is faking badly here:
“He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife.”
as Larry Johnson (former cia) says:
“Yes, why would the CIA send the former Director of Africa at the National Security Council, a former Ambassador to Gabon, and the last U.S. official to face down Saddam Hussein to Africa? Because Joe Wilson was uniquely qualified to do the job.”
goodness Hiatt is a nut.