Hardball-Isikoff & Corn – The Cheney-Libby lies and memory loss about Wilson, Plame, everything
firedoglake
November 02, 2009
Vodpod videos no longer available.
***
The Ed Show – David Shuster cuts through the Cheney-Libby ‘memory issue’ muck
Wexler Questions former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan in House Judiciary Committee on June 20, 2008.
Shorter clip:”The Raw Story | Dem Rep. calls for im…“, posted with vodpod
and story: Raw Story: Dem Rep. calls for impeachment at McClellan testimony: video
see
Scott McClellan Before House Judiciary + Conyers’ & Nadler’s Questions
Gore Vidal’s Article of Impeachment (+ audio)
Support Rep. Kucinich’s Articles of Impeachment + video (take action)
Dennis Kucinich Documents Grounds for Impeachment of Bush & Cheney (4 hours)
Kucinich introduces Bush impeachment resolution + videos + transcript
June 20, 2008
Vodpod videos no longer available.
Rep. Conyers (D-MI) opening statement at the testimony of Scott McClellan
Rep. Nadler’s Questions for Scott McClellan
Rep. Conyers’ Questions to Scott McClellan
see
Bruce Fein: McClellan, Impeachment and Congress
AP
asia.news.yahoo.com
Tuesday June 10, 4:58 AM
h/t: CLG
FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
Vodpod videos no longer available.May 29, 2008 NBC Today Show
see
Bush’s new book: It’s all McClellan’s fault (satire)
White House Puzzled Over McClellan Book: We Taught Him To Lie, Now He’s Forgotten How
Countdown: Excerpts from McClellan’s Book + Candy-Gramm for McCain
By Michael D. Shear
ICH
Washington Post Staff Writer
05/28/08 “Washington Post”
Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan writes in a new memoir that the Iraq war was sold to the American people with a sophisticated “political propaganda campaign” led by President Bush and aimed at “manipulating sources of public opinion” and “downplaying the major reason for going to war.”
McClellan includes the charges in a 341-page book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” that delivers a harsh look at the White House and the man he served for close to a decade. He describes Bush as demonstrating a “lack of inquisitiveness,” says the White House operated in “permanent campaign” mode, and admits to having been deceived by some in the president’s inner circle about the leak of a CIA operative’s name.
The book, coming from a man who was a tight-lipped defender of administration aides and policy, is certain to give fuel to critics of the administration, and McClellan has harsh words for many of his past colleagues. He accuses former White House adviser Karl Rove of misleading him about his role in the CIA case. He describes Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as being deft at deflecting blame, and he calls Vice President Cheney “the magic man” who steered policy behind the scenes while leaving no fingerprints.
McClellan stops short of saying that Bush purposely lied about his reasons for invading Iraq, writing that he and his subordinates were not “employing out-and-out deception” to make their case for war in 2002.
But in a chapter titled “Selling the War,” he alleges that the administration repeatedly shaded the truth and that Bush “managed the crisis in a way that almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option.”
FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
see
Countdown: Phil Gramm’s Lobbying Activities + McClellan + Fission Expedition
By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 20, 2008; 11:59 AM
Vice President’s Former Chief of Staff Convicted of Lying to Investigators in Plame Case
Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, was disbarred today by a District of Columbia court that ruled that his convictions last year for perjury and obstructing justice in a White House leak investigation disqualify him from practicing law.
Under the ruling by the D.C. Court of Appeals, Libby will lose his license to practice or appear in court in Washington until at least 2012. As is standard custom, he also would lose any bar membership he might hold in any other states.
h/t: CLG
***
Former Cheney Aide Libby Disbarred
h/t: CLG
FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
see
by Philip Giraldi
HuffingtonPost.com
February 4, 2008
Sibel Edmonds is the FBI translator turned whistleblower who decided to go public late in 2002 and has been seeking to tell her story about high level corruption in the United States government involving Turkey and Israel. What makes her story particularly compelling is that the corruption relates to the theft and sale of United States defense secrets, most particularly nuclear technology. Sibel obtained her information while translating Turkish language telephone intercepts directed against several Turkish lobbying groups who had contact with senior officials in the Bush Administration, both at the Pentagon and in the State Department. Many of the officials involved are apparently the same neoconservatives who cooked the books to enable the rush to war against Iraq and who are continuing to urge more wars in the Middle East, most notably against Iran and Syria. Several of them are close allies of leading Republican presidential candidate John McCain.
…
Why should Sibel be heard? Mostly because her story, if true, involves corruption at the highest levels of government coupled with the sale of secrets vital to the security of the United States. One of her claims is that a senior State Department officer who has been identified as Marc Grossman, recorded by the FBI while arranging to pick up bribes from a Turkish organization, also revealed the identity of the CIA cover company Brewster Jennings to a Turkish contact in late 2001. The Turk then passed on the information to a Pakistani intelligence officer who presumably warned the AQ Khan nuclear proliferation network that the CIA was apparently pursuing. Some might call that treason and it should be noted that it occurred two years before Robert Novak’s notorious exposure of Valerie Plame and Brewster Jennings which led to the conviction of Scooter Libby.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
see
Phil Giraldi chats about Sibel Edmonds by Luke Ryland
Why Bush Wants to Legalize the Nuke Trade with Turkey by Joshua Frank
Turkey’s Drug-Terrorism Connection By Martin A. Lee (1997)
by Robert Parry
Global Research, November 28, 2007
Consortium News – 2007-11-26
In the history of the American Republic, perhaps no political family has been more protected from scandal than the Bushes.
When the Bushes are involved in dirty deals or even criminal activity, standards of evidence change. Instead of proof “beyond a reasonable doubt” that would lock up an average citizen, the evidence must be perfect.
If there’s any doubt at all, the Bushes must be presumed innocent. Even when their guilt is obvious to anyone with an ounce of common sense, it’s their accusers and those who dare investigate who get the worst of it. Their motives are challenged and their own shortcomings are cast in the harshest possible light. Continue reading
by Mark Karlin, Editor and Publisher
www.BuzzFlash.com
After Downing Street
BUZZFLASH EDITOR’S BLOG
November 23, 2007
As we’ve noted before, BuzzFlash feels personally invested in the exposing of the White House treason surrounding the outing of Valerie Plame, which resulted in impairing our national security when it comes to tracking weapons of mass destruction. Following up on a David Corn commentary shortly after the infamous Bob “The Traitor” Novak column, BuzzFlash helped Corn raise the alarm about the dangerous and illegal significance of the identification of Plame as a CIA operative.
So it is with astonishment that we have watched the mainstream media ignore or dismiss the revelation by once White House loyalist Scott McClellan that Cheney and Bush were likely involved in the outing and knowingly sent him out to lie to the press about the role of the two key messengers: Libby and Rove.
You’ve no doubt heard by now that the McClellan admission was made in a first person excerpt from a book being printed early next year by Public Affairs Press (affiliated with the Perseus Group).While the first person confirmation of what anyone with a pea for a brain knew all along caromed across the Internet, the Washington Post and the New York Times gave it the cold shoulder, among other mainstream media outlets.
In the meantime, we suspect that the White House hit men gave McClellan and his publisher the same treatment that they have given other “made men” that ratted on them: the brass knuckles and warnings to back off if they cared about their families.
As one blogger noted: “John Dillulio calls them ‘machiavellian mayberries’ and suggests that they politicize everything–yet a week later he backs down completely. Paul O’Neill says that they planned on invading Iraq from the beginning, he is savaged by the machine.”
So the publisher, within a day backed off the first person quote by McClellan, with a rather bizarre claim that the book wasn’t finished yet, even though it was the publisher that posted the quotation on its website. McClellan was in seclusion, of course, no doubt being waterboarded by some of Cheney’s crew.
In an all too fitting and tragic irony, the mainstream media only took notice of the damning revelation of criminal behavior – certainly in the high crimes and misdemeanors category, as Valerie and Joe Wilson charge – on cue from the White House once the publisher recalled the first person quotation, which is indeed quite a remarkable feat, since clearly it would only be done under pressure, since it is hard for a publisher to post a first person quote and then claim that it was premature. What kind of credibility does that leave you with? But it was probably preferable than running a publishing house with two broken arms and a pencil rammed through your ear.All along, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald noted in his investigation that a cloud of suspicion hung over Dick Cheney, and he all but said that Cheney was the key culprit. In fact, Scooter Libby’s crime – the one he was convicted for – was integrally related to an obstruction of justice essentially revolving around the reality that he was covering up for Cheney.
Long forgotten – and barely noticed during the trial – was a document introduced during the case that directly implicates Bush. And the notes on the document that point at Bush as being a co-conspirator were written by Dick Cheney.
Truthout.org covered this crucial link to Bush, including a copy of the handwritten note:
Copies of handwritten notes by Vice President Dick Cheney, introduced at trial by attorneys prosecuting former White House staffer I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, would appear to implicate George W. Bush in the Plame CIA Leak case.
Bush has long maintained that he was unaware of attacks by any member of his administration against [former ambassador Joseph] Wilson. The ex-envoy’s stinging rebukes of the administration’s use of pre-war Iraq intelligence led Libby and other White House officials to leak Wilson’s wife’s covert CIA status to reporters in July 2003 in an act of retaliation.
But Cheney’s notes, which were introduced into evidence Tuesday during Libby’s perjury and obstruction-of-justice trial, call into question the truthfulness of President Bush’s vehement denials about his prior knowledge of the attacks against Wilson.
The revelation that Bush may have known all along that there was an effort by members of his office to discredit the former ambassador raises the question: Was the president also aware that senior members of his administration compromised Valerie Plame’s undercover role with the CIA?
Further, the highly explicit nature of Cheney’s comments not only hints at a rift between Cheney and Bush over what Cheney felt was the scapegoating of Libby, but also raises serious questions about potentially criminal actions by Bush. If Bush did indeed play an active role in encouraging Libby to take the fall to protect Karl Rove, as Libby’s lawyers articulated in their opening statements, then that could be viewed as criminal involvement by Bush.
Last week, Libby’s attorney Theodore Wells made a stunning pronouncement during opening statements of Libby’s trial. He claimed that the White House had made Libby a scapegoat for the leak to protect Karl Rove – Bush’s political adviser and “right-hand man.”
“Mr. Libby, you will learn, went to the vice president of the United States and met with the vice president in private. Mr. Libby said to the vice president, ‘I think the White House … is trying to set me up. People in the White House want me to be a scapegoat,'” said Wells.
Cheney’s notes seem to help bolster Wells’s defense strategy. Libby’s defense team first discussed the notes – written by Cheney in September 2003 for White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan – during opening statements last week. Wells said Cheney had written “not going to protect one staffer and sacrifice the guy that was asked to stick his head in the meat grinder because of incompetence of others”: a reference to Libby being asked to deal with the media and vociferously rebut Wilson’s allegations that the Bush administration knowingly “twisted” intelligence to win support for the war in Iraq.
However, when Cheney wrote the notes, he had originally written “this Pres.” instead of “that was.”
In another story on Truthout at the time of the Libby trial, it details other documents that indicate Cheney had claimed authorization from Bush to disclose classified information from a National Intelligence Estimate in order to try and discredit Joe Wilson.
It should also be remembered that Bush retained a private attorney in regards to the Libby case, a highly curious move for an innocent president. Furthermore, Bush promised to get to the bottom of the leak himself and fire anyone involved after the CIA formally requested a Justice Department investigation into Valerie Plame’s outing, because of the potential harm it had done to national security. As we now know, Bush, if he kept his word, would have ended up firing Dick Cheney and himself.
It is a testament to the persistent tacit alliance of the corporate media with the Republican Party (to ensure favorable big media regulations, tax cuts, and anti-trust favors) that damage done to the national security of the United States — authorized in all likelihood by the President of the United States and most certainly orchestrated by the Vice-President of the United States — is either roundly ignored or dismissed as insignificant.
Scott McClellan did not pen a rogue statement in his forthcoming book. What he said is entirely consistent with the information disclosed at the Libby trial, and even – ironically – with the defensive strategy of Libby’s own legal team, which was to position “Scooter” as a fall guy for the White House.
That may have, indeed, been the sole true assertion made on behalf of Mr. Libby.
BUZZFLASH EDITOR’S BLOG
FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
see
George Bush, Traitor and Liar in Chief by Larry Johnson
Impeachment on the Thanksgiving Table: McClellan’s Dish by Dave Lindorff
Olbermann: O’Reilly vs The USO + Lies and Consequences + Books and Liars + Worst (videos)
Hardball: What Did Bush Know and When Did He Know It? (video; CIA Leak)
McClellan implicates Bush, Cheney in Plame lie by Tim Grieve
Cheney’s Handwritten Notes Implicate Bush in Plame Affair
by Dave Lindorff
This Can’t Be Happening!
Thu, 11/22/2007
The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White House briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.
There was one problem. It was not true.
I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the Vice President, the President’s chief of staff, and the President himself.
–Excerpt from Scott McClellan’s forthcoming book “What Happened”
(Public Affairs Books, due out in April 2008)
With that one little statement, released on the Public Affairs Books website this week, all excuses for not impeaching President Bush and Vice President Cheney, not to mention indicting Cheney (who of course has no immunity from prosecution while in office), have evaporated.
Here is rock-solid evidence from a man who, as press secretary, was privy to the inner workings of the White House, of a vile conspiracy involving the two top men in the Bush/Cheney administration, as well as their top three staffpeople, to expose the identity of an important CIA undercover operative, Valerie Plame, and then, when caught, to obstruct a criminal investigation by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, into that crime.
Forget for a moment the administration’s other high crimes and misdemeanors and acts of bribery and treason, though many, like defying laws passed by the Congress, or violating the Nuremburg Charter, are surely far more egregious. This particular set of crimes–conspiracy, obstruction of justice, lying, and of course the underlying crime of abuse of power and perhaps treason (since Plame’s responsibility as a high-rankiing CIA operative was preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, particularly in the Middle East!)–is serious enough.
There is no way that American democracy can continue to survive, even in its current truncated form, if the Congress continues to duck this issue and pretend that it has “more important things to do,” as Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her retinue of “leaders” in the House have continued to claim for an entire year in control of the Congress.
To keep impeachment “off the table,” knowing that the president and vice president brazenly lied to the American people and to the Special Counsel’s office about such a serious offense, is to make a mockery of the Constitution and the law.
Bush and Cheney must be impeached at this point if only to save school districts across the nation the cost of having to buy all new American history and civics texts, revised so as to remove all discussion of the notion of Constitutional checks and balances and the word “impeachment.”
It is of course possible that the political reality is that Republicans in Congress have become such an antidemocratic conglomeration of authoritarian yes-men that they would defend their political leaders no matter what their crimes, and that thus impeachment would be a dead end, either in the House or certainly in the Senate. This, however, is no excuse for not calling the president and vice president to account in impeachment hearings in the House, where Democrats have a solid majority.
An impeachment hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, with full subpoena power granted to that committee, would lead to revelations and exposures far beyond that of Scott McClellan’s, though putting McClellan under oath on national TV in such a hearing promises to be as enlightening and entertaining as was the testimony in 1974 before the same panel by Nixon White House attorney John Dean.
The critical importance of such hearings to the future of American democracy, and to public understanding of the nature of the coup that has been undermining that democracy should be obvious. It wouldn’t matter what the vote was following such hearings. Certainly articles of impeachment would be voted out of the committee and sent to the floor of the House. Almost as certainly, the House would end up having to support those articles. So Bush and Cheney would at least stand impeached, probably with at least some Republican’s voting for impeachment. They would probably also be forced, like President Clinton before them, to stand trial in the Senate–if Republicans didn’t first succeed in convincing them to resign to spare their party a disaster at the polls next November.
Certainly it’s possible that proponents of conviction in the Senate would not be able to convince the 16 or 17 Republican necessary to win a conviction and removal from office, but it wouldn’t matter at that point. The Bush administration would stand condemned for all time as a gang of criminals and usurpers.
It’s worth noting that following Clinton’s impeachment and trial, which failed to remove him from office, the Oval Office has been off-limits to unchaperoned interns, and it is likely to be a long time before felatio is re-enacted under the Oval Office desk. Similar action against Bush and Cheney would make future Constitutional crimes equally unlikely for the same reason, even without conviction.
This would be even more true if Special Counsel Fitzgerald were to do his duty, as he clearly should, and reopen his Plame investigation with an indictment of Cheney, and with the naming of Bush, like Nixon before him, as an “unindicted co-conspirator.”
For starters, Pelosi must take this moment to declare that impeachment is “back on the table.”
FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
see
Radio: Kucinich on Impeachment (link)
Olbermann: O’Reilly vs The USO + Lies and Consequences + Books and Liars + Worst (videos)
Hardball: What Did Bush Know and When Did He Know It? (video; CIA Leak)
McClellan implicates Bush, Cheney in Plame lie by Tim Grieve
Time for impeachment yet? ~ Lo
Added: November 20, 2007
More stories:
Joe Wilson: Bush either ‘out of touch’ or accessory to a crime
Dodd calls for investigation into Bush role in Plame affair
see
McClellan implicates Bush, Cheney in Plame lie by Tim Grieve
by Tim Grieve
After Downing Street
Salon.com
Nov. 20, 2007
On Oct. 10, 2003, White House press secretary Scott McClellan stood before the cameras and proclaimed Karl Rove and Scooter Libby innocent of any involvement in the outing of Valerie Plame. “Those individuals — I talked — I spoke with those individuals, as I pointed out, and those individuals assured me they were not involved in this. And that’s where it stands.”
And that’s where it stood, until — well after George W. Bush was reelected — it became clear that both Libby and Rove were very much involved in outing Plame. McClellan has since acknowledged, albeit implicitly, that Libby and Rove had lied to him. Now he seems ready to go much further. In “What Happened,” a chronicle of his years in the White House to be published this spring, McClellan will apparently implicate George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and former White House Chief of Staff Andy Card in the false exoneration of Libby and Rove.
From an excerpt posted on McClellan’s publisher’s Web site and discovered by Editor and Publisher:
“The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby.
“There was one problem. It was not true.
“I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president’s chief of staff, and the president himself.”
Update: We’d like to tell you how Dana Perino responded to questions about McClellan’s charge at today’s White House press briefing. And we would, if only anyone in the White House press corps had asked her any.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
by David Corn
October 22, 2007
Here’s my last “Capital Games” column for http://www.thenation.com….
Four and a half years ago, after reading the Robert Novak column that outed Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA operative specializing in counter-proliferation work, I wrote an article in this space noting that this particular leak from Bush administration officials might have been a violation of a federal law prohibiting government officials from disclosing information about clandestine intelligence officers and (perhaps worse) might have harmed national security by exposing anti-WMD operations. That piece was the first to identify the leak as a possible White House crime and the first to characterize the leak as evidence that within the Bush administration political expedience trumped national security.
The column drew about 100,000 visitors to this website in a day or so. And–fairly or not–it’s been cited by some as the event that triggered the Plame hullabaloo. I doubt that the column prompted the investigation eventually conducted by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, for I assume that had my column not appeared the CIA still would have asked the Justice Department to investigate the leak as a possible crime. But now that Fitzgerald’s investigation is long done, the Scooter Libby spin-off is over (thanks to George W. Bush’s total commutation of Libby’s sentence), and Valerie Wilson has finally published her account, it seems a good time to say, I was right. And to add, where’s the apology?
From the start, neocons and conservative backers of the war dismissed the Plame leak and subsequent scandal as a big nothing. Some even claimed that somehow former Ambassador Joseph Wilson and I had cooked up the episode to ensnare the White House. (Oh, to be so devilishly clever–and to be so competent.) But these attempts to belittle the affair (and to belittle Valerie Wilson) were based on nothing but baseless spin. As was–no coincidence–the Iraq war. In fact, the Wilson imbroglio was something of a proxy war for the debate over the war itself. In the summer of 2003, when the Plame affair broke, those in and out of government who had misled the nation into the war saw the need to spin their way out of the Wilson controversy in order to protect the false sales pitch they had used to win public support for the invasion of Iraq.
First they attacked Joe Wilson when he disclosed that he had gone to Niger in February 2002 for the CIA and had reported back that the allegation Saddam Hussein had been uranium-shopping there was highly dubious. Then when Valerie Wilson’s CIA identity was exposed during the get-Wilson campaign, they pooh-poohed the leak. They subsequently spent years doing so. Here’s a brief list of Plame attacks I’ve published before:
* On September 29, 2003, former Republican Party spokesman Clifford May wrote that the July 14, 2003 Robert Novak column that disclosed Valerie Wilson’s CIA connection “wasn’t news to me. I had been told that–but not by anyone working in the White House. Rather, I learned it from someone who formerly worked in the government and he mentioned it in an offhand manner, leading me to infer it was something that insiders were well aware of.”
* On September 30, 2003, National Review writer Jonah Goldberg huffed, “Wilson’s wife is a desk jockey and much of the Washington cocktail circuit knew that already.”
* On October 1, 2003, Novak wrote, “How big a secret was it? It was well known around Washington that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA….[A]n unofficial source at the agency says she has been an analyst, not in covert operations.”
* On July 17, 2005, Republican Representative Roy Blunt, then the House majority leader, said on Face the Nation, “This was a job that the ambassador’s wife had that she went to every day. It was a desk job. I think many people in Washington understood that her employment was at the CIA, and she went to that office every day.”
* On February 18, 2007, as the Libby trial was under way, Republican lawyer/operative Victoria Toensing asserted in The Washington Post, “Plame was not covert.”
* In his recently published memoirs, Novak wrote of Valerie Wilson, “She was not involved in clandestine activities. Instead, each day she went to CIA headquarters in Langley where she worked on arms proliferation.”
A year ago, in our book, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, Michael Isikoff and I disclosed for the first time that Valerie Wilson was operations chief at the Joint Task Force on Iraq of the Counterproliferation Division of the CIA’s clandestine operations directorate. She was no paper-pusher or analyst, as Novak and others had said. She was in charge of covert operations on a critical front. (Isikoff and I detailed some of her work in the book.) As part of her job, she traveled overseas under cover. CBS News recently reported that it had confirmed she had also worked on operations designed to prevent Iran from obtaining or developing nuclear weapons. Ironic? Ask Dick Cheney.
And Valerie Wilson was not known about Washington as a spy. Though Cliff May has made this argument, in the years since the Novak column appeared, no one in Washington has come forward to say, “Oh yes, I knew about her before Novak outed her.” In fact, Valerie Wilson was a mid-level, career CIA officer–there must be hundreds, if not thousands–and such people are (to be frank) not usually on the radar screen of Washington insiders. They are not known regulars on the D.C. cocktail circuit, such as it is. Ask Sally Quinn.
For her part, Valerie Wilson, who left the CIA at the end of 2005, has only recently been able to challenge the purposefully misleading descriptions of her CIA tenure. Appearing before the House government oversight and reform committee in March, she testified the she was a “covert officer” who had helped to “manage and run operations.” She said that prior to the Iraq invasion she had “raced to discover intelligence” on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. “I also traveled to foreign countries on secret missions,” she said under oath, “to find vital intelligence.” She noted that she could “count on one hand” the number of people outside the CIA who knew of her spy work.
On Sunday, as she launched her new book, Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House, she appeared on 60 Minutes and repeated her case. Though the CIA has absurdly prevented her from acknowledging that she worked for the agency prior to 2002–she started there in 1985–Wilson told Katie Couric, “Our mission was to make sure that the bad guys basically did not get nuclear weapons.” After her name appeared in the Novak column, she said, “I can tell you, all the intelligence services in the world that morning were running my name through their databases to see, ‘Did anyone by this name come in the country? When? Do we know anything about it? Where did she stay? Well, who did she see?’…It puts in danger, if not shuts down, the operations that I had worked on.”
What damage was actually done by the leak remains a secret. On 60 Minutes, Valerie Wilson said a damage assessment was conducted by the CIA but that she never saw it. She added, “I certainly didn’t reach out to my old assets and ask them how they’re doing, although I would have liked to have.” That damage report has not been leaked. Nor has it been a subject of congressional interest–as far as one can publicly tell. in 2003, the Democrats in Congress who cared about the Plame leak were obsessed with calling for the appointment of a special prosecutor. That fixation proved to be a mistake. A special prosecutor could only focus on criminal matters and could only disclose information necessary for a prosecution–rules that Patrick Fitzgerald would stick by. The Democrats never pushed for a congressional investigation that could have examined (and perhaps made public, even if in a limited fashion) key issues in the case, such as the consequences of the leak. Valerie Wilson said to Couric that the damage was “serious.” The public ought to know if this is so. (When I once asked Senator Jay Rockefeller, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, if he had any intention of probing the Plame leak, he said he no interest in doing so.)
In trying to spin their way out of the CIA leak mess, the neocon gang made much of the fact (again, first revealed by Isikoff and me) that Richard Armitage, who was the No. 2 at the State Department and a neocon-hating Iraq war skeptic, was the administration official who initially told Novak that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA. But the Plamegate deniers often ignore the inconvenient truth that White House aide Karl Rove–during the White House campaign to undermine Joe Wilson–confirmed this classified information for Novak and also passed the same leak to Matt Cooper, then of Time. (It was only because Cooper’s editors at the newsmagazine did not care about Wilson’s wife that Novak published the leak first.) Libby and White House press secretary Ari Fleischer also shared information about Wilson’s wife and her CIA connection with reporters. This was all part of the White House effort to tarnish Wilson by making it seem as if his trip to Niger had been nothing but a nepotistic junket. And as testimony and documents presented at the Libby trial showed, Vice President Cheney had been driving the pushback effort and had early on learned about Valerie Wilson’s CIA employment and then conveyed that information to Libby.
Yes, this was a case of putting politics (getting Joe Wilson) ahead of national security concerns (such as protecting the identity and operations of a CIA officer working the WMD beat).
It is true that at the end of the day, no one was charged with a crime for leaking information on Valerie Wilson. Patrick Fitzgerald decided that he could not prove in court–as he would have to under the law–that the leakers knew that Valerie Wilson was a covert officer. But Fitzgerald did pursue Libby and Rove for possibly lying to FBI agents and the grand jury investigating the leak. He nabbed Libby but, after much consideration, opted not to indict Rove.
Still, Rove was caught in a lie. Toward the start of the Plame affair, the White House declared that Rove was not involved in the leak, and Bush indicated that anyone who had leaked classified information would be dismissed. But the White House statement regarding Rove was false (probably because Rove had misled White House press secretary Scott McClellan). Bush’s promise was false, too, for Rove remained Bush’s master strategist even after Isikoff published an email showing that Rove had leaked classified information about Valerie Wilson to Cooper.
The bottom line: this episode demonstrated that the Bush White House was not honest (the vice president’s chief of staff was even convicted of lying to law enforcement officials), that top Bush officials had risked national security for partisan gain, and that White House champions outside the government would eagerly hurl false accusations to defend the administration.
So is anyone apologizing? For ruining Valerie Wilson’s career? For perhaps endangering operations and agents? For lying about the leak? For misleading the public about Rove’s role? For placing spin above the truth? Armitage did apologize (via a media interview) to the Wilsons. But no one else involved has. And no one–not Bush, not Cheney, not their aides, not their neocon confederates–has admitted any wrongdoing in this saga.
It’s like the war: false statements, false cover stories, and failure to concede the errors in judgment and action that have caused harm to national security. But the meta-narrative of Bush and his neoconservative allies is one of no apology, no surrender. They say and do what they must to shield themselves from the consequences of their actions. Reality be damned. What matters is what they can get away with. In the case of Valerie Plame Wilson, they did escape retribution. In the larger case of the Iraq war, they are still hoping to.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
h/t: Antiwar.com
see
Dandelion Salad 