Hullabaloo

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

 
What Went Right In Ohio

Well, waddaya know? Schmidt pulls it out with a four point squeaker in a district that hasn't given a Democrat more than 30 percent in 20 years. And all it took was a little last minute massaging of the count in her home district.

Too bad Karl's so busy these days. The party would probably really like his input on where that permanent majority thing he's been working on stands.

Seriously, I think this really is a bellwether. There is no way in hell that Hackett should have come within 15 points of Schmidt and the fact that he came so close says that something is seriously going wrong with the GOP brand, regardless of how appealing Hackett is as a candidate or how fucked up the Ohio GOP is.

The polls show a spike in Democratic party ID and the GOP is looking more fat and corrupt than the Democrats were after almost half a century in power. We may just be seeing the beginning of our 1994.

Don't ever think it can't happen. Much larger swings than we need have happened a bunch of times. I have a feeling that this 50/50 stasis is about to break --- and this election makes me think it's going to break our way. I hope the powers that be take the time to really study what went right in Ohio.

And I hope our man Hackett decides to run again. He's got the shinin'.



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digby 8/02/2005 08:36:00 PM |

 
They Love Controversy

Talk Left points to a discussion regarding whether bloggers should stay with Blog-ads or go with the new Pajamas Media. It's using a different business model and apparently targeting larger mainstream advertisers.

My only question is how these mainstream advertisers are going to react when they find out they are affiliating themselves with a very controversial racist blog like Little Green Footballs? I suspect we'll find out.

It would certainly be a problem for me.



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digby 8/02/2005 07:17:00 PM |

 
Divining The Will Of The Voters

I'm looking at the return for Hackett at 9:49 and it's at 50/50. This is a very red district and the fact that Hackett is even in spitting distance is amazing.

But man, I'm getting tired of these squeakers, aren't you?


I suspect the GOP machine has kept a few votes "in reserve" if you know what I mean. It's Ohio, after all.

Update:

Ok. This is getting fricking ridiculous. Hackett's down by 800 votes and for some unknown reason they are holding back the tally for 91 precincts in Jean Schmidt's home county. Seems they are having some "problems" counting the vote. Can ya believe it?


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digby 8/02/2005 06:51:00 PM |

 
Talk Puke

I guess these Marines and soldiers in Iraq had better check their foxholes and humvees and ask whether their buddies hold the proper political beliefs. Those who are Democrats are all cowards and liars, evidently.

I heard Senator Tom Harkin talk the other day about his still unsuccessful attempts to get Armed Forces Radio to provide some balance in their programming. Perhaps he might have better luck next time if he's armed with a transcript of that drug addled gasbag's characterization of Marine major Paul Hackett as a "staff puke." If there's anyone left in the GOP caucus with a conscience (and that's highly doubtful) it might just make a difference.

And honorable marines out there should tell that flatulent fuckhead to shut his vomitous pie-hole, regardless of their politics. Chickenshit chickenhawks like Rush Limbaugh are telling them that they are required to be Republicans or their service will be deemed open season for any asshole who disagreees with their politics. Max Cleland, John Kerry, now Major Paul Hackett. This pattern is becoming quite obvious.

The military is Republican, godddamit. And remember that when you come home, you'd better toe the line. If you don't the Republican party will portray you as a "puke," no matter what you did. Word to the wise. Forget about freedom. Just vote GOP. That's what you are fighting for.



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digby 8/02/2005 05:39:00 PM |

 
Novakula's Tea Bag

The Howler notes something important about Novak's column yesterday in which he wrote:

I have previously said that I never would have written those sentences if Harlow, then-CIA Director George Tenet or anybody else from the agency had told me that Valerie Plame Wilson's disclosure would endanger herself or anybody.

You have to assume by this statement that he must have talked to Tenet before he ran the story, right? Perhaps this is common knwledge and I've just missed it, but this is the first I've heard of this. Novak just slinging around Tenet's name in that context is a little bit bizarre to say the least.

Somerby thinks that there's a good chance that Tenet was the source Novak refered to as "not a partisan gunslinger," and I think that's certainly a possibility. (According to joe Wilson, Novak told him that his original source was with the CIA.) In fact, Tenet was one of the few members of the Bush administration who could even conceivably be characterized that way. Somerby speculates that Tenet being a "hail fellow well met" sort who knew the names of agents and remembered birthdays and such that he might have been the one who knew Valerie Wilson by her maiden name and told it to Novak.

This is intriguing since just a couple of weeks ago the papers were all reporting that a "source who had been briefed on the matter" and others were saying that Karl Rove and Lewis Libby had been working closely with Tenet on the official mea culpa:

"People who have been briefed on the case said the White House officials said Karl Rove and I. Lewis Libby Jr., were helping to prepare what became the administration's primary response to criticism that a flawed phrase about the nuclear materials in Africa had been included in Mr. Bush's State of the Union address six months earlier. They had exchanged e-mail correspondence and drafts of a proposed statement by George Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, to explain how the disputed wording had gotten into the address. Mr. Rove, the president's political strategist, and Mr. Libby, the chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, coordinated their efforts with Stephen Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser, who was in turn consulting with Mr. Tenet.

[...]

The work done by Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby on the Tenet statement during this intense period has not been previously disclosed. People who have been briefed on the case discussed this critical time period and the events surrounding it to demonstrate that Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby were not involved in an orchestrated scheme to discredit Mr. Wilson or disclose the undercover status of his wife, Valerie Wilson, but were intent on clarifying the use of intelligence in the president's address. Those people who have been briefed requested anonymity because prosecutors have asked them not to discuss matters under investigation.

We all wondered why that odd bit of information was revealed by the Rove forces. It was interesting, of course, as all these tid-bits are, but during that flood of friendly Rove-camp leaking, this always struck me a strange. How was this supposed to exonerate Rove? Somehow, we were supposed to believe that Tenet and Hadley and Rove and Libby were working together coordinating a Tenet's response. But, so what? Why would that have prevented Rove and Libby from leaking about Plame? Can't they walk and chew gum at the same time?

Then, on the 27th, the WaPo prints this and we are reminded that this has always been a battle between the white house and the CIA and it seems to be escalating as Rove comes under closer public scrutiny in the leak probe:

Prosecutors have questioned former CIA director George J. Tenet and deputy director John E. McLaughlin, former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, State Department officials, and even a stranger who approached columnist Robert D. Novak on the street.

In doing so, special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has asked not only about how CIA operative Valerie Plame's name was leaked but also how the administration went about shifting responsibility from the White House to the CIA for having included 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Africa, an assertion that was later disputed.

A former senior CIA official said yesterday that Tenet's statement was drafted within the agency and was shown only to Hadley on July 10 to get White House input. Only a few minor changes were accepted before it was released on July 11, this former official said. He took issue with a New York Times report last week that said Rove and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, had a role in Tenet's statement.

If I had to guess, Novak's seemingly innocuous mention of Tenet yesterday wasn't an accident. Tenet is being fingered as the source quite deliberately. It's another salvo aimed at laying the blame for this whole mess (and I mean the WHOLE mess --- wmd's and all) at the CIA's feet:

Behind the scenes, the White House responded with twin attacks: one on Wilson and the other on the CIA, which it wanted to take the blame for allowing the 16 words to remain in Bush's speech. As part of this effort, then-deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley spoke with Tenet during the week about clearing up CIA responsibility for the 16 words, even though both knew the agency did not think Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger, according to a person familiar with the conversation. Tenet was interviewed by prosecutors, but it is not clear whether he appeared before the grand jury, a former CIA official said.

Obviously, this article is informed by CIA sources who are enacting their own damage control. But it's pretty clear to me on whose side Novak is coming down.

Somerby chastises me a little bit for assuming that Novak was carrying water for the White House when it's possible his source was actually George Tenet. It's true that Novak's original column was fairly measured. It often is. But Novak's appearances on CNN leave absolutely no doubt as to his loyalty to the Republican party and his willingness to carry water for the Bush administration. When a journalist appears regularly on television to openly advocate for one political party or a specific administration I think he gives up any right to claim journalistic objectivity or even journalistic integrity in a situation like this.

For instance, here's one we can all appreciate Speaking of Al Gore at the Democratic convention last summer Novak said:

They [Democrats] just pray he doesn't go into one of his rants where he's screaming and yelling and can't control himself. They shouldn't feed him too much Coke before the uh-- Coca-Cola before tonight.

Any journalist who says things like that can be fairly assumed to be "sympathetic" to white house spin, I think.

We know that Karl Rove, and very likely, Scooter Libby, were passing the "wife" information around, whether Tenet was the original source (and whether he was involved in the smear) or not. Rove has admitted that he spoke with Novak. And, finally, we also know that Robert Novak is the only one of several journalists reportedly approached who ran with that information. I do not think it is all that unreasonable for me to characterize Novak as doing Rove's bidding in this. As I wrote yesterday, there really was no legitimate reason to report that Wilson's wife was involved if what they were trying to do was say that Wilson's mission was low level.

The man who likes to call Hillary Clinton "Madame Defarge" and a "very mean lady" who has "done very bad things" is just the guy I'd go to if I wanted to create a little smear about a henpecked little wimp and his overbearing spy of a wife who just wanted him to get a damned job.

Certainly, Novak's statements subsequent to the leak have been just as dicey as Sommerby has documented Wilson's of being. And I would suggest that they are far more worthy of condemnation since Novak is supposed to be a journalist.

In his original column revealing Plame's name, he wrote this about Wilson:

That's where Joe Wilson came in. His first public notice had come in 1991 after 15 years as a Foreign Service officer when, as U.S. charge in Baghdad, he risked his life to shelter in the embassy some 800 Americans from Saddam Hussein's wrath. My partner Rowland Evans reported from the Iraqi capital in our column that Wilson showed "the stuff of heroism." President George H.W. Bush the next year named him ambassador to Gabon, and President Bill Clinton put him in charge of African affairs at the National Security Council until his retirement in 1998.

[...]

During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Wilson had taken a measured public position -- viewing weapons of mass destruction as a danger but considering military action as a last resort. He has seemed much more critical of the administration since revealing his role in Niger. In the Washington Post July 6, he talked about the Bush team "misrepresenting the facts," asking: "What else are they lying about?"

Here is his characterization of Wilson a few months later when he spoke with Wolf Blitzer:

BLITZER: Joining me now for an exclusive conversation, the veteran journalist, is my colleague, Bob Novak. Bob, thanks very much for joining us. Let's talk about this. What made you decide to go out, first of all, and write about former Ambassador Joe Wilson?

NOVAK: Former Ambassador Wilson broke the secrecy that a retired diplomat, unknown, had gone to Niger in the year 2002 to investigate whether the Iraqis tried to buy yellow cake, uranium from Niger.

BLITZER: You mean when he wrote that op-ed page article in The New York Times?

NOVAK: New York Times ... That was on a Sunday morning. On Monday, I began to report on something that I thought was very curious. Why was it that Ambassador Wilson, who had no particular experience in weapons of mass destruction, and was a sharp critic of the Iraqi policy of President Bush and, also, had been a high-ranking official in the Clinton White House, who had contributed politically to Democrats -- some Republicans, but mostly Democrats -- why was he being selected?

I asked this question to a senior Bush administration official, and he said that he believed that the assignment was suggested by an employee at the CIA in the counterproliferation office who happened to be Ambassador Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame. I then called another senior official of the Bush administration, and he said, Oh, you know about that? And he confirmed that that was an accurate story. I then called the CIA. They said that, to their knowledge, he did not -- that the mission was not suggested by Ambassador Wilson's wife -- but that she had been asked by her colleagues in the counterproliferation office to contact her husband. So she was involved.

Novak seems to be trying to make a case that he's the one who asked how Wilson got selected for the mission, not that anyone offered it up to him. In that same interview, he furiously denies that he ever told Newsday, "I didn't dig it out. They gave it to me." His characterization of Wilson is quite dramatically at odds with the way he wrote of him in the original column.

I would imagine that this discrepancy is something that Patrick Fitzgerald wondered about and why he was checking phone records after the Novak column came out. It reeks of cover up.

I realize that this does not demonstrate absolutely that Novak was carrying water for the administration when he revealed her name, but it certainly does show that he was carrying water for them after the fact. This entire line of bullshit about Wilson being a partisan is White House damage control chapter and verse.

I want to make clear that I'm not picking on Bob Somerby here. In the midst of that minor criticism, he also positively linked to my piece on Novak from yesterday, which I appreciate. He made a reasonable point, I think, that I was making an assertion that was not grounded in specific evidence. My response here is to demonstrate that I think it's a reasonable assertion based upon observing Robert Novak's career, his other public statements and the fact that he is, quite demonstrably, a douchebag for liberty.



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digby 8/02/2005 01:23:00 PM |

 
The Insider's Insider

I'm sure you've all heard by now that Patrick Fitzgerald is still interviewing people for the Grand Jury and that he called Rove assistants Susan Ralston and Izzy hernandez just last Friday.

Republican establishment groupies, The Note, which broke this story says this:

We should Note that Ralston and Hernandez are two of the nicest people in Washington and their being called to appear is a necessary reminder of the Caputoean phenomenon from the Clinton Era, which some have forgotten. When there are special prosecutors, a lot of kind, innocent people can get caught up in the investigation, often saddling them with huge legal bills and emotional stress.

That might be true, Perhaps these two are innocents. However, Susan Ralston's name has the unfortunate propensity to pop up in conjunction with some serious GOP scumbags:

When Rove got to the White House in 2001, he hired as his personal assistant one Susan Ralston, who previously was Jack Abramoff's personal assistant and was recommended by Abramoff for the job. Since then Ralston has become an insider's insider. "She's a remarkably gifted leader, playing a vital role," Rove told the National Journal in its June 18, 2005 issue.

According to the Washington Monthly (June 1, 2004), Grover Norquist "had a deal with Susan Ralston, who until recently was the assistant to Karl Rove. An unnamed Republican lobbyist recently told Salon.com: "Susan took a message for Rove, and then called Grover to ask if she should put the caller through to Rove. If Grover didn't approve, your call didn't go through."

"How did Norquist attain such influence over Ralston? Flowers every Friday? Redskins tickets?" the magazine wrote. "The answer, actually, is what the White House ethics lawyers call a 'preexisting relationship.' Ralston had formerly worked for lobbyist Jack Abramoff, a close friend of Norquist's and a top fundraiser for House majority whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas)."

I have no idea what Fitzgerald's looking at but it has something to do with Karl Rove. As Talk Left points out:

The two witnesses could be providing evidence that corroborates Rove's version. It's interesting, but not quite up to being a "dot" yet.

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digby 8/02/2005 11:10:00 AM |

 
Rearing His Head

I was busy yesterday and didn't get a chance to follow up, but I wondered about the item in Robert Novak's column yesterday in which he claimed that the Kerry campaign discarded Wilson after the SSCI report claimed Wilson's statements had no basis in fact. I had no recollection of that happening, particularly since the bipartisan SSCI report said no such thing --- that "no basis in fact" statement came from the "additional views" of partisan tools Orrin Hatch, Pat Roberts and Kit Bond. (It's quite telling that the committee couldn't even get all the republicans to sign on to that little smear.)

Robert Parry gets to the bottom of this and lo and behold, it all comes back to our favorite little GOP man-ho, JD Guckert:

The other part of Novak’s attack on Wilson – about his supposed repudiation by Sen. John Kerry’s Democratic campaign – can be traced back to a story by Talon News’ former White House correspondent Jeff Gannon, whose real name is James Guckert.

On July 27, 2004, just over a year ago, a Talon News story under Gannon’s byline reported that Wilson “has apparently been jettisoned from the Kerry campaign.” The article based its assumption on the fact that “all traces” of Wilson “had disappeared from the Kerry Web site.”

The Talon News article reported that “Wilson had appeared on a Web site www.restorehonesty.com where he restated his criticism of the Bush administration. The link now goes directly to the main page of www.johnkerry.com and no reference to Wilson can be found on the entire site.”

A Web Redesign

But Peter Daou, who headed the Kerry campaign’s online rapid response, said the disappearance of Wilson’s link – along with many other Web pages – resulted from a redesign of Kerry’s Web site at the start of the general election campaign, not a repudiation of Wilson.

“I wasn’t aware of any directive from senior Kerry staff to ‘discard’ Joe Wilson or do anything to Joe Wilson for that matter,” said Daou, who now publishes the “Daou Report” at Salon.com. “It just got lost in the redesign of the Web site, as did dozens and dozens of other pages.”

I don't want to hear any more speculation that Robert Novak has anything but the highest journalistic standards. Nobody has more credibility than the Bulldog.

The Talon article was scrubbed of course. But the freepers kept a copy on their site. Perhaps old Bob hangs out there --- many Republican whores do. Here it is in its entirety:

Kerry Dumps Joe Wilson From Campaign Team
Talon News ^ | 7/27/2004 | Jeff Gannon

Posted on 07/27/2004 7:22:20 AM PDT by ConservativeMajority

WASHINGTON (Talon News) -- Last week, the presidential campaign of Democratic candidate Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) very publicly distanced itself from former National Security Advisor Samuel "Sandy" Berger after it became known that Berger was under investigation for removing highly classified documents from the National Archives.

Talon News reported that Kerry's anti-terror policy was removed from the candidate's web site immediately following Berger's dismissal as a campaign advisor. But in the last few days, another advisor has apparently been jettisoned from the Kerry campaign. All traces of former Ambassador Joe Wilson, the central figure in the controversy of faulty intelligence about Iraq and uranium has disappeared from the Kerry web site. Wilson had appeared on a web site www.restorehonesty.com where he restated his criticism of the Bush administration. The link now goes directly to the main page of www.johnkerry.com and no reference to Wilson can be found on the entire site.

Wilson was discredited by a Senate Intelligence Committee report that contradicted Wilson's public statements about how he was selected for a sensitive mission to Niger in 2002 and the results of his report about Saddam Hussein's attempt to purchase uranium in Africa. Wilson represented his investigation as proof that President Bush misled the United States in making the case for the invasion of Iraq. An investigation into British intelligence confirms that Bush's claim was "well founded."

It is likely that Kerry's handlers took advantage of the Berger affair to quietly break official contact with someone who has proved to be something of a loose cannon. The ambassador was known for his vitriolic rhetoric against members of the Bush administration, particularly political advisor Karl Rove. Last year he suggested that Rove be "frog-marched from the White House in handcuffs," over the alleged leak of his wife's identity.

The Kerry campaign did not respond to a Talon News inquiry about Wilson's departure.

Copyright © 2004 Talon News -- All rights reserved.

This really is worth some follow-up with the mainstream press, I think. All things being equal, Novak should be joining Dan Rather for a geriatric fuck-up cruise. It's amazing he's skated thus far.



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digby 8/02/2005 08:26:00 AM |

Monday, August 01, 2005

 
WTF

I think I'm just going to call this post my WTF post of the day.

First I read via Avedon and King of Zembla that the California National Guard doing surveillance on anti-war protesters may be a national strategy

A state senator frustrated with what he called "stonewalling" by the California National Guard said Tuesday he would launch contempt hearings against the state's military unit for failing to turn over documents.

-Sen. Joe Dunn, D-Garden Grove, sought the documents as part of his probe into the Guard's new controversial intelligence unit. After squaring off with a top Guard official and a lawyer for the unit Tuesday, Dunn also threatened to seek subpoenas against dozens of current and former top Guard officials.

The hearing was the first since the Times Sacramento Bureau reported the existence of the Information Synchronization, Knowledge Management and Intelligence Fusion program last month. Internal Guard e-mails show the unit had high-level interest in a small Mother's Day anti-war rally at the Capitol.

[...]

Before the hearing, the U.S. Army also dealt the committee a blow saying that a computer hard drive and a hand-held Blackberry used by the retiring California Guard colonel who oversaw the fledgling intelligence unit was federal property, and not subject to the subpoena.

The hard drive was erased the same day Dunn requested the Guard preserve all documents related to the unit.

WTF? So it really looks as if the California National Guard with the help of some members of the US Army was spying on anti-war protesters. This is nasty stuff. If it's happening all over the country, it's really nasty stuff.

One of the harshest questioners in the hearing was none other than Tom McClintock erstwhile GOP candidate for Governor. He's very right wing, but sometimes this civil liberties issue creates strange bedfellows. And needless to say, he hates Schwarzenneger with a passion. But then, these days, who doesn't?

For my second WTF, I find out that even prosecutors in the GITMO Kangaroo courts were appalled by the methods being used to find the "non-combatants" guilty. But, as with all these people who have expressed reservations, revulsion or concern about our handling of prisoners --- from the bad apples at Abu Ghraib, to reports of the "Biscuit" teams using psychological torture, to the dog handlers' testimony, to the FBI agents who were concerned about their legal culpability in inhumane treatment and rendition, to the highly placed members of JAG Corps worrying about complicity in war crimes, to the prosecutors at Guantanamo --- they are all mistaken or they are whiners and complainers.

Every day we are learning about people who complained about the legality and morality of our treatment of prisoners and each and every time the defense department whitewashes it. This is becoming unsustainable.

This latest story today about the prosecutors in Guantanamo complaining about the legality of the process discusses a "personality" clash even though the prosecutors who complained were discussing specific instances of unethical and illegal behavior. It sounds to me as if they had some legal Geoffrey Millers down there, whose tactics were as offensive as Miller's were.

And I suspect that the Colonel Borch mentioned in the article who calls these claims "monstrous lies" may be one of them. I wonder if when the dust settles we will find that Rumsfeld's Pentagon routinely put the most incompetent and the most gung-ho, quasi-psychotic officers in charge. It would certainly fit the pattern of refusing to listen to anything but their own hype.

My final WTF for the moment is from Josh Marshall, who quotes Michael Barone actually putting finger to keyboard and writing this:

"Richard Nixon, by obstructing investigation of the Watergate burglary, unwittingly colluded in the successful attempt to besmirch his administration. Less than two years after carrying 49 states, he was compelled to resign."

The intellectual contortions we are seeing on the right these days are quite magnificent. I'm just wondering when their heads will explode.



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digby 8/01/2005 10:52:00 AM |

 
Six Degrees Of Paul Hackett

Paul Hackett is asking the netroots to try out a new GOTV maneuver. It sounds like it might be worth a try, and I don't see how it could hurt. Experimentation is a good thing. And if the candidate calls, we should probably answer, particularly when it doesn't really take any effort to speak of.

Check it out. It will be fun to see if it has any impact.

They are also pushing to raise a few last minute bucks. Here's the link.


Update: I understand that some people are quite upset with the idea of sending out an e-mail to your friends asking them to send an e-mail to their friends in the hopes of spreading the word virally. Some consider this spam, but I'm of the opinion that sending a mass e-mail to people you know is not the same as sending out unsolicited messages to strangers. In fact, i do it all the time. But to each his own.

People should be aware that chain e-mails have become a primary tool of the Republicans and they used them to great effect during 2004. Read this article from Harper's about how they use them and the dishonesty and calumny they contained. (We are suggesting nothing like this.) Republicans are experts at direct mail and this is the hi-tech version of their vaunted mailing lists. Apparently they believe that it is quite effective and developed lists of people who would willingly start the chain. I don't think it was used to get out the vote so much as perpetuate whisper campaigns and bad information. It occurred mostly under the radar. I think we can be quite confident that they are refining this technique and will be using it to great effect going forward whether we learn to use it or not.

It just doesn't seem wrong to me to use the same method to simply ask your friends to pass on a GOTV message. It is slightly annoying but door knocking and phone calling strangers is far more intrusive and yet we do it all the time. It's one of the more annoying aspects of grassroots politics, but its absolutely essential. You have to try to get people to vote however you can.

But everyone has to do what they think is right. I know what the Republicans think is right. Do what has to be done to win and if that means annoying their friends with an e-mail, they do it.

Update II: I forgot to include this link which explains how chain e-mails can be used effectively and for good, written by Phil Agre, information expert and one of the clearest thinkers about the current political scene around.



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digby 8/01/2005 10:24:00 AM |

 
Removing All Doubt

You can see why Bob Novak's lawyers have told him to keep his mouth shut. Today he writes a column "defending" himself that opens up one big ole can of worms again.

Novak's original column opened with this paragraph:

The CIA's decision to send retired diplomat Joseph C. Wilson to Africa in February 2002 to investigate possible Iraqi purchases of uranium was made routinely at a low level without Director George Tenet's knowledge. Remarkably, this produced a political firestorm that has not yet subsided.

Had Novak left it at that there would have been no repercussions. But he went on to reveal that Wilson's wife was the one who suggested him for the mission. And we know that it was the "wife" part of this story that was being spread all over town, not the fact that the decision to send Wilson to Niger was made in the bowels of the CIA.

This would have been a fairly standard issue character assassination if it hadn't been for the fact that Plame was undercover. But she was, and the CIA told Novak that. Bill Harlow, former spokesman for the CIA, recently went on the record with the Washington Post and said that he had warned Novak off the story using the only language the CIA can use without revealing classified information. Novak claims in his column today that this simply wasn't good enough:

So, what was "wrong" with my column as Harlow claimed? There was nothing incorrect. He told the Post reporters he had "warned" me that if I "did write about it, her name should not be revealed." That is meaningless. Once it was determined that Wilson's wife suggested the mission, she could be identified as "Valerie Plame" by reading her husband's entry in "Who's Who in America."

Except he could have easily written the story without revealing that Wilson's wife allegedly sent him on the mission at all. It was a colorful detail that didn't mean anything unless you were Joe and Valerie Wilson and your careers and reputations were being destroyed. The substance of Novak's story was that Cheney knew nothing of the mission, not who sent Wilson. It appears to me that this is exactly how Harlow assumed Novak would handle it when he warned him not to use Plame's name if he wrote the story.

Why did Novak think Plame's alleged involvement was important in the first place? He certainly didn't spell it out in his column. He just dropped it out there. In fact, there has still not been, to this day, any satisfactory explanation from him or anyone else involved as to why it was so significant that Plame allegedly suggested her husband for the job. Other than casting aspersions on Wilson's manhood, creating the impression that he wasn't qualified or sending a message to critics, I can't conceive of any legitimate reasons why it would be considered worth reporting -- particularly since the CIA had not given him an unequivocal green light. Reporting her involvement can only be seen for what it was: character assasination and political retribution.

Novak knew what Rove and Libby wanted him to do and, alone among his peers, he ran with the petty little detail they were working hard to get into the papers. And now he has the nerve to get indignant when he gets called on it. Douchebag For Liberty doesn't even begin to describe it.



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digby 8/01/2005 07:45:00 AM |

Sunday, July 31, 2005

 
They're Good At It

It just occurred to me how offensively stupid it is for some Washington chickenhawk to be saying the GOP is going to "bury" an Iraq war veteran.

US Military Fatalities at 7/31/05: 1796

digby 7/31/2005 01:06:00 PM |

 
National Democrats Please Listen

If you want a message that will resonate with red staters --- maybe even some of those macho white working class Nascar males who pride themselves on their independence --- this is how you do it:

"I don't need Washington to tell me how to live my personal life or how to pray to my God," he said.

The Republicans spent multi-millions over the last 25 years selling the idea that the American people want the government "off their backs." We should piggy back our candidates right on the back of that marketing slogan and ride it to victory.

What the national Democratic party needs to recognise is that when many people heard the Republicans saying that, they thought that they were talking about literally getting the government "off their backs" not just lowering their taxes. Instead, the Republicans are creating a national government that seeks to intrude in the most personal of ways, interfering with people's religious and moral choices. That wasn't what the independent, individualistic western style libertarian signed on for. They are ours for the taking if we have the nerve to say what Paul Hackett said up there.

Combine that with some big ticket ideas like "guaranteed health insurance for all Americans" with a foreign policy narrative that refocuses the threats and policy prescription in the proper direction as Matt Yglesias talks about here, and we have the essence of a Democratic message that will resonate.




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digby 7/31/2005 12:22:00 PM |

 
Pull The Other One

Talk Left points to this post about a joint US Canadian raid day before yesterday in Canada to arrest a marijuana seed distributer on charges that his seeds are being used by Americans to break the law. Selling the seeds in not illegal in Canada, but the Americans persuaded the canadians that they should be able to reach across the border and arrest their citizens. The story is complex, but if you are interested in this subject I recommend you check it out.

I was struck by one quote by the US Attorney in Seattle under whose auspices this bust came about:

“The fact is, marijuana is a very dangerous drug,” Sullivan said. “People don't say that, but right now in America, there are more kids in treatment for addiction to marijuana than every other illegal drug combined."

Now, I can't say for sure, but I would bet a million dollars if I had it that this is flat out bullshit. Certainly, the "very dangerous" part is flat out bullshit. And I cannot believe that there are more kids in treatment for marijuana "addiction" than all other drugs combined. This is your government lying in your face. The kids know it and as a result they disregard all the warnings about drugs (like meth -- a very, very serious problem.)



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digby 7/31/2005 11:17:00 AM |

 
Back In Ohio

I don't know how many people are following the corruption scandals in Ohio, but they are doozies -- just flat out graft in the highest reaches of the Ohio Republican party. It's one reason why Paul Hackett may just have a chance to win. Combine that with the outrages documented in "What Went Wrong In Ohio" and the GOP is becoming so discredited as an institution that its brand is suffering.

Jean Schmidt has been running from the Ohio bigwigs implicated in the scandal as fast as her bandy little legs will carry her. But it appears that in these last couple of days her lies about knowing some of the major players are unravelling. Swing State project has the story.

In another display of the GOP's irony and history impaired lameness, the Washington Post reports today why the national GOP decided to throw a bunch of last minute money at Schmidt:

"He called the commander in chief a son-of-a-[expletive]," said NRCC spokesman Carl Forti. "We decided to bury him."

I suppose he took off his shoe and pounded on the table too.

In many ways, they really are "Red" states.



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digby 7/31/2005 10:14:00 AM |

 
How We CIA

Arthur has a must read post up dissecting Highpockets' tribalism and the meaning of plaid pants and cultural paranoia. (If you aren't checking in with his blog frequently you are missing some of the most consistently amazing cultural and political analysis in the blogosphere.) I'll leave that fascinating topic to him for now, but he does mention one thing in passing that I'd like to expound on a bit; the wingnuts and the CIA.

I've been thinking a lot about how the Plame affair has brought up an interesting political contradiction: the right is now openly contemptuous of the CIA while the left is a vocal supporter. I think it's probably a good idea to clarify that bit so we don't get confused. The fact is that both sides have always been simultaneously vocal supporters and openly contemptuous of the CIA, but for entirely different reasons.

I usually don't speak for "the left" but for the purpose of this discussion I will use my views as a proxy for the lefty argument. I'm not generally a big fan of secretive government departments with no accountability. I always worry that they are up to things not sanctioned by the people and it has often turned out that they are. I have long been skeptical of the CIA because of the CIA's history of bad acts around the world that were not sanctioned or even known by more than a few people and were often, in hindsight, wrong --- like rendition, for instance. I don't believe that we should have a secret foreign policy operation that doesn't answer to the people. They tend to do bad shit that leaves the people holding the bag.

But I didn't just fall out of the back of Arnold's hummer, so I understand that a nation needs intelligence to protect itself and understand the world. I also understand that the way we obtain that information must be kept secret in order to protect the lives of those who are involved in getting it. I have never objected to the idea that we have spies around the world gathering information about what our enemies are up to. I also think that intelligence should, as much as possible, be objective and apolitical. Otherwise, we cannot accurately assess real threats. If the CIA (and the other intelligence agencies) only make objective analyses, the buck will stop at the president, where it always properly should.

Therefore, I see this Plame affair -- and the larger matter of the pre-war WMD threat assessment -- as a matter of compromised intelligence and an extension of the 30 year war the right has waged against what it thinks is the CIA's tepid threat analysis. Never mind that the right's hysterical analyses have always turned out to have been completely wrong.

But then accuracy was never the point because the right takes the opposite approach to the CIA's proper role. They have always been entirely in favor of the CIA working on behalf of any president who wanted to topple a left wing dictator or stage a coup without congressional knowledge. This is, in their view, the proper role of the CIA --- to covertly advance foreign policy on behalf of an executive (of whom they approve) and basically do illegal and immoral dirty work. But they have never valued the intelligence and analysis the CIA produced since it often challenged their preconcieved beliefs and as a result didn't validate their knee jerk impulse to invade, bomb, obliterate, topple somebody for reasons of ideology or geopolitical power. The CIA's intelligence often backed up the success of the containment policy that kept us from a major bloody hot war with the commies --- and for that they will never be trusted.(See Team B, and the Committee on the Present Danger parts I and II.)

Therefore, the right sees the Plame affair as another example of an inappropriately "independent" CIA refusing to accede to its boss's wishes. They believe that the CIA exists to provide the president with the documentation he needs to advance his foreign policy goals --- and if that includes lying to precipitate a war he feels is needed, then their job is to acquiesce. When you cut away the verbiage, what the right really believes is that the US is justified in invading and occupying any country it likes --- it's just some sissified, cowardly rule 'o law that prevents us from doing it. The CIA's job is to smooth the way for the president to do what he wants by keeping the citizen rubes and the allies in line with phony proof that we are following international and domestic laws. (This would be the Straussian method of governance --- too bad the wise ones who are running the world while keeping the rest of us entertained with religion and bread and circuses are so fucking lame.)

Back in the day, they used to just admit that they were engaging in Realpolitik, and as disgusting as that is, at least it was more honest than the current crop of neocons who insist that they are righteous and good by advancing democracy and vanquishing evil using undemocratic, illegal means. It makes me miss Kissinger. At least he didn't sing kumbaya while he was fucking over the wogs.

I have no idea where people who don't pay much attention to the political scene would come down on this. It may be that they think the government should have a branch that does illegal dirty work. But I suspect they would also think that the president should not be allowed to run a secret foreign policy or stage wars for inscrutable reasons. Indeed, I think most people would find it repugnant if they knew that there are people in government who think the president of the United States has a right to lie to them in order to commit their blood and treasure to a cause or plan that has nothing to do with the one that is stated.

Of course, that's exactly what happened with Iraq. The right's greatest challenge now is to get the public to believe that they were lied to for their own good.



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digby 7/31/2005 09:02:00 AM |

Saturday, July 30, 2005

 
Volunteer For Hackett

I just got this e-mail from Bob Brigham of Swing State Project:

Man, cellular laptop cards are great. I'm riding in Paul Hackett's motorcade and live-blogging over at Swing State Project.

The campaign has momentum and is peaking perfectly, but needs more people. It would be great if you could post a general call for the netroots to get down to Ohio 2nd district. People have been reading about this on the blogs and coming from all over, Philly, Michigan, Florida and a whole helluva lot of netroots people from Ohio. So far, over 7,000 people have donated. Let's see if we can get 1% to go volunteer for GOTV.

We need a few hundred more people and every available Democratic volunteer in the area is already plugged in. Let's finish the job.

Ask people to call HQ at (513) 735-4310.

It's a long shot, but if Hackett could pull this out it might be considered the kind of bellweather that Harris Wofford was back in 1991. It could change the media dynamic considerably for '06.



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digby 7/30/2005 12:55:00 PM |

 
Testy, Testy

Wow. Anyone who hasn't seen this Jean Schmidt interview with David Gregory over at Crooks and Liars needs to check it out.

Let's just say that if the election turns on which candidate has the most winning personality, Hackett should win in a lanslide. Yikes.


Update: I hope the canvassers are armed with this information as they spread the word this week-end. It may be too late to make much of it, which is too bad. it would be a nice test case of the new libertarian red state Dem vs the religious extremist red state Republican paradigm:

...here's one fact her side is carefully guarding, knowing only about 10 percent of those registered will vote Tuesday: her extreme views. If voters from places like Mariemont, Anderson Township or Hyde Park knew fully what Schmidt believed, they might sit out the election or switch over for once to a Democrat, especially one like Hackett.

Here's the backup. During the campaign Schmidt is on leave as president of the Right to Life of Greater Cincinnati. Now, no one should begrudge her that commitment. It's personal and religious. But does that commitment affect her political judgment and fitness? Second District voters must decide that.

But go to her group's Web site, www.affirminglife.org/ index.asp, and click around through the many buttons and pages and you'll learn she and her cohorts abhor living wills. Huh? Isn't that the one lesson from the Republican exploitation of Terri Schiavo -- that we should immediately get willed up? She says no.

Her local Right to Life site to this day says Schiavo was executed. And that you shouldn't buy Levi jeans or anything Microsoft or Johnson & Johnson baby cream or read The New York Times. And they say no to the promise of embryonic stem cell research that could help our relatives and friends survive diseases and crippling paralysis.

Flat out, Schmidt is a political extremist. Of course, she thinks those fringe views put her in the 2nd District mainstream. I don't think so, not with the suburban masses or even the man farming a rural field while his wife packs lunches for the kids waiting for their long school bus ride.

No doubt Schmidt will turn out her Right to Life friends on Tuesday. They believe their numbers will be enough for at least a victory.

But the more mainstream voters come to realize she's a friend of Taft's and the leader of such a fringe group, they might conclude she's not Rob Portman, she's not like them. And putting in a Democrat, especially one who still wears the Marine uniform and has economic success but with colorful, earthy edges, could be the more comfortable choice.

It all comes down to what people know, when they know it and whether they'll care. We'll soon know.

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digby 7/30/2005 09:44:00 AM |

Friday, July 29, 2005

 
Swooning

I know that most of you have already seen this, but I wanted to post it anyway, just for posterity.

Armando at Kos caught this from Hindquarter and the Gang:

It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can't get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile.

I've written a lot about "up-is-downism" and "epistemic relativism" and "bizarro world" trying to analyse the Republicans' alternate reality, wondering whether it comes from a full absorbtion into the field of public relations, a consciously created competing discourse or simple lying with a straight face. All of that is bullshit. It's a form of mass hysteria ---- along the lines of the Salem Witch trials or the audience at an NSynch NSync concert.



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digby 7/29/2005 08:27:00 AM |

Thursday, July 28, 2005

 
Oooh Daddy

Via Jesse at Pandagon,(who will give you the full hilarious run-down) I see that the Cornerites are all a twitter at the new Geena Davis show "Commander In Chief." They are having little giggle fits at the idea that a woman president would be, like, so cute when she's negotiating and baking cookies!

Here's little taste of the more serious side of the discussion from Jonah "Doughy Pant Load" Goldberg:

The idea that a female liberal president would be more "feminine" than Bill Clinton is absurd, laughable, factually untrue. Bill Clinton was weepy, huggy and at all times pain-feeling. He'd wax eloquent on the glories of talk and empathy. At the end of one marathon meeting which accomplished nothing, he stretched out in his chair and said "That was great" as if he was about to light a cigarette. Feminists declared him the first female president. He talked of security not in the sense of blowing up terrorists but of leaving no children behind...And, sad to say, it was so successful that George W. Bush and Karl Rove copied it with their treacly "compassionate conservatism." It took 9/11 to remind George W. Bush why Republicans are called the Daddy Party.

Actually, I'd heard about that all night meeting too, except I'd heard that at the end of it, he stretched out in his chair and said "that was great --- Monica."

And I believe he lit a cigar if I'm not mistaken.


I don't actually blame Jonah. With a mother like his it's hard to see how he could have come out unscathed. But this is just sad. The little guy wrote that whole thing without even realizing what he was revealing about his issues with women --- and why Republican males like him hated Bill Clinton.



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digby 7/28/2005 08:16:00 PM |

 
Hippie Spooks

Crooks and Liars is featuring a rather nutty exchange on Faux news in which it's posited that al Qaeda set up the poor Brazilian schmuck in the London subway in order to discredit the US and British governments. That's kooky, all right.

But there's a lot of that going around, I'm afraid. After quoting from Deborah Orrin's breathless scoop that Valerie Wilson went to a Springsteen fundraiser for Kerry, Orrin Judd speculates:

It's not beyond the realm of possibility that MoveOn, ActUp, and the rest of them are just CIA fronts.

For those of you who aren't following the latest line of thinking in wingnuttia, the whole Plame deal was an elaborate scheme by a cabal of evil CIA hippies who were trying to bring the president down. Just ask Senator Pat Roberts if you think I'm kidding.


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digby 7/28/2005 07:15:00 PM |

 
Simmering The Slime

Joe Conason has a nice piece here about how the right is preparing the ground to slime Pat Fitzgerald. Now that Senator Roberts has narrowed the scope of his interest in the Plame case, I think it's pretty clear that the little trial balloon about hearings (and my speculation about them granting immunity) was premature. The Dem Senators understood that better than I did --- they are keeping the heat on Roberts to hold hearings that he now quite clearly doesn't want to have. It really didn't make sense to pre-emptively slime Fitzgerald or haul Rove before the committee. They don't know what Fitzgerald has. And if I'm not mistaken, the special prosecutor, unlike the Independent Counsel, has no requirement to file a report if there is no indictment.

Therefore, if Fitzgerald doesn't indict, there is every reason to believe that all we'll ever find out is that ... no law was technically broken. The Republicans have wisely decided to back off at least until they know what they are dealing with. Why make him mad?

But if Fitzgerald does indict somebody --- and the spectre of a trial looms --- you can bet they'll be ready to try to bury him.


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digby 7/28/2005 05:31:00 PM |

 
Failing By Their Own Standards

While I have been engaging in the blogospheric pie fight over the liberal hawks' approach to national security to some extent, I do think it's important also to engage in a substantive response to the the DLC on this. Kevin links to a very good article at Democracy Arsenal that challenges the DLC's overreliance on the military to solve problems. This is a huge issue, particularly in light of the threats we actually face.

I was actually quite stunned to realize that they had signed on so fully to the idea that the GWOT or the G-SAVE or whatever, is a military challenge when quite clearly it is something else entirely. After all we've seen from 9/11 to Bali to Madrid to London --- and our our ineffectual and impotent performance in Iraq --- you would think that even hawks would have done some tweaking of the old superpower handbook.

But they haven't. And they even went a step further, indicating that criticising the methods that the Bush administration has employed thus far is naive (or vaguely anti-American) when it seems to me that it is vital to publicly reject their approach in order to repair the damage. The Bush administration has employed some catastrophically bad tactics and methods that have destroyed our credibility and our moral authority --- two things that are essential in repelling terrorism, attracting allies and keeping foreign enemies from overreaching. And in squandering those things the Bush administration has created recruiting propaganda for the terrorists and probably ruined any chance the liberal hawks might have had to test their Wilsonian experiment in exporting democracy.

First, the Bush administration continues to this day to tell the entire world that our intelligence services are completely untrustworthy. By invading a country without provocation, failing to find the WMD which would have justified the preemption doctrine, failing to prepare for the post war and then blaming the CIA and the state departments for that failure, they are saying to the world that the greatest military power the world has ever known is entirely incompetent. It leads enemies to overreach and it leads friends to be wary of letting us take the lead.

The only thing that can set this right is to publicly hold the Bush administration accountable for its politicising of the war for its own ends. To hush it up is to make us less safe, not more.

Second, by using torture and humiliation tactics we have shown the Muslim world that we are uncivilized. This is not just a matter, as Will Marshall said, of us not being grown-ups and undertanding that bad apples will blow off steam. It is clear that these things were ordered at the highest levels. And, as it has been reported today in even greater detail than before, there was a huge amount of dissension within the military about using these tactics for a variety of reasons. The primary concern for them is that it puts our own troops in danger, both morally and physically.

Marshall says that we have no credibility on torture unless we also condemn the acts of the barbaric insurgency in Iraq. This is precisely the opposite of the truth. Civilized people take for granted that anyone who blows up innocent people is barbaric. It does not have to be individually condemned. The behavior of the insurgency is not our responsiblity. The tactics and methods of the US Military are. It is incumbent upon us to take specific note of our own people who do barbaric things and show the world that we condemn it in the harshest possible terms. We cannot hope to export our democratic freedoms and demonstrate their benefits unless we hold ourselves to this higher standard --- and exporting our democratic freedoms is what these liberal hawks so fervently believe we must do.

So, they are defeating their own stated purpose of keeping the country safe by allowing the Bush administration to get away with exploding the myth that US intelligence is virtually omnipotent and possibly emboldening would be enemies.

They are defeating their own stated purpose of defending the military, by refusing to stand with those within it who objected to the way the Bush administration ignored its rules and regulations.

They are defeating their own stated purpose of spreading democracy by refusing to demonstrate our system's higher moral and ethical standards to people who are skeptical of our power.

If we are looking to the DLC for smart thinking on national security, we'd better look elsewhere. In all these ways the policies of the DLC hawks have already failed even by their own standards.


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digby 7/28/2005 03:41:00 PM |

 
Point Break

Atrios points today to this article in the Village Voice by Rick Perlstein which I encourage you to read. It's short and to the point. I think Perlstein has really gotten to the heart of why the Democratic party is having such a difficult problem getting through to people; we're not staying true true to our long term vision.

However, I'd like to draw your attention to an interview this week with Perlstein in this week's In These Times in which he discusses his book "the Stockticker and the SuperJumbo" which is only 8 bucks and is filled with interesting insights not just from him but other writers and thinkers in response to his ideas. You get a very real sense of the outlines of the debate within the party.

I'd like to discuss one thing in particular that Perlstein notes in the book and the interview and which I touched upon in my post earlier this week about Will Marshall and the DLC. I took issue with Marshall's point that liberals had been traumatized by the "protest politics" of the 60's to such an extent that they could not rationally deal with national security --- particularly the military. He characterized this as a feature of the grassroots liberal activists which I disagreed with because the "Move-On" left is quite a diverse group and it's certainly intergenerational. I do not believe that the grassroots were traumatized by the protest politics of the 60's --- although I'm sure there are some among us who were. We are a large group.

However, there is one group of Democrats who most certainly were traumatized by the protest politics of the 60's. Unfortunately, contrary to what Marshall set forth in his piece, the Democrats who are still carrying around that baggage are now the leaders of the Democratic party --- and particularly the leaders of the DLC. Indeed, their entire political careers have been forged in response to their early radicalism and subsequent political losses in 1972 and beyond.

The rest of us have indeed "moved on," going with the flow of changing political tides and reassessing our priorities as most people do as they go through life. But the people who came of age as political leaders in 1972 through the Reagan losses have been forever chastened by their youthful enthusiasm and as a result have an emotional aversion to bold, confrontational politics. Perlstein says:

The trauma of the generation of people who are running the Democratic Party was being blindsided by the political failures of left-of-center boldness. If you look at a lot of the most resonant and stalwart centrists and Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) Democrats, for a lot of them, their political coming-of-age was being blindsided by conservatism. For Bill Clinton, it was losing the governorship in 1980. For Joe Lieberman, it was losing a congressional race in 1980. For Evan Bayh, the chair of the DLC, it was seeing his dad lose his Senate seat to Dan Quayle in 1980. But the formative traumas of my generation of Democrats—and I’m 35—have been the failures of left-of-center timidity. So there really is a structural generational battle among Democrats. People of a certain age are terrified that the electorate is going to associate them with the excesses of the ’60s, but most voters are too young to remember that stuff. The Republicans keep trying to paint the Democrats as the party of the hippies and punks who burn the flag.

I'm a baby boomer myself, although I'm 10 years younger than the vanguard leaders of the 60's, and I certainly understood the tremendous frustration that we felt as Reaganism exploded across the 80's. I was deeply demoralized for a long time and I supported the DLC's attempt to reposition the party away from sectarian social issues to a more mainstream middle class economic focus. What I didn't count on was that while we settled into our grown-up middle aged persona, the right wing was going to have a doozy of a mid-life crisis and hurl themselves into true radicalism. It was a failure of imagination of epic proportions on my part.

But when they impeached the president on trumped up charges, I learned. And I realized that as you fight the political battles of the day, all you have to hang on to are the core beliefs that brought you into the arena in the first place.

As Perlstein demonstrates in his book, the key to long term political success is to have big things you stand for over the long haul. People understand different political realitites. Life happens. But they want to know what you care deeply about and what you want to accomplish even when you haven't a chance in hell of actually accomplishing it any time soon. Perlstein calls it laying down "markers:"

It’s a gambling term. A marker basically is a commitment to pay. In Guys and Dolls, Nathan Detroit would say, “that guy holds my marker.” It’s something you can’t back out of, on pain of getting your knees broken. The marker that Republicans have is that everyone who runs for office has to sign a pledge—it’s enforced by their own knee-breaker, Grover Norquist—that on pain of political death they’re not going to raise taxes.

My thesis is that a commitment that doesn’t waver adds value by the very fact of the commitment. The evidence is that even though the individual initiatives that make up the conservative project poll quite poorly, they’ve managed to succeed simply because everyone knows what the Republicans stand for. And the most profound exit poll finding in the last election had nothing to do with moral values, it was all the people who said that they disagreed with the Republicans on individual issues, but they voted for George W. Bush anyway because they knew what he stood for.

I think this is spot on. And it applies particularly to times in which we have the strange political freedom in which to operate without the responsibility of governance. We do not have to appease the pork barrel needs of legislators. We don't have to massage corporate donors. We can, instead, use the opportunity to advance ideas that have no particular hope of passage but that illustrate what we stand for.

And we don't have to do it merely by submitting ten point plans and stirring manifestos, although that's certainly legitimate. What we should do is promote big ideas and attach those ideas to the Democratic party across the spectrum of political activity.

Perlstein sugggests that every Democrat put on his or her website that they support "guaranteed health insurance for all Americans." Simple and sweet. Do we all agree that every American should have guaranteed health care? I think so. Should we say it out loud, so that the American people know that we support guaranteed health insurance for all Americans? Uh, yes.

I would also say that there are other ways to express our long term committments to more abstract ideals, like a right to privacy. When we question Judge Roberts we should make it clear what the stakes are in that battle. We shouldn't just talk about Roe, although that's important, we should put Roe in the context of all the other intrusions people will suffer both by the government and corporations if we don't acknowledge this as settled law and fundamental to our liberties. We are going to lose this nomination battle, but it is a good forum for staking out a long term position on privacy rights vis a vis everything from the Patriot Act to birth control. The libertarian strain that guys like Paul Hackett represents needs to be woven into our agenda for the long haul so that we can continue to fight for the freedom to be left alone by religious extremists and zealous police agencies alike.

I agree with Matt Yglesias that this is also a good opportunity for the Democrats to stand together and just say no. We don't have to trash the guy, if that's something that's unpalatable, but we certainly don't have to allow any free votes for a very right wing ideologue either. Unlike social security, we will not win the battle, but we stake out a position much more strongly if we hold together as a caucus instead of allowing free "gimmes" to Senators who want to appear above the fray. Nobody should be above the fray.

Tactics and strategies are, by necessity, subject to changing circumstances. Our goals and aspirations shouldn't be. Thinking big is what progressives do, and we pay a price for that at times when people adjust to progress. But we cannot survive if people don't know what we stand for. We need to take every opportunity to make that known and then stick to it even when it's impossible to achieve in the next election cycle or two.

The Democratic party apparatus for a variety of reasons have become risk averse. We in the grassroots have to help them see that this is not wise. It means that we are going to be perceived by some as intemperate and unpleasant at times. But that's ok. As Perlstein says:

We do have a timid bunch of folks in the Democratic Party, but that doesn’t mean all is lost. Timid and cautious people can often express their timidity and cautiousness by being swept up in a tide. We’ve got to provide the tide and let them surf it.

Update: Publius at legal Fiction makes a similar point about the "60's trauma" in this excellent post.


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digby 7/28/2005 11:54:00 AM |

 
Fighting Liberals

So it looks like Paul Hackett actually has a chance. I can't tell you how happily surprised I am. According to Swing State Project he's within five points in a district in which the Democrat hasn't achieved more than 30% in over twenty years. it's still a long shot, but this is a very good sign.

Hackett is, of course, a particularly attractive candidate being a good looking Iraq veteran family man and all. But the fact that he's making inroads in such a conservative district is pretty amazing in this era of GOP dominance in the red states. Let's hope it's a bellweather.

I cannot help but make note of the fact that the allegedly anti-military Move-on crowd have embraced Hackett so fervently. I would hope that this is noticed by the critics who say that there is an anti-patriotic strain in the grassroots. Clearly, we of the rank and file do not actually have a problem with the military --- we love this guy.

What this points up is the fact that the DLC badly misunderstands the reasons why the grassroots reject their leadership. It's only partially to do with policy and has almost nothing to do with ideology. It's about tactics and strategy. We see their split-the-difference "third way" approach -- particularly their rhetoric --- as a form of appeasement that may have made sense in a time of shared power but that is now self-defeating and dangerous.This is particularly so in light of the demonstrable ruthlessness of the opposition and their willingness to go far beyond any normal political limits.

We like Hackett because he's a strong, tough talking Democrat who takes it to the Republicans. I would imagine that there are plenty of gun control advocates among the urban netroots who nonetheless have given money to his campaign. And I know for a fact that there are quite a few like me who did not support the Iraq war, who nonetheless are proud of brave men like Hackett who subscribe to the military ethos of service to country. We certainly don't hold the insane decisions of ivory tower neocons against him --- we know the difference between those who make the policies and those who carry them out -- it's spelled out in our constitution.

The grassroots are not united in pacifism or any other particular ideology. The grassroots are united in our belief that the Republicans are dangerous radicals who are driving this country off of a cliff. And we've concluded that accomodationist rhetoric at a time of total GOP political dominance is suicidal, particularly when the Republicans are losing the support of the American people on virtually every issue. We think that it's time for a confrontational strategy that shines a light on the Republicans' radicalism. We believe that the country is yearning for some authentic straight talk about real issues and real problems and real solutions --- including national security --- instead of half baked esoteric reworkings of Republican talking points disguised as Democratic moderation.

We believe that you can't be perceived as strong unless you are willing to fight the political fight head on. It's that simple. It's about speaking truth to power. We don't hate the military and we aren't afraid to protect the country. In fact, our entire ethos is just the opposite. The legendary "fighting liberal" image that the hawks evoke with such nostalgia --- is us.

Paul Hackett is one of us.


It's getting down to the wire. If anyone is in the vicinity and can volunteer over the next few days until the election --- or if you have another couple of bucks to send his way --- here's the info:

Paul Hackett For Congress

Act Blue Contribution Page
digby 7/28/2005 10:24:00 AM |

Wednesday, July 27, 2005

 
Sailed Through

There had been some talk that the Democrats had a secret plan for Karen Hughes when every one of them failed to show up for the hearings on Friday and that they would unveil it on Tuesday when the hearings reconvened. Well...

Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday unanimously approved the nomination of Karen Hughes, a former political adviser to President Bush, as the State Department's top public relations official.


The Senate is expected to complete the confirmation process this week before leaving for its August recess.

Hughes' main assignment as Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs is to reverse anti-American sentiment around the world.

I'm sure there would have been no political value in getting Hughes on camera admitting that she'd been called before the grand jury. Not would it have been valuable to have on-camera reporters on the cable and evening news explaining to their viewers that Patrick Fitzgerald's probe evidently reached up to all of president's Bush's closest advisors, even Hughes.

It's a good thing we don't waste our time with such crass political tactics. Besides, Republicans might might say we are mean and nobody votes for mean. Well, unless it's being mean to a Democrat in which case people seem to positively love it.



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digby 7/27/2005 10:55:00 AM |

Tuesday, July 26, 2005

 
Debt Nanny

Can someone tell me why the government, under the "we trust you with your own money" Bush administration no less, is pressuring the credit card companies to double their minimum payments from 2% to 4% (with interest) for the stated purpose that people need to be forced to pay off their credit cards sooner?

Where does the government sponsored MNBA tough-love end? The bankruptcy bill wasn't enough, apparently. They now want to drive people who are struggling in a weak labor market into bankruptcy by abruptly doubling their monthly credit card bills. I guess there's no use wasting time in getting people into their properly indentured forever status.

Seriously, I can understand why the credit card companies want to do this now that they are protected from people having their debts discharged when they suddenly can't make their monthly payments. But on what basis does a Republican government excuse its meddling into the private financial affairs of American citizens?

This sounds like a good campaign issue to me. It hits home --- it's like Gray Davis doubling the car tax in California; it's an increase everybody notices. If the Bush administration is actually pushing it, the Democrats ought to staple this little GOP corporate collusion right on the foreheads of Republicans everywhere in the '06 election.



Update: Apparently a lot of progressives think that this is a good idea. The government should be in the business of forcing people to save more money, lower their credit card debt faster and behave more responsibly.

Unfortunately, the problem is that a large number of people who are paying only their minimums right now are people who just can't afford to pay any more. And while it's always nice to assume that people who get themselves into debt are all bums who aren't smart enough or don't care enough to manage their money properly, we actually have no idea why individuals have such high debt --- but the statistics show that good many of them are people who suffered a protracted job loss, a health crisis or a divorce. Some of them are juggling high debt because they are changing careers, they started a business or they took some other entrepreneurial chance. The large numbers of good people in a temporary jam are, sadly, going to get lumped in with all the people we feel need to be taught a lesson.

This piss poor labor economy has been propped up by easy credit for a long time by people who wanted to keep the party going. Individuals who have not been getting raises or who can't change jobs because of employer based health care have had to manage inflation and necessary big ticket items with credit at ever higher interest rates. They've met their obligations, but apparently that's not good enough. Now, the government needs to raise the national savings rate because the government itself is spending like drunken sailors so they are going to put the onus on people who are living under the high stress of a stagnant job market and high debt to do it. Somehow that just doesn't seem right to me.

The credit card companies get "hurt" by a slight dip in their usurious profits and the individual working stiff gets to learn a lesson in not eating.

This is a suckers issue for Democrats. Telling working people that we think the government should encourage their credit card companies to raise their payments because they need to learn how to manage their money is something even I find offensive --- and I'm a liberal Democrat. Let the credit card companies eat it for a while by telling them to tighten their new credit requirements --- don't just suddenly lower the boom on people. Make all new debt subject to the higher minimums. But if people are carrying a heavy load like 300 dollars a months in minimums which they can just manage --- doubling it to 600(+ interest) one month is enough to put them on the spiral of late payments, 30% interest and financial doom. Real live people are going to be hurt quite badly if this happens.

I hate MBNA as much as any person but "sticking it to 'em" by pressuring them to abruptly raise the payments of their customers isn't really a winning way to deal with this, in my book.


Here is another article that explains what's happening in greater detail.

And another.

And another.



In every single article it discusses the long term good of people paying down their debt faster. And they also discuss the singular hell that people are going to be facing when this abruptly happens to them and they don't have the ability to come up with the cash.

I'm sure there are a lot of people whohave just been too dumb to realize that they should pay more than the minimums each month in order to keep up with the compounding interest on their debt. This may help them. But it's also quite obvious that alot of people are going to be thrown to the wolves on this:

Of course, if your finances are already squeezed to the breaking point, the rate hike is a bitter pill to swallow -- good for you in the long run, but hard to take right now.

"If you're living paycheck to paycheck and your minimum payment goes from $200 to $275, spread over five cards, that's an extra $375 a month," says Brauer. "A lot of families can't come up with that." The banks already know that and are planning for it. Bank of America, one of the first to raise minimum payment requirements, worked an extra $130 million into its 2005 budget to cover projected losses from defaulting cardholders.

The same defaulting cardholders who are now going to have to pay much higher fees to go bankrupt and who, if they make above the median in their state, will no longer be allowed to file chapter 7. Quite the double whammy.



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digby 7/26/2005 10:48:00 PM |

 
Rumble

I have been skeptical that Patrick Fitzgerald would broaden the scope of his investigation to include anything beyond the narrow question of who leaked Valerie Plame's name to Robert Novak and other reporters. I thought it was possible that if he uncovered perjury or obstruction in the course of that investigation he might run with it. But, this WaPo article indicates that he might have gone beyond that narrow question:

The special prosecutor in the CIA leak probe has interviewed a wider range of administration officials than was previously known, part of an effort to determine whether anyone broke laws during a White House effort two years ago to discredit allegations that President Bush used faulty intelligence to justify the Iraq war, according to several officials familiar with the case.

Prosecutors have questioned former CIA director George J. Tenet and deputy director John E. McLaughlin, former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, State Department officials, and even a stranger who approached columnist Robert D. Novak on the street. In doing so, special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has asked not only about how CIA operative Valerie Plame's name was leaked but also how the administration went about shifting responsibility from the White House to the CIA for having included 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Africa.

Most of the questioning of CIA and State Department officials took place in 2004, the sources said.

It remains unclear whether Fitzgerald uncovered any wrongdoing in this or any other portion of his nearly 18-month investigation. All that is known at this point are the names of some people he has interviewed, what questions he has asked and whom he has focused on.

This is interesting, but I have to say that I'm not getting my hopes up. Unless he's got a high level witness who's spilling his guts, I have my doubts that this will blow the lid off of the Iraq lies. His investigation, after all, is said to have been pretty much wrapped up in 2004. How thoroughly could he have investigated this in that time? On the other hand it's very intriguing that he looked into it at all and it's at least possible that he could have exposed the white house effort to shift the blame for the yellowcake mess.

One thing is clear. The turf war between the White House and the CIA is now open warfare:

Harlow, the former CIA spokesman, said in an interview yesterday that he testified last year before a grand jury about conversations he had with Novak at least three days before the column was published. He said he warned Novak, in the strongest terms he was permitted to use without revealing classified information, that Wilson's wife had not authorized the mission and that if he did write about it, her name should not be revealed.

Harlow said that after Novak's call, he checked Plame's status and confirmed that she was an undercover operative. He said he called Novak back to repeat that the story Novak had related to him was wrong and that Plame's name should not be used. But he did not tell Novak directly that she was undercover because that was classified information.

In a column published Oct. 1, 2003, Novak wrote that the CIA official he spoke to "asked me not to use her name, saying she probably never again will be given a foreign assignment but that exposure of her name might cause 'difficulties' if she travels abroad. He never suggested to me that Wilson's wife or anybody else would be endangered. If he had, I would not have used her name."

Harlow was also involved in the larger internal administration battle over who would be held responsible for Bush using the disputed charge about the Iraq-Niger connection as part of the war argument. Based on the questions they have been asked, people involved in the case believe that Fitzgerald looked into this bureaucratic fight because the effort to discredit Wilson was part of the larger campaign to distance Bush from the Niger controversy.

Wilson unleashed a multimedia attack on Bush's claim on July 6, 2003, appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press," in an interview in The Post and writing his own op-ed article in the New York Times, in which he accused the president of "twisting" intelligence.

Behind the scenes, the White House responded with twin attacks: one on Wilson and the other on the CIA, which it wanted to take the blame for allowing the 16 words to have remained in Bush's speech. As part of this effort, then-national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley spoke with Tenet during the week about clearing up CIA responsibility for the 16 words, even though both knew the agency did not believe Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger, according to a person familiar with the conversation. Tenet was interviewed by prosecutors in the leak case, but it is not clear whether he appeared before the grand jury, a former CIA official said.

[...]

A former senior CIA official said yesterday that Tenet's statement was drafted within the agency and was shown only to Hadley on July 10 to get White House input. Only a few minor changes were accepted before it was released on July 11, this former official said. He took issue with a New York Times report last week that said Rove and Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, had a role in Tenet's statement.

Fitzgerald has run a very tight investigation for it not to have come out before now that he interviewed the head of the CIA and his top deputy. (And it certainly makes it important to know if John Bolton was one of those who was interviewed and if he lied about it to the Senate...)

If he's on to something really serious, perhaps even reaching the president, it may very well explain why Pat Roberts has been hinting around about investigating Fitzgerald and talking openly about holding hearings into whether the CIA is handling its covert agents properly. They are firing shots across the bow now --- at both Fitzgerald and the Agency.


*By the way, the mysterious stranger mentioned in the article is covered in depth in Wilson's book --- and Wilson evidently went to great lengths to document the meeting at the time it happened.

**And you have to love the fact that it now looks very much like Robert Novak knew that Plame was covert and published her identity anyway. He really is a Prime DFL.


UPDATE: This is truly scary, but I think Susie may be on to something. The hearings may just be an efficent way to grant immunity to the perpetrators. There would be nothing Fitzgerald or anyone else could do about it. Wow.

And as we speak, the Democrats are all clamoring for hearings. Is it possible they didn't anticipate this possibility?

At a news conference on Capitol Hill, Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., unveiled an Internet "Accountability Clock" to highlight the lack of congressional hearings in the 742 days since Plame's identity was disclosed after her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, attacked some of the administration's pre-war claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Lautenberg noted that he had served in the Senate under four presidents, but that "for the first time ... I'm watching the United States shirk its duty to check the powers of the White House."

The Republican majorities in the House and Senate are giving the president "a free pass" on the CIA leak controversy, he charged.

Spokesman for Frist and Hastert did not respond immediately to requests for comment Monday.

But within hours of the release of Kerry's letter, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, announced his panel would hold hearings on toughening legislation barring unauthorized disclosure of classified information.

Similarly, Hoekstra's counterpart in the Senate, Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., disclosed he will preside over hearings on how the intelligence community determines which officers need their identities protected and are covered by the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

It would be Frist-worthy if the Democrats actually helped enable the GOP to derail Fitzgerald's investigation.

On the other hand, they've given no indication that they are willing to get into this case in public, which they would have to do if they give Rove and Libby immunity and call them before the panel. But you never know. If the shit is really hitting the fan they may just be willing to take some lumps, call them as witnesses and "explain" under immunity how it really wasn't a bad thing to expose Plame because she wasn't really covert. In which case, Fitzgerald's case is over.

I can see them doing this and I can see them getting away with it too. It's just confusing enough and clever enough to baffle the press corpse and leave the Democrats gasping impotently on the sidelines.


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digby 7/26/2005 09:21:00 PM |

 
Failing Up

Following up my post below on Bremer's baby, I see that TBOGG caught the fact that the number two guy in the CPA boondoggle is being rewarded with an ambassadorship to Israel. Watch your wallets, Israelies. Neocons are coming to help you.



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digby 7/26/2005 06:34:00 PM |

 
My New Buddy

I have left it to others to do the heavy lifting on Paul Hackett's netroots campaign and I have regrets because I really would like to see him win after reading this endorsement from the conservative Cincinnati Post:

Schmidt served as a township trustee for 10 years before winning election in 2000 to the Ohio House of Representatives. There she served for four years before giving up the seat to run for the Ohio Senate - a race she lost, in a recount, by just 22 votes.

Schmidt has also held a variety of civic and political posts, and serves on the governing boards of such entities as the Clermont County Library, Clermont Mercy Hospital Foundation, the Live Oaks/Great Oaks Business Industry Partnership Council and Greater Cincinnati Right to Life.

Hackett's public service revolves around the Marine Corps. In 1982 he enlisted in a reserve officers program while he was a student at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He completed law school at Cleveland State before starting full-time active duty in 1989. He continued in the active reserves after returning in 1992 to Cincinnati, where he practiced law in a small firm before launching a solo practice in 1994. Hackett served on Milford City Council from 1995-98; he stepped down after purchasing what he describes as the oldest house in Indian Hill - a recently-renovated, 200-year-old stone structure on the banks of the Little Miami River.

Last year Hackett re-enlisted in the Marine active reserves; he went in with the rank of major and served in Iraq with a governance support team, where part of his job involved organizing convoys to bring money and supplies from Baghdad to Iraqis serving in the regional government.

In terms of their ideology and their approach to issues, Schmidt and Hackett present sharp differences.

Schmidt, from what we can discern, would likely be a dependable vote for the Bush administration, particularly its foreign policy and Iraq. In this campaign she has allied herself with the president, as she did earlier to Ohio Gov. Bob Taft and before that to former House Speaker Larry Householder. Her approach to policy issues is incremental, except perhaps concerning taxes. She seems generally to favor supply side economics, and wants to make President Bush's personal income taxes permanent and get rid of the estate, capital gains and alternative minimum taxes entirely. She supports incentives to encourage small businesses to offer health insurance, greater reliance on ethanol as a fuel source and a prohibition against Congress' use of Social Security funds for general government operations.

Hackett, in our view, is a gust of fresh air. If we had to put a label on him, it would be Libertarian Democrat. He says what he thinks and doesn't seem to have much use for the orthodoxy, or the partisanship, of either party. He doesn't want the government telling him what kinds of guns he can own, nor does he want it interfering in family or medical decisions or taking away civil liberties in the name of fighting terror. He regards Social Security more as an insurance program than a retirement savings plan, but wants to put it on a sound footing and would raise the earnings ceiling if necessary to do so.

If elected, he notes, he would be the only member of Congress with direct military experience in Iraq - which, he says, is a fight we should end as soon as possible. He wants to finish the job and get out, and he wants the United States to stop holding hands with Pakistan and to get serious about tracking down those responsible for the 9-11 attacks.

We like Hackett's candor. We're impressed with the freshness of his ideas. We believe his experience shows him to be someone who is action-oriented.

We endorse Hackett for the 2nd District seat.

It just doesn't get any better than that for a Democrat in a Republican district. I don't know if he'll win -- special elections are tough --- but he certainly seems like the kind of candidate that we should be trying to field in these conservative districts if we want to ever take back the congress.

And, by the way, I think he's even patriotic enough for the DLC, don't you? Of course, he doesn't endorse free trade and he doesn't seem inclined to jettison all of our civil liberties one at a time in order to appease religious zealots and panicked neocons, so I'm not sure he's quite malleable enough.

I understand the Republicans have found his achilles heel though, as they always do. Seems he is a bit of an effeminate pansy. As a US Marine he was only involved in transporting goods and cash through a war zone instead of furiously pounding out the words "Smoke 'Em Out!" on his little keyboard while whistling the Colonel Bogie March as true patriots do. Well, nobody's perfect. Perhaps the voters will overlook his cowardice.

Here's the page to donate if you're of a mind. Even if you don't, read about this guy and see if you can live with this mix of issues. I'm inclined to think that with a fat dose of fiery economic populism, this could really work for us on a larger scale. The fact that the Cincinnati Post sees this guy's views a "fresh" should give us pause. We desperately need some fresh.

My readers know that I'm a big civil libertarian so I'm attracted to candidates who emphasize those issues. But I think I'm a little bit anomalous among the leftie netroots crowd on that and I'm thrilled to see that we are backing this guy so fervently. It makes me think that we will be able to transcend some of our differences when the time comes and coalesce around candidates who advance our agenda but who might have a mix of priorities that don't fit perfectly with our own.

Just one last note: Hackett apparently got off the plane from Iraq and was so disgusted by the Terri Schiavo circus that he decided to run for congress. You've just gotta love a Democrat like that.


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digby 7/26/2005 02:15:00 PM |

 
Bremer's Baby

So, people in Baghdad have worms in their drinking water and no electricity during the worst heat of the day. If someone wants to know why they hate us, that's a good place to start.

Over 18 months, American officials spent almost $2 billion to revive the capital ravaged by war and neglect, according to Army Gen. William G. Webster, who heads the 30,000 U.S. and foreign troops and 15,000 Iraqi soldiers known collectively as Task Force Baghdad. But the money goes for long-term projects that yield few visible results and for security to protect the construction sites from sabotage.

As a result, Iraqis have seen scant evidence of improvement in their homes, streets or neighborhoods. They blame American and Iraqi government corruption.

"We thank God that the air we breathe is not in the hands of the government. Otherwise they would have cut it off for a few hours each day," said Nadeem Haki, 39, an electric-goods shop owner in the upscale Karrada district in the east of the capital.

Of the major completed projects in Baghdad, more than $38 million went to sewage projects, $375,000 to a water main and $101.2 million to electricity generation and transmission.

Others are in the works. More than $792 million is being invested in water, sewage and electricity projects across the capital, according to U.S. military documents.

The progress is slow and the rewards incremental. Parts of the city - such as the impoverished Shiite Muslim neighborhood Sadr City, once flooded with green rivers of sewage - now have functioning sewer systems.

"The things that go below the ground and provide enough electricity are incredibly expensive, especially when you have to pay for security for that local job site," Webster said.

Yes. All these things are very expensive. Too bad we can't lay our hands on the 8 Fucking Billion Dollars of the Iraqis own money that went missing under Paul Bremer's Coalition provisional Government.

When Paul Bremer, the American pro consul in Baghdad until June last year, arrived in Iraq soon after the official end of hostilities, there was $6bn left over from the UN Oil for Food Programme, as well as sequestered and frozen assets, and at least $10bn from resumed Iraqi oil exports. Under Security Council Resolution 1483, passed on May 22 2003, all these funds were transferred into a new account held at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, called the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), and intended to be spent by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) "in a transparent manner ... for the benefit of the Iraqi people".

The US Congress also voted to spend $18.4bn of US taxpayers' money on the redevelopment of Iraq. By June 28 last year, however, when Bremer left Baghdad two days early to avoid possible attack on the way to the airport, his CPA had spent up to $20bn of Iraqi money, compared with $300m of US funds. The "reconstruction" of Iraq is the largest American-led occupation programme since the Marshall Plan - but the US government funded the Marshall Plan. Defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Bremer have made sure that the reconstruction of Iraq is paid for by the "liberated" country, by the Iraqis themselves.

The CPA maintained one fund of nearly $600m cash for which there is no paperwork: $200m of it was kept in a room in one of Saddam's former palaces. The US soldier in charge used to keep the key to the room in his backpack, which he left on his desk when he popped out for lunch. Again, this is Iraqi money, not US funds.

The "financial irregularities" described in audit reports carried out by agencies of the American government and auditors working for the international community collectively give a detailed insight into the mentality of the American occupation authorities and the way they operated. Truckloads of dollars were handed out for which neither they nor the recipients felt they had to be accountable.

The auditors have so far referred more than a hundred contracts, involving billions of dollars paid to American personnel and corporations, for investigation and possible criminal prosecution. They have also discovered that $8.8bn that passed through the new Iraqi government ministries in Baghdad while Bremer was in charge is unaccounted for, with little prospect of finding out where it has gone. A further $3.4bn appropriated by Congress for Iraqi development has since been siphoned off to finance "security".

[...]

Lack of accountability does not stop with the Americans. In January this year, the Sigir issued a report detailing evidence of fraud, corruption and waste by the Iraqi Interim Government when Bremer was in charge. They found that $8.8bn - the entire Iraqi Interim Government spending from October 2003 through June 2004 - was not properly accounted for. The Iraqi Office of Budget and Management at one point had only six staff, all of them inexperienced, and most of the ministries had no budget departments. Iraq's newly appointed ministers and their senior officials were free to hand out hundreds of millions of dollars in cash as they pleased, while American "advisers" looked on.

"CPA personnel did not review and compare financial, budgetary and operational performance to planned or expected results," the auditors explained. One ministry gave out $430m in contracts without its CPA advisers seeing any of the paperwork. Another claimed to be paying 8,206 guards, but only 602 could be found. There is simply no way of knowing how much of the $8.8bn has gone to pay for private militias and into private pockets.

"It's remarkable that the inspector general's office could have produced even a draft report with so many misconceptions and inaccuracies," Bremer said in his reply to the Sigir report. "At liberation, the Iraqi economy was dead in the water. So CPA's top priority was to get the economy going."

The Sigir has responded by releasing another audit this April, an investigation into the way Bremer's CPA managed cash payments from Iraqi funds in just one part of Iraq, the region around Hillah: "During the course of the audit, we identified deficiencies in the control of cash ... of such magnitude as to require prompt attention. Those deficiencies were so significant that we were precluded from accomplishing our stated objectives." They found that CPA headquarters in Baghdad "did not maintain full control and accountability for approximately $119.9m", and that agents in the field "cannot properly account for or support over $96.6m in cash and receipts". The agents were mostly Americans in Iraq on short-term contracts. One agent's account balance was "overstated by $2,825,755, and the error went undetected". Another agent was given $25m cash for which Bremer's office "acknowledged not having any supporting documentation". Of more than $23m given to another agent, there are only records for $6,306,836 paid to contractors.

Many of the American agents submitted their paperwork only hours before they headed to the airport. Two left Iraq without accounting for $750,000 each, which has never been found. CPA head office cleared several agents' balances of between $250,000 and $12m without any receipts. One agent who did submit receipts, on being told that he still owed $1,878,870, turned up three days later with exactly that amount. The auditors thought that "this suggests that the agent had a reserve of cash", pointing out that if his original figures had been correct, he would have accounted to the CPA for approximately $3.8m more than he had been given in the first place, which "suggests that the receipt documents provided to the DFI account manager were unreliable".

I urge you to read the whole story. It was published earlier this month and fell down the memory hole. It's simply unbelievable.

I'm sure that Bush apologists will be tempted to say that's the price the Iraqi people had to pay for their liberation, but it's a little bit hard to understand why they would have had to pay to line the pockets of corrupt Americans and local bigshots for the privilege. If they weren't still dodging worms in their drinking water, they might have let it slide.

Meanwhile, we struggle at home with the fact that US taxpayers are still spending a billion dollars a week --- most of it on homegrown corruption, one suspects, because the troops are still having to put sheet metal on their humvees because they don't have the proper armor. I would guess that if there is ever a proper accounting, and there will likely never be one, that US taxpayers are being screwed more royally on this than they can possible imagine. There is no transparency and congress is ironically too afraid of being called cowardly to demand explanations.

The CPA though was a very special boondoggle, if you'll recall. It was an experiment in Republican Party governance. They refused to allow anyone on "the team" who didn't pass the GOP litmus test. They would not hire experts nor would they allow foreign or domestic political actors who were not deemed sufficiently loyal to Bush to help with planning and implementation. So much so that they were finally reduced to hiring kids who had posted resumes on the Heritage Foundation web-site in order to ensure ideological purity. If I recall correctly, Ari Fleischer's brother was put in charge of setting up the new Iraqi stock market despite the fact that he knew absolutely zero about stock markets. But he had the right contacts, that's for sure.

And, let's not forget that all this happened because we were in such a damned hurry to "disarm" Iraq that we couldn't take even a minute to think through how we might re-start their economy and rebuild their infrastructure in a planned and rational way. We just invaded come hell or high water and then sent in a bunch of college Republicans with planeloads of cash. This is one of the aspects of the DSM's that hasn't yet been properly discussed. The minutes make clear that it wasn't that our plans just didn't forsee the particular problems we encountered. We didn't plan for the post war period at all.

This is a huge story for someone to truly unravel although I think it will probably take a novelist or a filmmaker to do it justice. The grand Neocon experiment turns out to be a corrupt boondoggle of unprecedented, epic proportions. Perhaps that plot is just too predictable to sell...

I can tell you one thing, though: I don't want to hear one more goddamned self-righteous word from any Republican about the "Oil For Food" scandal. Not one.
digby 7/26/2005 08:36:00 AM |

Monday, July 25, 2005

 
Running On Empty

Will Marshall of the DLC has written a critique of us Michael Moore Democrats who are ruining the party with our anti-Americanism and lack of real patriotism. Don't even bother to read it if this kind of thing pisses you off because this one's a doozy.

There are many problems with his thesis, but this is perhaps the central thing he gets wrong:

The left's unease with patriotism is rooted in a 1960s narrative of American arrogance and abuse of power. For many liberals who came of age during the protests against the Vietnam War, writes leftish commentator Todd Gitlin, "the most powerful public emotion of our lives was rejecting patriotism." As he and other honest liberals have acknowledged, the excesses of protest politics still haunt liberalism today and complicate Democratic efforts to develop a coherent stance toward American power and the use of force.

When Americans ponder such questions today, their frame of reference is not the Vietnam War, but Sept. 11, 2001. The terrorist attacks evoked the most powerful upsurge in patriotic feeling since Pearl Harbor, and thrust national security back into the center of American politics. Democrats have yet to come to grips with this new reality. More than anything else, they need to show the country a party unified behind a new patriotism -- a progressive patriotism determined to succeed in Iraq and win the war on terror, to close a yawning cultural gap between Democrats and the military, and to summon a new spirit of national service and shared sacrifice to counter the politics of polarization.

Well, I don't know about you, but I happen to be an American who went through 9/11 just like the conservatives and the hawkish centrists did. I don't know who he's talking about. We all have the same frame of reference as everyone else who has lived in our time. We live in the new reality too and we've come to grips with it --- we simply don't agree with their prescription for dealing with terrorism and it has nothing to do with Vietnam or patriotism.

How petty and lacking in imagination this discussion is. Apparently, all honest liberals are ex-campus radicals who went to school with Todd Gitlin and who feel "uncomfortable" with this new patriotism because their formative experience was with protest politics. Whatever. Perhaps Marshall ought to check with his boss Al From, who Rick Perlstein quotes in "The Stockticker and the Superjumbo" as saying that that his formative experience was McGovern's loss in 1972. I think that might just be a bit more to the point.

I'm a baby boomer but I'm 48 and my formative political experience was probably Watergate, in which patriotism was shown to be a willingness to put the country above politics when the chips were down. Republicans Howard Baker and Barry Goldwater ranked as major patriots for me. Indeed, Watergate was one of those moments when I think the entire country was impressed (and surprised) by the incredible resiliency of its system of government and the integrity of men and women who rose to the occasion. To me patriotism isn't about fighting wars, it's about love of country.

People born in 1970 are now in their mid-30's. Are they scarred by their parents' youthful beliefs in "anti-patriotism?" Their formative political years were during the Reagan era, hardly a period of anti-americanism. Flag waving was a fetish.

My friends' mother is 80 years old. She's a child of the depression and she's a Democrat who was adamantly against the Iraq war. It had nothing to do with Vietnam; it was because she didn't believe in "wars of aggression." That was the reflexive foreign policy belief of cold war liberals who learned their lessons from the two world wars. I have another friend who is 22 and was against the war in Iraq because he believes it distracts from the War on terrorism. I was against it because I gravely mistrust the neocon vision of American global hegemony and I wanted them to do the minumum possible until we could get sane people in office to assess the threat properly. We are not all singing kumbaya from the 60's campus radical manual.

He talks about liberals (or maybe just the unbearable bi-coastal elites he describes in such loving detail) as if we are from Mars. I have no doubt that there are quite a few who really disdain the military and would be shocked to see one of their friends' children from the elite private school choosing to join the marines instead of going to an Ivy League College as expected. But really, can we call this a particularly Democratic or liberal response? Considering the remarkable problem the military is having with recruitment, I'd have to say it's a pretty common American response, rather than any comment on Democrats. It's not as if Republicans are all rushing out to join up either. If it's a lack of patriotism that's causing that reaction I think you would have to say that most Americans are unpatriotic.

He worries that the military itself is too Republican and laments that the Democrats are not better represented. His evidence is two polls which show that the majority of officers are Republicans. Can everyone see what might be wrong with that picture?

The salient point in all this is that there are no national Democrats who are anti- military and very, very few rank and file Democrats who are anti-military. Even the hated Michael Moore shows a tremendous affinity for the grunts in his movies in which he focuses on the sacrifices of working and middle class families who are being treated terribly by the government in thanks for their sacrifice. This thing that Marshall and his DLCers see is not anti-military; it's anti-Washington and that's not the same thing at all.

He builds a straw man out of poll results that purport to show that most Democrats don't want to fight the war on terrorism with the same sort of dizzying fervor he thinks is required, and calls them unpatriotic for their views. He refers to a list of foreign policy issues in which more Democrats consider outsourcing to be a bigger worry than dismantling al Qaeda.

Why is that a measure of patriotism? It's actually surprisingly rational. The statistics would certainly show that any individual stands a greater chance of being personally affected by outsourcing than an al Qaeda terrorist attack. It's actually kind of dumb to put al Qaeda at the top of your list of national security worries when really, it isn't the biggest one we face --- loose nukes are, and nobody gives a fuck about that.

Furthermore, it's entirely possible that at least some Democrats realize that al Qaeda isn't something you can just "dismantle" with a ripping good show of military might because it's morphed into a constantly changing, moving concept, rather than a single entity you can "end." And while terrorism is scary and we need to do all we can to protect people from it, it is not any more threatening than Leonid Bresznev potentially getting into a pissing match or losing control of his military or any other thing that could have resulted in an accidental nuclear exchange during the cold war. We lived for many years under an unimaginable threat (still do, actually) and we managed to keep our heads for the most part and not turn ourselves inside out over it. This threat of terrorism is real and it's important, but we simply have to stop overreacting like we did with Iraq or we really are going to turn it into the existential threat these people seem to desire so fervently.

Finally, Marshall suggests that we not make such a big deal out torture.

"...the revelation that some U.S. troops aren't saints should not come as too great a shock, at least to grownups. By dwelling obsessively on U.S. misdeeds while ignoring the far more heinous crimes of what is quite possibly the most barbaric insurgency in modern times, anti-war critics betray an anti-American bias that undercuts their credibility."

(Yeah, it's the liberals who are ignoring the barbaric insurgency in Iraq. And here the last I heard they were in their last throes.)

Let's just say I'm a big believer in supporting the troops --- troops like Spc. Joseph Darby, for instance, who had the courage and patriotism to stand up and say something when his fellow troopers were committing reprehensible acts --- or the FBI agents who complained on the record about what they saw at Guantanamo. I will never excuse the United States using torture or abuse or holding prisoners indefinitely without due process. Never. No matter what the "barbaric insurgency" does in Iraq. And I am more than willing to throw down the gauntlet on this and say that anyone who soft peddles those things is the worst kind of anti-American there is. We're not going to find common ground on this subject. If that kicks me out of the big tent so be it. I'm not signing on to that shit, ever.

I recognise that saying all this means that I couldn't get elected. And for that reason there are almost no elected Democrats who do say what I'm saying. They all wave flags and shriek like old ladies every time something happens --- and they back ridiculous wars, because if they don't the chattering classes will go nuts and label them unpatriotic. But saying it doesn't make it true. That's inside the beltway Republican kabuki which nobody who calls himself a Democrat should ever allow himself to perform. There are legitimate reasons why we might disagree on this stuff and still take national security seriously.

Being lectured all the time by effete DC Democrats on "patriotism" because I don't back their reflexively hawkish foreign policy is not only insulting it's dumb. It plays into stereotypes that only serve the Republicans by turning this into a dick measuring contest when we should be turning the conversation into who can get the job done. I would submit that if anyone's been traumatized by the Vietnam experience it's the tired Democratic national security hawks who are always rushing to support military action, no matter how insanely counterproductive, because some Republican somewhere might call him a pussy. They've been around since the 60's too. Hell, they've been around forever.



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digby 7/25/2005 05:04:00 PM |

 
"Never Tell Anybody Outside The Family What You're Thinking Again"

This Alberto Gonzales 12 hour gap is quite interesting, but I'm sure that we all also remember that Gonzales also later reviewed every document that was produced and vetted it before it was released to the Justice Department --- the Justice Department run by John Ashcroft who didn't bother to recuse himself until three months later. Let's just say there were many opportunities for documents to have gone astray in this process.

As I was perusing old articles about the document production, I also realized that none of the top administration aides bothered to lawyer up in the early days when they were talking to the FBI. One could assume that they were confident they'd done nothing wrong, but it strikes me that these guys may have thought it was in the bag. They had old "Let The Ego Soar" Ashcroft at justice and Alberto the torturer handling any incriminating documents.

And while one might have expected the president to say that he knew the truth would be revealed because he expected his staff to be forthcoming with the authorities, instead we got this:

"I have no idea whether we'll find out who the leaker is, partially because, in all due respect to your profession, you do a very good job of protecting the leakers," he said. "You tell me: How many sources have you had that's leaked information that you've exposed or had been exposed? Probably none. I mean, this town is a town full of people who like to leak information."

We always knew that somebody leaked this to Bob Novak. And unless Novak was lying, it was two senior white house officials. But the president of the United States said quite candidly that he didn't think we would ever know the truth unless reporters burned their sources. He certainly didn't seem to expect the "senior white house official" sources to come forward, did he?

With the benefit of hindsight, that sounds like the president of the United States was reminding the press corpse to keep its collective trap shut, doesn't it? (Are you listening Judy?)



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digby 7/25/2005 02:02:00 PM |

 
Tripping Them Up

Josh Marshall points out today that Senator Pat Roberts (R- Partisan Tool) has decided that the congress must waste no time holding hearings on whether the CIA is properly protecting its covert agents. After all, if Karl Rove and Scooter Libby can find out who they are, how safe can they be?

The only other possibility -- one which I've referred to jokingly in the past -- is to argue that she wasn't covert enough. That is to say, maybe she was covert to the CIA. But she really wasn't covert up to the standards of say, Bill Safire or Tucker Carlson or Bill O'Reilly.

And this, understand, is the premise of the new Roberts' hearings. Was she really covert enough? And does the CIA really know how to define 'covert'. Asked about a bankrobber caught red-handed outside the bank, Sen. Roberts response would be to say, "But how much real claim did the bank have to that money? Did they really earn it? And what did they do to protect it?"

Roberts is one of the more reprehensible hacks in the GOP caucus and that's saying something. That he's chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is frankly scary. His little addendum to the SSCI report on Iraq pre-war intelligence is one of the most amazing examples of partisan smearing we've ever seen coming from a committee that is usually held up as the model of bi-partisan seriousness.

But his appearance on CNN yesterday had him dancing like he was challenging Ricky Martin to a samba contest. And, unfortunately, my senator, Dianne Feinstein made little effort to trip him up.

BLITZER: How big of a deal in your assessment is the fact that the CIA asked the Justice Department to investigate the leak of that covert CIA operative, Valerie Plame? Is this a big deal in your opinion, releasing the identity of an undercover CIA officer?

ROBERTS: Why yes, it is a big deal. And in the Intelligence Committee, we're going to go into quite a series of hearings in regards to cover. You cannot be in the business of outing somebody, if that's the proper word.

BLITZER: I ask the question because some are suggesting she really wasn't undercover any more. She had been working at the CIA in nonproliferation. She really wasn't a technical...

ROBERTS: There's a five-year period, OK? And whether or not that five-year period had been reached or not is still questionable. And I must say from a common sense standpoint, driving back and forth to work to the CIA headquarters, I don't know if that really qualifies as being, you know, covert.

But generically speaking, it is a very serious matter although it obviously dovetails now into the issue of the day in regards to Karl Rove and the First Amendment, and all of that.

BLITZER: The fact that the CIA asked for this criminal investigation, this probe into who leaked her name to Bob Novak, what does that say to you, Senator Feinstein?

FEINSTEIN: Well, it says to me that the CIA values this as extraordinarily important. If they can't protect their agents, they can't survive as an agency. And I've been distressed to even see in the newspapers, I believe this morning, about what some of the undercover placements were, listing them rather generically.

BLITZER: Have you been briefed, has the committee been briefed by the CIA about the potential damage that has been done, if any lives have been endangered, her contacts, undercover spies, if you will, as a result of her name being made public?

FEINSTEIN: I have not been briefed.

BLITZER: Have you been briefed on that?

ROBERTS: We are going to have those hearings, or those briefings, pardon.

BLITZER: But have you received a preliminary assessment of damage? Because usually when someone has been exposed like this, they do a damage assessment.

ROBERTS: I'll tell you what we have done in the 511 page document that we've released from the WMD report: We went into considerable detail in regards to the veracity of Admiral Wilson's testimony.

BLITZER: Ambassador Wilson.

ROBERTS: Pardon me. Admiral. All of a sudden, I've got him in a different, you know category. But the ambassador. And I'm just going to be very blunt about it. I don't think the White House had any need to discredit him. He discredited himself. He was all over the lot.

Now, I'm not going to say anymore about that because that's one issue.

I want to know basically who assigned him and what role she played. And then obviously we want to find out exactly what happened in regards to her covert status.

Now, we're going to have to wait on that in regards to the special prosecutor. But overall, Dianne is exactly right. If we're in the business now where somehow, through some means, a covert officer working in the CIA, if that becomes public, that just can not happen. And so that is why the committee is going to be so aggressive in really taking a look at it.

BLITZER: Should the president's top political adviser, the deputy White House chief of staff, Karl Rove, who has now apparently, according to sources close to him, acknowledged speaking to reporters about Valerie Plame Wilson, should his security clearances, based on what you know, Senator Feinstein, be revoked?

FEINSTEIN: Well, based on what I know, I think yes for the time being. I think you have to look at this: Who had opportunity, who had means, and who had motive? And if you look at those three things, you see the White House somewhere, some way figures into it.

Now, the details and the precise statements are being analyzed by the prosecutor, very well-regarded Mr. Fitzgerald. It's going to be very interesting to see what he comes up with. But in the meantime, I mean, you have somebody that quite possibly either corroborated or volunteered information that shouldn't be in the public sector.

BLITZER: Let's talk about the new Supreme Court nominee, John Roberts.

ROBERTS: I had another comment by the way, but...

FEINSTEIN: I figured you would.

BLITZER: Well, go ahead. Briefly comment and then we'll move on to John Roberts.

ROBERTS: Well, I think you're presumed innocent until proven guilty. And I think we ought to wait on the special prosecutor. If you go down a laundry list of leaks in this town as to who was involved and who wasn't, you'd probably have 10 or 12 people, and some of them are in the CIA. And there's been leaks from the CIA.

You know, in this town, when there is a leak, nobody gets wet until there is a leak. And right now we're about up to here on this particular issue. So let's wait on the facts.

Roberts refused to say if he'd been given a damage assessment, which is kind of interesting. But, he's just a blunt tool, not a very sharp one, so it could be that he was just rushing to the next talking point. But he was all over the map with that little exchange, ending with the "everybody leaks classified information so what's the big deal" excuse.

Dianne said that Rove should probably have his security clearance revoked for the time being and that the white house had the means and the motive to leak Plame's name. Well, doesn't that just blow the lid off this thing? As if we don't know that the white house was involved ferchirstsake. She wasn't well prepared, as usual.

She and all the Democrats should be trying to tie these guys up in knots with the obvious contradiction that the tough-guy national security Republicans have been caught red-handed being loosy-goosy with classified information for political reasons. They should always bring up the president. This isn't too difficult to do.

Imagine if Feinstein had said in reponse to Wolf's question about revoking Rove's security clearance, "Well, Wolf, it is well established already that Karl Rove was involved in leaking Valerie Plame's identity to the press. His lawyer admitted just this week that he was one of Robert Novak's two sources. I have every faith that the special prosecutor will find out if there is evidence that he or anyone else broke the law by doing this. But I think that even Pat here would have to admit that regardless of whether it was legal or illegal, Karl Rove and others in the White House have shown an appalling lack of judgment. As the man in charge, the president has a responsibility for the actions of his staff. He should have called Karl Rove into his office and demanded an explanation and withdrawn his security clearance the minute it was found that he was involved in this. Breaking the law isn't the issue here, Wolf. This is about national security. We're at war. The president shouldn't be playing politics with this stuff."

It would be helpful to show Bush as being either impotent to deal with Karl Rove, or covering for him, because it is imperative for Democrats over the long haul to begin to show the Republicans as being unable to deal responsibly with national security. If you look at what Roberts was saying it was basically, "Joe Wilson is a liar and his wife worked in Washington and anyway everybody leaks." Hardly the stuff of a macho "never complain, never explain" warrior, is it? This is an opportunity for Democrats to change the long standing narrative that the Republicans have built up about their national security prowess. If the Commander in Chief can't even call his own staff on the carpet when they screw up, then how tough is he?

This is the second time in 25 years that we've had a two term GOP president who has to be portrayed as dumb, distanced and out-of-it in order to cover for his staff running amuck. They're always out of the loop, aren't they? Never quite in charge when the bad shit happens, only the good. It's time for the Democrats to start tying this into a bigger narrative about national security. These tough guys, these people who are going to keep us safe, seem to continually elect presidents who are cluelss about what's going on around them. Or, at least, that's what they are always forced to use as an excuse when they fuck up.

It takes time to build new storylines. Even if this one isn't very good, we really need get started on something. And that means that Democrats have to agree among themselves on a basic framework of criticism for Republican national security policy and practice. They need to internalize it so that when a guy like Roberts starts blathering, they can respond with vigor and authority without having to think too much about it. Vague, off-point pablum like Feinstein's is exacerbating our problem. We look weak because we won't confront a blowhard like Roberts. And we are weak because we refuse to take every opportunity to show the American people that the Republicans are screw-ups on national security. That last should actually be pretty easy, because it patently true.



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digby 7/25/2005 11:23:00 AM |

Saturday, July 23, 2005

 
Second Track

Meanwhile, a parallel investigation is under way into who forged the Niger documents. They are known to have been passed to an Italian journalist by a former Italian defence intelligence officer, Rocco Martino, in October 2002, but their origins have remained a mystery. Mr Martino has insisted to the Italian press that he was "a tool used by someone for games much bigger than me", but has not specified who that might be.

A source familiar with the inquiry said investigators were examining whether former US intelligence agents may have been involved in possible collaboration with Iraqi exiles determined to prove that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear programme.

Well now. That would be something, wouldn't it?

Josh Marshall, who was once hot on the trail of this forgery story, wrote this a couple of weeks ago, the night O'Donnell revealed Rove's name on the McLaughlin report:

One other note along these lines.

I've gotten hints or suggestions from several sources over the last month that new information is bubbling to the surface, not about who leaked Valerie Plame's identity, but who was behind the underlying caper that started the whole drama afoot in the first place: those phoney Niger uranium documents.

As longtime readers of this site know, last year colleagues of mine and I were able to trace the documents back to a former Italian intelligence agent named Rocco Martino. Martino was the 'Italian businessman' who tried to sell the documents to Elizabetta Burba, the journalist who eventually brought them to the US Embassy in Rome.

We were able determine that the documents had been put into Martino's hands by a then-serving member of SISMI -- Italian military intelligence. And this SISMI colonel had done so using a women working in the Niger embassy in Rome, an Italian national, as a cut-out.

This was, as you might imagine, more than enough to make us want to know a lot more. But we were never able to develop any conclusive proof about who or what was behind the SISMI colonel or what the backstory was within SISMI.

Suspicions, we had plenty. But in terms of hard facts, we hit a wall just inside SISMI.

Just who forged the documents? And, more significantly, who put the whole process in motion? And why had SISMI or elements within it involved themselves?

This story and Plame ar running on different tracks, but they come to the same station eventually. And, once again, the spectre of Judith Miller hangs over it --- she's the Zelig of the iraq operation.

I don't have enough information to speculate about this, but I think it is significant that information is leaking out about this case as well. It's hard to know whether it's because people are fed up or because the white house is weak or some combination of both. But the veil is lifting on this administration's shenanigans, for sure. It's going to be a very interesting time.

Here's the immediate political result for Dear Leader:

Across the board, those stellar character ratings which supposedly meant Bush could weather any political storm have become mediocre to poor. And he's lost the most ground among independents, only 38 percent of whom now believe Bush is trustworthy or cares about people like them. Even more amazing, less than half (48 percent) of indepedents now think Bush is a strong leader, which is a massive 24 point decline since Pew's previous measurement.

And how about this: in February of this year, the two leading one word description of Bush were "honest" and "good", cited by 38 percent and 20 percent of the public, respectively. Today, honest has declined to 31 percent, closely followed by "incompetent" (26 percent, up from 14 percent) and "arrogant" (24 percent, up from 15 percent).

Reality bites.

Update: Just to be clear, what's new about the Guardian story isn't that the FBI suspects Iraqi exiles of being involved, it the part about retired US intelligence being involved that I was unaware of.

Seymour Hersh has speculated that it was a sort of reverse sting by appalled ex-CIA operatives, but this would indicate a less byzantine explanation. People with common interests helping each other out.



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digby 7/23/2005 09:45:00 AM |

Friday, July 22, 2005

 
Waivering

Via Atrios I see that Steve Clemens has it on good authority that John Bolton is known to be a regular source for Judith Miller, although we don't know if he was her source on this.

We know that whoever spoke with Miller waived his or her confidentiality. Does anyone know who all signed waivers?



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digby 7/22/2005 03:34:00 PM |

 
Too Tired To Be Outraged

This is just sad:

This morning the Wall Street Journal reported that Senate Democrats were planning “to grill Bush confidant Karen Hughes” about her involvement in the ever widening leak-case. But, Senate Democrats must have gotten lost on the way to the hearing. Not one showed up. Instead, according to the Associated Press:

“A scaled-back Senate Foreign Relations Committee showered praise Friday on Karen Hughes and put the former political adviser to President Bush on a fast track to confirmation as the State Department’s top public relations official.”

The absence of the Democrats is even more glaring considering just today the New York Times reported that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald called Karen Hughes before the grand jury to testify as to her involvement in the leak-case. Of course, this begs the obvious question: Karen Hughes, did you have a role in leaking the name of an undercover CIA agent?

Instead of any substantive questions, the Democrats simply didn’t show up. But we did get this statement from ranking minority member Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE):

“Mr. Chairman, I regret that previous commitments prevent me from attending the confirmation hearing this morning.

I am particularly interested in and supportive of the nomination of Karen Hughes to be undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. What this job requires, among other things, is continuity. The last two undersecretaries have stayed six and 18 months, respectively.

I met with the nominee yesterday and understand that, barring unforeseen circumstances, she is willing to stay through the president’s term.

I believe that she is highly qualified because of her professional background, and, importantly, enjoys the full confidence of the president and the secretary of state...

Well, that's awfully friendly of him. No need to provide the evening news or the Sunday news shows with footage of Karen Hughes being grilled about getting called before the grand jury in the Plame case. That would be what Republicans would do in our situation and that wouldn't be nice at all.

Think Progress has a list of questions the Democrats might have asked if they could have gotten it up to attend the meeting. I assume they were too busy with their preparations to lionize John Roberts and didn't have the time.

We just don't have the killer instinct. They do. So they win and we lose. I guess we have to wait for total economic armageddon or nuclear meltdown in which case we will win by default.



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digby 7/22/2005 03:17:00 PM |

 
Executive Infallibility

It would appear that the president is sticking to his belief that he has the sole right to order torture, hold people indefinitely and secretly and make up the rules as he goes along. To hell with the congress. It doesn't matter what Senator John McCain, former torture victim and POW says; it doesn't matter what Senator Lindsey Graham, former JAG lawyer says; and it doesn't matter what Senator John Warner,former Secretary of the Navy says. (I won't even mention that "elections have consequences" and Democrats are supposed to STFU for the duration.)No one has any right to tell the president nothin' bout prisoners in a time 'o unending, ever-present war. And they have no right to ask any questions about it either.

The White House on Thursday threatened to veto a massive Senate bill for $442 billion in next year's defense programs if it moves to regulate the Pentagon's treatment of detainees or sets up a commission to investigate operations at Guantanamo Bay prison and elsewhere.

The Bush administration, under fire for the indefinite detention of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and questions over whether its policies led to horrendous abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, put lawmakers on notice it did not want them legislating on the matter.

In a statement, the White House said such amendments would "interfere with the protection of Americans from terrorism by diverting resources from the war."

"If legislation is presented that would restrict the president's authority to protect Americans effectively from terrorist attack and bring terrorists to justice," the bill could be vetoed, the statement said.

Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, who endured torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, said after meeting at the Capitol with Vice President Dick Cheney that he still intended to offer amendments next week "on the standard of treatment of prisoners."

South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who was working on legislation defining the legal status of enemy combatants being held in Guantanamo, also said he would offer an amendment.

They were working with Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner of Virginia on amendments intended to prevent further abuses in the wake of the scandal over sexual abuse and mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison and harsh, degrading interrogations at Guantanamo.

And just look at what these unAmerican, commie bastards are trying to do:

Possible measures included barring the holding of "ghost" detainees whose names are not disclosed, codifying a ban against cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment, and using the Army manual as a basis for all interrogations.

Really, what business is this of the congress anyway? Who do they think they are --- elected representatives of the people?

It would be very nice to see the president veto the defense bill over this but, needless to say, it will not happen. But someday, if the country survives this wretched radical era, people will look back on this with particular disgust, not just because the president of the United States openly seeks to preserve his right to torture (which is stomach churning) but also the total abdication of responsibility by the Republican congress.

And people say the Democrats are the chickenshits. Another big lie. Nobody, but nobody, is more gutless than a congressional Republican cowering at the feet of the flatulent Rove and his little dog George.



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digby 7/22/2005 12:22:00 PM |

 
Leaking Briefs

Talk Left has an excellent primer on how to figure out who's doing the leaking.



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digby 7/22/2005 12:12:00 PM |

 
Overlooking The Obvious

In this week's editorial The New Republic discusses the rightwing push back on Rovegate. They complain that the emphasis on Rove obscures the more important story of Iraq lies. I submit that without Rovegate, there would be no coverage of the Iraq lies at all, so we should not knock the hook that gives us the opportunity to talk about the bigger picture.

The editorial brings up something else, however, that I think is quite important. It mentions the single most important weapon in our arsenal when arguing about the bigger picture surrounding Wilson's trip:

As that investigation has spilled onto the front pages in the last few weeks, supporters of the administration have picked up where they left off two years ago, saying that Wilson was unqualified for the Niger investigation and declaring that his credibility is in tatters. It's true that Wilson has made himself an easy target for such accusations by posing with his wife for Vanity Fair magazine and taking a very public role advising the Kerry campaign last fall. But the most serious charge that Wilson's critics level against him is the allegation that he was wrong in his assessment of Iraq's dealing with Niger. Supporters of Rove have revived this accusation in an effort to claim that, when Rove spoke to reporters about Plame, he wasn't trying to disparage Wilson so much as warn them off a "bad story." But what, exactly, was "bad" about Wilson's story?

Both the national security adviser and the CIA director at the time (Condoleezza Rice and George Tenet, respectively) issued public apologies for the Niger claim, admitting it was unsubstantiated. And the most authoritative report on the matter comes from the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), which spent a year combing the Iraqi countryside for alleged weapons of mass destruction. Its conclusion: "ISG has not found evidence to show that Iraq sought uranium from abroad after 1991 or renewed indigenous production of such material."

Because of all the deliberate obfuscation coming from the Rove machine, this central piece of evidence has not been discussed nearly enough. Ivo Daalder on TPM cafe brought this up some time ago, but it's worth repeating: Wilson's conclusions have been born out by the Iraq Survey Group, who spent a year inside Iraq, looking at all the records and speaking to the parties. There is no point in speculating about meetings in 1999 or the Butler Report or any other reports that testify to evidence that Iraq sought to buy uranium from Niger. The fact is that it didn't. Period. End of story. The non-believers were right, the true-believers were wrong, whatever their motives.

It's two years later, we have a definitive report from the ISG, and people are still saying that Wilson was a flake, he was sent by his wife, he was trying to set up the Republicans, whatever. In a normal world, that fact that Wilson's conclusions (along with others) were correct would have some salience in this argument --- particularly since the Reublicans are basing theirs on the the mistaken premise that Wilson's credibility is in question when quite clearly, he was right.

Rick Perlstein relayed in the comments of one of my other posts a comment from a right wing correspondent of his who said of Plame: "she was part of a CIA attempt to discredit the elected government. She should be swinging from a lamp post." And yet, there was no uranium deal. There were no WMD. This comment therefore means that naysayers (in and out of the CIA, presumably) were trying to discredit the elected government with the truth.

It's enormously frustrating to argue with people who have so little intellectual integrity, but that's the way it is. They continue to dig themselves in on this point --- even as the huge elephant holding a sign that says "there were no WMD in Iraq" is sitting in the middle of the room, mocking them.

But over time, through all the bickering and small bore detail and gossip, that elephant comes more and more into focus for average Americans. And it lays the groundwork for a scathing Democratic critique of Republican foreign policy for the first time in many years if we can just find the nerve to claim it. The Republicans are going to have Iraq hung around their necks like a burning rubber tire for a long time to come, as they should.

When you strip all the fulminating away, the Republican argument for the massive failure in both concept and execution of Iraq is that they didn't do it on purpose --- they just screwed up. That's the same excuse Karl Rove is using, as well, and it's no surprise. At this point, it's realistically their best case scenario. Would you want to run on that record?



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digby 7/22/2005 10:15:00 AM |

 
Depends On What The Definition Of "Secret" Is

I confess that I'm feeling more than a bit of schadenfreude reading the rightwing bloggers' responses to the Plame scandal over on the Daou Report. It so sucks being on the receiving end of the drip, drip, drip, doesn't it?

Here's one that's fairly typically uninformed from Captain's Quarters (all links available at the Daou Report), in which he, taking his cues from the RNC, piles on the ridiculous assertion that Plame was not covert, even if her status was labeled "secret."

"Today's Washington Post article on the State Department memo detailing Valerie Plame's involvement in sending her husband to Niger lacks a great deal of context. Bloggers appear to assume that the (S) described in the article denotes the status of Plame's identity, but a more careful read of a poorly-written article shows that it doesn't mean that at all. Most people don't understand that "secret" is the second-lowest classification grade possible. I would hope that NOC lists have much higher classification than that, and surely they do.

It all depends on how you look at it. It's also the second-highest classification. There are only three levels of classified material: confidential, secret, top-secret. According to the very Washington Post article he quotes, covert agents are all classifed as "secret."

Apparently, these people think that the government has a whole string of classified levels, many of which you don't have to take seriously. Like "secret" which doesn't really mean secret, it means kinda-sorta secret but not if you need to smear a political opponent. They assume that there also must be a bunch super-duper-double-cross-your-heart secret levels that you really, really, really shouldn't tell the media about. But "secret?" Not a problem. Go ahead and spill your guts to Bob Novak.

Google is your friend:

Classified vs. Unclassified Information

In the U.S. information is called "classified" because it has been assigned one of the three levels, confidential, secret or top secret. Information which is not so labled is called unclassified information. The term declassified is used for information which has had its classification removed, and downgraded refers to information that has been assigned a lower classification level, but is still classified. Many documents are automatically downgraded and then declassified after some number of years. The U.S. government uses the term sensitive but unclassified (SBU) to refer to information that is not confidential, secret or top secret, but whose dissemination is still restricted. Reasons for such restrictions can include privacy regulations, court orders, and ongoing criminal investigations as well as national security. Information which was never classified is sometimes referred to as "open source" by those who work in national security.


Levels of Classification used by the U.S. Government

The United States Government classifies information according to the degree which the unauthorized disclosure would damage national security:

Top secret

This is the highest security level, and is defined as information which would cause "exceptionally grave damage" to national security if disclosed to the public. Despite public mystique, relatively little information is classified at "Top Secret" (when compared to the other levels of classification). Only that which is exceptionally sensitive (weapon design, presidential security information, nuclear-related projects, various intelligence information) is classified at the Top Secret level.


Secret

The second highest classification. Information is classified secret when its release would cause "serious damage" to national security. Most information that is "classified" is held at the secret sensitivity.


Confidential

The lowest classification level. It is defined as information which would "damage" national security if disclosed.

Unclassified is not technically a "classification", this is the default, and refers to information which can be released to individuals without a clearance. Information that is unclassified is sometimes "restricted" in its dissemination. For example, the "law enforcement bulletins" often reported by the U.S. media when United States Department of Homeland Security raises the U.S. terror threat level are usually classified as "U//LES" or "Unclassified - Law Enforcement Sensitive." This information is only supposed to be released to Law Enforcement groups (Sheriff, Police, etc.) Because the information is unclassified, however, it is sometimes released to the public as well. Information which is unclassified, but which the government does not believe should be subject to Freedom of Information Act requests is often classified as U//FOUO - Unclassified-For Official Use Only.

It is very serious if they were collecting and disseminating cheap political dirt from a classified document labeled "secret." The definition of secret is secret, and it's a big deal.



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digby 7/22/2005 09:23:00 AM |

Thursday, July 21, 2005

 
Father Tim And The Leak

Two top White House aides have given accounts to the special prosecutor about how reporters told them the identity of a CIA agent that are at odds with what the reporters have said, according to persons familiar with the case.

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

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

If this is true, the wingnuts are going to have to call Father Tim and poor old Bob Novak liars. I have no doubt they will do it if they have to. But this game gets more and more dangerous for them every day.

And the thing about Libby is just delicious. WTF, did Scooter just blurt out Tim Russert's name without thinking? If he lied about the Monsignor he was making a grave error. There aren't many media figures in Washington who are viewed with any reverence anymore, but he's one of them, as sad a comment as that is. It's a fatal error to get into a he said/she said with a guy like him --- if there's a trial, he's the guy who will be believed.

Oh what a hissy fit these allegedly slick operators had over this one piece of criticism. Anyone with any sense would have known this was just the beginning, as it was becoming obvious that there were no WMD to be found. If they'd have kept their poweder dry for a few days they probably could have come up with a better explanation, but they lost their heads, just like always do under pressure. There really could not have been a worse crew in charge after 9/11. This little episode, in microcosm, is why we are in Iraq today, throwing billions of dollars down the tube, losing our credibility by the boatload and seeing thousands of people die for with no end in sight. No grace under pressure.


Needless to say, this could also be bullshit. William Safire once famously claimed Hillary Clinton was going to be indicted. Rove (or a person who "has been briefed on the matter") already revealed that he learned Plame's name from Novak and then said "Oh I heard that too" or "Oh, you've heard about that?" depending on who's telling the story. We've all been under the impression that Novak agreed that Rove confirmed the story, but maybe he didn't. Or maybe there is some convoluted way in which his behavior can be explained as both learning about it and confirming it at the same time. There's obviously more to this story than we know --- perhaps Fitzgerald is putting together a bigger case than just perjury. Or maybe, as I said, this is bullshit.

But this is getting fun.



Update: According to the NY Times, friends of Rove and Libby are trying to make the case that the two were not trying to out Plame or discredit Wilson --- they were working together on Tenent's statement with Stephen Hadley. It's hard for me to see how this helps them --- it suggest coordination if not conspiracy.

There is one interesting little tid-bit, however: they say Ari testified that he never say the memo on AF One. We've certainly heard otherwise, so Ari may be in a little bit of a pickle too.

All this leaking is looking more and more like internecine fighting among the "subjects." This could get ugly.



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digby 7/21/2005 06:44:00 PM |

 
Scandal As Metaphor

In an entertaining piece comparing the sad small scale corruption of Duke Cunningham to the titanic all encompassing corruption of Tom DeLay, Noam Scheiber brings up something I think is important:

But it's worth pointing out that, if DeLay loses his job, it won't be because of the machine he has built. It will be thanks to a handful of smaller offenses, such as allowing a lobbyist to pay for his overseas travel--offenses more in line with ... Duke Cunningham's.

How to explain these little perversities? The answer has to do with the press. Most news organizations are profoundly uncomfortable making subjective judgments, however obvious. Instead, the preoccupation is with small, easily provable allegations. When it comes to political discourse, as my colleague Jonathan Chait has pointed out, the result is that politicians get nailed for tiny embellishments but get away with statements that are technically true but spectacularly dishonest, such as George W. Bush's claims about the size of his 2001 tax cut. Likewise with corruption, where the press practices a kind of literalism that dwells on what is officially illegal or improper (like an affair with an intern) while ignoring behavior that is technically OK but ethically obscene.

I think all of that is true, but it's also because scandals that expose human frailty are easier to understand. A fall from grace is the original story, isn't it?
And they are often emblematic of a bigger narrative that is instinctively understood but more complicated in detail than people need to know.

Just as a third rate burglary was a perfect window into an abusive and paranoid Nixon administration, Rovegate is a perfect illustration of the intimidation and arrogance that characterizes Bush. The Lewinsky matter could be said to show the indiscipline that characterized Bill Clinton; Iran-Contra the disconnectedness of an aging, disengaged president.

I'm not saying all those things are the only lessons to be taken from these scandals; far from it. But they engaged the public and the press because they spoke to bigger issues by using people's highly developed instinctive understanding of human character. I don't necessarily think it has to be this way, but it usually is. People seem to need to see and feel the human dimension in order to understand the big picture.

Rovegate is quite interesting in this way, not because it centers around the president but because it centers around the one person who most personifies the modern conservative movement's strategy. And he is the one person who is feared and respected for his effectiveness by people on both sides --- almost to the point of being gifted with magical abilities to tell the future and shape events.

He serves a purpose for both sides in this way, explaining for Democrats their sense of impotence and justifying for Republicans their excesses. None of this is really their doing, you see, and there is nothing they can do to change it; it the product of a brilliant political alchemist who is beyond the scope of normal human behavior or understanding. Fear him or follow him but do not question him.

So, Rove being exposed in a petty, unnecessary act of revenge and overreach, pathetically reaching for Clintonian legalisms and falling back on infantile excuses is a bit of a jolt. Whether by hubris or error, Rove's naked vulnerability is a very useful parable with which to explode the myth of Republican omniscience and explain something that is vastly complex and difficult for average people, much less the compromised kewl kidz, to get their arms around.

Bush's Brain is not omnipotent. The administration that sold itself on simple homespun values and manly virtues has been caught in an act of waspish backstabbing to cover its dishonesty. The war was based on lies and now we are losing it. How could this masterful white house screw this up so badly? These questions can now be asked outside the context of the simple narrative that's been constructed about Bush's honor and Rove's supernatural talents. The scandal opens it up. What has, up to now, been hailed by both sides and in the press as unassailable political mastery is exposed as gross arrogance combined with gross incompetence. That's the story: Mayberry Machiavellis.

Regardless of whether Karl escapes the noose, which he may very well do, Roveism --- defined as politics of the supernatural --- is dead. Cutthroat Republican tactics will be alive and well as they always has been. Roveism was actually never anything more than that.



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digby 7/21/2005 04:45:00 PM |

 
Feeling Safer

So they've released a few more prisoners from Guantanamo because they "no longer represent a threat to the United States." I'm glad to hear that being as they must have been terrorists and all. Otherwise they wouldn't have been in there in the first place, right?

So, how do we know they are "no longer a threat?" Did they promise never to be terrorists again, cross their hearts and hope to die? Did they swear on the Koran and the Bible and the TV Guide that they will be good-for-goodness-sake?

Gosh I sure hope they did because otherwise I might be tempted to think that they weren't terrorists at all --- which would mean we are holding innocent people down there for long periods of time without due process.

Surely, we wouldn't do any such thing, now would we?
digby 7/21/2005 04:09:00 PM |

 
Here's Looking At You Kid

This is rich. Christopher Hitchens is defending outing Plame in the press. He has gone completely down the rabbit hole.

I don't know if any of you remember a little episode of a few years ago in which Hitchens was personally involved in a similar situation, but let me refresh your memory if you don't. In the waning days of the Monica Lewinsky impeachment case, Christopher Hitchens dicided it was his patriotic duty to reveal to the House managers that Sidney Blumenthal had revealed at lunch one day that Monica was a stalker. He signed an affidavit to that effect and it resulted in Blumenthal being one of only three witnesses in the Senate Impeachment trial.

Here's the thing. Hitchens worked himself into a frenzy about this because he claimed this was a concerted effort by the White house to smear Monica Lewinsky, which he believed was a possible criminal act. Hitchens took his boozy self all over TV to moralize endlessly about the White house abuse of power and obstruction of justice.

In this new article in Slate, Hitchens seems to have another view. 9/11 changed everything to mean that up is down and black is white. It's now perfectly legitimate for the White House to blow CIA agents' covers as long as you believe that they aren't sufficiently slurring the word "islamofascism" at every turn and sending the proper messages about freedom by endorsing the liberating of thousands of innocent people from their lives. The infallible cult leader George W. Bush had every right to do whatever was necessary to make these people pay. Besides, everything was the CIA's fault anyway.

Blumenthal on the other hand should be in jail and President Clinton should have been convicted and removed from office because Blumenthal gossipped about Monica's obsession with Bill at lunch one day.

Ipdate: Billmon makes the excellent point that this is a good career move for Hitch.


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digby 7/21/2005 12:57:00 PM |

 
Judy's Job Description

Atrios points to this very informative article about Judith Miller by Russ Baker. There's a lot to it, but he mentions one thing in particular that has long puzzled me:

Fine. But they owe the rest of the country's journalists --- whose future ability to work with confidential sources and to operate with public credibility is affected by this -- a far greater sense of what Miller's role was in the affair, and of what "nuances" are involved. This can be done without naming the source. For example, Miller could explain what the source told her, and if it was one or more sources, and whether she called the source or the source called her, without revealing the source's identity --- which is the only issue involved in the confidentiality pledge.

This is what I don't get. Why can't Judith Miller write an article about what she knows without revealing her source? She is, allegedly, a reporter.

Matt Cooper wrote an article. Robert Novak wrote an article. Walter Pincus wrote an article. All three have dealt differently with the special prosecutor on the subject of confidential sources. But they ALL wrote articles about what they were told, which means that if they decided to protect their source, they were doing it in service of performing their jobs. And just because she didn't write one at the time doesn't mean she can't write one now. She's still employed by the NY Times.

Reporters write articles in order to inform the public. That is the essence of their job. In order to do that they sometimes have to keep their sources confidential. Miller has not done the one thing she must do to justify keeping her source confidential --- inform the public of what she knows about the story. Neither is there even a bit of evidence that she was ever even working on a story about this subject.

Woodward and Bernstein kept Mark Felt's confidence for decades --- but at the time they were using his information to unravel a complicated story that they were writing about every day. Miller has not written one word on this subject. Even if we grant that she has an obligation to protect liars who use the news media for character assasination, we can't say that she should be able to do this in service of anything but doing her job as a journalist --- either as part of an investigation or a story. And if she has a story, she should be forced by her editors to write what she knows (protecting her source if necessary, just as Cooper did) or be fired for not doing her job.

How she deals with Fitzgerald is up to her. I think when a reporter is used by a powerful members of the government, in their official capacity, to destroy political opponents with lies, that a reporter should be automatically released from any confidentiality agreement. Otherwise, it is nothing but outsourced government propaganda. Others disagree. But that has no bearing on her responsibility as a journalist and employee of the most important newspaper in the world.

Miller may now be saving her information for the blockbuster book she's planning to write, but that doesn't explain why the NY Times didn't insist that Miller do her job and write a story about what she knows, even if she can't reveal who told her about it. It's in the public interest, all the other journalists have done it, why can't she?



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digby 7/21/2005 11:09:00 AM |

 
Losing Their Touch

So the White House press corps is all up in arms because the Bush White House lied to them about Clement.

I wrote the other day that I couldn't think of one good reason why they would have done it. Many people wrote in to tell me that it was because they wanted to float a woman or distract from Rove or any number of other reasons. I agree that they could have done it for these reasons, but I didn't think those were good reasons, mostly because there was something strange and clumsy about it. But there is one reason that I hadn't considered: it was done for no other reason than to mislead the press just for the day, for purely theatrical reasons.

I read over on bartcop yesterday that Bush was reportedly "furious" that Roberts' name had been leaked before he could announce it in his bizarre, unprecedented, prime-time, no-questions-allowed little pageant. If that's true, then it's likely that they leaked Clement not to assuage people's fears that he hadn't considered a woman and not to put the liberal interest groups off base, and not to float her to get reaction from the Christianists --- but purely to misdirect the press so Junior could unveil a big surprise on National Teevee. Kind of like pulling a rabbit out of the hat, only with the Supreme Court.

That was not the brightest public relations decision they've ever made under the circumstances. So, I stand by my belief that it was a mistake. And it's looking like it was a bigger mistake than I realized at the time.



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digby 7/21/2005 10:27:00 AM |

Wednesday, July 20, 2005

 
"I'm A Source Not A Target"



Yup. That's what the button says.

I'm not kidding.

courtesy of the AP/Frankfurt Times via Crooks and Liars --- go there for larger pic and full story.



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digby 7/20/2005 10:41:00 PM |

 
President Barney

"What I'm telling you is that we're focused here," Bush said from the Port of Baltimore, where he got a waterside demonstration of cargo-screening techniques. "When you're at war, you can't lose sight of the fact that you're at war."

Among the state-of-the-art techniques Bush observed were computerized systems, sophisticated radiation detectors and advanced X-ray equipment.

"You can look inside in the truck, and you don't even have to get in it," Bush said afterward to an audience of state and local officials and port employees. "That's called technology. And it's working. It makes a big difference."

What is he, 6?

Jesushchrist! What in the hell has happened to this country?



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digby 7/20/2005 10:26:00 PM |

 
Yankee Doodle Judy

Gene Lyons has written an interesting column about Judith Miller and her crusade to protect powerful whitehouse souces who use the NY Times to destroy their critics. Lyons, many may recall, has some particular knowledge of the NY Times and its sources, having chronicled its massive journalistic failure in the Whitewater matter in his book "Fools For Scandal." Let's just say that the Times has a very credulous relationshihp with its sources. In fact, they've made a virtual fetish of being willing tools of lying Republicans over and over again.

Lyons says that Miller should testify:

In a haughty tone familiar to anybody who's ever caught the newspaper with its metaphorical pants down, the editors reminded the prosecutor that they're The New York Times, and he's not. "Mr. Fitzgerald's attempts to interfere with the rights of a free press while refusing to disclose his reasons for doing so, when he can't even say whether a crime has been committed, have exhibited neither reverence nor cautious circumspection."

What rubbish. Reverence, indeed. (To be fair, it's an allusion to James Madison, not a demand to be worshipped.) In making its argument, the Times states it wouldn't print information that "would endanger lives and national security."

So here's my question: In a post-9/11 world, what information could possibly be more sensitive than the identity of a covert agent charged with preventing nuclear proliferation?

Answer: None.

Let's put aside the fact that Judith Miller has long been a passionately outspoken ally of Bush administration neo-conservatives who pushed for war with Iraq. She gave paid public speeches urging Saddam's overthrow. Many journalists have asked why such a partisan was given the Iraqi WMD assignment to begin with. The answer? Access, access and access.

What everybody's ignoring here is that Fitzgerald already knows Miller's sources. That's not what he wants to ask her. His prosecution brief urging her incarceration stipulates that "her putative source has been identified and has waived confidentiality."

Even editor Bill Keller has conceded that there's no imaginable journalist's shield law that would protect her. It's Miller's patriotic duty to talk.

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digby 7/20/2005 09:25:00 PM |

 
Along Comes Mary

Sorry for the non-existent posting. Busy day. But here's a little Rovegate nugget to ponder: Mary Matalin was called to the Grand Jury to testify. I think we all assumed it was because she worked for Cheney and was a member of the iraq Group. But Mary Matalin left the White House at the end of 2002, six months before the Wilson op-ed and all the hoopla. (And you'll notice that Karen Hughes, also a member of the Iraq Group, was not, to my knowledge, called to testify. She left in 2002 also.)Matalin was hired back after Novak's column broke, specifically to handle the media on the Wilson matter.

He also subpoenaed the guest list for a White House party for Gerald Ford that took place on July 16th, days after the Novak column ran. I would take a wild guess that someone had told the FBI that Plame was mentioned (maybe as "fair game") at the party and Fitzgerald wanted to talk to others who had attended to see if it was being spread around.

He subpoenaed the records of the Iraq Group from July 7th to July 30th, which includes the two weeks after the leak had already been out there.

This brings up one of the questions I think is being overlooked in the Fitzgerald investigation. He seems to have been quite interested in how the White House behaved after Novak's column ran, which makes the most sense if he thinks there was a cover-up or that continuing to spread the information (as Rove admits to doing) was a violation of the law in itself. And, of course, people may have lied to the FBI or before the Grand Jury about all this, which would be criminal, but we don't know.

It's just a curiosity that I have long wondered about. It sure looks like he was thinking, at one point anyway, that he had a potential conspiracy case of some kind. I wonder if he still thinks so?


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digby 7/20/2005 08:40:00 PM |

 
The Good Old Days

Via Think Progress, we are reminded of Ronald Reagan's words upon signing the Intelligence Identities Protection Act

Whether you work in Langley or a faraway nation, whether your tasks are in operations or analysis sections, it is upon your intellect and integrity, your wit and intuition that the fate of freedom rests for millions of your countrymen and for many millions more all around the globe. …

Like those who are part of any silent service, your sacrifices are sometimes unappreciated; your work is sometimes misunderstood. Because you’re professionals, you understand and accept this. But because you’re human and because you deal daily in the dangers that confront this nation, you must sometimes question whether some of your countrymen appreciate the value of your accomplishments, the sacrifices you make, the dangers you confront, the importance of the warnings that you issue.

He continued

But that's not true. As long as you are provably loyal to the Republican Party above all else and promise to fit intelligence to our preconceived notions, we appreciate everything you do. Otherwise you are fair game.

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digby 7/20/2005 07:35:00 AM |

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

 
Back Scratch Fever

In case anyone is wondering if Roberts really is a partisan hack or not, Jeffrey Toobin's book "Too Close To Call" sheds some light on that subject:

The president's first two nominations to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia curcuit --- generally regarded as the stepping-stone to the Supreme Court --- went to Miguel Estrada and John G Roberts Jr., who had played important behind-the scenes roles in the Florida litigation.

"Some day, and that day may never come, I will call upon you to do a service for me. But, until that day, accept this justice..."



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digby 7/19/2005 08:49:00 PM |

 
Up, Up And Away

A commenter asks why I think Clement was floated earlier in the day and it's a good question. I don't think it served any purpose. The only reason to float trial balloons on Supreme Court justices is to guage how they'll be accepted. That is an irrelevant concern for this White House except for one consituency --- the radical religious right. But they have a very direct pipeline to the the leaders of that constitutency and they don't need to float a name publicly to find out how it will be seen by these people. They just have to pick up the Jesus phone.

I think it was a mistake. And I'm surmising that it might just be because things are breaking down a little bit in the vaunted white house message center. Perhaps people are a little bit distracted and not keeping their eye on the ball the way they should? Wonder why?

Honestly, I can't think of a single good reason to do it.



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digby 7/19/2005 08:08:00 PM |

 
Demographically Correct

Is it just me or is it a little bit odd that the allegedly liberal Washington Post is advertising on this conservative DC blog and not advertising on this liberal DC blog?

It seems particularly odd considering that the conservative blog gets only 1/6th the weekly traffic that the liberal blog gets.

That damned liberal media sure is biased.



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digby 7/19/2005 07:37:00 PM |

 
Ooops

White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove did not disclose that he had ever discussed CIA officer Valerie Plame with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper during Rove’s first interview with the FBI, according to legal sources with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

The omission by Rove created doubt for federal investigators, almost from the inception of their criminal probe into who leaked Plame's name to columnist Robert Novak, as to whether Rove was withholding crucial information from them, and perhaps even misleading or lying to them, the sources said.

Also leading to the early skepticism of Rove's accounts was the claim that although he first heard that Plame worked for the CIA from a journalist, he said could not recall the name of the journalist. Later, the sources said, Rove wavered even further, saying he was not sure at all where he first heard the information.

Martha knitted a lovely poncho and lost 25 pounds. Do you think Karl will make such good use of his time?



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digby 7/19/2005 07:35:00 PM |

 
GOP Creature

My initial take on reading around the web on Roberts is that he's a purely political choice --- a Republican die-hard to the bone. This means that even if he isn't seen as "ideological" in theory, he's ideological in practice. They all are.

He's spent his entire adult life in Washington. He's been a judge for only two years. Before that he represented corporations and worked for Republican administrations. That's it. He's not a scholar or a prosecutor or someone who has ever worked in the trenches. He's a creature of the radical right GOP establishment.

Good choice for Bush. He'll take care of his friends. And he knows exactly what he's supposed to deliver.



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digby 7/19/2005 07:17:00 PM |

 
The Suspense Is Killing Me

CNN has already announced who the new Supreme Court nominee will be. Yet the president is still going to go live at 9pm est to give us this "news."

And right now, 29 minutes before the big "announcement" CNN is discussing the nominee while a clock ticks down in the corner of the screen telling us how long we have to wait until the president tells us what we already know.

Reason #4672 why the cable news networks are completely worthless.



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digby 7/19/2005 05:31:00 PM |

 
John Roberts

So what do the shrieking wingnuts think of him? Is he pure enough? Does he speak in tongues, handle snakes, speak directly to Jesus and James Madison about original intent? Fill me in.



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digby 7/19/2005 05:00:00 PM |

 
Scotus With The Mostest

I think Clement is going to sail through --- unless the far-right has a temper tantrum. So the question is, how do we get as much political advantage from this as possible?

Would it be best to try to bait the far right into blowing it by saying that we think Clement may be the kind of "Sandra Day O'Connor, David Souter" centrist that we can live with? You know how they feel about that.

Or do we use the opportunity to ram home all the principles and ideals that we feel are in jeopardy with Republicans in power choosing who gets lifetime appointments?

As I said, she's in. The Gang of 14 are not going to disband over this one. So, how do we get the most out of it?

I'm thinking it might be a good play to rile up the wingnuts while Karl is on the hotseat. Karl probably made this decision, after all. How could he betray them this way?


Update: What? A one day trial balloon? Whatever. We'll know in a couple of hours...


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digby 7/19/2005 02:54:00 PM |

 
Clueless

Gawd help us. Apparently Jon Meacham has spent so much time praying with Monsignor Tim lately that he hasn't had time to bone up on the basic facts of the Plame case. It hasn't stopped him from talking about it, though. According to The Daily Howler, he actually said on Don Imus that Wilson was dispatched after the war had started. For real:

How completely clueless was Meacham? This clueless—he actually thought that Wilson’s trip had been commissioned in the spring of 2003, after the war in Iraq was over. He had seemed to imply this at the two-minute mark, bringing our analysts out of their chairs; discussing the political fall-out in the spring 2003 as the WMD failed to turn up, Meacham said that Wilson had “undertaken a mission to go to Niger and discover if these 16 words were true.” Since Wilson’s trip occurred a full year before those 16 words were spoken, it seemed that Meacham was working from a bogus chronology—but even we couldn’t quite believe that the parson could be this clueless. But later, as he gave that brilliant “best guess,” his confusion became all too clear:

MEACHAM: My best guess is that it did come out of the bureaucracy of the CIA, and it may have, it could have originated with the wife.

IMUS: Who asked them to do it, the CIA?

MEACHAM: Well, they were trying—remember, everything was falling apart. So they’ve got to—now, one would hope that they would have undertaken this, done their homework before we had begun a war based partly on this. But things were beginning to very explicitly disintegrate and these documents were—it turned out they’d been faxed through Italy, remember this?—on the uranium. So I think it came out—it probably came out of the CIA, which is supposed to vet all of this.

But this should not surprise us. Meacham proved to us some time back that he has a rather odd notion of reality when he wrote this:

The uniqueness—one could say oddity, or implausibility—of the story of Jesus' resurrection argues that the tradition is more likely historical than theological.

The uniqueness, one could say oddity, of big time celebrity "reporters" who don't know their asses from holes in the ground argues that mainstream journalism is more likely moribund than relevant.



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digby 7/19/2005 01:54:00 PM |

 
Reading the Wingnuts So We Don't Have To

The Daou Report has a very helpful special page up featuring the musing of both right and left on the Plame Affair. If you want the overview of how both sides of the blogosphere are dealing with the issue this is a great place to go.

Today on the left we are talking about the Iraq lies, parsing the evidence and calling for Rove's head for leaking. On the right they are saying Clinton was worse and the whole thing is boring. It's fun, check it out.



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digby 7/19/2005 10:56:00 AM |

 
The Cup is Empty

If you have an extra buck or two, my friend Joe Vecchio, who runs Cup 'O Joe "the blog of the working unemployed man," could use a little scratch while his wife's in the hospital.



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digby 7/19/2005 10:40:00 AM |

 
Bad Advice

If anyone is still in the dark about what is wrong with the Democratic Party, look no further than this:

I just got off the boat. For the past week my family and I have been guests on the R Family Vacations cruise created by Rosie and Kelli O’Donnell. Along with 2000 other people – gay, straight and lots of kids – we sailed to Halifax, Nova Scotia and back down to NYC through Boston and Cape Cod. And I was a cynic. Truth is, since I get both claustrophobic and seasick, I had to be brought kicking and screaming on this trip. I just wasn’t in the mood for an onslaught of gayness.

I was wrong. It was a magical vacation...But sailing in international waters gave me a different perspective to the news of the moment. The distance I felt from the hype was much akin to the everyday attitude of a majority of Americans.

Over and over people on the ship asked me why the Democrats are focusing so much attention on Karl Rove and not, instead, providing a better alternative story for the American people to hear. It is a good question.

Karl Rove won’t resign no matter how many blog posts, front page stories or speeches from the floor of Congress take place...So why are Democrats wasting the chance to talk to people about what they really care about? As long as the political conversation is about Karl Rove, the Republicans win. Sure, the President’s current allegiance to Rove is damaging but the White House has obviously made a calculation that it is better to keep Karl around than to get rid of him and have the subject changed. That alone should give Dems a clue as to how important it is for us to change the subject.

It is no sure thing that Democrats will be able to get people to focus on politics at all during these few weeks. But our only hope is to talk about something more relevant. Summer vacation is family time. It is also a time for anxiety for parents. Because instead of worrying about our jobs, on vacation, most parents worry about their kids.

[...]

(And lest anyone doubt that the gay and lesbian parents on our cruise have all the same anxieties and commitment to their children as straight parents, rest your concern. In fact, the normalcy of the conversations was soothing.)

Democrats have more answers to the problems faced by families in America today. Now is a good time to try and dominate the conversation with those concerns. When people across the country feel certain that the Democratic political leadership cares more about these issues than scoring political points, we will finally benefit from the President’s dropping approval ratings.

Hold on to your hats folks. This person is a Democratic political consultant. In other words, Democrats pay her for political advice. I'm not kidding.

First of all, her attitudes toward gay people seems to be something closer to an anthropologist finding the lost tribe of Borneo. She wasn't ready for an "onslaught of gayness" but was eventually soothed to learn that gay people are normal. Good for her.

But, of course, the other huge sin is this fucking insane, deranged, bass-akwards, idiotic advice that we should stop talking about Karl Rove so we can swing the conversation toward child care. She actually said that as long we are talking about Karl Rove, the Republicans win.

Oh yes, by all means let's drop this hot potato and schedule a press conference about parental anxiety. The cable shows and the papers are clamoring for that kind of copy. They can't get enough of it. Perhaps we can get all the elected Democrats to stand on the steps of congress and sing "I'm a little teapot, short and stout" for the evening news. Meanwhile, let's just let the criminals in the White House blow up the world. After they're done, we'll have a helluva parental leave policy to enact. Unfortunately we won't have a country.

Seriously, as long as we have this white house off balance, not controlling the message and the agenda, the Republicans lose. Really. The Democrats can't "win," you see, because we have no power to legislate or mandate fuck-all. Our only job is to stop the Republicans from destroying the country any more than they already have and lay the groundwork for winning elections. Taking on Republicans is a vital part of that job.

I'm sure that Rosen had a lovely time with the liberals on the ship who all were parroting the conventional wisdom "but the Democrats don't have any ideas!" or "nobody knows what the Democrats stand for" which Rosen, the professional political consultant, took for some sort of homespun wisdom. If she thinks being on a cruise with 2000 people who can afford to spend a week with Rosie O'Donnell and her family is like being an average American she needs her head examined.

Here's a clue for the professionals who hear this shit at cocktail parties: people say this because they don't have anything else to say. These mantras are conversational elevator music, things that people say in social situations that are uncontroversial, genteel and guaranteed to result in agreement. These political platitudes are conversational filler that are often used to obscure the fact that the speaker isn't really conversant with the details or because they really, really don't want to get into an argument. And it's exactly the type of bullshit that you see among super liberals who feel they have to temper their overwhelming feelings of shadenfreude with public tut-tutting about the terrible waste of it all in light of all the real problems in the world.

I don't understand how anyone can become a political consultant without having some instinct for the manners of even her own social class. Ms Rosen should probably re-read her copy of Pride and Prejudice and concentrate on something besides Mr Darcy this time. She'd learn something about human nature.

There is no way we will ever again be in a position to help families or do anything else as long as our politicians are being advised by people like this.


Update: I've been reliably informed that Hilary Rosen is gay. It's good to know that she discovered on her trip that other gay people are normal. She must be so relieved.



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digby 7/19/2005 09:28:00 AM |

 
Hot Links

For those of you who are enjoying playing Nancy Drew in this Rove case, here is a great link resource to official documents related to Plame. Have fun!



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digby 7/19/2005 09:21:00 AM |

 
The Smoking Notes

I somewhat regrettably waded into the minutia of the Rove case last week-end and am now stuck with revising what I said everytime I become aware that I got something wrong in order to hold up the honor of the self-correcting blogosphere. So here goes.

I wrote that I thought the person who wrote the June 10th classified memo was the same INR analyst who had been quoted liberally in the SSCI report and who was evidently the one who noted that "it appeared that she [Plame] had arranged the trip" in his notes of the meeting. I won't go into it here --- if you need a nap you can read my whole post.

Anyway, I was challenged by emptywheel at The Next Hurrah (who wrote this excellent post called "Anatomy of the WH Smear defense" and this one, called "About That INR Memo") who was working the same angle, but who concluded that the memo may have been based on this INR's notes but that it appeared it was written by someone else. (We are interested in this because it might have been someone juicy from Bolton's gang, for instance.) Anyway, I said I preferred the simple explanation that the one who wrote the notes probably wrote the memo.

I was wrong because I think I know who wrote the notes and he was long gone from the State Department when the memo was written. I'm pretty sure that the INR analyst was Greg Thielman, one of the good guys. He's one of the few people who went on the record that they administration was cooking intelligence.

I had written in a draft of the post that I thought it was ironic that the INR analyst who apparently spilled the beans on Plame in his notes (which was picked up in the "work-up" later done on Wilson in May of 2003) was also the guy in the SSCI report who was most skeptical of the Niger connection and who backed Wilson's interpretation of events. (You should read how tortured the analysis was to come up with some factual basis for the Niger connection. It's shockingly thin.)

Anyway, here's the gist. Greg Thielman left the State Department in September of 2002. But he left his notes behind. When Wilson's story started to surface in the press, the white house or somebody ordered someone to put together a file on how Wilson was sent on the trip. (Although Wilson never said Cheney directly sent him, the inference was that he knew.) So the INR went through its files on the matter and put together a report. (I suspect the other agencies did the same thing.) This report contained a nugget of information that nobody else had --- that Wilson's wife had sent him on the trip.

That was seized upon as a good smear and the rest is history.

The reason I believe it was Greg Thielman who wrote the notes in question is because the SSCI report indicates that the same person who wrote the report Niger: Sale of Uranium Unlikely is the same person who noted that "it appeared" Wilson's wife arranged the trip. Greg Thielman wrote that report.

If you are at all interested in this subject, check out this PBS interview with Thielman. Has anybody talked to him lately?



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digby 7/19/2005 08:31:00 AM |

Monday, July 18, 2005

 
Tangled Up In Yellowcake

Responding to my quip about Rove not being in town to "warn off" 60 Minutes from its embarassing TANG story, Lukery of Wotisitgood4 reminds me in the comments that the TANG story actually knocked off another big story that 60 Minutes had been working on for months: The Niger forgery story.

If you'll recall, after Rathergate 60 Minutes decided to withhold the story entirely. I have been unable to ascertain if it was ever shown, but I know I didn't see it.

Salon magazine saw a tape of the show and reported this:

The importance that CBS placed on the report was evident by its unusual length: It was slated to run a full half hour, double the usual 15 minutes of a single segment. Although months of reporting went into the production, CBS abruptly decided that it would be "inappropriate to air the report so close to the presidential election," in the words of a statement that network spokeswoman Kelli Edwards gave the New York Times.

The real reason, of course, was that because of CBS's sloppy reporting on the Bush National Guard story, the network's news executives believed they could no longer report credibly on the heart of the Iraq nuclear issue, involving another set of completely forged documents: those purporting to show that Iraq had purchased yellowcake uranium from the African country Niger.

Salon was given the videotape by CBS News on the condition that we report on it only shortly before it was to air. But after the network effectively spiked its own story (which was reported by Newsweek online and by the New York Times), we sent an e-mail late last week to CBS stating that we believed that the embargo no longer applied. We received no reply and therefore feel free to report.

[...]

Whatever the case, the CBS producers apparently decided to concentrate on what could be nailed down: the Bush administration had, either intentionally or with breathtaking credulity, relied on patently false intelligence to make the case for invading Iraq.

"Two years ago, Americans heard some frightening words from President Bush and his closest advisors," Bradley said in his introduction of the now-shelved report. "Saddam Hussein, they said, could soon have a nuclear bomb. Of course, we now know that wasn't true." Not only did Saddam not have a nuclear program, Bradley said, but "he hadn't for more than 10 years. How could the Bush administration be so wrong about something so important?"

[...]

In his closing, Bradley explains how fiercely the White House fought his report. Administration officials and Republicans in Congress turned down "60 Minutes'" requests for interview. So did former Rep. Porter Goss, the Florida Republican whom Bush has appointed as the new director of the CIA.

"60 Minutes" defied the White House to produce this report. But it could not survive the network's cowardice -- cowardice born of self-inflicted wounds.

What a shame. The TANG story really was old news and the only people who still cared about Vietnam were hardline republicans who were always going to vote for Bush. This story was about a real scandal.

It is interesting, though, that the White House fought this story tooth and nail but didn't say a word when 60 Minutes ran the story about the Killian documents past them. You can understand why these people believe so fervently in God. 60 Minutes killed the serious story about forgeries that would have fed right into the Democrats' story line about Iraq so that they could show a senational story about Bush that was based on forgeries. God was definitely rooting for the Republicans that day.

I wonder if 60 Minutes is recovered enough from their trauma to think about finally running (or rerunning) this story. Or do they still think it's inappropriate?


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digby 7/18/2005 06:13:00 PM |

 
Case Closed

We can all close shop on Rovegate. The freepers have it all figured out:

Joe Wilson already admitted she was not under cover and:

Plame was not a covert agent. She had not been covert for nine years as she was outed by Aldrich Ames prior to 1994 and then again by the Cubans. She was assigned a desk job as an analyst at that time for her own safety.

The identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame was compromised twice before her name appeared in a news column that triggered a federal illegal-disclosure investigation, U.S. officials say.

Mrs. Plame's identity as an undercover CIA officer was first disclosed to Russia in the mid-1990s by a Moscow spy, said officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity. In a second compromise, officials said a more recent inadvertent disclosure resulted in references to Mrs. Plame in confidential documents sent by the CIA to the U.S. Interests Section of the Swiss Embassy in Havana.

The documents were supposed to be sealed from the Cuban government, but intelligence officials said the Cubans read the classified material and learned the secrets contained in them, the officials said.

Washington Times

She would have had to have been covert in the last five years for Rove to have broken the law, per former Assistant Deputy Attorney General Victoria Toensing, who helped draft the 1982 law in question.

For Plame's outing to have been illegal, the one-time deputy AG explained, "her status as undercover must be classified." Also, Plame "must have been assigned to duty outside the United States currently or in the past five years."

Case closed.

So, there you go. The bizarro world version of the Plame case brought to you by the Washington Times and Newsmax.

Oh, and there's one more interesting little bit of speculation that I think we all need to think about. (These freepers are sharp.)

And we're to believe that Judith Miller went to jail to protect Karl Rove?

Really. I am so very interested to know what the Prosecutor knows about Judy Miller that we don't. Is this going to end up with The Plame-Wilsons in jail?

I've read that elsewhere. There really is a theme on the right that Fitzgerald is actually going to indict Joseph Wilson and his wife. This is understandable. In their experience federal prosecutors are all Republican hacks who work hand in glove with Drudge and Lucianne Goldberg. In their view the rule of law says that only Democrats are criminal. (And note the derisive "Plame-Wilson." Does Karl know his people or does Karl know his people?)


And then you have to really love this one:

and I'm sure he'll go right ahead and shut the whole thing down.


And end his lucrative gig?

Fitzgerald's in it for the money.

Remember, this is the base that Karl and Junior have so carefully cultivated and are valued over any other constituency in the country. Doesn't it make the hair on the back of your neck stand up?
digby 7/18/2005 04:30:00 PM |

 
Question On Judy

I'm just curious about something and maybe my readers can help me out. In yesterday's NY Times article it says:

Asked whether New York Times reporter Judith Miller might have provided information about Plame to government sources, George Freeman, an assistant general counsel of The New York Times Company told Liptak: "Judy learned about Valerie Plame from a confidential source or sources whose identity she continues to protect to this day. If the suggestion is that she is covering up for her source or some fictitious source, that is preposterous.

Has Miller ever said before that the source she's protecting told her about Valerie Plame? She didn't write a story, she hasn't turned over her notes and she hasn't talked about who or what the prosecutor wants to question her about, to my knowledge.

Certainly, it seems clear that someone else must have told Fitzgerald that Miller was a party to the information, but until now I didn't know she had admitted it or that she had so explicitly said that she was protecting someone who told her about Plame. Am I wrong?




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digby 7/18/2005 03:41:00 PM |

 
Performance Blog

If you are in New York in August, plan to check out the "Year Of Living Rudely" starring everybody's favorite dirty talker (and my personal inspiration) The Rude Pundit. Guaranteed to blow your mind. Or blow something. Bring cigarettes and bottled water.



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digby 7/18/2005 01:56:00 PM |

 
Mr Helpful

It occurs to me as I read the pithy Charles Pierce piece I've been yearning for, that it's quite wonderful that Karl Rove makes it a practice to warn reporters off of stories he thinks will embarrass them. I guess he must have been out of town the day CBS submitted its National Guard story to the white house for comment.



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digby 7/18/2005 11:35:00 AM |

Sunday, July 17, 2005

 
Rove Food

New detail about what Fitzgerald knows from the LA Times:

Prosecutors investigating whether White House officials illegally leaked the identity of Wilson's wife, a CIA officer who had worked undercover, have been told that Bush's top political strategist, Karl Rove, and I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, were especially intent on undercutting Wilson's credibility, according to a person familiar with the inquiry.

While lower-level White House staff members typically handle most contacts with the media, Rove and Libby began personally communicating with reporters about Wilson, prosecutors were told.

A source directly familiar with information provided to prosecutors said Rove's interest was so strong that it prompted questions in the White House. When asked at one point why he was pursuing the diplomat so aggressively, Rove responded: "He's a Democrat." Rove then cited Wilson's campaign donations, which leaned toward Democrats, the person familiar with the case said.

[...]

Activities aboard Air Force One are also of interest to prosecutors -- including the possible distribution of a State Department memo that mentioned Wilson's wife. Prosecutors are seeking to find out whether anyone who saw the memo learned Plame's identity and passed the information to journalists. Telephone logs from the presidential aircraft have been subpoenaed; among those aboard was former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, who has testified before the grand jury.

The source familiar with the investigation said Saturday that prosecutors had obtained a White House call sheet showing that Novak left a message for Fleischer on the afternoon of July 7, 2003, the day after Wilson's op-ed article appeared and the day that Fleischer left with the president for Africa. Fleischer declined to comment for this article, but has flatly denied that he was the source of the leak.

Wilson said in an interview Saturday that he had known that Novak was interested in him a week or so before the column appeared. He said that a friend who saw Novak on the street reported that Novak told him, "Wilson is an (expletive) and his wife works for the CIA."

[...]

There have been other indications of a concerted White House action against the former envoy. Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus has said that two days before Novak's column, he was told by an "administration official" that the White House was not putting much stock in the Wilson trip to Africa because it was "set up as a boondoggle by his wife, an analyst with the agency working on weapons of mass destruction," according to an account of the conversation Pincus wrote for the Summer 2005 issue of Nieman Reports, published by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

Let's suppose you are a straight shooting prosecutor or a grand juror. And let's suppose an extremely powerful and arrogant asshole testifies that he thinks it's perfectly ok to "discredit" his political opponents with derogatory information about them. Let's assume that a whole bunch of people from the White House testify that this arrogant asshole was obsessed with smearing a critic "because he was a Democrat."

Do you think he'd get the benefit of the doubt asbout whether he actually smeared this critic from either the straight shooting prosecutor or the grand juror?

I don't either. If they can nail him they're going to. He's a pig.
digby 7/17/2005 11:45:00 PM |

 
Closing Ranks

Bob Novak, who is now Karl Rove's howling bitch until the day his rotting cadaver finally admits it's dead, says that Ed Gillespie (whom he pointedly calls a protege of Karl Rove) may be the new chief of staff. It appears they are easing Andy Card out.

He has been disloyal in the past:

I made these inquiries in part because last spring, when I spoke to White House chief of staff Andrew Card, he sounded an alarm about the unfettered rise of Rove in the wake of senior adviser Karen Hughes’s resignation: "I’ll need designees, people trusted by the president that I can elevate for various needs to balance against Karl. . . . They are going to have to really step up, but it won’t be easy. Karl is a formidable adversary.

One wonders if Karl may think he's been disloyal more recently. After all, as Weldon Berger has been reminding us, there is still the question of who leaked to the Washington Post that the Plame leak was done "purely and simply for revenge." I always speculated it was Andy, who's not part of the Texas mafia.

In any case, it looks like the hankie twisting, pearl clutching Ed "political hate speech" Gillespie is being brought on to shore up Karl and "send a message." That's what they do. It's only a matter of time before we see Ben Ginsberg on the scene.

When they call in James "divaaaaaahn" Baker, we'll know the jig is up.



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digby 7/17/2005 08:29:00 PM |

 
Is It Safe?

Via Crooks and Liars, I see that Bob Schieffer takes the president to task for not just hauling in his top aides two years ago and telling them he wanted to know who talked to the press. This is a good question and one which I think the press should be asking every day. But then, Bush has always been a little cagey on this, hasn't he? Why you'd almost think he already knew all about it.

And then there's David Broder who seems to have popped half a viagra this morning and actually condemns the White House for it's ruthless behavior AND takes the press corpse top task for its wimpiness. Father Tim came close to giving Ken Mehman an Al Goring this morning.

The DC establishment has opened one droopy eye and they see that the Republicans might actually be vulnerable. So they pulled their guts from the storage box under the bed and tried them on for size. I wonder if they still fit after all this time?



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digby 7/17/2005 06:14:00 PM |

 
Another Unhappy Ambassador

I sure hope this guy's wife didn't have any pecadilloes in college or anything because they are going to be after him, for sure.



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digby 7/17/2005 04:57:00 PM |

 
Memo Minutia


Warning: Extreme parsing of arcane Rovegate evidence follows. Read at the risk of being put to sleep immediately.


Michael at Reading A1 suggests that I've misinterpreted the Fred Barnes piece I wrote about yesterday and that Cheney may have seen an earlier memo from an American diplomat rather than the now infamous June 10, 2003 classified memo that everybody's talking about. He may very well be right. I even questioned whether there even were any earlier memos.

Well, there were, and a whole bunch of them. (See the SSCI Report on Pre-War Intelligence, here.) And there was an American diplomat who debriefed Wilson whose report Cheney very likely saw if he requested information about Wilson's trip --- Barbara Owens-Kirkpatrick, the Ambassador of Niger. It's entirely believable that if the VP wanted to see a report on someone they'd send him the report of an Ambassador. He may have even picked up the phone and called her. In any case, it's certainly true that Cheney could have seen earlier memos and probably did. (We don't know when he saw those memos, but they do exist.) My speculation was probably off base.

Michael sets forth a theory about Cheney's revenge that I find quite persuasive. Along with him and Josh Marshall I would not be in the least bit surprised that this whole thing stemmed from the turf wars that characterized the run up to the invasion. I'm sure they are still fighting them. Negroponte may have to find some of his old friends in the Honduran Army to quell them.

Yesterday, like me, Marshall asked who wrote the June memo and why:

Who requested that the memo be written? Who actually wrote it? Why does it contain the inaccuracies the CIA claims it does? Who were the administration officials who continued to circulate the classified document to conservative news outlets even after Plame's identity was initially revealed? And how did it get into the hands of Jeff Gannon?

I think I have discovered some answers:

The answer to the first question is that we don't know who requested the memo.

The answer to the second question appears to be an INR analyst who is quoted heavily in the SSCI report and seems to be the only real source for the fact that Plame somehow finagled to get Wilson the trip.

In answer to the third, there is a big question as to whether anybody in the administration continued to circulate the memo to conservative news outlets (although they were certainly discussing it with mainstream news outlets.) Rather it appears that the CIA got the impression Jeff Gannon of Talon News had seen the memo (and rightly so, he acted as if he did) when he had in fact seen this article from October of 2003 in the WSJ (sorry can't find working link) which said:

An internal government memo addresses some of the mysteries at the center of the White House leak investigation and could help investigators in the search for who disclosed the identity of a Central Intelligence Agency operative, according to two people familiar with the memo.

The memo, prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel, details a meeting in early 2002 where CIA officer Valerie Plame and other intelligence officials gathered to brainstorm about how to verify reports that Iraq had sought uranium yellowcake from Niger.

Ms. Plame, a member of the agency's clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested at the meeting that her husband, Africa expert and former U.S. diplomat Joseph Wilson, could be sent to Niger to investigate the reports, according to current and former government officials familiar with the meeting at the CIA's Virginia headquarters. Soon after, midlevel CIA officials decided to send him, say intelligence officials.

Classified memos, like the one describing Ms. Plame's role, have limited circulation and investigators are likely to question all those known to have received it. Intelligence officials haven't denied Ms. Plame was involved in the decision to send Mr. Wilson, but they have said she was not "responsible" for the decision.

Gannon played games for quite a while pretending he was protecting sources and the like but finally he admitted that he was actually referring to the WSJ story. (The CIA was misled by Jeff Gannon into thinking that this classified memo was making the rounds of conservative male prostitutes. You can understand why they were upset. Might as well plaster it all over the Web. In living color.)

They were also likely upset that this memo was being discussed (and in such detail) because it was still classified. (I'll leave it up to the lawyers to figure out whether releasing new details of a classified document that has been preivously leaked contitutes a crime.)

In the end, it appears to me that there is only one primary source of the "Wilson's wife sent him" story and it is a single INR (state department intelligence) analyst. I suspect he is the one who wrote the 2003 memo. The SSCI Report entry on this specific subject begins:

CPD officials could not recall how the office decided to contact the former ambassador, however, interviews and documents provided to the Committee indicate that his wife, a CPD employee, suggested his name for the trip. The CPD reports officer told Committee staff that the former ambassador’s wife “offered up his name” and a memorandum to the Deputy Chief of the CPD on February 12,2002, from the former ambassador’s wife says, “my husband has good relations with both 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 activitv.” This was just one day before CPD sent a cable-requesting concurrence with CPD’s idea to send the former ambassador to Niger and requesting any additional information from the foreign government service on their uranium reports. The former ambassador’s wife told Committee staff that when CPD decided it would like to send the former ambassador to Niger, she approached her husband on behalf of the CIA and told him “there’s this crazy report” on a purported deal for Niger to sell uranium to Iraq.

(This allegedly unbiased SSCI report is big on the scare quotes when describing the Wilsons's testimony.It tries to make a not very subtle case that she was trying to slant the evidence to favor Saddam even before the trip. It's this biased language to which the Democrats on the panel rightly objected in their dissent.)

The Plame memo in question here has been explained as one written about Wilson's qualifications, but not one that suggested he go. The interviews mentioned indicate only two people, the person who said "she offered up his name" and the INR analyst who said the first meeting with Wilson was "apparently convened by [the former ambassador’s] wife who had the idea to dispatch [him.]" There appears to be no other corroboration although the meeting was full of people. The only other documentation the SSCI report provides is the INR analyst's notes:

On February 19,2002, CPD hosted a meeting with the former ambassador, intelligence analysts from both the CIA and INR, and several individuals DO and CPD divisions. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the merits of the former ambassador traveling to Niger. An INR analyst’s notes indicate 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.” The former ambassador’s wife told Committee staff that she only attended the meeting to introduce her husband and left after about three minutes.

The CIA has disputed in press reports that this analyst could have been at the meeting in which sending Wilson was broached. And that meeting must have been before the one the analyst refers to, since Wilson attended the one he's discussing. I don't know if the analyst had attended any earlier meetings in which Wilson was discussed for the mission, but the report doesn't mention it if he did. I think the press has been confused about this or deliberately misled.

What appears to have happened is that there was an earlier meeting in which it was decided (we don't know how) that Wilson should be sent. Plame introduced her husband at a later meeting with a bunch of people from throughout the intelligence community and then left. The analyst's impression was that she arranged the meeting and he put that in his notes. The rest is history.

Here's the bottom line as I see it. It's still quite possible that Cheney saw Wilson's report. According to the SSCI report, the CIA issued one and sent it up the line specifically because they knew that Cheney had asked about the Niger question. They did not make a special delivery to his office, so there is no way to prove one way or the other if Cheney ever saw it short of subpoenaeing the VP's records --- which I'm sure have long since been "misplaced." There were other reports issued as well, including the one written by this INR analyst called Niger: Sale of Uranium To Iraq Is Unlikely.

On the other hand, it's entirely possible that Cheney didn't see any reports. It's clear that people were trying to give him information he wanted to see. Wilson's report backed up Owen-Kirkpatrick and others who said Iraq was very unlikely to have been trying to buy yellowcake from Niger. Therefore, since it wasn't dispositive in their view on that fact, they may not have wanted to draw Cheney's ire by bringing it up.

One thing that's intriguing, however, is that the CIA told Cheney's briefer on March 5th that a source was coming back from Niger that day who could shed further light on the subject. That source was Joe Wilson. Either the briefer never gave Cheney that heads up or Cheney never followed up with it. Then again, maybe he did.

Whatever the case, Cheney says that he didn't know anything about it until he started to read the anonymous quotes in the newspapers from "a former ambassador" at which point he got a debriefing from an American diplomat. At this same time a memo was requested by somebody about the provenance of Wilson's trip (Wilson was saying it was to answer questions raised by Cheney.) It appears to me that at this point the INR analyst wrote up his notes about his involvement in the trip and those notes became the June 10th memo. And the White House seized on the fact that he said Wilson's wife was involved.

I suspect that's as far as they got. With the modern Republicans, all you have to do is mention that there might be some dirt on somebody's wife and they are all over it like slavering wolves. This would be exactly the kind of smear they'd jump on. This, then, would be their counterattack.

If that's so, the question then becomes, did they ever follow up with anyone to find out Plame's status with the CIA? Did anyone ever even contemplate that she might be in a delicate position there? Did they ever ask anyone at CIA if it was true that she had "arranged" the trip? And then of course there are the pivotal questions of who saw this memo and when --- and who leaked it to whom and when.

That's my theory of how the June 2003 memo came to be. And I'm pretty convinced that it's the real source of this whole thing. Judy Miller may complicate this, but I suspect that if she's a source, she's a cut-out for Libby (to whom we know she spoke during this period) not an original source herself. However, since I know fuck-all about what she knows, I can't really speculate.

Given what we know today from news reports and the SSCI report, this single INR analyst's notes, which people have conflated with a meeting he may never even have attended, seems like the simplest most believable source of this mess.

Update: Clarification on the Plame memo in which she discusses her husbands qualifications. TIME magazine says today:

Or, more personally, was Rove suggesting that Wilson was chosen not for his expertise but because his wife was trying to help him stay in the game? Certainly Rove distorted her role when he claimed she had authorized the trip. "She was not in a position to send Joe Wilson anywhere except to bed without his supper," says Larry Johnson, a Plame classmate at the CIA who later worked on Central American issues for the agency and then moved to the State Department as a counterterrorism officer. According to a declassified July 7, 2004, report from the Senate Intelligence Committee, it was Plame's boss, the deputy chief of the CIA's counterproliferation division, who authorized the trip. He did so after Plame "offered up" her husband's name for the Niger mission, according to the report. In a Feb. 12, 2002, memo to her boss, Plame wrote that "my husband has good relations with both 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."

It's highly unlikely that her boss was involved in the classified state department memo that made the rounds because well ... he actually knew she was clandestine.
If he was consulted by the White House on this matter, and told them (as I assume he would) that she was undercover, then they are criminal scumbags for outing her. If they didn't bother to consult they are stupid scumbags for outing her. Either way, they're scumbags.



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digby 7/17/2005 09:23:00 AM |

 
The Dog Ate My Classified Memo

So it's finally been revealed that Libby and Rove were Cooper's sources. What a coincidence. And both of them "heard" about Wilson's wife sending him on the mission from a reporter. Man oh man, what are the odds? It's even more shocking that the two most powerful political operatives in the White House were so out of the loop because we now know that on the trip to Africa on AF One, for reasons unknown, Rove subordinates Dan Bartlett and Ari Fleischer "prompted clusters of reporters" to look into how Wilson got his job while classified memos on the subject were being faxed back and forth to Condi to prepare her to go on television. Colin Powell was reported to be waving another secret classified memo around the cabin, a memo prepared more than a month earlier, that contained the information that Wilson's wife sent him on the trip.

And yet we are supposed to believe that Karl and Scooter never saw or heard about any of this classified information, but rather heard about it from a reporter. And I'm assuming that Bartlett and Fleischer are supposed to have heard all about this from reporters too, or maybe second hand from Rove or Libby. None of these people in the white house political and press operation who were aware of Wilson's wife's alleged involvement had ever seen the classified document that was all over the place. They just heard the "gossip" and had nothing to do with planting it.

(I had not heard this business about Fleischer and Bartlett throwing out hints to the press corps on the Africa trip. Certainly, the press corps knew it, but I guess they were protecting their super-double deep backround confidential communal gaggles with the White House Press Office by not telling anyone.)

And if we are to believe they all got this information from reporters who told Libby and Rove (who because there exists no political assassin shield law are forced to say they don't recall who they were) we must also then believe that throughout all of these very innocent exchanges of water cooler gossip among the press corps and the White House, neither Rove nor Libby nor anyone else thought to check with the CIA about Plame's actual job in WMD and whether it was appropriate that her job become public. Even Novak now denies that he thought of it and only used the word "operative" by accident. Nobody anywhere had a second thought that there might be a reason not to publicize the identity of someone who works in weapons of mass destruction at the CIA. This is what we are supposed to believe.

It seems more likely to me now that Fitzgerald is building an obstruction and conspiracy case. Unless he's stupid, which no one has ever said he is, he cannot believe these laughable excuses. If he has evidence that ties Novak into it after he shot his mouth off then that's a real cover-up.

And, yes,to answer those readers who think that it's a big waste of time to be talking about Rove in this detail, I think we all know the real story here is that "Karl Rove and others in the White House outed an undercover CIA operative to cover-up their lies about Iraq." I've been saying that for some time. John Podesta said so this morning. Frank Rich wrote it yesterday. Even Monsignor Russert seemed to be seeing the bigger picture when he brought Woodward and Bernstein on to talk about how the Watergate burglary was part of a bigger story of White House corruption. (Woodward is spinning pretty badly, but then what would you expect? He wrote the allegedly definitive story of "Bush at War" and didn't really get the story did he?)

But there is value in parsing the Rove stories in meticulous detail (besides being fun.) It feeds the scandal beast and if you don't feed that beast it dies. So, I'm going to keep writing about both aspects of this story --- the big picture and the detail about Rove --- because that's how you sustain a scandal. See, I learned this at the feet of the Mighty Wurlitzer. You just keep pounding in whatever way you can --- relentless, focused and loud.

And I truly believe that Rove and his antics in this case are symbolic of the whole corrupt political machine that he has built --- and the outing of a CIA agent is symbolic of the reckless desire to invade Iraq and roll over anyone who stood in their way. I think people are starting to get this in their gut.



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digby 7/17/2005 08:47:00 AM |

Saturday, July 16, 2005

 
War Of The Chickenhawks

Apparently the wingnut braintrust thinks that H.G. Wells is a Hollywood scriptwriter living in Laurel Canyon with a gold retriever and BMW Z8. Jesus, it's almost enough to make me cry.

Amanda links to Fred at Slacktivist as they both try to come to grips with some of the stupidest people on this planet --- the 101st keyboarders --- who seem to think that Spielberg wrote "War of the Worlds" and Michael Moore invented anti-colonialism.

These critics believe that WOTW is an anti-American screed. But they are very confused. Here's why:

To anyone with a brain, the story is anti-colonial so if it can be interpreted as representing events of today, it represents the war in Iraq. The US would be the aliens, right?

The alien invaders arrive. We cannot understand them. Our best technology cannot harm them. They are inscrutable and unstoppable. There is nothing we can do.

Big tough America. Hooyah!

But the keyboarders are complaining about the behavior of the humans:

Right-wing critics of the film complain that Spielberg's hero, played by Tom Cruise, spends most of the movie running away and hiding. But that's the point -- there's nothing else he can do.

But, see, if this is an allegory about Iraq (presciently written a hundred years before it happened) then the humans represent the Iraqis. Which means that if they think the humans are behaving in a cowardly fashion, the Fighting Hellmice must admire the real life Iraqi insurgents who are ferociously fighting back the alien invaders --- the US. The Iraqi "terrorists" are behaving precisely in the manner the Cheeto Brigade insists brave people should behave.

In other words, these chickenhawks are terrorists sympathizers.

However, I don't think the fighting keyboarders understand that the movie is anti-colonial. I think they think it's about 9/11 and the martians are supposed to be al Qaeda. They think it shows America as being weak and afraid because Tom Cruise tries to get away from the aliens.

I actually agree with them, although not in quite the same way, I'm afraid. Before I ever knew that Spielberg was re-making WOTW, I saw the crazed reaction of the right wing as being comparable to the hysteria we would see if Martians had landed rather than the intelligent, critical response we would expect a superpower to show in the face of a bunch of Islamic fundamentalist losers. Rightwing behavior from the beginning has been one of extreme overreaction --- the "existential threat" the "our oceans no longer protect us," the whole litany of fear inducing lies about Iraq are all manifestations of severe panic. Look at the difference between the way everyone else in the world behaved in the face of terrorist attacks and look at us. It's embarrassing.

I think you can see the movie both as a criticism of the invasion of Iraq and as a criticism of the inchoate frenzy that overtook the right wing after 9/11. Their hysterical reaction betrayed what they would do if a real existential threat emerged --- they'd lose their heads.




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digby 7/16/2005 10:42:00 AM |

 
Who Read The Memo?

Reader Suzanne D sent me this tantalizing little tid-bit this morning. Last night I wondered who received this 2003 classified State Department Memo and it seems that Fred Barnes answered that question, at least in one respect, back in July of 2003:

Nonetheless, it was reported in the media and repeated by politicians that Cheney had asked the CIA to send someone to Niger to look into the matter. This is untrue. What did happen is that CIA officials, without the knowledge of Cheney or Tenet, dispatched a former ambassador, Joseph Wilson, to investigate. Columnist Robert Novak has reported that Wilson's wife, a CIA employee, recommended him for the job. Wilson traveled to Niger, interviewed current and former officials, and decided that no deal for uranium had been made with Iraq.

When Wilson returned, he gave an oral report to the CIA. But he didn't meet with Cheney or send him a written report on his trip. Cheney didn't learn of Wilson's trip until he read in the New York Times in May 2003 that an ex-ambassador had been sent. Cheney later received a document from an American diplomat who had debriefed Wilson. It was marked with a warning that the information might be unreliable. Leaders in Niger were not likely to admit to an American envoy that they'd violated United Nations sanctions by selling uranium to Saddam, it suggested.

If this document from an "American diplomat" who had debriefed Wilson is the same classified state department document from June of 2003 we are now talking about, Vice President Dick Cheney was one person who was aware that it was being alleged that "Wilson's wife" had sent him on the trip. Perhaps he didn't receive it until after Wilson's op-ed, but it seems unlikely since that wasn't published until two months after Cheney became aware of Wilson's charges. Is it reasonable to believe that he would have waitied that long to inquire about someone who was saying the intelligence was fixed in Iraq? I seriously doubt it.

If that's the case, then the idea that Libby and Rove didn't see it is preposterous.

I think that the oddest thing about this memo is that it was written in June of 2003. Surely, there were earlier real-time documents that reflect Wilson's debriefing upon his return? Why did they need to create this new memo at all? If Cheney really was unaware of Wilson's trip (and he may very well have been) why didn't they just send over the original debriefing instead of writing a new one?


And here's another piece of information in that article that I hadn't heard before:

Finally, last week, the truth started to emerge. At his press conference with President Bush, Prime Minister Blair said, "In case people should think that the whole idea of a link between Iraq and Niger was some invention, in the 1980s we know for sure that Iraq purchased round about 270 tons of uranium from Niger." The White House, for its part, had had enough and started what it's calling a "counteroffensive."

The first step was to declassify and release the portion of the NIE entitled "Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction." Iraq, the intelligence document says, has been "vigorously trying to procure uranium ore" in Somalia and Congo as well as Niger. And there's more to come in the campaign for Bush's recovery. Congressional Republicans are joining the fight. The White House has brought back Mary Matalin, the Republican operative and ex-Cheney aide, to manage the media campaign. Maybe it will work. But the truth is, it shouldn't have been necessary at all.

The media campaign she was managing was the media campaign that also happened to smear Wilson. This was the period in which Karl Rove admits to pushing the story all over town --- reportedly claiming it is perfectly legitimate to ferociously discredit (smear) your political critics and use the entire Republican Noise Machine to do it. It appears that Mary Matalin was right in the middle of that.

We haven't seen much of her lately, have we?



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digby 7/16/2005 09:20:00 AM |

Friday, July 15, 2005

 
Canteloupe Eyes, Judy In Disguise

So, Judy actually met with an unnamed government official on July 8th, the same day Rove spoke with Novak? I don't know what it means, but it sure sounds interesting. Rove to Miller to Novak to Rove? He's known for using cut-outs.

But this, I think, is even more interesting:

In court papers filed earlier this month urging that Ms. Miller be jailed, Mr. Fitzgerald said that "the source in this case has waived confidentiality in writing."

George Freeman, an assistant general counsel of The New York Times Company, said Ms. Miller would not say who that source was. "She has never received," Mr. Freeman said, "what she considers an unambiguous, unequivocal and uncoerced waiver from anyone with whom she may have spoken."

Mr. Freeman declined to say what efforts, if any, Ms. Miller and her lawyers have made to obtain a satisfactory waiver.

Presumably, like Cooper's, Miller's lawyers don't feel it's a good idea to be contacting her source, if they even know who it is.

This statement from Miller's attorney strikes me as an explicit call for her source to give her an "unambiguous, unequivocal and uncoerced waiver." Maybe Judy isn't enjoying herself as much in jail as she thought she would.

So who's going to ask Karl and Scooter to give Judy this unambiguous, unequivocal and uncoerced waiver? Surely they will be happy to do it, right? Neither of them have anything to hide.

In fact, every person who previously signed a waiver in the matter should be asked to sign this explicit one, even if they never talked to her, in order to give the guilty party some cover so that Judy can testify and the public won't automatically know who she's been protecting. That seems fair, doesn't it?

Maybe Michael Isikoff could suggest this next time he's on TV. It might focus his mind on who's really responsible for Miller being in jail.



Oh and this business about the classified state department memo being the source is quite interesting. I wrote about this earlier in the week but there is a significant detail that's been changed since the early reports about it. It was evidently written in June of 2003, just a month before Wilson's op-ed --- probably at the behest of someone who was reading Nicolas Kristoff's columns about a trip to Africa by an unnamed ex-ambassador. (The story says it was written for Marc Grossman, under secretary of state for political affairs, but that may only mean he was the bureaucrat charged with getting a report.) All the original stories had it dated in 2002, which made me assume that it was the original state department report about Wilson's trip, written in real time. It wasn't. It was written a year and a half later based on the memory of a staffer who said he had been present at the meeting, a fact which the CIA disputed.

This memo being written just a month before the op-ed changes the equation. Who wrote it and who requested it? And did anyone in the White House see it before Wilson's op-ed was published? If so, who?

Update: Maybe this is why Miller's lawyers are starting to "ask" that her source give her a special waiver:

Lawyers in the CIA leaks investigation are concerned that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald may seek criminal contempt charges against New York Times reporter Judith Miller, a rare move that could significantly lengthen her time in jail.

[...]

While media coverage in recent days has focused on conversations that White House senior adviser Karl Rove had with reporters, two sources say Miller spoke with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, during the key period in July 2003 that is the focus of Fitzgerald's investigation.

The two sources -- one who is familiar with Libby's version of events, and the other with Miller's -- said the previously undisclosed conversation occurred a few days before Plame's name appeared in Robert Novak's syndicated column on July 14, 2003. Miller and Libby discussed former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, Plame's husband, who had recently alleged that the Bush administration had twisted intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war, according to the source familiar with Libby's version.

But, according to the source, the subject of Wilson's wife did not come up.

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digby 7/15/2005 09:24:00 PM |

 
Anticipation

Unless something really exciting happens, I'm done for the day. But here's something to look forward to: Matt Cooper is writing an article about his Grand Jury appearance that probably has the White House boyz 'n grlz wetting their pants. I would guess it will come out on Sunday, maybe tomorrow in anticipation of the gasbags.

They are going to try to "Rather" him if says anything damaging. Rove's lawyer already laid the groundwork:

"By any definition, he burned Karl Rove," Luskin said of Cooper."

I still think that was probably not the smartest thing they ever did, but they probably thought they could intimidate Matt Cooper. And maybe they did. We'll see.

Swopa has some interesting thoughts on what Cooper might say and how it might affect the case. And if you haven't read Murray Waas' account of how this mysterious "lawyer who has been briefed on the case" came to talk with the NY Times and Washington Post, do so. It's fascinating.


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digby 7/15/2005 07:34:00 PM |

 
Awwwww

Attaturk has a special gift for Karl. Check it out.




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digby 7/15/2005 05:50:00 PM |

 
Joe And Dick On The Same Page

September, 2003

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "MEET THE PRESS")

DICK CHENEY, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I had heard a report that the Iraqis had been trying to acquire uranium in Africa, Niger in particular.

I get a daily brief on my own each day before I meet with the president to go through the intel. And I ask lots of question. One of the questions I asked at that particular time about this, I said, "What do we know about this?" They take the question. He came back within a day or two and said, "This is all we know. There's a lot we don't know," end of statement. And Joe Wilson -- I don't know who sent Joe Wilson. He never submitted a report that I ever saw when he came back.

Here's what Wilson said in the op-ed on July 6th, that Ken Mehlman and half the Washington Press Corps is characterizing as "Cheney sent me to Africa:"

In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake -- a form of lightly processed ore -- by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990's. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office.

When Karl Rove was talking to Bob Novak on July 8th about Valerie Plame this is what Wilson had actually said. If Karl was "knocking down" a story it was one that he was making up in his head because Cheney himself backed up Wilson's story long after the brouhaha had hit the fan. Nothing in Cheney's statement contradicts what Wilson said, even about the disposition of the report:

I later shared my conclusions with the State Department African Affairs Bureau. There was nothing secret or earth-shattering in my report, just as there was nothing secret about my trip.

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.

All Karl and his hit squad had to do to "knock down" Wilson was say, "Cheney had some questions back in 2002, but he never saw any report on Wilson's trip and was unaware that the CIA had dispatched him. And frankly, after looking into the matter and seeing his report for the first time we can see why it wouldn't have been forwarded to the White House. Ambassador Wilsons himself says that there was nothing earth shattering in it. In retrospect he was on the right track but nobody knew that at the time. Fog of war and all that..."

But no. They couldn't try to be reasonable and put the thing into perspective. They had to immediately smear Wilson with this business about his wife. And a smear it was --- it was the main thrust of Rove's "evidence" in his discussion with Cooper and he admits that he at least confirmed this information to Novak. That's the mark of Rove.


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digby 7/15/2005 05:01:00 PM |

 
I don't think it's quite fair to condemn the whole program because of a single slip up...

Goddamn, no matter what else happens, if this sadist goes down, I'll be happy. General Geoffrey D. Miller aka General Geoff D. Ripper truly is one of the most malevolent pieces of garbage in the US Army and he really should be court martialed. Today it's been revealed the Ripper was actually meeting, apparently in secret, with Wolfowitz and Cambone and lied to congress about it. I am not surprised.

An Army general who has been criticized for his role in the treatment of prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention center and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq has contradicted his sworn congressional testimony about contacts with senior Pentagon officials.

Gen. Geoffrey Miller told the Senate Armed Services Committee in May 2004 that he had only filed a report on a recent visit to Abu Ghraib, and did not talk to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or his top aides about the fact-finding trip.

But in a recorded statement to attorneys three months later, Miller said he gave two of Rumsfeld's most senior aides - then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary for Intelligence Steve Cambone - a briefing on his visit and his subsequent recommendations.

"Following our return in the fall, I gave an outbrief to both Dr. Wolfowitz and Secretary Cambone," Miller said in the Aug. 21, 2004, statement to lawyers for guards accused of prisoner abuse, a transcript of which was obtained by the Chicago Tribune.

"I went over the report that we had developed and gave them a briefing on the intelligence activities, recommendations, and some recommendations on detention operations," Miller added.

Specific interrogation techniques, he said, were not discussed.

Miller's statement about the meeting, if true, suggests that officials at the very top of the Pentagon may have been more involved in monitoring activities at the prison than previously disclosed. Abu Ghraib was later at the center of a scandal surrounding prisoner abuse, which has led to punishments for soldiers.

Here's the thing. After artillery officer Miller showed such pluck and spunk down at Gitmo with his novel interrogation techniques, they sent him to Iraq to see what he could do. See, the Iraqis weren't behaving like the grateful liberated people they were expected to be. He made an evaluation and then sent his "best guys" from Gitmo to Abu Ghraib to implement his techniques. We have recently had it confirmed that many of the techniques authorized by Miller at Gitmo were of the same ilk as those captured in the pictures at Abu Ghraib.

And in a bizarro world decision worthy of Wil E Coyote, after the scandal broke they sent Miller in to "straighten things out."

All of this has been known for some time. I wrote back on May 29th, 2004:

It wasn't a bunch of bad apples. It was at the explicit instruction of General Geoffrey D Ripper, who sent in his best leg breakers to teach 'em how to get the job done.

And then, as reports of the abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib were coming to light the Bush administration decided that the best way to deal with the problem was to put in charge the same guy who had recommended and implemented the abuse and torture in the first place.

How long will it take for somebody to ask, considering his history at the prison, why in the world General Ripper was brought in after the scandal broke? I'm just asking. He is, after all, an obviously sadistic freak who is one of the causes of the greatest foreign policy PR disaster in American history.

That not hyperbole. Abu Ghraib did us greivous harm around the world and probably helped al Qaeda more than any single act we've done. And General Geoff D Ripper was the go-to guy.

It looks now as if he was doing all this with the express knowledge and permission of Rumsfeld's top brass and presumably Rumsfeld himself. (Remember Rumsfeld weighed in on "interrogation" techniques in some detail --- "why shouldn't they have to stand for longer than four hours, I do!") This is not surprising either.

These guys picked a sadistic amateur to run both Gitmo and Abu Ghraib because his predecessors were insufficiently willing to "take the gloves off." This is in keeping with their over-arching theory about how to fight the War on Terror. It's worked out awfully well.

Today, we know that Bush administration loose lips are sinking ships all over the place, and their zeal to fear monger at home combined with their desire to treat the wogs with maximum ferocity has resulted in the US actively encouraging terrorism. It's a fucking miracle we've escaped another hit, and it's no thanks to anything these clowns have done.



Update: Lest anyone get the idea that I do not condemn the torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib on a moral basis because I did not explicitly say so in this piece, please feel free to check these posts in which I discuss torture in great detail in moral,ethical,practical and strategic terms. I regret not mentioning in this particular post that I think torture is immoral. Consider that oversight corrected.



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digby 7/15/2005 01:55:00 PM |

 
Toadys

...Mr. Rove and other administration officials had a legitimate interest in rebutting Mr. Wilson's inflated claims -- including the notion that he had been dispatched to Niger at Mr. Cheney's behest. It's in that context, judging from Mr. Cooper's e-mail, that Mr. Rove appears to have brought up Ms. Plame's role. Whether Mr. Rove or others behaved in a way that amounted to criminal, malicious or even merely sleazy behavior will turn on what they knew about Ms. Plame's employment. Were they aware she was a covert agent? Did they recklessly fail to consider that before revealing her involvement? How they learned about Ms. Plame also will matter: Did the information come from government sources or outside parties?

None of that matters. Her cover was blown and Rove participated in it. I don't care if he thought he was saving the world from an invasion from aliens, his act, not his motive should be the primary concern of a white house that is in the middle of what they tell us every day is a global war on terror. He could have had the best reasons in the world, but he either fucked up or he committed a crime, neither of which should be tolerated at his level. We know right now, at this minute, that at a minimum he fucked up.

Do you think that in the private sector if a person in Rove's position of trust and power had "accidentally" told the press about a secret patent or a new formula that he'd be allowed to keep his job? Would he be trusted going forward with information about patents and secret formulas? Why is this so hard to understand? What Rove did may or may not have been a criminal offense. But it definitely was a firing offense.

And what's this bullshit about "Mr. Rove appears to have brought up Ms. Plame's role." "Appears" nothing. He clearly did bring up Ms Plame's role, and for reasons that are very hard to make sense out of. And just today, the WaPo itself reports that Rove admits that he confirmed that fact to Bob Novak. There's no appearance about it. Rove admits it.


Update: MediaMatters has a thorough debuning of all these RNC spin points masquerading as an editorial here.
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digby 7/15/2005 12:54:00 PM |

 
Spikey's Threat

I woke up this morning thinking about Michael Isikoff, which isn't my favorite thing to think about first thing in the morning. Last night he told Jon Stewart that Pat Fitzgerald had better have something really, really strong to justify this investigation taking the turns its taken. It had better be about something really important --- it had better be about national security. He was quite fierce about it.

I didn't hear the rest because I threw the remote at the TV and it mercifully turned off.

The idea that Michael Isikoff, of all people, is laying down the gauntlet --- warning Fitzgerald that if he's thinking of prosecuting someone for perjury, say, or obstuction of justice, he will lead the chorus denouncing him as an overzealous prosecutor --- is stunning. I don't know what is in the Chardonnay in DC but it's causing a lot of people to have severe problems remembering things --- and seeing themselves in the mirror.

Michael Isikoff was practically Ken Starr's right hand man in the media. He performed at only a slightly less partisan level than Drudge or Steno Sue Schmidt. He admits in his book that he became convinced that the president treated women badly and therefore needed to be exposed. He didn't seem to think that throwing a duly elected president from office for lying about a private matter was overzealous in the least. He was on that bandwagon from the very beginning and one of the guys who drove it.

Michael Isikoff did not go on television and say that the punishment didn't fit the crime or that Starr should have had something really, really important to justify his 70 million dollar investigation. Indeed, he did exactly the opposite.

Isikoff has done good work on this story. He continues to do good work. But apparently he doesn't see outing CIA agents as serious as presidential fellatio. I suspect that holds true for the entire press corpse. They haven't really had the fire in the belly for this one, have they?

Isikoff was a fine help to the Bush administration last night and I hope it makes up for that unfortunate Koran in the toilet business. He set the frame for indictments to be seen as unreasonable if don't show national security was compromised. If Fitzgerald indicts members of the administration for lying or covering their tracks, it will not be taken well by the king of the kewl kidz. I have no doubt that the lemmings of the independent press corpse will fall into line as well, in the unfortunate event that Karl Rove is indicted for perjury or obstruction. After all it's not as if he's anything like that mean bitch Martha Stewart or that cruel lothario Bill Clinton. Those people really deserved it.



Update:

I realize that Isikoff was talking about the heinous, heinous crime of sending poor Judy Miller to jail. But I don't really think that should be the standard by which a prosecutor should decide that only proveable crimes of national security should be investigated.

The point here is that this case is intrinsically about the press. Fitzgerald wasn't conducting a fishing expedition to find out what Judy and Matt might know about a potential crime --- he wanted them to testify because they may have been an element of the crime itself. This is a very important distinction.

It's nice that Mikey and others are such zealous defenders of the freedom of the press. But freedom of the press is a right. Serving our democracy by giving the public the information it needs to govern itself is their responsibility. It is very hard to see how Judy's martyrdom can be seen as a pure unalloyed matter of principle when(as Stewart pointed out) the press' privilege seems to have been used pretty exclusively these last few years to protect their access to powerful government officials who want to use them to spread official lies.

I compare the coverage and attitude of the press covering this investigation to the shrill and breathless reporting of the Clinton years because it's instructive. Never once did Isikoff express reservations about the non-stop partisan character assasination, the invasion of privacy, the perjury trap or the clear overstepping by the prosecutor as he "investigated" whether Bill Clinton lied about sex in a case that had already been dismissed --- all of which were betrayals of principle just as important as the reporter's privilege in my mind. But because this case involves a member of the press caught in a prosecutors net, suddenly he isn't so sanguine about charging people with the crimes of lying or covering-up. That's just not a good enough reason to put one of them on the hot seat. He and all of his brethren salivated at the idea that our democracy would be weakened by the partisan removal of a duly elected president, but let Judy go to jail and the hinges are coming off the nation.

I am reserving judgment on Judy's status in the investigation because I have no facts one way or the other. I suspect it is more complicated than just protecting Karl Rove or someone else, but I don't really know. I do know that she is the type of person who relishes drama, so I have a feeling that this little sojourn in lock-up isn't exactly traumatizing for her. She's already compared herself to soldiers in Iraq (where she wore a military uniform for god's sake!) I'm figuring she'll soon be saying she's like MLK in the Birmingham jail. I think ole Judy can handle doing the time. In fact I think she relishes it.

Mickey and his friends can stop worrying about that part of the case and worry about why this government has lied to the nation repeatedly and blown over 200 billion dollars on an illegal and unnecessary war when terrorists are blowing shit up all over the world. Judy is more than happy to do her time for the principle of the reporter's privilege.


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digby 7/15/2005 08:50:00 AM |

Thursday, July 14, 2005

 
Short Term Memory Loss

The NY Times is reporting than an anonymous Rove defender who has been briefed on the case (by Rove?) says that Novak was the one who told Karl Plame's name and informed him of "the circumstances" in which her husband traveled to Africa --- at which point we are supposed to believe Karl suddenly remembered that he'd heard some of this from other journalists and confirmed the story to Novak by saying either "I heard that too" or "oh, you know about it."

I can certainly understand why Fitzgerald might have been suspicious of this tale --- especially when he read that Novak's first comment on the matter was:

"I didn't dig it out, it was given to me. They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it."

According to this article "they" refers to an unknown source and ... Karl Rove.

Rove Reportedly Held Phone Talk on C.I.A. Officer

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

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

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

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

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

It's late and I'm tired so I'm not going to look it up, but didn't I also hear a bunch of people saying over the last few days that Rove didn't know Plame's name when he spoke with Cooper? This conversation took place three days earlier. Not that it matters because he "identified" her as Wilson's wife, but it's interesting anyway.


Update: from the WaPo:

The lawyer, who has knowledge of the conversations between Rove and prosecutors, said President Bush's deputy chief of staff has told investigators that he first learned about the operative from a journalist and that he later learned her name from Novak.

Rove has said he does not recall who the journalist was who first told him that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA, or when the conversation occurred, the lawyer said.

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digby 7/14/2005 10:25:00 PM |

 
Get To Work, Kewl Kidz

Dan Froomkin nicely linked to my post from yesterday asking why Rove hadn't saved the country some time and money and made sure that Cooper knew he didn't have to keep his confidence. He says:

But here's what that makes me think: if reporters want to help get New York Times reporter Judith Miller out of jail, let's contact every conceivable person who might have been her source, and ask them (or their lawyers): if for some reason Judy Miller were in jail thinking that she's protecting you, would that be a mistake? Would you tell that to her lawyer?

Let's start with Rove, Cheney Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, deputy national security adviser Elliot Abrams, Cheney national security adviser John Hannah, counselor Dan Bartlett, press secretary Scott McClellan, former press secretary Ari Fleischer -- and every other person's name who has ever even remotely been attached to this story in the past.

What have we got to lose? Is anyone with me, or shall I get going myself.

I think that's a terrific idea. Certainly you'd think Judy's pals in the press corps would want to do her this service. Help her out kidz.



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digby 7/14/2005 06:30:00 PM |

 
Let's Talk About Sex

I'm getting dizzy with the hypocrisy:

Think Progress has this:

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) had these kind words to share last night on Hannity & Colmes:

If you can prove a case against Karl Rove, let the legal system do it, otherwise just shut up, because you’re ruining a guy’s reputation before anything has happened.

Let the legal system work, eh?

... I would like to speak a few minutes to what I believe is the unshakable, undeniable truth. And much of it is about sex.

[...]

The most chilling thing was, for a period of time, the president was setting stories in motion that were lies. Those stories found themselves in the press to attack a young lady who could potentially be a witness against him.

To me, that is very much like Watergate. That shows character inconsistent with being president, and every member of Congress should look at that episode and decide, is this truly about sex? Is Bill Clinton doing the right thing by continuing to make us have to pursue this, have to prove to a legal certainty he lied? The president's fate is in his own hands. Mr. President, you have one more chance. Don't bite your lip; reconcile yourself with the law.

It's just a good thing Rovegate isn't about the vitally important issue of consensual sex between two adults because Goober and his Mayberry Machiavelli crew would be forced to talk about it in numbing detail for months on end before the facts are in.

Luckily, instead of it being a case about a woman blowing the president, this is only about the white house blowing a CIA agent's cover for political purposes in a time of war. We really should have more respect for the reputation of the person who the facts clearly show right now to be either an ignoramus or a thug. How rude.


Update: From Evan in the comments:

Bumper sticker par excellence

WHO DO YOU HAVE TO BLOW TO GET A
PRESIDENT IMPEACHED AROUND HERE?!

I'm getting one.



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digby 7/14/2005 05:38:00 PM |

 
Rebel With A Cause

Via Atrios:

Ken Mehlman: A leak is when you ask a reporter to write a story. He was discouraging a reporter from writing a false story.

So why did Bob Novak write the same story, virtually verbatim, that Rove told Cooper? Was he rebelling against the Republican establishment? Refusing to be cowed by political operatives? Unable to take a hint? What?


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digby 7/14/2005 05:10:00 PM |

 
Gobsmacked

Newshounds reports on Ann Coulter's soon to be legendary performance on Hannity and Colmes last night:

Alan Colmes started off the interview by asking an excellent question:

"If Karl Rove wasn't revealing something secret, why did he have to speak on double super secret background?"

For a moment, it looked like Coulter might have been genuinely reluctant to talk to a liberal (as the title of her last book claims she is) but I think it was more likely that she had a moment of panic at not having a good answer. After a pause, she began to speak slowly, as if she were trying to think of the right words as she went along.

Because you don't generally read in the press - you know - I think it was all - you didn't see Karl Rove, I think, being quoted on a lot of these things - but I think the point was, um, Clown Wilson was going around implying that he had been sent by the CIA and reported to Dick Cheney's office... I mean, it's amazing if you go back and read these articles now, he uses these - you know - sort of Clintonian legally accurate phrases...

She must not have had her coffee. She's usually a little bit swifter than this.

And "Clown" Wilson? Man, these guys are rattled.



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digby 7/14/2005 04:46:00 PM |

 
Still Wrong, Always Wrong

Kevin Drum's got some interesting stuff up today. He is one of the blogosphere's resident experts on the Plame story --- he was the go-to guy when it broke and he seems to to remember a lot of details I've forgotton (or never knew.)

He reminds us today (via Mickey Kaus) of this Howard Fineman analysis from 2003 in which Fineman speculates that the leak was really an attempt to smear Wilson and his wife as being part of a "pro-Saddam" CIA cabal. Here's the relevant excerpt:

I am told by what I regard as a very reliable source inside the White House that aides there did, in fact, try to peddle the identity of Joe Wilson’s wife to several reporters. But the motive wasn’t revenge or intimidation so much as a desire to explain why, in their view, Wilson wasn’t a neutral investigator, but, a member of the CIA’s leave-Saddam-in-place team.

I think this may very well have played into at least some of the participants' thinking at the time although since they've never made this explicit in the smear, I think it may have been meant more for beltway kids and the wingnut choir than for broad public consumption. This is inside baseball stuff.

The big players in this turf war are the neocons and Dick Cheney, who is only sort of an honorary neocon. He and Rummy are more simple craven power mongers. (He doesn't give a shit about democracy which the neocons sorta, kinda do, even though they think we should create it by force, which is incoherent.) Anyway, it's imnportant to remember that within this administration are a whole bunch of people who think that the CIA is made up of a bunch of hippies who don't understand How The World Works.

What's interesting about them is that they have always been wrong about everything. If there was no other reason not to back the war in Iraq, it was that it was being pushed by people who have either hugely overestimated every single threat this country has faced for the last 30 years or gotten the nature of the threat completely upside down.

Lawrence Korb wrote a piece about this subject in August of 2004, called "Time To Bench Team B":

The reports of the 9/11 Commission and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence miss the real problem facing the intelligence community. The real problem is not organization or culture, but the Team B concept which began in 1976, and the real villains are those hardliners who refuse to accept the unbiased and balanced judgments of intelligence professionals about the threats facing the country.

[...]

To be sure, the intelligence community has made misjudgments. That is to be expected. But given the fact that the intelligence community has been second-guessed and publicly embarrassed when it tried to present unbiased objective assessments of threats from the Soviets, China, and rogue nations, it is not surprising that it caved in on whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. While there was no formal Team B pressure, the hardliners were now back in power.

And from the Soviet threat to China to rogue states to Iraq, the neocons and hardliners were wrong each and every time. And they weren't just wrong on some details, they massively, abundently wrong about everything. Korb discusses one particular fact in his piece that I think illuminates their rather insane view about terrorism:

In 1981, after the publication of Clare Sterling's book, "The Terror Network," which argued that global terrorists were actually pawns of the Soviets, leading hard-liners asked the CIA to look into the relationship between Soviets and terrorist organizations. The agency concluded that although there was evidence that the Soviets had assisted groups such as the Palestine Liberation Organization with weapons and training, there was no evidence that the Soviets encouraged or approved these groups' terrorist acts. However, hard-liners like Secretary of State Alexander Haig, CIA Chief William Casey and Policy Planning Director Wolfowitz rejected the draft as a naive, exculpatory brief and had the draft retooled to assert that the Soviets were heavily involved in supporting "revolutionary violence worldwide."

Since they never adjust to changing circumstances or admit any new evidence that doesn't fit their preconcieved notions, this was still the framework they were working from when bin Laden came on the scene. It's why the neocon nutcase Laurie Mylroie was able to convince people in the highest reaches of the Republican intelligensia that Saddam had something to do with bin Laden, even though there was never a scintilla of evidence to back it up. They simply could not,and cannot to this day, come to grips with the fact that their view of how terrorism works --- through "rogue states" and totalitarian sponsorship --- is simply wrong.

When Clare Sterling's book came out CIA director William Casey was said to have told his people, "read Claire Sterling's book and forget this mush. I paid $13.95 for this and it told me more than you bastards who I pay $50,000 a year." Wolfowitz and Feith are said to have told their staff in the Pentagon to read Laurie Mylroie's book about Saddam and al Qaeda. Richard Clarke, in "Against All Enemies" quotes Wolfowitz as saying: "You give Bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don't exist."

This, then, is simply how they think. It's as Rob Cordry says, "the facts are biased." (That's the state of mind that led neocon Judith Miller to make her bizarre incomprehensible comment "I was proved fucking right!") They truly believe that even though they have been completely wrong about everything for the past thirty years that it just can't be so.

And no matter what, in their minds the the CIA is always trying to screw them.

So the political environment in which Valeria Plame was outed was virtually hallucinogenic. There may have really been some part of certain members of the Bush administration's dysfunctional lizard brains that really thought in July of 2003 that the CIA had been trying to set them up and used Joe Wilson to do it.

But it's not July of 2003 now, is it? It's two years later and we know for a fact that the analysts, including Wilson, who said the Niger deal was bullshit were right and we know that the analysts who doubted the evidence about Saddam's WMD were right too.

Not that this will stop the Team B neocons from insisting that "they were proved fucking right." They really are delusional and they always have been.


Karl Rove, however, is a lot of things, but delusional isn't one of them. He just put out the hit on Plame and Wilson to shut down the questions Wilson was raising. He was taking care of business. But others in the administration may have made a good case, at least in their own beautiful minds, that they were the victims. God knows these people love to be victims.

I don't know if you saw Wilson on the Today show, but I thought he acquitted himself very well --- mainly because he kept on the topic of the larger Iraq lies. I really think this is a key to making people understand this story.

There is a confluence of events right now with the bad news on the ground in Iraq, the Downing Street memos, the London bombings and Rovegate flaring up that are beginning to filter into the body politic. A new conventional wisdom is being written. I think that people are putting these things together which is why you are seeing the preciputous dip in the president's approval ratings. It's not that people know, or even want to know, the details. Only junkies like me (and you) get this into it. But the ground has shifted and people are understanding that something went terribly wrong.

The president's right hand man exposing a covert CIA agent for political puposes perfectly symbolizes the entire fetid mess.


Update: Looks like Rush got the memo. According to Bradblog:

Rush's final words at the end of the show (referring to the Press Conference scheduled by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) to happen shortly): "Chuck Shumer is Joe Wilson's 'handler' in this agency plot to bring down the President."

Are the dittoheads buying this?


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digby 7/14/2005 03:02:00 PM |

 
No Longer A Beer Buddy

Finally, it's not just honesty where Bush is taking a hit. Only 50 percent of those polled gave him high ratings for being easygoing and likeable, down from 57 in January; 43 percent gave him high ratings for being smart, down from 50; 40 percent gave him high ratings for being compassionate enough to understand average people, down from 47; and only 29 percent gave him high ratings for being willing to work with people whose viewpoints are different from his own, down from 33.

I'm not the greatest judge in the world because I've always thought he was a dominating, unlikeable, dumb, arrogant intolerant asshole. A bunch oif people thought he'd be fun to hang around with, though, and it's a big reason why he got re-elected. Without his personal popularity, what has he really got?

The good news is that this should finally kill off the "enormously popular" president meme that refused to die. I'm sure Andrea Mitchell and Tim Russert are in mourning today.



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digby 7/14/2005 12:26:00 PM |

 
Bookmark This

From Bloomberg:

Wilson's Iraq Assertions Hold Up Under Fire From Rove Backers



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digby 7/14/2005 12:06:00 PM |

 
The Source


It's nice to be able to fit another piece into the Rovegate puzzle. This Kos diary by PollyUSA is an excellent rundown of the original source of the Plame information --- a classified state department document from 2002 that was then circulated all over Washington after Novak's column ran. Clearly, most people following the case closely already know this because it's all in the public record. I hadn't connected the dots even though I've written about this document in a couple of different contexts.

In a nutshell:

There is a leaked classified state department document from 2002 in play in this case. It is widely considered to be the likely source of the information that Plame worked for the CIA.

It says that Valerie Plame recommended her husband for the job.

It was leaked to a bunch of news organizations during 2003 and is a piece of evidence in the Senate commission report.

This is the same document that was on the Africa trip with Colin Powell and the president.

The CIA has publicly disputed the accuracy of the memo, saying that the author of the memo could not have been at the meeting and therefore didn't know what he was talking about.


PollyUSA rounded up a number of newpaper articles that discussed this document but here are just a couple of them:

WSJ October 17, 2003:

An internal government memo addresses some of the mysteries at the center of the White House leak investigation and could help investigators in the search for who disclosed the identity of a Central Intelligence Agency operative, according to two people familiar with the memo.

The memo, prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel, details a meeting in early 2002 where CIA officer Valerie Plame and other intelligence officials gathered to brainstorm about how to verify reports that Iraq had sought uranium yellowcake from Niger.

WaPo December 26th 2003:

Sources said the CIA is angry about the circulation of a still-classified document to conservative news outlets suggesting Plame had a role in arranging her husband's trip to Africa for the CIA. The document, written by a State Department official who works for its Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), describes a meeting at the CIA where the Niger trip by Wilson was discussed, said a senior administration official who has seen it.

It is a crime to leak classified information, so this may well be an element of Fitzgerald's case. In an interesting sidenote, it was this document that JD Guckert referenced when he interviewed Wilson and it got him a visit from the FBI. (After preening about confidential sources for a while, Guckert eventually said that he'd read about the document in the Wall Street Journal.)His story confirms that the FBI was following up on this document and that means it probably was still classified when Guckert wrote about it in October 2003, however.

I have a couple of thoughts about this.

In order to stay out of legal and political trouble, members of Bush administration simply have to claim that they didn't know Valerie Plame was undercover. So, if this classified report is the source of the leak and it only says "Wilson's wife suggested he go on the mission" with no mention of her status, then it appears that not one person who saw that document --- whether it was Colin Powell on Air Force One or whether it was Cheney and Libby with the entire Iraq Group holding their hand towels in the mens room ----- not one bothered to raise a flag about this CIA "employee's" status before Rove et al blabbed the story all over town. If they are innocent of purposefully outing a CIA Agent this is what we must believe.

I don't have a top security clearance and I don't work in Washington and I am as far out of the war planning for this country as you can get. Yet I know that I would have wondered whether it might be a matter of national security to tell the press that someone was a CIA employee. Anybody who watches "Alias" would know that for gawd's sake. We are supposed to believe that top presidential advisors took the information from one state department document and ran with it without ever checking the details.

Could be. Nobody ever thought the president would personally authorize the break in of the Democratic National Committee, but he did.


Second, the CIA has disputed the characterization of Plame's role in getting her husband the assignment. I don't know or care whether she did or not --- it's a red herring. But nonetheless, it's worth pointing out that is has been challenged by the CIA from the beginning. From Newsday July 22, 2003:

A senior intelligence official 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."

I think we've figured it out.

But what's interesting about that is that this classified document that people consider the source of the leak was written in 2002. I'm assuming it was part of a report on what Wilson's findings, although I have no proof of that. And I don't know who wrote this memo (although it's certain that some members of the press do, since they've seen it) but he or she has been described as an analyst at the INR --- the state dept intelligence division. I have to wonder what was the purpose of putting in this little tid-bit about Plame in the first place?

It would be nice to know who wrote it if only to prove or disprove the speculation that Bolton's cabal was involved. If he was, then this is a whole new ballgame. I would be very tempted to think that Bolton had spiked Wilson's report from the get. On the other hand, Bolton and his minions apparently have not been called to the Grand Jury so perhaps that's unlikely. If I had to guess, I'd say this tid-bit about Wilson's wife was a throw away line that caught Rove and Libby's attention as a possible way to feminize Wilson.

I'm speculating that when they got wind that Wilson was going to spill the beans they looked for dirt.(Wilson says he was told that when the yellowcake story was falling apart in March the VP's office ordered a "work-up" on him.)This classified state department document contained the information that Wilson's wife got him the job. The character assassins decided that this was their weapon --- Wilson's CIA employee wife got him the job for either nepotistic, partisan or treasonous reasons. Maybe something else. (Maybe all three if you ask John Gibson.) And the optics of it were that Wilson was an effeminate loser whose wife had to find work for him ("little wifey got it for him.") It sure sounds like a Rove special.

And at the end of the day, the simple truth remains: they either knew she was undercover and outed her with malice aforethought or they were so stupid and sloppy that they never bothered to find out what her status was. Which explains why they are so intent upon making people believe that Plame wasn't undercover. It's their only decent defense.

I'm also reminded today of Murray Waas' account of Roves testimony to the FBI:

But Rove also adamantly insisted to the FBI that he was not the administration official who leaked the information that Plame was a covert CIA operative to conservative columnist Robert Novak last July. Rather, Rove insisted, he had only circulated information about Plame after it had appeared in Novak's column. He also told the FBI, the same sources said, that circulating the information was a legitimate means to counter what he claimed was politically motivated criticism of the Bush administration by Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.

Rove and other White House officials described to the FBI what sources characterized as an aggressive campaign to discredit Wilson through the leaking and disseminating of derogatory information regarding him and his wife to the press, utilizing proxies such as conservative interest groups and the Republican National Committee to achieve those ends, and distributing talking points to allies of the administration on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. Rove is said to have named at least six other administration officials who were involved in the effort to discredit Wilson.

Everytime I read that I'm amazed. If that is true it is a truly damning confession of character assassination by the man who is the president's most trusted advisor. Regardless of any actual crime being committed, I think that if the American people knew this a large majority would demand that Rove be dismissed. He basically admits that smearing opponents is something he does with the help of the entire Republican infrastructure. We know this stuff exists in politics, some on both sides. But to insist it's "legitimate" and admit freely that you do it is something else.

But I mention it here because that passage contains something that may or may not be legally problematic for Rove. It depends upon his precise words, which we don't have:

Rove insisted, he had only circulated information about Plame after it had appeared in Novak's column.

I suppose it depends on what the definition of "circulate" is, if he even used that word at all. But, generally speaking, if he insisted that he hadn't been talking about Plame before Novak's column, he lied to the FBI. We know he spoke with Cooper.

And then there's the classified document being passed around to every wingnut in town.

Rove is in an unpleasant box. He's claimed that his aggressive smear campaign to to leak and disseminate derogatory information about Bush's critics through partisan channels was completely legitimate --- but that he didn't know that Plame was undercover or that this document was classified. I hope for his sake that's not actually his defense. I've long said he's no genius, but nobody will believe he's that stupid. I doubt Patrick Fitzgerald is that stupid either.



Hat tip to Grand Moff Texan in the comments.


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digby 7/14/2005 07:19:00 AM |

Wednesday, July 13, 2005

 
Connecting The Dots With Invisible Ink

It will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog to find that I'm more than a little glad to finally see General Geoffrey Miller finally exposed for the sadistic incompetent that he is --- even a little bit. Apparently, he might be "reprimanded" for his sadistic tactics at Gitmo. But maybe not. I sure hope it doesn't go that far because I'm sure it would really, really hurt his feelings. Testimony today before the Senate Armed Services Committee says that practices condoned by Miller (and approved by the pentagon) at Gitmo went too far:

Investigators described their findings before the Senate Armed Services Commttee Wednesday. They were looking into allegations by FBI agents who say they witnessed abusive interrogation techniques at the Guantanamo prison for terrorist suspects.

The chief investigator, Air Force Lt. Gen. Randall M. Schmidt, described the interrogation techniques used on Mohamed al-Qahtani, a Saudi who was captured in December 2001 along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

It was learned later that he had tried to enter the U.S. in August 2001 but was turned away by an immigration agent at the Orlando, Fla., airport. Mohamed Atta, ringleader of the Sept. 11 hijackers, was in the airport at the same time, officials have said.

Schmidt said that to get him to talk, interrogators told him his mother and sisters were whores, forced him to wear a bra, forced him to wear a thong on his head, told him he was homosexual and said that other prisoners knew it. They also forced him to dance with a male interrogator, Schmidt added, and subjected him to strip searches with no security value, threatened him with dogs, forced him to stand naked in front of women and forced him onto a leash, to act like a dog.

Still, he said, "No torture occurred."

He was kept in solitary confinement for 160 days. Interrogations went on for 18 to 20 hours a day, for 48 out of 54 days. Apparently, however, this wasn't torture because "torture involves inflicting physical pain or withholding food, water or medical care, none of which took place."

Well, sure. Being forcibly "strip-searched" is a walk in the park. I would imagine that anybody who is captured by the enemy ought to be mighty careful going forward. If this is true, guards putting their fingers in orifices to break them isn't actually torture. In fact, under this definition, sexual assault may not be torture at all since it might not feature the appropriate level of physical pain.

There is one teensy little problem with this AP story, however:

Miller, a subject of criticism by human rights groups, took command of the prison camp at Guantanamo in late 2002 with a mandate to get more and better information from prisoners. He later went to Iraq to oversee detainee operations there. He is now stationed at the Pentagon in a position unrelated to prisoners.

True. Except he was the guy who was sent to Abu Ghraib with the express orders to use his fabulous Gitmo techniques on Iraqis, who at the time, nobody was considering terrorists. We know what happened after he got there. It's a fairly significant part of this story, I would think. Expecially since at least half of the techniques described in this report were the exact same "abuses" perpetrated by the low life bad apples on the night shift at Abu Ghriab! We've got pictures, ferchristsakes, doesn't anybody remember that? How in the hell did Lynde and her friends just happen to come up with exactly the same college hijinks that were used on a top level prisoner in Gitmo???

We're told that these techniques eventually resulted in the "20th hijacker" offering "useful" information. Perhaps. But I have to reserve judgement since virtually everyone involved has been lying their asses off from the beginning. Especially that sadist Geoffrey D Ripper, the artillery officer turned interrogation expert, who will undoubtedly skate on this whole thing.

Too bad about America's reputation, though. It sure does make it tough to see the moral clarity through all the whitewash.



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digby 7/13/2005 05:53:00 PM |

 
Firing Offense #456

Matt Coopers lawyer said today:

For the last year or so, Matt has been a subpoenaed witness in a grand jury investigation.I advised him and he accepted the advice that he should not have private conversations with other people who may be witnesses in the grand jury proceeding. I was concerned about the perception. I was concerned about what Mr. Fitzgerald might think. And so it was on my advice that he did not personally contact his source.

For me to contact Mr. Rove's lawyer at the time, prior to the time that Mr. Rove had been identified as Matt's source, would have
actually been a breach of confidentiality. My conversation with Mr.
Rove was not privileged and would not have been privileged -- with Mr. Rove's attorney.

There was no indication that we had that Mr. Rove or his lawyer
were interested in receiving such a request. And it was really only
in the last few days, when Mr. Luskin started making some of his
comments, especially the one that I just quoted to you that was in the Wall Street Journal that led us to feel that we were on firm footing picking up the phone and calling and saying, "Based on your public comments, we would ask for an express and personal...," and that's what we did.

Rove could have made it clear, though legal channels, during the solid year that Fitzgerald was litigating this, that he didn't expect Cooper to keep his confidence, if that's what he was doing. He obviously knew that there was a battle royale going on between Time magazine and the special prosecutor and he knew that he'd spoken to Cooper. He could have let it be known that if Cooper was going to all this trouble over him, he needn't bother.

Rove's lawyer has been bloviating all week --- and the RNC shills are repeating it like a mantra --- that Rove had waived the privilege long ago and had nothing to hide. But he was willing, apparently, to let Cooper go to jail without lifting a finger to clarify that fact. I wouldn't call that "fully cooperating with the investigation," which is what both Scotty and Junior have been emphasizing is the prime directive.

He let Fitzgerald spend millions of taxpayer dollars to get Cooper to testify. He certainly had no legal obligation to help. But his boss, the president, did say that he wanted his staff to fully cooperate. Rove knew very well that Cooper was way out on a limb, and it was probably because of him, and he said nothing. And now he's acting like he was a big hero.

He should be fired for that too. And asked to pay back the money that was spent by the prosecutor getting Cooper and TIME to reveal their source when all Rove had to do was make it clear through his lawyer that if Cooper was holding out because of him, he didn't need to.



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digby 7/13/2005 05:31:00 PM |

 
Mehlman on Matthews

I think the RNC has made a mistake in going back into the original Wilson smear. Chris Matthews just showed footage of Cheney on Press The Meat. He was talking about how he'd personally been interested in the Niger story. It seems to back up Wilson. And the last thing they want is to have Cheney's mug all over this story.

They also are making a mistake by pounding the fact that the entire leadership of the Democratic party including Kerry and Clinton are calling for Rove to resign. Mehlman even seemed a little gobsmacked by it. The problem is that almost everybody in the country believes that Democrats are the last people on the planet to go out on a limb. Without realizing it, Mehlman is being hoist by his own petard. Somebody just turned to me and said, "Jesus, if they're saying it, he must be toast."

Calling Democrats wimps for 20 years has its effects. It means that when they actually do say something people automatically assume that they aren't acting out of political courage. They assume that there is no risk involved.

Mehlman also said that everyone knows that Karl Rove has the highest ethical standards. Hahahahahaha. To quote the Clenis --- that dog won't hunt. Once again, they are hoist by their own petard. You can't go around telling everyone who'll listen that Karl Rove is a cross between Sun Tzu and Machiavelli for years on end and then suddenly portray him as a simple, straight shooting public servant. Only the most ardent neanderthals are going to buy this. Certainly not one member of the press will.

This was a very weak performance. They aren't on their "A" game.

Oh and the new NBC Wall Street Journal Poll is out and it ain't good news for Bush. Check this out:

Bush honesty rating drops to lowest point

[...]

Only 41 percent give Bush good marks for being “honest and straightforward” — his lowest ranking on this question since he became president. That’s a drop of nine percentage points since January, when a majority (50 percent to 36 percent) indicated that he was honest and straightforward. This finding comes at a time when the Bush administration is battling the perception that its rhetoric doesn’t match the realities in Iraq, and also allegations that chief political adviser Karl Rove leaked sensitive information about a CIA agent to a reporter. (The survey, however, was taken just before these allegations about Rove exploded into the current controversy.)

Drumbeat.


Update: here's a better link to the WSJ poll.
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digby 7/13/2005 04:07:00 PM |

 
"It Turns Out Little Wifey Did It"

If anyone would like to see the full manifestation of the Rove smear against Plame and her pathetic, henpecked husband in all it's glory, you only need to watch the video (via Crooks and Liars) of John Gibson's insane rant yesterday.

Newshounds has the transcript. Here's just a little taste:

You wouldn't send a peacenik to see if we should go to war, if we need to go to war, now would you? That's exactly what happened, as they say in the news biz, inquiring minds now want to know how the heck did this happen? Well, it turns out little wifey did it.

[...]

So why should Rove get a medal?

Let's just assume that spy Valerie Plame knew her husband's attitudes about the war in Iraq - she was married to him - and sending him off to Niger could be regarded as an attempt to influence national policies. Where I come from, we want to know who that is. We do not want secret spymasters pulling the puppet strings in the background. That is something that should be out in the open and the person doing it should be identified and should own up to it.

Yeah. Senior white house advisor and deputy chief of staff Karl Rove was an interepid whistleblower, putting himself on the line exposing government wrongdoing when he outed Plame. He is the Daniel Ellsberg of the Bush administration bravely risking all to let the people know what its government was doing.

My head hurts.

Newshounds came up with something else quite interesting about Gibson's schizoid ramblings, however:

Notes: This is something I haven't done before; I compared the transcript posted on FoxNews.com with what he actually said, reading along. The discrepancies are interesting:

website: conclusions from a Senate investigation
actual: conclusions from a joint investigation of Congress

website: Well, turns out the wife did it.
actual: Well, it turns out little wifey did it.

website: Let's just assume that spy Valerie Plame knew her husband's attitudes about the war in Iraq and George W. Bush's policies. Sending him off to Niger could be regarded as an attempt to influence national policies.
actual: Let's just assume that spy Valerie Plame knew her husband's attitudes about the war in Iraq - she was married to him - and sending him off to Niger could be regarded as an attempt to influence national policies.

website: That is something that should be out in the open and the person doing it should own up to it.
actual: That is something that should be out in the open and the person doing it should be identified and should own up to it.

website: Rove should get a medal if he did what he says he didn't.
actual: Rove should get a medal even if he did do what he says he didn't do.

Somebody didn't think Gibson's statement was quite the thing so they doctored it. But hey, they never said they told the truth, only that they were fair and balanced. Which isn't true either.


Oh, and be sure to check out this extension of that theme from today's Wall Street Journal: Karl Rove, Whistleblower.


Thanks to reader Four Legs Good for the tip.


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digby 7/13/2005 02:38:00 PM |

 
Wild In Beantown

Does anyone find it at all ironic that Rick Santorum is blaming Boston for the priest molestation scandal? Has he ever heard the phrase "banned in Boston?" Does he know where it comes from?

From the late 19th century until the mid-20th century, the phrase "Banned in Boston" was used to describe a literary work, motion picture, play, or other work prohibited from distribution or exhibition. During this time, Boston city officials took it upon themselves to "ban" anything that they found to be salacious, immoral, or offensive: theatrical shows were run out of town, books confiscated, and motion pictures were prevented from being shown—sometimes stopped in mid-showing after an official had "seen enough". This movement had several effects. One was that Boston, arguably the cultural center of the United States since its founding, now came across as less sophisticated than many lesser cities without such stringent censorship practices. Another is that the phrase "banned in Boston" began to be associated in the popular mind with something sexy and lurid; many distributors of such works were happy when they were banned in Boston, as it gave them more appeal elsewhere; many distributors also advertised that their products had been banned in Boston when in fact they had not to increase their appeal.

It hasn't actually changed all that much. I love Boston, but a free-wheeling sexual libertine town it ain't.

In fact, if we were to accept Rick Santorum's silly cause and effect it would probably make more sense to say that it was the repressive sexual attitudes of Boston combined with the unnatural state of celibacy that "caused" the priests to molest countless children.

This is, of course, completely ridiculous. But it actually makes more sense than Santorum's armchair sociology, which isn't saying much. It would also make more sense to say that the priests' bodies had been taken over by demons. Which I'm sure Santorum also believes. Liberal demons, naturally. Is there any other kind?



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digby 7/13/2005 02:00:00 PM |

 
Judy, Judy, Judy

Gene Lyons writes in to point out this little tid-bit about our good friend Judith Miller. One of the things missed in all the paeans to Judy's martyrdom to the confidential source is that the Jeanne D'arc of the Gray Lady had been known to burn her sources without a second thought if it suits her. Seems Judy has some shifting standards when it comes to betraying the reporter's privilege:

In April, Miller interviewed an expert from the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington on background, then made up a quote and attributed it to the person, who she then named.

It infuriated colleagues and a senior editor, but it only merited a small editors' note on April 9: "An article on Saturday about the search by United States forces for chemical, biological and radiation weapons in Iraq included a comment attributed to Amy Smithson, a chemical weapons expert at the [Stimson] Center, a research institute in Washington. Ms. Smithson was depicted as suggesting that Bush administration officials might be less certain of finding such weapons now than before the war. She was quoted as saying that 'they may be trying to dampen expectations because they are worried they won't find anything significant.' In fact the comments were paraphrases of a remark Ms. Smithson made in an e-mail exchange for the Times's background information, on the condition that she would not be quoted by name. Attempts to reach her before publication were unsuccessful. Thus the comments should not have been treated as quotations or attributed to her."

This is actually what Miller did: the interview was conducted by e-mail, Miller added that "if I don't hear back from you I'll assume it's OK to use." Not hearing back, she used it. But the scientist didn't check her e-mail further that day.

In fairness, it may be that this confidential source didn't explicitly say she wanted to be on "super-double-secret-deep" backround and Karl Rove evidently did. So it was probably her own fault for thinking she could rely on "backround" alone to keep Judy from making up quotes and spilling her name all over the New York Times. She should have known better. And, after all, this source was questioning the evidence for WMD and Judy couldn't really sanction that. Indeed, one might even wonder if she burned this source on purpose.

So, before we get all gooey about Judy's great sacrifice in fighting for the reporter's privilege, maybe we need to ask whether or not she believes in it in the first place. The evidence suggests that she doesn't.

So why is she in jail?



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digby 7/13/2005 12:55:00 PM |

 
Clearing The Cobwebs

A friend of mine asked me to give her a synopsis of Rovegate in easy to understand, non-insider language. Perhaps you will find it interesting too:

In his op-ed on July 6th,2003, Wilson gave a straighforward account of who he is and why he went on this fact-finding trip to Niger. He says "I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report." He does not say that Cheney had sent him personally on the mission. He reports that he found no evidence that Saddam had tried to buy uranium from Niger.

He says that he assumes from working in the government for many years that his report had been forwarded through channels. When he heard the president use the claim about African uranium in the SOTU, he became alarmed and asked the State department about it. He accepted that the excuse that the president might have been talking about a different African country than Niger until he later learned that Niger was specifically mentioned quite recently in official documents. He concludes at this time, based upon the fact that he had personally been involved in debunking this claim, that the administration had been "fixing" intelligence.

The administration was now for the first time explicitly and openly being accused of knowingly using false information to sell the war. And since Wilson had specifically named the Vice president as having been the one to request additional information that led to his trip, the White House was involved at a very high level. The administration claims that this was not true, that in spite of a series of mishaps, there was no concerted or conscious effort to mislead the country about the intelligence. And whatever mistakes were made were the result of shoddy intelligence work, not the "fixing" or "sexing up" of the evidence. When the Niger episode became public, they decided that it was time for George Tenet to admit that he had screwed this particular case up and they arranged for him to make a public statement to that effect.

The White House response to Wilson's piece is that Cheney never asked for the information in the first place. And they said they had no idea about Wilson's evidence because his trip was a low level nepotistic boondoggle arranged by his wife, a CIA "employee." Karl Rove and others spoke to several reporters to that effect (They now claim, since Matthew Cooper's e-mail was leaked that it was only in order to "warn them off" taking Wilson seriously.) Robert Novak --- an extremely unlikely columnist for the white house to feel they had to warn off Wilson --- was the first to put this into print on July 13th.

When it came out, exposing Valerie Plame as an undercover operative, Wilson believed that it was an act of retaliation and a signal to anyone else who might be thinking of coming forward. Novak was quoted shortly after the column ran saying: "I didn't dig it out, it was given to me. They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it." (He has since said that he used the term "operative" inappropriately, although he has used that word very precisely throughout his career to mean "undercover.")In the days after the column appeared there were reports that the administration was actively pushing the column, claiming that Wilson's wife was "fair game."

I have no idea if Joe Wilson's wife or the ghost of Ronald Reagan was involved in sending him on that trip and I don't care. It's irrelevant and it's always been irrelevant and they were either incredibly malevolent or incredibly negligent in settling on using her as the best way to discredit Wilson. But as I wrote earlier, I think it was a P.R. decision, and it has the mark of Rove all over it. Thuggishness is his hallmark. Any chance they have to portray a male opponent as a milksop, they do it. I think the "wife" being involved in getting her husband a job was central to their calculations.

I don't know if Cheney read his report but considering what we now know, I don't find it credible that he didn't. He has been proven to have been immersed in the pre-war intelligence, particularly the claim that Saddam was reconstituting his nuclear program. That was his baby. But Wilson didn't claim in the op-ed that Cheney knew, only that he assumed his report had been circulated. And since he'd been told that the trip itself was a result of Cheney's question he assumed that it had filtered up to Cheney.

That is what sent the administration into overdrive --- Wilson merely mentioning Cheney in the context of fixing the intelligence. Quite a panicked reaction, don't you think?

The White House response to Joe Wilson's report was that it was something cooked up in the bowels of the CIA by his (gasp) wife and it was not very compelling and nobody paid any attention to it, even there, and they never sent the information back to the White House anyway.

If it weren't for the fact that Wilson's conclusions about the uranium were right, you might even believe their tale. If it weren't for the fact that Dick Cheney was knee deep in the intelligence, even personally spending time at the CIA, leaning over the shoulders of desk officers, you might believe it. If it weren't for the fact that the aluminum tubes "evidence" was shown to be false, the drone plane "evidence" was shown to be laughable and the mobile labs "evidence" was shown to be non-existent you might even believe it. If it weren't for the fact that the meeting in Prague between Mohammed Atta and the Iraqis was proven false, that we had chances to take out Zarquawi and refused and that the inspectors were at the very moment of the SOTU reporting that they were not finding any stockpiles, we might even believe it. If it weren 't for the fact that the Downing Street Memos show definitively that the US knew its intelligence was weak and decided to "fix" it we might even believe it.

If we'd found even one scintilla of evidence that Saddam had the stockpiles, the programs or the means to make weapons of mass destruction, we might even believe it.

Unfortunately for the White House, there have been so many revelations now aside from the "16 words" that they no longer can claim credibility on this issue. It is quite clear to any sentient being that they manipulated, misled and outright lied about the intelligence. Joe Wilson knew back in 2003 that something was wrong. He had been involved in one particular part of the intelligence gathering and he knew the facts were being misrepresented. He spoke out. And the white house responded by portraying him as a partisan loser whose report was so low level that nobody ever saw it. In the course of that they also exposed his wife's covert status, likely endangering national security.

If we knew then what we know now, would there be any question as to who should get the benefit of the doubt about this?

And knowing what we've always known about how the Rove operation works, is there really any question that they were smearing Wilson in the press and were thoroughly capable of outing an undercover operative in retaliation for attacking the white house? It occurs to me that all this talk about Valerie Plame these last few days --- how she wasn't "credible" as an NOC, how she was a "desk jockey," how her cover was thin etc --- I'm beginning to wonder if they weren't retaliating against her as much as him. If she was involved in the meeting in which it was decided to send Joe Wilson to Niger I wouldn't be surprised if they decided to teach her a little lesson too. It's what Tony Soprano would do.

Remember. It doesn't matter who sent Wilson on the trip. What matters is that his questions in that op-ed, the questions they didn't want anyone asking --- have been answered. As the drip, drip drip of new evidence comes to the fore, we become more sure, not less, that the administration took this country to war on false pretenses. That's what they are trying to hide.

Here's the conclusion of Wilson's piece that started this whole thing:

I was convinced before the war that the threat of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein required a vigorous and sustained international response to disarm him. Iraq possessed and had used chemical weapons; it had an active biological weapons program and quite possibly a nuclear research program — all of which were in violation of United Nations resolutions. Having encountered Mr. Hussein and his thugs in the run-up to the Persian Gulf war of 1991, I was only too aware of the dangers he posed.

But were these dangers the same ones the administration told us about? We have to find out. America's foreign policy depends on the sanctity of its information. For this reason, questioning the selective use of intelligence to justify the war in Iraq is neither idle sniping nor "revisionist history," as Mr. Bush has suggested. The act of war is the last option of a democracy, taken when there is a grave threat to our national security. More than 200 American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq already. We have a duty to ensure that their sacrifice came for the right reasons.

I have a little assignment for all my readers today. I think it's important that you all re-read these two things:

Joe Wilson's op-ed of July 6, 2003
Bob Novak's column of July 13, 2003

I think you'll find it amazingly bracing to see in stark relief the two columns at the heart of this. You'll see why it's so absurd that they tried to make these questions about Joe Wilson's wife so central to the story. The story is about Dick Cheney. And they knew it.

If he hadn't defaulted to his patented South Carolina smear tactics, Karl would be in a much safer place today.


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digby 7/13/2005 08:48:00 AM |

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

 
No Good Deed Goes Unpunished


It was that rat bastard Cooper:

"By any definition, he burned Karl Rove," Luskin said of Cooper. "If you read what Karl said to him and read how Cooper characterizes it in the article, he really spins it in a pretty ugly fashion to make it seem like people in the White House were affirmatively reaching out to reporters to try to get them to them to report negative information about Plame."

Oooh. That's dangerous stuff there. It may not be the smartest thing in the world for Karl Rove's lawyer to be disparaging Matt Cooper on the day before he testifies, do you think? They only know what one e-mail says and they have no idea what Cooper is going to say. Bizarre.

There's more:

According to Luskin, Cooper originally called Rove — not the other way around — and said he was working on a story on welfare reform. After some conversation about that issue, Luskin said, Cooper changed the subject to the weapons of mass destruction issue, and that was when the two had the brief talk that became the subject of so much legal wrangling. According to Luskin, the fact that Rove did not call Cooper; that the original purpose of the call, as Cooper told Rove, was welfare reform; that only after Cooper brought the WMD issue up did Rove discuss Wilson — all are "indications that this was not a calculated effort by the White House to get this story out."

"Look at the Cooper e-mail," Luskin continues. "Karl speaks to him on double super secret background...I don't think that you can read that e-mail and conclude that what Karl was trying to do was to get Cooper to publish the name of Wilson's wife."

Nor, says Luskin, was Rove trying to "out" a covert CIA agent or "smear" her husband. "What Karl was trying to do, in a very short conversation initiated by Cooper on another subject, was to warn Time away from publishing things that were going to be established as false." Luskin points out that on the evening of July 11, 2003, just hours after the Rove-Cooper conversation, then-CIA Director George Tenet released a statement that undermined some of Wilson's public assertions about his report. "Karl knew that that [Tenet] statement was in gestation," says Luskin. "I think a fair reading of the e-mail was that he was trying to warn Cooper off from going out on a limb on [Wilson's] allegations."

Gosh, is it ever too bad that whoever talked to Bob Novak didn't make it just as clear in their conversation (after they were done answering questions about welfare reform or maybe the latest news on stem cell research, of course) that they were only giving him this information to keep him from "going out on a limb."

Old Bob must be getting senile because he went right out and wrote a whole damned column about it, mentioning senior white house officials and everything. Man I'll bet whoever spoke to Bob is in the doghouse now, huh?

Here they were just trying to make sure the old duffer didn't embarrass himself by writing any supportive columns about Wilson (which you know he was planning to do) and look what happened. Now everybody thinks just because they had a few casual conversations on the run with a couple of reporters (only to to warn them off, of course) that this was a calculated effort to get the story out. What are the odds that two such different reporters would both get the story wrong in essentially the same way? Talk about bad luck. Do they all have egg on their faces or what?

Looks to me as if Bob Novak was a rat bastard too. Will he go down with the ship?


Update: Via &y in the comments, Murray Waas, who seems to have some good sources on this matter, has an update today on Novak:

Columnist Robert Novak provided detailed accounts to federal prosecutors of his conversations with Bush administration officials who were sources for his controversial July 11, 2003 column identifying Valerie Plame as a clandestine CIA officer, according to attorneys familiar with the matter.

[...]

Novak had claimed to the investigators that the Bush administration officials with whom he spoke did not identify Plame as a covert operative, and that use of the word "operative" was his formulation and not theirs, according to those familiar with Novak's accounts to the investigators.

White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove and at least two other Bush administration officials have told federal investigators that they had spoken to reporters about Plame, but that they did not know at the time that she was a covert operative with the CIA, the same sources told me.

And, as has now been widely reported, an email turned over last week by Time magazine correspondent Matthew Cooper to investigators shows that Cooper spoke to Rove just prior to Novak's column. The notes indicate that Rove told him that Plame worked for the CIA, and that Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, obtained an assignment from the CIA, on her recommendation, to go to the African nation of Niger to investigate allegations that the then-Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein was attempting to covertly purchase uranium to build a nuclear weapon.

When Wilson made known that the Niger allegations were untrue, but were still cited by President Bush to make the case to go to war with Iraq, Rove and other administration officials mounted a campaign to discredit Wilson by claiming that he obtained the assignment only because of his wife.

[...]

Federal investigators have been skeptical of Novak's assertions that he referred to Plame as a CIA "operative" due to his own error, instead of having been explicitly told that was the case by his sources, according to attorneys familiar with the criminal probe.

That skepticism has been one of several reasons that the special prosecutor has pressed so hard for the testimony of Time magazine's Cooper and New York Times reporter Judith Miller.

[...]

Also of interest to investigators have been a series of telephone contacts between Novak and Rove, and other White House officials, in the days just after press reports first disclosed the existence of a federal criminal investigation as to who leaked Plame's identity. Investigators have been concerned that Novak and his sources might have conceived or co-ordinated a cover story to disguise the nature of their conversations. That concern was a reason-- although only one of many-- that led prosecutors to press for the testimony of Cooper and Miller, sources said.

Lending credence to those suspicions was that a U.S. government official questioned by investigators said Novak specifically asked him whether Plame had some covert status with the CIA. The official told investigators that Novak appeared uncertain whether she was undercover or not. That account, on one hand, might lend credence to the claims by Rove and other Bush administration officials that they did not know Plame was a covert CIA officer. Conversely, however, the fact that Novak asked the question in the first place appeared to indicate that he might have indeed been told Plame was a covert operative, and was seeking confirmation of that fact.

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digby 7/12/2005 05:14:00 PM |

 
Call Me Talk Radio

...only in print.

Atrios says that certain people remain concerned that corporate entities or politicans will infiltrate the web and pour big money into it to influence politics. As if the amount of money that MSNBC is flushing down the toilet each night on Tucker Carlson isn't pouring big money into television to influence politics. What, is Tucker an unbiased "journalist?"

And what do they plan to do about guys like Sean Hannity, who appears regularly at campaign rallies speaking on behalf of big shot republicans. Is he an activist subject to regulation on his web site, but a member of the media on his radio show?

It's awfully hard to know where to draw these lines, isn't it? But let's not let that stop us. It makes perfect sense to draw it by regulating the web, the one place where there is at least a small chance that a regular person, or a group of citizens, can compete with the huge money that already dominates the media --- which is exempted from regulation. Awesome, awesome logic. I guess we can content ourselves with calling in to Rush and hoping he lets us on the air.

After all, someday some rich person might find a way to influence the political system by putting lots on money into a web site somewhere that will be so grand that all the other voices are drowned out by its incredible incredibleness. I can hardly wait. Will it dispense cash? Blow jobs? Because that's what it's going to take to make "production values" be the difference on the internet. God speed to the person who figures out how to make that work. I suspect he or she will not waste his or her time on political talk, however. There are much bigger fish to fry once you crack that nut.


Truly, this is an asinine debate.



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digby 7/12/2005 03:17:00 PM |

 
Beat Me Hurt Me

For all those who are still breathless with appreciation at the White House press corpses performance yesterday, a commenter reminded me of this incident as an illustration of how the White House and the Press Corps normally interact. I remember writing about it at the time:

The story not told was that the president of the United States was acting like a 15 year old trash talking punk in the above mentioned restaurant and refused repeatedly to answer any of the questions posed by reporters by throwing his weight around and making stupid, juvenile jokes for about 15 minutes.

Maybe he was drunk, I don't know. But he was certainly an asshole to David Gregory and Terry Moran, the two most tenacious questioners yesterday. In that little show of manhood, he's calling both reporters "Stretch," which he apparently think is hilarious:

Remarks by the President to the Press Pool
Nothin' Fancy Cafe
Roswell, New Mexico

11:25 A.M. MST

THE PRESIDENT: I need some ribs.

Q Mr. President, how are you?

THE PRESIDENT: I'm hungry and I'm going to order some ribs.

Q What would you like?

THE PRESIDENT: Whatever you think I'd like.

Q Sir, on homeland security, critics would say you simply haven't spent enough to keep the country secure.

THE PRESIDENT: My job is to secure the homeland and that's exactly what we're going to do. But I'm here to take somebody's order. That would be you, Stretch — what would you like? Put some of your high-priced money right here to try to help the local economy. You get paid a lot of money, you ought to be buying some food here. It's part of how the economy grows. You've got plenty of money in your pocket, and when you spend it, it drives the economy forward. So what would you like to eat?

Q Right behind you, whatever you order.

THE PRESIDENT: I'm ordering ribs. David, do you need a rib?

Q But Mr. President —

THE PRESIDENT: Stretch, thank you, this is not a press conference. This is my chance to help this lady put some money in her pocket. Let me explain how the economy works. When you spend money to buy food it helps this lady's business. It makes it more likely somebody is going to find work. So instead of asking questions, answer mine: are you going to buy some food?

Q Yes.

THE PRESIDENT: Okay, good. What would you like?

Q Ribs.

THE PRESIDENT: Ribs? Good. Let's order up some ribs.

Q What do you think of the democratic field, sir?

THE PRESIDENT: See, his job is to ask questions, he thinks my job is to answer every question he asks. I'm here to help this restaurant by buying some food. Terry, would you like something?

Q An answer.

Q Can we buy some questions?

THE PRESIDENT: Obviously these people — they make a lot of money and they're not going to spend much. I'm not saying they're overpaid, they're just not spending any money.

Q Do you think it's all going to come down to national security, sir, this election?

THE PRESIDENT: One of the things David does, he asks a lot of questions, and they're good, generally.

You should have seen the footage. It was unbelievable. Gregory and Moran looked like a couple of idiots. I'm sure they remember.

And then there was this one when Gregory addressed a question to Jacques Chirac in French:

NBC's David Gregory, unwisely pushing Bush to explain "why it is you think there are such strong sentiments in Europe against you and your administration," had the bad taste to ask President Chirac—in French, of all languages—if he also wanted to comment.

"Very good," shot back a very petulant Bush, "The guy memorizes four words, and he plays like he's intercontinental."

When Gregory offered to go on in French, Bush was determined to squelch the bilingual upstart: "I'm impressed—que bueno. Now I'm literate in two languages." At the end of the press conference, the President of the United States called to Gregory: "As soon as you get in front of a camera, you start showing off."

Richard Reeves reported:

It turned out that what set him off was Gregory's turning to the French leader. Later Bush told Chirac: "I'll call on the Americans."

What Gregory said later was: "Well, that's it for my career."

Bush owns all the Americans, you see. It's the ownership society thing.

If these guys are turning on lil' Scotty McClellan now that Rove is injured and bleeding that's nice. But let's not kid ourselves that they haven't allowed themselves to be treated like freshmen frat pledges for the last four and half years. It hasn't been pretty to watch.



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digby 7/12/2005 01:08:00 PM |

 
Focus

For the last couple of days I've been saying that the GOP's new excuse is that Karl Rove was just setting the record straight about that lyin' Joe Wilson. Deborah Orrin prattled about it last night on Hardball. Here are the official RNC talking points and my suggested answers::

Cooper’s Own Email Claims Rove Warned Of Potential Inaccuracies In Wilson Information:

“[Time Reporter Matt] Cooper Wrote That Rove Offered Him A ‘Big Warning’ Not To ‘Get Too Far Out On Wilson.’ Rove Told Cooper That Wilson’s Trip Had Not Been Authorized By ‘DCIA’ - CIA Director George Tenet - Or Vice President Dick Cheney.” (Michael Isikoff, "Matt Cooper’s Source," Newsweek, 7/18/05)

Inaccuracies? You mean Bush's 16 words in the SOTU were right after all? Wow.

Wilson Falsely Claimed That It Was Vice President Cheney Who Sent Him To Niger, But The Vice President Has Said He Never Met Him And Didn’t Know Who Sent Him:

Wilson Says He Traveled To Niger At CIA Request To Help Provide Response To Vice President’s Office. “In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney’s office had questions about a particular intelligence report. … The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president’s office.” (Joseph C. Wilson, Op-Ed, “What I Didn’t Find In Africa,” The New York Times, 7/6/03)

* Joe Wilson: “What They Did, What The Office Of The Vice President Did, And, In Fact, I Believe Now From Mr. Libby’s Statement, It Was Probably The Vice President Himself ...” (CNN’s “Late Edition,” 8/3/03)

Vice President Cheney: “I Don’t Know Joe Wilson. I’ve Never Met Joe Wilson. … And Joe Wilson - I Don’t [Know] Who Sent Joe Wilson. He Never Submitted A Report That I Ever Saw When He Came Back.” (NBC’s “Meet The Press,” 9/14/03)

CIA Director George Tenet: “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.” (Central Intelligence Agency, “Statement By George J. Tenet, Director Of Central Intelligence,” Press Release, 7/11/03)

* Tenet: “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.” (Central Intelligence Agency, “Statement By George J. Tenet, Director Of Central Intelligence,” Press Release, 7/11/03)

So, because Wilson says that he was told Cheney had requested a report and Cheney says he never met Wilson, that means that Joseph Wilson's report was wrong?

Why did the White House keep saying that there were WMD in Iraq when there haven't been any found? Was it Joe Wilson who got everything wrong or was it the administration?

Wilson Denied His Wife Suggested He Travel To Niger, But Documentation Showed She Proposed His Name:

Wilson Claims His Wife Did Not Suggest He Travel To Niger To Investigate Reports Of Uranium Deal; Instead, Wilson Claims It Came Out Of Meeting With CIA To Discuss Report. CNN’S WOLF BLITZER: “Among other things, you had always said, always maintained, still maintain your wife, Valerie Plame, a CIA officer, had nothing to do with the decision to send to you Niger to inspect reports that uranium might be sold from Niger to Iraq. … Did Valerie Plame, your wife, come up with the idea to send you to Niger?” JOE WILSON: “No. My wife served as a conduit, as I put in my book. When her supervisors asked her to contact me for the purposes of coming into the CIA to discuss all the issues surrounding this allegation of Niger selling uranium to Iraq.” (CNN’s “Lade Edition,” 7/18/04)

* But Senate Select Committee On Intelligence Received Not Only Testimony But Actual Documentation Indicating Wilson’s Wife Proposed Him For Trip. “Some [CIA Counterproliferation Division, or CPD,] officials could not recall how the office decided to contact the former ambassador, however, interviews and documents provided to the Committee indicate that his wife, a CPD employee, suggested his name for the trip. The CPD reports officer told Committee staff that the former ambassador’s wife ‘offered up his name’ and a memorandum to the Deputy Chief of the CPD on February 12, 2002, from the former ambassador’s wife says, ‘my husband has good relations with both 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.’” (Select Committee On Intelligence, “Report On The U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments On Iraq,” U.S. Senate, 7/7/04)

So the white house revealed that Valerie Plame was an undercover Cia agent working in the field of weapons of mass destruction because they thought she sent her husband on the trip. Was that really good judgment do you think? And, anyway, does this mean that Saddam did try to buy uranium after all? What did his wife sending him have to do with that anyway?

Wilson’s Report On Niger Had “Thin” Evidence And Did Not Change Conclusions Of Analysts And Other Reports:

Officials Said Evidence Was “Thin” And His “Homework Was Shoddy.” “In the days after Wilson’s essay appeared, government officials began to steer reporters away from Wilson’s conclusions, raising questions about his veracity and the agency’s reasons for sending him in the first place. They told reporters that Wilson’s evidence was thin, said his homework was shoddy and suggested that he had been sent to Niger by the CIA only because his wife had nominated him for the job.” (Michael Duffy, “Leaking With A Vengeance,” Time, 10/13/03)

Senate Select Committee On Intelligence Unanimous Report: “Conclusion 13. The Report On The Former Ambassador’s Trip To Niger, Disseminated In March 2002, Did Not Change Any Analysts’ Assessments Of The Iraq-Niger Uranium Deal.” (Senate Select Committee On Intelligence, “Report On The U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Assessments On Iraq, 7/7/04)

* “For Most Analysts, The Information In The Report Lent More Credibility To The Original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Report On The Uranium Deal, But State Department Bureau Of Intelligence And Research (IN) Analysts Believed That The Report Supported Their Assessments That Niger Was Unlikely To Be Willing Or Able To Sell Uranium.” (Senate Select Committee On Intelligence, “Report On The U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Assessments On Iraq, 7/7/04)

CIA Said Wilson’s Findings Did Not Resolve The Issue. “Because [Wilson’s] 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.” (Central Intelligence Agency, “Statement By George J. Tenet, Director Of Central Intelligence,” Press Release 7/11/03)

The Butler Report Claimed That The President’s State Of the Union Statement On Uranium From Africa, “Was Well-Founded.” “We conclude that, on the basis of the intelligence assessments at the time, covering both Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the statements on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa in the Government’s dossier, and by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons, were well-founded. By extension, we conclude also that the statement in President Bush’s State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003 that: ‘The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.’ was well-founded.” (The Rt. Hon. The Lord Butler Of Brockwell, “Review Of Intelligence, On Weapons Of Mass Destruction,” 7/14/04

)

Aha. So now we're getting somewhere. So Saddam was trying to buy that uranium. Wasn't he? For his nuclear program. That doesn't exist.

Didn't I hear something about the documents being forgeries and the administration admitting that they shouldn't have included the "16 words" in the SOTU speech? Are you taking that all back now? Wilson's report was wrong but it was right?

Sens. Pat Roberts (R-KS), Kit Bond (R-MO) And Orrin Hatch (R-UT) All Stated, “On At Least Two Occasions [Wilson] Admitted That He Had No Direct Knowledge To Support Some Of His Claims And That He Was Drawing On Either Unrelated Past Experiences Or No Information At All.” (Select Committee On Intelligence, “Additional Views Of Chairman Pat Roberts, Joined By Senator Christopher S. Bond And Senator Orrin G. Hatch; Report On The U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments On Iraq,” U.S. Senate, 7/7/04)

* “The Former Ambassador, Either By Design Or Through Ignorance, Gave The American People And, For That Matter, The World A Version Of Events That Was Inaccurate, Unsubstantiated, And Misleading.” (Select Committee On Intelligence, “Additional Views Of Chairman Pat Roberts, Joined By Senator Christopher S. Bond And Senator Orrin G. Hatch; Report On The U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments On Iraq,” U.S. Senate, 7/7/04)

* “[J]oe Wilson Told Anyone Who Would Listen That The President Had Lied To The American People, That The Vice President Had Lied And That He Had ‘Debunked’ The Claim That Iraq Was Seeking Uranium From Africa … Not Only Did He NOT ‘Debunk’ The Claim, He Actually Gave Some Intelligence Analysts Even More Reason To Believe That It May Be True.” (Select Committee On Intelligence, “Additional Views Of Chairman Pat Roberts, Joined By Senator Christopher S. Bond And Senator Orrin G. Hatch; Report On The U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments On Iraq,” U.S. Senate, 7/7/04)

Oh, That must be the bipartisan commission everybody's quoting. When did Bond, Hatch or Roberts become a Democrat?



I'm actually only half kidding on this. If the talkers would think about it, the best thing they can do is constantly shift this back to the very salient fact that what Wilson said was true. Wilson said Saddam didn't try to buy the uranium and that he (Wilson) told the CIA he didn't try to buy the uranium. And he wasn't the only one who disbelieved the story. So did George Tenet hiumself who insisted it be pulled from Bush's first big speech in Cincinnatti. Then, months later, after even more evidence was available that it was bullshit, Bush went ahead said Saddam DID try to buy the uranium in the big State of the Union speech. He was forced to retract that statement a couple months later. Wilson was right.

All the rest of this is inside baseball mumbo jumbo designed to discredit Wilson after the fact because he criticized the administration.

Let's not forget. What Wilson criticized the administration for was putting the Niger uranium business into the State of the Union speech when he knew they were aware that it was bullshit. And let's not forget --- it was bullshit.

And where are those WMD, anyway?


Here is an informative article on the commission in Wikipedia. It's being challenged for neutrality by wingnuts because, as Rob Cordry says, "The facts are biased, Jon."

Just in case anyone's wondering about the status of this bipartisan commission's look at whether the administration may have cooked the intelligence, there's this:

At the time of the report's release (July 9, 2004), Democratic members of the committee expressed the hope that "phase two" of the investigation, which was to include an assessment of how the Iraqi WMD intelligence was used by senior policymakers, would be completed quickly. Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-KS) said of phase two, "It is a priority. I made my commitment and it will get done."

On March 10, 2005, during a question-and-answer session after a speech he had given at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Senator Roberts said of the failure to complete phase two, "[T]hat is basically on the back burner." Senator John D. Rockefeller (D-WV), vice chairman of the Committee, made a statement later that day in which he said, "The Chairman agreed to this investigation and I fully expect him to fulfill his commitment... While the completion of phase two is long overdue, the committee has continued this important work, and I expect that we will finish the review in the very near future."

In a statement regarding the release of the report of the presidential WMD commission on March 31, 2005, Senator Roberts wrote, "I don’t think there should be any doubt that we have now heard it all regarding prewar intelligence. I think that it would be a monumental waste of time to replow this ground any further."

On April 10, 2005, Senators Roberts and Rockefeller appeared together on NBC's Meet the Press program. In repsonse to a question about the completion of phase two of the investigation, Roberts said, "I'm perfectly willing to do it, and that's what we agreed to do, and that door is still open. And I don't want to quarrel with Jay, because we both agreed that we would get it done. But we do have--we have Ambassador Negroponte next week, we have General Mike Hayden next week. We have other hot-spot hearings or other things going on that are very important."

Moderator Tim Russert then asked Senator Rockefeller if he believed phase two would be completed, and he replied, "I hope so. Pat and I have agreed to do it. We've shaken hands on it, and we agreed to do it after the elections so it wouldn't be any sort of sense of a political attack. I mean that was my view; it shouldn't be viewed that way."

As of July, 2005, phase two of the Committee's investigation had not yet been completed.

digby 7/12/2005 11:37:00 AM |

 
My Bad

Bob Somerby takes John Aravosis and me to task today for some good reasons. He says:

Liberals and Dems simply can’t afford to play the dim games of the kooky-con right. But all across the liberal web, we find the virus spreading—a virus in which every bit of reasoning, no matter how daft, is accepted as seminal brilliance as long as it “proves” King Karl’s guilt. Yesterday, we were amazed when the sagacious Digby praised this post from John Aravosis:


ARAVOSIS (7/11/05): Perhaps it's legally relevant if Rove "knew" Plame was undercover or not, but it's not relevant in terms of him keeping his job. Rove intentionally outed a CIA agent working on WMD, it is irrelevant whether he did or didn't know if she was an undercover agent. First off, he knew she wasn't THAT public about her identity or there'd have been no need to "out" here—everyone would have known her already.

Aravosis makes some excellent points in his longer post. But that paragraph, which Digby featured, makes almost no sense at all. The last sentence is completely absurd. The second sentence isn’t much better.

The point I was making, and that I think Aravosis was making, is really captured in the first sentence: "It doesn't matter if Rove 'knew' Plame was undercover or not, it's not relevant in terms of him keeping his job." If I had it to do over again I would leave it at that.

The issue I was concerned with was that political and legal culpability aren't the same thing, not so much that King Karl was guilty of outing Plame. The newsweak article proved that Rove disclosed to a reporter on deep backround that Joseph Wilson's wife was with the CIA, working on weapons of mass destruction. That was a reckless thing for a top White House official to do if he did not know her status --- and possibly illegal if he did. We don't know if he committed a crime, but we do know that what he did was at least negligent. Valerie Plame WAS an undercover operative whose cover was blown when white house officials leaked the fact that she worked with the CIA to the press. He should resign for having done that, regardless of his motives or knowledge of her undercover status. It's the act, not the intent, that should govern whether he remains in the White House with a top security clearance.

I admit that John's paragraph was not the clearest thing he's ever written, or that I ever endorsed. I suspect that we were both a little bit overexcited and mentally fatigued. (Aravosis at least has the excuse that he'd been crammed like a sardine on airplanes all week --- I'm just overdosing on schaudenfreude.) The larger point, however, remains valid.

But Somerby's not an ass for pointing this out. It's what he does. If you can't take the heat, y'know...



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digby 7/12/2005 10:34:00 AM |

 
"A" Game

In the same NY Times article refenced below, there's this:

"Knowing Rove, he's still having eight different policy meetings and sticking to his game plan," said one veteran Republican strategist in Washington who often works with the White House. "But this issue now is looming, and as they peel away another layer of the onion, there's a lot of consternation. Rove needs to be on his A game now, not huddled with lawyers and press people."

A senior Congressional Republican aide said most members of Congress were still waiting to learn more about Mr. Rove's involvement and to assess whether more disclosures about his role were likely.

"The only fear here is where does this go," the aide said. "We can't know."

Getting Rove off his A game is almost worth as much as getting him out. He's man known for his surly temperament in the best of times and this has been a bad second term so far for the GOP maestro. Social Security, his "legacy" project, is dead in the water. Iraq is a quagmire. Schiavo was a huge mistake and the SCOTUS battles ahead need his personal attention --- the religious right is his very special constituency. Bush's ratings are in the toilet. This, he did not need.

So, we will see whether The Magician is capable of handling the spotlight and all the pressure --- at a time when you can be sure that his little Prince is very, very unhappy with his performance. Junior may remain loyal, but never think that it has to do with real personal loyalty. It has to do with never being willing to admit to a mistake. Bush will make Karl's life a living hell. Do you think he really likes the guy who's called "Bush's Brain?" Does Karl strike anyone as a "W" kinda guy?

No, Karl is now under the worst kind of pressure imaginable. We're not going to see his "A" game.

And as for "where does this go?" I think it's time to start asking why George W. Bush, from the very beginning of this saga, has been saying things like "he'll be taken care of" instead of "he'll be fired." His careful statements strong imply that he's known from the start that someone important to him was the leaker.Otherwise, he would do his cowboy routine and issue a steely eyed threat (making Peggy Noonan moan in ecstacy.) If so, the question would be, did Rove confess after the fact or was Bush in on it from the beginning? WDTPKAWDHKI.

Michael Isikoff's hinting yesterday about a classified file being the source of the leak is certainly tantalizing in that regard.

ISIKOFF: But the problem that people in the White House, Rove among them, may have is how did they know that Valerie Plame, or Wilson's wife worked at the CIA? What we do know is there was a classified State Department report that said this, that was taken by Secretary of State Powell with him on the trip to Africa that President Bush was then on, and many senior White House aides were on.

That classified State Department report appears to have been -- or may well have been the source for the information that Rove and others were then dishing out to reporters. And if that's the case, there still may be -- we don't know yet, but there still may be an instance where classified information was provided to reporters.

The Grand Jury subpoenaed the phone records of Air Force One during that period. Who knows what they found? But if they found something, it's come quite close to Colin Powell --- and Bush himself. Air Force One isn't that big.


Here's the Newsweak story from last year about Powell's grand jury appearance:

Powell's appearance on July 16 is the latest sign the probe being conducted by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is highly active and broader than has been publicly known. Sources close to the case say prosecutors were interested in discussions Powell had while with President George W. Bush on a trip to Africa in July 2003, just before Plame's identity was leaked to columnist Robert Novak. A senior State Department official confirmed that, while on the trip, Powell had a department intelligence report on whether Iraq had sought uranium from Niger—a claim Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson, discounted after a trip to Niger on behalf of the CIA. The report stated that Wilson's wife had attended a meeting at the CIA where the decision was made to send Wilson to Niger, but it did not mention her last name or undercover status. At the time, White House officials were seeking to discredit Wilson, who had become a public critic of the Bush administration. There's no indication Powell is a subject of the probe; the department official said the secretary never talked to Novak about the Plame matter.

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digby 7/12/2005 08:34:00 AM |

 
Dumb Defense #236

In today's NY Times piece, there's this, which I've heard bandied about quite a bit in the right blogosphere:

There has been some dispute, moreover, about just how secret a secret agent Ms. Wilson was.

"She had a desk job in Langley," said Ms. Toensing, who also signed the supporting brief in the appeals court, referring to the C.I.A.'s headquarters. "When you want someone in deep cover, they don't go back and forth to Langley."

It is highly doubtful that the special prosecutor would convene a grand jury and investigate the White House for two years without first determining whether there was any potential crime to investigate since determining her status was the easiest element of the case --- finding out who did it and whether they knew she was undercover, which is obviously what he's been doing, is the difficult part. It's hard to believe that he'd send a journalist to jail and interview the president only to come up later and admit she wasn't actually an undercover agent after all, so fuggedaboudit. And it's pretty clear that the judges who have reviewed the classified documents in the contempt cases agree, by the way. They all say the case concerns a breach of national security.

One might also assume that since the CIA sent the damn referral to the justice department that they considered her undercover too! Who else is going to make that determination --- Highpockets?

By the way, has there ever been a scandal in which Republican shill Victoria Toensing is not a media ready expert on the underlying crime?


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digby 7/12/2005 07:56:00 AM |

Monday, July 11, 2005

 
Stonewall Twins

Scott:

I am well aware of what was said previously. I remember well what was said previously. And at some point I look forward to talking about it. But until the investigation is complete, I’m just not going to do that.

Bob:

And unfortunately, as somebody who likes to write, I'd like to say a lot about the case, but because of my attorney's advice I can't. But I will. And there might be some surprising things.

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digby 7/11/2005 10:29:00 PM |

 
Patsies

I am a big fan of Garance Franke-Ruta, but I think this is funny:

If there is one thing that reporters hate, it's being played for patsies. McClellan has publicly humiliated some of the most prominent reporters in the country by persistently feeding them information that has now been revealed to be false, and I'm pretty darn sure that they are not going to grant him any favors and extend him the benefit of the doubt in the future.

I'm glad to know that they feel huniliated by being persistently fed information that has been revealed to be false, but it certainly isn't unprecedented. It's not unprecedented by a long shot. In fact, they have been just such patsies for years.

I suspect that the real reason they acted up today is they have been treated like shit by George W Bush's administration and one of their own is sitting in jail. That's not the same thing. But I'll take it.


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digby 7/11/2005 09:41:00 PM |

 
Feels Good

Rep. Louise Slaughter is pistol. She's got a petition going to demand President Bush fire Karl Rove. If you feel like you want to do something, dammit, go sign it.



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digby 7/11/2005 09:25:00 PM |

 
On Message

Via Froomkin:

Powerline:

"The media feeding frenzy will, indeed, be massive. But absent a serious claim of a statutory violation or perjury, it's questionable whether anyone apart from liberal bloggers and other pre-existing Bush haters will partake in the media's dog food. This isn't a top presidential aide accepting an expensive gift, or engaging in lewd sexual conduct. It's a top aide providing truthful information to journalists in response to lies told to embarrass the administration and our government."

You might wonder why he did it on double secret backround if it was all on the up and up, but whatever. Highpockets and pals got the memo.

This is, of course, precisely the opposite of the truth, as one would expect from Bush apologists with serious projection problems. While it's true that this isn't about taking expensive gifts (Dukester call your office) or engaging in lewd sexual conduct which I agree is always an appropriate reqason to call in the feds --- this is in fact a case of a top aide providing false information to journalists in response to truths told to expose the administration's lies. This is upside-downism at its finest.

The exceedingly unpleasant Deborah Orin just framed this exactly the same way on Matthews. Poor Karl, he was just trying to correct the record on that liar Joe Wilson, who has been completely discredited --- even saying that his report actually backed up the claims about the yellowcake rather than refuted it. Matthews interjected, wondering why the White House has taken this long to produce that explanation and openly pondering whether it was all connected to the larger Iraq lies, specifically naming Cheney. Unfortunately, Dionne merely tried to deflect the Wilson calumny and said that this was about Rove, not Wilson.

He should have gone for the bigger question. Democrats need to develop some conventional wisdom about this right away and they need to filter it into the punditocrisy. Oddly, Chris Matthews has it right.

Update: Arthur has a stinging set-down of the Powerline boys here. I neglected to add the sickening coup de grace to the the above entry:

Valerie Plame isn’t very convincing as a covert agent of the United States, although she did fairly well as an agent of her husband and the president’s other enemies.

Apparently these pathetic geeks haven't even ever seen a James Bond Movie. I'm sure they turn away at the "lewd sexual" parts and read passages from the Bible.


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digby 7/11/2005 04:34:00 PM |

 
Drumbeat

Just heard the CNN anchor say "are his days numbered in the White House?" referring to our favorite turdblossom.

This is a very good thing, my friends. Once they start asking that, it's hard to turn things around. Bill Clinton did, but Karl Rove is no Bill Clinton.



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digby 7/11/2005 04:01:00 PM |

 
Still Covering For Dick

Rove did not mention her name to Cooper," Luskin said. "This was not an effort to encourage Time to disclose her identity. What he was doing was discouraging Time from perpetuating some statements that had been made publicly and weren't true."

In particular, Rove was urging caution because then-CIA Director George J. Tenet was about to issue a statement regarding Iraq's alleged interest in African uranium and its inaccurate inclusion in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address. Tenet took the blame for allowing a misleading paragraph into the speech, but Tenet also said that the president, vice president and other senior officials were never briefed on Wilson's report.

Right. Rove was "protecting" Cooper from making a mistake and believing Wilson when he said Cheney knew the yellowcake story was bogus; it was really all "Slam Dunk" Tenet's fault, remember? All they really meant to say was that it was "the CIA" that requested the Wilson trip. Making it sound like Wilson was some kind of emasculated wimp whose macho spy wife had to get him work was just for fun.

(Using the wife is one of their oldest tricks, from the canuck letter (a Don Segretti special --- one of Karl Rove's mentors) to Cindy McCain's drug problems. They try to get their marks to overreact to attacks on their wives. The mafia does this too.)

I expect the white house to continue to say that they were only trying to knock down an incorrect story that Cheney knew about the Niger Report and in the course of that they accidentally let the cat out of the bag. Remember, they told us that nobody in the white house had any idea that this Niger stuff was bogus because Condi forgot to check her in-box, Steven Hadley developed amnesia and medal-of-freedom-whore George Tenet forgot to read his draft of the SOTU speech. The whole staff was just a bunch of wacky butterfingers who made the same mistake over and over again. That's what we were all supposed to believe.

Remember this?

I can tell you, I either didn't see the memo, I don't remember seeing the memo, the fact is it was a set of clearance comments, it was three and a half months before the State of the Union.

Q: Should you have seen the memo?

A: Well, the memo came over. It was a clearance memo. It had a set of comments about the [Oct. 7 Cincinnati] speech. [The yellowcake reference] had already been taken out of the speech, from my point of view and from the point of view of Steve Hadley. Steve Hadley runs the clearance process. And when Director Tenet says something takes something out of a speech, we take it out. We don't really even ask for an explanation. If the DCI, the director of Central Intelligence, is not going to stand by something, if he doesn't think that he has confidence in it, we're not going to put that into a presidential speech. We have no desire to have the president use information that is anything but the information in which we have the best confidence, the greatest confidence.

And so when Director Tenet said take it out of the speech, I think people simply took it out of the speech and didn't think any more about why we had taken it out of the speech.

Convincing, no? That was the national Security Advisor, Condi Rice. Good thing she's been promoted. Tim Noah at Slate dealt with this nonsense two years ago:

Both Rice and Hadley state that they had already removed the offending line from the Cincinnati speech when Tenet sent them a memo urging them to remove it. Tenet had already told Hadley by phone to take it out, and Hadley had complied. If, as Rice says, it's axiomatic that when the CIA director wants something out of a presidential speech, it comes out, Tenet would have known there was no danger that his complaint - the way Rice makes it sound, it was more like a command - would go unheeded. So why did Tenet - a man who is so busy fighting the war on terrorism that three months later he didn't have time to read an advance draft of the State of the Union, an oversight that made him Yellowcakegate's Fall Guy No. 1 - write a superfluous memo?

Because, Chatterbox believes, it wasn't superfluous. Tenet knew that his complaint was not a command and that somebody at the White House still needed convincing. But who would have the standing to tell the CIA director to go jump in the lake? Surely not Fall Guy No. 2, the National Security Council's nonproliferation expert, Robert Joseph. Surely not Fall Guy No. 3, the NSC's deputy, Steve Hadley. And surely not even Fall Person No. 4, Condi Rice, who'd have to be insane to lie, on national television, about dissing Tenet. (Tenet, she surely knows, is superb at exacting revenge.)

Chatterbox therefore posits the existence of a Fall Guy No. 5, Vice President Dick Cheney. The one person in the White House who has no patience for addressing the Yellowcakegate mystery at all and who questions the patriotism of anybody who does.

This is really where the rubber meets the road on this story. Cheney had become engaged in a virtual fantasy about Saddam's nuclear capability before and even after the war when it became clear that there was none. He is almost certainly the guy who put the yellowcake back in the speech. And his personal assassin, Scooter Libby, is knee deep in the Plame outing.

The Niger episode was one of the first windows into the Iraq lies and Wilson directly implicated Cheney. That's why they were panicking and that's why they mishandled this smear job so badly.

The reality is that it doesn't matter if Cheney received a full briefing on Wilson's findings because it's patently obvious that he and Tenet and Rice and a whole bunch of other people (likely including the president if he wasn't too busy tending to his scrapes and bruises) all knew it was bullshit and put it in the SOTU anyway. They doctored it up with "the British have learned" or whatever it was and that's turned out to be crap too. Rove and his pals can try to pretend that they were knocking down an erroneous story by impugning Wilson's allegedly partisan motives, (and, oopsie, "accidentally" outing a CIA agent) but it doesn't make sense in light of what we already know.

They were knocking down a true story, which is an entirely different thing.

The WaPo article ends with this, which is really laughable:

After the investigation into the leak began, Luskin said, Rove signed a waiver in December 2003 or January 2004 authorizing prosecutors to speak to any reporters Rove had previously engaged in discussion, which included Cooper.

"His written waiver included the world," Luskin said. "It was intended to be a global waiver. . . . He wants to make sure that the special prosecutor has everyone's evidence. That reflects someone who has nothing to hide."

Then why in the hell didn't he just openly admit that he'd spoken to Cooper instead of having TIME litigate this mess for months on end, have the government spend god knows how many millions and leave poor Matt Cooper thinking until the very last minute that he was going to have to do jail time to protect him?

If Rove didn't expect Cooper to keep his confidence all he ever had to do was explicitly tell Cooper that he had no problem with him testifying to what he'd said. Cooper kept the confidence because he was sure that his journalistic reputation would be smeared (by Rove presumably) if he accepted the "global waiver" --- I suspect because he knew that what he had to say was revealing. Perhaps others, like Walter PIncus, either didn't have that information or weren't worried about Rove's retaliation. We don't know for sure. But in Cooper's case we know absolutely that when Rove personally released him he agreed to cooperate with the prosecutor. Rove could have done that at any time in the last two years. He didn't.

I seem to remember a lot of bloviating a while back that said that the president should have admitted to extra-marital blowjobs in order to spare the country the expense of pursuing the case. I think most people can understand why it's not any of the government's (or the country's) business what consenting adults do alone together and that it's worth fighting for the principle that investigating such people's sex lives is off limits.

This, however, is something very different. The principle at stake for Rove, if not the reporters, is the right to use the press for his own purposes and be protected by the reporters privilege. Rove could have saved the country a bunch of money and bunch of time by simply admitting publicly that he'd talked to Cooper. If he isn't guilty of committing this crime it wouldn't have mattered a year ago any more than it mattered last week.

He should resign for smearing Wilson and outing his wife (whether inadvertantly or not) merely because Wilson exposed the fact that the government knew the yellowcake story was bullshit. Wilson was right.

And he should also resign for having the chutzpah to release Matt Cooper from his obligation at the very last minute, after sitting back and allowing the government to spend its resources for years getting him to do it.

I'm glad to see that Harry Reid has weighed in:

“I agree with the President when he said he expects the people who work for him to adhere to the highest standards of conduct. The White House promised if anyone was involved in the Valerie Plame affair, they would no longer be in this administration. I trust they will follow through on this pledge. If these allegations are true this rises above politics and is about our national security.”


And MoveOn is launching a campaign demanding Rove's resignation but they are taking the next step as well and asking "what did the president know and when did he know it?" This is what partisan groups should do. They should make the pivot to the president first. It re-positions the Rove question further to the center.

The liklihood that Rove will actually resign is still quite small although it's growing. But the liklihood that this will become a major distraction for him and the administration is getting bigger by the day. Let's see how well these guys can compartmentalize, shall we?

Update: Tim Noah says "Turdblossom Must Go"

Update II: Just caught the gaggle over on Crooks and Liars. Scotty had a rough day. One gets the feeling that the White House press corps may have been waiting for this opening for some time. I especially emjoyed it when someone asked him if he'd gotten his own lawyer. Ouch.

Update III: Missed the NY Times piece on Cooper this morning. Looks like Karl was more than willing to see Cooper go to jail rather than talk. It was his lawyer who shot his mouth off and gave Cooper the opportunity to claim he'd been released. Nice.
Nonetheless, the point remains. Rove could have "cleaned this up" as Gergen just put it on Lou Dobbs' show, very simply a long time ago if he wanted to. He didn't and there's a reason for that. If it turns out it was about blow-jobs I'll back his right to keep his mouth shut. Otherwise, he's got some splainin' to do. After he resigns.


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digby 7/11/2005 12:31:00 PM |

Sunday, July 10, 2005

 
He Should Resign

John is absolutely right about this. It makes no difference for our purposes whether Rove is legally culpable because he did or did not know that Plame was undercover. He was a very, very, very high level official in the White House and he shouldn't have been telling anyone anything about CIA agents for political reasons, particularly ones he knew worked in the field of weapons of mass destruction, period. He may have broken the law; the investigation will proceed apace whether we think he did or not. But regardless, the fact is that Rove conducted a smear operation in which a CIA agent was outed.

Aravosis says:

Bush said he wanted to get to the bottom of this over a year ago. Why then did we have to waste all this money on a special prosecutor and a grand jury if Rove knew from day one that he was the guy who leaked Plame's identity? If Rove was so innocent, why didn't he just come forward immediately and say "yeah, it was me, but I didn't realize she was undercover"? Did he tell the president it was him? And if so, why didn't the president go public and put this investigation to an end? Or did Rove refuse the president's request and NOT come forward a year ago? And if so, what is he still doing working in the white House?

Perhaps it's legally relevant if Rove "knew" Plame was undercover or not, but it's not relevant in terms of him keeping his job. Rove intentionally outed a CIA agent working on WMD, it is irrelevant whether he did or didn't know if she was an undercover agent. First off, he knew she wasn't THAT public about her identity or there'd have been no need to "out" here - everyone would have known her already.

All of us and all of the Democrats should be screaming bloody murder for what we know he did --- and we should be demanding his resignation.

I realize that Bush is not going to fall over weeping when we do this, and the press will probably somnambulently tip-toe until roused, but it begins the drumbeat and it puts pressure on the White House. We are about to enter a huge fight over two Seats on the Supreme Court. Anything to put them off their game is a good thing.

And there is no reason that Rove should not be forced to resign over this. If it were any other White House we would naturally assume it would happen. But I think that for some reason everyone, wingnuts and moonbats alike are invested in the idea that Rove is omnipotent. He's not. He's a cheap thug. And while it may be true that if he is forced to resign he will still be able to advise the president, it's also true that the president would not have his single most necessary and loyal lieutenant by his side every day. Rove is the most malevolent force in the Republican party. He's building a criminal Republican machine --- that's his legacy. It's vitally important that we stop him if he can. Wringing our hands and saying nothing will ever happen because he's Superman is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The dirtiest most devious president in history was brought down by his own paranoia and sloppiness. Karl Rove is no more omnipotent than he was.



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digby 7/10/2005 12:22:00 PM |

 
Push Back

I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that since the Republicans have cancelled all congressional oversight of the executive branch that they are turning their attention to the judiciary. After all, what else do they have to do? K Street writes legislation, the leadership tells them how to vote --- they have to flex their egos somewhere.

I thought that the judicial "activism" the wingnuts were so exercised about regarded judges who refuse to change the law to accomodate religious nuts as they try to enforce their sharia on the public. But, apparently not.

Congressman Sensenbrenner of Illinois Wisconsin is involving himself in an obscure drug case by outright telling the federal appeals court to change their opinion:

In an extraordinary move, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee privately demanded last month that the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago change its decision in a narcotics case because he didn't believe a drug courier got a harsh enough prison term.

Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), in a five-page letter dated June 23 to Chief Judge Joel Flaum, asserted that a June 16 decision by a three-judge appeals court panel was wrong.

He demanded "a prompt response" as to what steps Flaum would take "to rectify the panel's actions" in a case where a drug courier in a Chicago police corruption case received a 97-month prison sentence instead of the at least 120 months required by a drug-conspiracy statute.

"Despite the panel's unambiguous determination that the 97-month sentence was illegal, it appears to ... justify the sanctioning of both the illegal sentence and its own failure to [increase the sentence] by stating `[that the panel's decision] not to take a cross-appeal [ensures] that the [courier's] sentence cannot be increased.' The panel cites no authority for this bizarre proposition and I am aware of none," wrote Sensenbrenner, who cited a 1992 ruling as precedent for his argument that the longer prison term should have been imposed.

[...]

Apperson, who is chief counsel of a House Judiciary subcommittee, argues that Sensenbrenner is simply exercising his judicial oversight responsibilities. But some legal experts believe the action by the Judiciary Committee chairman, who is an attorney, is a violation of House ethics rules, which prohibit communicating privately with judges on legal matters, as well as court rules that bar such contact with judges without contacting all parties.

Further, the letter may be an intrusion on the Constitution's separation-of-powers doctrine, or, at least, the latest encroachment by Congress upon the judiciary, analysts said.

David Zlotnick, a law professor at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island and an expert on federal sentencing law, said, "I think it's completely inappropriate for a congressman to send a letter to a court telling them to change a ruling."

Contrary to court rules, Sensenbrenner's letter was not sent to Rivera's appellate attorney, Steve Shobat, who received a copy only after the letter was placed in the official court file.

"To try to influence a pending case is totally inappropriate," Shobat said. "My client had a very small role in this case, and to think that she is the focus of the head of the House Judiciary Committee? It is intimidating."

Intimidating to whom? Aside from general right wing dickishness, why do you suppose Sensenbrenner would use a rather low level drug case like this one to challenge the separation of powers?

Naturally, the nut graf comes at the very end of the article. Hold on to your hats:

At sentencing, U.S. District Judge Blanche Manning imposed the 97-month term, citing a 1993 court ruling that allowed that the drug quantity that relates to an individual be taken into account in imposing a sentence less than the minimum required.

At the time, federal prosecutor Brian Netols told Manning, "I think that would be the appropriate sentence."

Shobat appealed, contending the sentence still was too high. The U.S. attorney's office did not appeal the sentence as a violation of the 120-month minimum.

The three-judge panel on the case, Frank Easterbrook, Ilana Diamond Rovner and Diane Wood, issued its opinion, written by Easterbrook, stating that the sentence should have been 120 months.

"By deciding not to [challenge the 97-month sentence], the United States has ensured that Rivera's sentence cannot be increased," the opinion states.

Apperson said the committee learned of the decision after being contacted the day of the ruling by "a citizen who I assume had seen it on the court's Web site."

After Sensenbrenner's letter was placed in the court file, the three-judge panel issued a revised final paragraph of its decision that added a citation explaining why it was not legal to change Rivera's sentence and why the precedent cited by Sensenbrenner was wrong.


Sensenbrenner also wrote a letter to Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales, demanding that the decision be appealed further and that he investigate why the U.S. attorney's office in Chicago did not appeal Rivera's sentence.

Bryan Sierra, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said Sensenbrenner's letter was being reviewed. Randall Samborn, a spokesman for U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald, declined to comment.

This is about Patrick Fitzgerald. If he's got the full force of the GOP machine on his back, let's hope he believes in the Chicago Way.



Hat tip to sharp commenter Samela


Update: Fitzgerald is an interesting guy. If you haven't read this WaPo bio, check it out. He sounds like a pretty straight shooter. And a pretty scary prosecutor. I wonder if there is a plan afoot to pull an Archibald Cox. They've learned their lesson, though; this time they'd fire him for "cause."



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digby 7/10/2005 10:52:00 AM |

 
Alert

It is vitally important that you click this link.


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digby 7/10/2005 09:21:00 AM |

Saturday, July 09, 2005

 
Roadkill

From David Corn:

...tonight I received this as-solid-as-it-gets tip: on Sunday Newsweek is posting a story that nails Rove. The newsmagazine has obtained documentary evidence that Rove was indeed a key source for Time magazine's Matt Cooper and that Rove--prior to the publication of the Bob Novak column that first publicly disclosed Valerie Wilson/Plame as a CIA official--told Cooper that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife apparently worked at the CIA and was involved in Joseph Wilson's now-controversial trip to Niger.

To be clear, this new evidence does not necessarily mean slammer-time for Rove. Under the relevant law, it's only a crime for a government official to identify a covert intelligence official if the government official knows the intelligence officer is under cover, and this documentary evidence, I'm told, does not address this particular point. But this new evidence does show that Rove--despite his lawyers claim that Rove "did not tell any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA"--did reveal to Cooper in a deep-background conversation that Wilson's wife was in the CIA. No wonder special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald pursued Cooper so fiercely. And Fitzgerald must have been delighted when Time magazine--over Cooper's objection--surrendered Cooper's emails and notes, which, according to a previous Newsweek posting by Michael Isikoff, named Rove as Cooper's source. In court on Wednesday, Fitzgerald said that following his receipt of Cooper's emails and notes "it is clear to us we need [Cooper's] testimony perhaps more so than in the past." This was a clue that Fitzgerald had scored big when he obtained the Cooper material.

This new evidence could place Rove in serious political, if not legal, jeopardy (or, at least it should).

I think we may be getting close to a time where Karl Rove is going to decide to spend more time with his family. Bush is too politically weak to finesse this and the story comes awfully close to the Iraq lies to try to brazen it out.

I want to know the truth,' president tells reporters

Wednesday, February 11, 2004 Posted: 1:46 AM EST

WASHINGTON (CNN) --President Bush said Tuesday he welcomes a Justice Department investigation into who revealed the classified identity of a CIA operative.

"If there's a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is," Bush told reporters at an impromptu news conference during a fund-raising stop in Chicago, Illinois. "If the person has violated law, that person will be taken care of.

"I welcome the investigation. I am absolutely confident the Justice Department will do a good job.

"I want to know the truth," the president continued. "Leaks of classified information are bad things."

He added that he did not know of "anybody in my administration who leaked classified information."

Bush said he has told his administration to cooperate fully with the investigation and asked anyone with knowledge of the case to come forward.

In the summer of 2003 Karl Rove thought he could get away with anything.

hubris \HYOO-bruhs\, noun:
Overbearing pride or presumption.


Update:

Here's the story.

... NEWSWEEK obtained a copy of the e-mail that Cooper sent his bureau chief after speaking to Rove. (The e-mail was authenticated by a source intimately familiar with Time's editorial handling of the Wilson story, but who has asked not to be identified because of the magazine's corporate decision not to disclose its contents.) Cooper wrote that Rove offered him a "big warning" not to "get too far out on Wilson." Rove told Cooper that Wilson's trip had not been authorized by "DCIA"—CIA Director George Tenet—or Vice President Dick Cheney. Rather, "it was, KR said, wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip." Wilson's wife is Plame, then an undercover agent working as an analyst in the CIA's Directorate of Operations counterproliferation division. (Cooper later included the essence of what Rove told him in an online story.) The e-mail characterizing the conversation continues: "not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[d] suspect but so is the report. he [Rove] implied strongly there's still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro[m] Niger... "

[...]

A source close to Rove, who declined to be identified because he did not wish to run afoul of the prosecutor or government investigators, added that there was "absolutely no inconsistency" between Cooper's e-mail and what Rove has testified to during his three grand-jury appearances in the case. "A fair reading of the e-mail makes clear that the information conveyed was not part of an organized effort to disclose Plame's identity, but was an effort to discourage Time from publishing things that turned out to be false," the source said, referring to claims in circulation at the time that Cheney and high-level CIA officials arranged for Wilson's trip to Africa.

Uh. Bullshit. It was an effort to keep TIME from publishing things that turned out to be true. The big question that was swirling wasn't who sent Wilson on the trip, for gawds sake. It was whether they knew the Niger documents were forgeries and spread it around anyway. Karl's little phone call was an effort to cover-up the fact that the administration had lied its ass off making the case for war --- Valerie Plame was a pawn they used to try to taint Wilson as some kind of hen-pecked househusband when he exposed an element of their bogus evidence. Regardless of whether Rove knew she was an NOC, and this doesn't prove it one way or the other, it proves he was a scumbag who was engineering a cover-up. One thing we know for sure is that Wilson was right.


Karl Rove and others in the White House exposed an undercover CIA agent in order to cover up their lies about Iraq.



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digby 7/09/2005 10:39:00 PM |

 
The Answer

My wing-nut e-mailer weighs in with a solution:

We could keep playing the capitalist odds hoping it is our neighbors who get killed next or, very simply, we could demand that the enemy surrender. We would simply announce to the Muslim world that their support for OBL ( 52% of Muslims in London were not willing to condemn the 9/11 bombings in NYC) and his ideology has earned them the following ultimatum: change your ways and turn over OBL in one month or there will be a crater one mile wide round outside of Medina, with Gumbad-e-Khizra being precisely at ground zero. If at that point you still feel smart about following OBL toward some 5th Century mad dog Caliphate we will eliminate Mecca one terrorizing month or so later, at which point you can pray 5 times a day in the direction of the Pakistan/Afganistan border where your great savior OBL is living like a scared slimy rat in a hole.

It is so odd isn't it, they know they can pick us off a few at a time and we will be too civilized to crush them in an instant, or is it that they know they can pick a few of us off at a time and we will be too selfish, calculating, and materialistic to risk boldly crushing them? Regardless of what they know about us though this war may eventually make us decide what we know about ourselves.

The old "nuke 'em into the stone age" never fails to give them a woody.

I wonder if he realizes that there are a lot of fetuses in Mecca and Medina?


Update: Via Kevin at Catch, I see we have a wingnut blogger on the scene who goes by the name of "Atlas" (for Atlas Shrugged, natch.) She posts on Jackson's Junction. She's much more thoughtful than the e-mailer above, plus she posts a glamor shot of herself with each entry (that you can click for higher res!) Here's a taste:

War Must be Declared on those Against us

Pamela aka Atlas says BASTA! Enough hand holding, appeasing, talking "their"talk..........

THE BUSH DOCTRINE................either you're with us or against us

I say, first Declare War on Syria with our Coalition (Brits, Japanese, Baltic Nations, Israel, Australia) with a tactical approach to moving into Iran. The young people Of Iran (75% of the population) will rise and fight with us.

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digby 7/09/2005 04:15:00 PM |